Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  “What I’m going to show you has to be kept in strict confidence,” Rachel said.

  “Of course.”

  She led the way through a set of fireproof doors, then through a maze of corridors and book-filled rooms, around a sharp corner, and into a small annex. Twelve-foot-high shelves were squeezed between narrow aisles. Rachel motioned me down a remote row, then waved her hand in the direction of an empty shelf toward the top. “This is where the Beadle’s Dime Book collection is supposed to be shelved.” She looked completely baffled. “All three hundred and twenty-one volumes of it. Thirty linear feet of books. All gone. Not a single one left. Seems I was wrong when I said the book thief hadn’t gotten anything.”

  ***

  Wednesday afternoon after class, I headed back to the library. As I passed the construction site for the new building, a crane was moving steel beams into place. Watery sun illumined the winter-blasted campus. Two women students strolled by, the blonde wearing a short denim skirt. A worker acknowledged her passing with a long whistle. She froze in place for about five seconds, then pivoted and gave the wolf the finger. His face turned bright pink, convulsing his buddies in guffaws.

  In the Special Collections reading room I filled out call cards for a half-dozen 1940s paperbacks. If I couldn’t get the nineteenth-century dime books, I’d jump ahead a century. While I waited for them, I looked around for Rachel. Nowhere. Damn. I’d been silent as the grave all weekend about the stolen books, and was dying to ask her what was happening. And when—if ever—I’d be able to get my research done. I eyed Nellie hopefully, but couldn’t imagine her doing anything as lively and life-affirming as passing on gossip. In any case, she was hardly aware I was in the room. Her eyes were fixed on the potato-faced guy with the laptop. As she gazed, and tapped on the polished oak of her desk with a pencil’s pink eraser, I checked him out, to see what the attraction was. A short, sturdy man with straight dun-colored hair, thinning on top. Small nose and overly large jaw. Heavy five o’clock shadow. Not much to look at, but Nellie seemed mesmerized. She was hardly aware I was in the room. De gustibus, I thought.

  I pulled Tough Times out of my book bag and opened it to the ATM receipt I was using for a bookmark.

  Kit eased the apartment door shut behind her. So far, so good. Vecchio would be downtown for the day. She’d made sure of that. The coast was clear. She took a step forward.

  Heavy furniture cast dense shadows in a room decorated in homage to wealth. What wasn’t leather was mahogany. Everything was oversize, and the walls were the color of money.

  Suddenly a bullet whistled past Kit’s head. Beretta 9mm with silencer, she thought. Dropping to her belly, she slithered behind an ornately carved breakfront and slipped the big Sig Sauer from its holster—

  Plop: Peggy delivered the requested paperbacks to my table. I gave her a smile, closed Tough Times and addressed myself to the old novels. I ogled lurid covers, skimmed through two or three titles, settled down with Dead Men Don’t Love Blondes (1952), and began to read in earnest. The dame in the red dress was dead….

  What I learned from these books about perceptions of homicide in twentieth-century working-class literature was that hot babes look really good dead on the covers of paperback books. It was depressing as hell.

  For most of the afternoon I was alone in the reading room with Nellie Applegate and the little researcher with the laptop. Today his sweater was salmon-pink instead of yellow, but I could have sworn that Potato-face hadn’t moved from his seat at the table across from me since I’d seen him there the previous week. As the minute hand on the big, round clock over the door ticked jerkily to three minutes before the five o’clock closing time, he piled his books up, aligned their edges, set them on a book cart for return to the oblivion of the stacks. I followed suit. He pushed his chair away from the table, and stretched. Squeezing past him in the narrow aisle, I said, companionably, “Seems like you and I are closing the place tonight.”

  He gave me a blank look, processed my comment, recognized it as small talk, and responded with a stiff nod. “They say,” he offered, “that precipitation is expected to hold off until well after midnight in our area. Then a band of snow squalls will cause hazardous driving conditions throughout the morning rush hour.”

  “Oh.” I gave him a blank look of my own and shouldered my way through the double doors.

  “Rachel around?” I asked Nellie, as she came out of the curator’s office with a ring of keys in her hand.

  “She took the day off.” Nellie stood fidgeting with the keys, as if waiting for me to leave.

  “Oh,” I said. Pretty casual for a librarian whose library had just been plundered. “Will she be back tomorrow?”

  She shrugged.

  Perversely, I wanted to get something resembling a human reaction from this passive woman. “Who’s the guy in the sweater?” I asked.

  Involuntarily she turned her head to glance at him through the glass doors, then her gaze snapped back to me. “Th… that’s Bob—Bob Tooey. From Lake Superior College in Michigan.” The light wasn’t all that great in the Special Collections anteroom, but I could have sworn a slight pink suffused her pallid face. Was Nellie blushing? I don’t know why I was surprised. Even librarians fall in love.

  “Lake Superior College,” I responded, trying to draw her out. “Now that’s one I haven’t heard of.”

  “It’s a community college. But he’s very dedicated to his work,” she said, with a defensive edge, as if I’d somehow maligned a stellar patron. She jingled her keys. “He’s here every morning when we open the doors, and doesn’t leave until we close them.” More consecutive words than I’d ever heard from the little librarian.

  Bob Tooey, dedicated researcher, exited the reading room with a curt nod. He jogged past me and up the stairs. I followed him, but we didn’t engage in further social niceties.

  ***

  I took a couple of minutes to peruse the exhibits in the lobby cases. Bob Tooey was also engrossed by the displays, studying one of the Enfield library’s prizes, the only known manuscript of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, signed and inscribed with his handwritten revisions. Displayed next to the manuscript was a mint-condition first edition of the novel, its acid-yellow dust jacket featuring the falcon statuette and a hand dripping with jewels. In the more than fifty years since Hammett had published his hard-boiled, hyper-masculine private-eye fiction, his books had become highly collectible.

  Collectable, I thought. I’ve really got to find the time to hunt down my twenty-five-cent copy of Hardcastle’s Rough Cut. Who knows what it’s worth by now?

  ***

  On the narrow, twisting roads, a cotton wool fog obscured everything more than three feet in front of the car, and the twenty-minute drive home lengthened into thirty. As I turned into my driveway I spotted the big red Jeep backed up to the front door, then the smoke issuing from a newly kindled fire in the wood stove. A sudden flush of contentment suffused me, and I stopped thinking about anything at all other than a long cozy evening with Charlie Piotrowski.

  Chapter Five

  I still had my mind on murder as I met with my honors seminar the next week. They’d been assigned Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and discussion centered on the grotesque nature of the killings: In a locked room, a mother and daughter are brutally slaughtered, then one is shoved up a chimney, the other thrown from a fourth-floor window. In their prurient focus on the heinous details of the crime, students ignored Poe’s attempts to stress the analytical nature of the solution. At the far corner of the table an indistinct movement caught my eye; a hand attempted to rise, then faltered, then continued its shaky ascent. “Peggy,” I called.

  This was a first—Peggy Briggs actually volunteering an opinion.

  “Murder isn’t fun.” Peggy glared at her fellow students. Mouse brown hair parted in the center and cut uncompromisingly straight just below her ears. Plump shoulders bulked out even further by a too-large hooded Red Sox sw
eatshirt in navy blue. Round face pink with indignation. “You people are getting off on this story. You’re…titillated by it.” She turned her glare to me. “Is that the right word? Titillated?”

  I nodded.

  “But there’s nothing…titillating…about murder. Real murder is brutal and…sordid.” She took a deep breath. “I hate this story. It exploits violent death simply to entertain people, just the way those Hardcastle novels do. I don’t think this is a great piece of literature. I think it stinks.”

  The thick silence in the room was broken only by the laughing banter of students in the hallway. “Oh, that’s so fun,” a girl’s voice exclaimed.

  Peggy’s diatribe was a shocking violation of the Enfield student culture of detachment. Almost as a religion, these young people practiced an outward show of languor and irony, a refusal to acknowledge themselves subject to the woes of the flesh. Also it was embarrassingly obvious to everyone in the room that Peggy’s outbursts must be rooted in some traumatic personal experience, another no-no. In the Enfield classroom we deal with the life of the mind, clear and cold and pure, or the murkier political discourse of race, gender, and class, but never the painful, messy, merely personal clutter of individual lives.

  This is a literature course, I thought. Please, please, please, don’t make me play therapist. I zoomed into literary hyperdrive, evading the emotions behind the outburst. “Well, Peggy, you make an important point. Poe founded the genre of the murder mystery with this story and others, but the genre does operate on a fundamental disparity between its literary conventions and the realities of its subject matter. Violent death is terrible. Mystery novels are pleasurable. So, what can we make of a seeming contradiction like that?” Toss it back to the class. Diffuse the tension in the room.

  I’d talk to Peggy later.

  Stephanie Abrams, in appearance the polar opposite of Peggy—tall, model slim, with smooth, pale hair and a wardrobe of sleek pants and sweaters in muted autumn shades—leafed through her edition of Poe’s works. She paused and studied a passage, then leaned forward, elbows on the table. “If you notice, Poe says the same thing as Professor Pelletier—about pleasure, I mean—only he calls it amusement. He has his detective say, ‘An inquiry will afford us amusement.’” She looked directly at Peggy as she spoke. “I think there is ‘pleasure’ in these stories. It stems from…what?…some kind of…existential damage control,” she continued. “I mean, we’re all going to die….”

  Pretty Tiffany Milford gaped at Stephanie in blank incomprehension: Die? Who? Me?

  Peggy nodded fiercely. She looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

  Stephanie bit her lip, shrugged and fell silent.

  I picked up the thread. “Stephanie’s right. Given the randomness of life, each one of us is at risk of a violent death no matter how safe we think we are with our locked rooms. War. Insanity. Revenge. Anger. Greed. Simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It happens. Poe knew that. Telling stories about murder helps us feel in control when the world is so out of control. In mystery fiction, everything is tied up. Order is restored. There’s justice in the end.”

  After class I took Peggy aside. “Listen, why don’t you stop by my office sometime? We can talk about…ah…how the course is going for you.”

  Peggy’s brown eyes grew skittish. “It’s going fine,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t going to let her evade me, as she had in the library. “Sure. But let’s just set up an appointment—” But Peggy was out the door and into the hall, where Stephanie was waiting. Peggy handed the other girl a bulky bag. It was a common plastic bag from Stop ‘N’ Shop, but where it had once held groceries, it now bulged out with weightier fare. From a rip in the side of the flimsy bag, what looked like the corner of a thick manuscript poked out. Without exchanging a word, the two students separated and walked away in opposite directions.

  ***

  You. Have. Four. New. Messages, the zombie lady on my voice mail informed me. To. Hear. New. Messages. Press. One. I pressed One and tucked the receiver between my ear and shoulder. With my hands free, I slid open the bottom desk drawer and inserted my class notes into the file folder with the rest of my teaching materials. If Dickinson Hall ever burns down, I’ll be at a total loss for class preparation material.

  Karen, it’s Rachel, said the first message. I want to apologize again for the missing Beadle’s Dime Novels. I’ve been making some inquiries and have located a number of volumes at the Smith College library. They’ve got at least two you asked for, and their Special Collections operates on the same schedule as ours. Hope that helps. Hmm, nice of Rachel to check into that for me when she had so much else on her mind. I made a note to get myself over to Smith as soon as possible.

  Beep.

  It’s Claudia Nestor calling Tuesday afternoon. Karen, we need an escort to accompany Sunnye Hardcastle around campus during the conference. I assume, of course, you’ll be only too happy to accept the honor. Thanks. The honor? Obviously Claudia hadn’t met the arrogant novelist yet.

  Beep.

  Monica’s voice said, Karen, I’m forwarding a message. It’s about your high-school reunion. A couple of clicks, and Ruth Ann Bouchard, the voice from the past, said: Karen, we’re all so excited about Saturday night. Just wanted to let you know everyone’s going to be dressed to the nines! See you later, alligator!

  God! Why had I let myself get sucked into this damn thing!

  Beep.

  Professor? Peggy Briggs’ voice. I’m sorry about how I acted in class today. Please don’t hold it against me. A long pause, then a sob. Then a hang up.

  I sat with the receiver to my ear for a few seconds and listened to the silence.

  ***

  “Something disturbing just happened,” I said, as I pulled out the cane-and-chrome chair at Rudolph’s Cafe and joined Earlene Johnson and Jill Greenberg. We meet there every other Tuesday for pasta, wine, and a good, long, grown-up-girl talk. “Earlene, you must know Peggy Briggs.”

  Earlene nodded. She’s Enfield’s Dean of Students. She knows everyone. And everything.

  “I know her, too,” Jill said. Today Jill looked every inch the transplanted Manhattanite. No one can wear black with quite the flair of a fairskinned redhead. “She’s in my Soc 411 class. Conscientious student, but kind of weird…introverted.” To an extravert like my pal, Jill, introverted was synonymous with weird.

  “What’s going on with Peggy?” Earlene was letting the grey grow into her close-cropped hair. A pair of hand-carved ebony tribal figures dangled from her ears.

  I told them about my student’s outburst in class and her message on my answering machine.

  Earlene took a few seconds before responding. “I think I know where that’s coming from, Karen. But it might be better if Peggy told you the story herself.”

  “The story?” Jill squealed. “Oooh! That sounds so…deliciously mysterious.”

  “Peggy’s had a rough life.” Earlene’s expression was sober.

  “Who hasn’t?” Jill asked, her Park Avenue upbringing in abeyance.

  Earlene shot me a side-of-the-eyes look: Like she knows what rough is! Then she glanced ostentatiously around the restaurant, crammed at 6:30 with Enfield students and faculty. “Want me to make you a list?”

  Jill laughed. “No, thanks. I just want a bottomless glass of wine.”

  I beckoned to the waitress, then turned back to Earlene. “So, you’re not about to enlighten me as to that scene in class?”

  She adjusted one of her earrings. “I really can’t. Let’s just say that Peggy is not unacquainted with tragedy.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling chastised. “I of all people should know better than to pry into a student’s past.” I glanced around the restaurant. “Where’s that waitress?”

  Our server was on the other side of the room, uncorking a bottle of wine for Claudia Nestor. Claudia was seated alone at a table for two. I sinc
erely hoped someone was going to join her, if only to help consume what appeared to be a fine California red.

  Jill noted Claudia’s presence, then leaned over the table in a confiding posture: Good Gossip. Earlene and I instantly inclined toward her. “That woman just gets battier and battier,” Jill said. Claudia was up for tenure this year in Sociology, Jill’s department. “She does that thing with her eyes, you know?” We nodded. “She does it all the time. I heard one student call her ‘The Blink.’ And…” Jill leaned toward us so far her breasts brushed her plate. “One day last week, right smack in the middle of a department meeting, she pulled out a little flowered cosmetic bag, you know, the kind they give away in department stores. Then she proceeded to do a full-face makeup: foundation, blusher, mascara. Lip liner. The works. In a department meeting! In front of twenty colleagues! This from a woman who expects the Sociology Department to consider her a serious scholar.”

  Claudia glanced over at our table and waved. Jill gave her a flash of beautifully straightened teeth, then sat up primly. She raised her eyebrows at us. “Do you think she heard me?” she muttered through barely moving lips.

  “Not possible over all the other gossip being mongered in this room,” I assured her. Rudolph’s clientele was almost exclusively composed of Enfield College faculty, staff, and students. A gabby bunch.

  As I checked out the scene, a trio of students prepared to leave. Their table was littered with the remains of pricey food. A kid in a retro wool-and-leather football jacket thrust a platinum credit card at the waiter. “Put it all on this,” he said, waving his hand over the half-eaten steaks and melted parfaits. Big Man on Campus. Would Papa even notice the hefty charge?

  “Anyhow,” Jill said, “let’s change the subject. So, Karen, how’s that big gorgeous guy of yours?”

  “Well, Charlie’s big, all right, but I’ve never thought of him as gorgeous. Good-looking in a plain-brown-wrapper sort of way. Smart. Strong. Dependable. But gorgeous? I don’t think so.”