Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  Dennis carried over two sweating bottles, dangling them by the necks. No glasses. I watched him approach: In spite of the academic garb, he really did look right at home in Moccio’s. It had something to do with the white scar knife-straight across his temple, the easy way he walked, on the balls of his feet, as if ready to spring. You can take the boy off the street, but you can never get the street out of the boy. You can dress up a jungle cat, but he never really leaves the jungle.

  Dennis told me about his evening. Rachel had given him a brief tour of Special Collections: the reading room, the librarians’ offices, the stacks. “It’s a maze down there—corridors, cul-de-sacs, huge, open rooms crammed with books. A vault that must have been manufactured in 1892. Oh, yeah, the place is alarmed, but it’s a security nightmare, anyhow. A shitload of potential access points. I’ll have to ask Mitchell for a diagram—electrical wiring, heating systems, book elevators.” Dennis drank beer.

  “You mean this is your first look at the place?”

  “Yeah, well…” The Lowell accent became more pronounced. “Yaw distinguished president couldn’t make up his mind about whethah or not The College should do anything as crass as dealing with a common shamus.” The acid in his words could have eaten through a junkyard fence. “Especially one from the othah side of the tracks.”

  “Avery’s not so bad.”

  He glared at me from under furrowed eyebrows. “Give me a break. The man’s a platinum-plated snob. But so’s the college’s money—platinum-plated, I mean. So, on my own I put in a few hours on the Internet.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Oh,” he said, vaguely, “there are data bases, if you know where to look. I knew Mitchell would call back. I was ready for him.”

  I laughed. “Dennis O’Hanlon, a Sam Spade for the twenty-first century. How’d you get into this business anyhow?”

  He shrugged. “Tried a little of this, a little of that. Couple of years as a Boston cop….”

  “Really.”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “You never were any good at taking orders.”

  “Right.”

  “Ninth-grade English. Mr. Mulford. You told him he could take his sentence diagram and shove it up his ass with a razor blade.”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “He slugged you. The guy must have been twice your size.”

  “I hit him back, though. Right? Puny as I was.”

  “That was smart. Got you kicked out of school, didn’t it?”

  “Sure did.” He laughed ruefully. “After that I was more cautious. It was cold out and the only place I had to go was home.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.” He tipped the bottle back, drank the last of his brew. “But, you know, thinking back, it was all good training. Life handed me a habit of looking out for myself.”

  “A habit of…observation,” I agreed. “Wariness. Very useful in the academic world, too.”

  “A habit of observation,’” he repeated slowly, as if trying the words on his tongue. “And a certain set of suspicions, too. Nothing is ever what it seems to be.”

  “Well,” I said, only partially agreeing, “sometimes things are not what they seem to be.”

  “Never. More beer, Karen?”

  “Sure.” He went and got it, plopped mine in front of me. I picked it up, then set the bottle back on the table without sipping from it. “You know, I shouldn’t do this, Dennis. I’ve got to drive home. One more drink, and I’ll be over the limit.”

  “Give it here,” he said. I edged the bottle across the sticky table toward him. He guzzled his own beer, then started on mine. His eyes began to develop the meditative inward gaze of the mildly sloshed. “You know, Karen, I can’t forgive myself for going off on you the way I did earlier. By nature I’m pretty much a loner, and I do a loner’s job. It gets me away from trusting people. But the last thing I want to do is put you off.”

  “It’s okay, Denny. I understand.” The air in Moccio’s was one part oxygen to three parts beer fumes. Distilled with Dennis’s liquid-green gaze, it was intoxicating. Three hours earlier I had been ready to clobber this guy. But, now…those eyes. And here was someone with whom I had shared twin traumas: a deprived childhood and an American public high school. I reached over and patted the back of his hand. “After all, what are old friends for.”

  He caught my hand and held it. My breath tightened in my ribs. A thrill ran through my body. “Karen,” he said, gazing into my eyes, “Listen, sweetheart, tell me, are you… seeing anyone?”

  For a millisecond I couldn’t remember whether I was or not. Then Charlie’s plain honest face swam to the front of my addled consciousness. “I…am.”

  Although I didn’t pull my hand away, Dennis gave it a squeeze, then slowly, and reluctantly, I thought, he let it go. “Sometimes I feel such a weight of loneliness,” he said, smiling wistfully, “and you’re so…I think we could…But I wouldn’t want to screw up anything for you.”

  “No, of course not,” I replied, thinking, not for the first time, what an unnatural thing monogamy is. “Of course not,” I repeated. “But,” I sighed, “you know, it’s getting late. Maybe we better go.”

  He held my coat like the Victorian gentleman civilized manners demanded, and we left the bar. Six inches of snowfall had turned the town into a pristine fairyland, and the storm showed no signs of abating. The chill air eased in at my collar despite the wool scarf. I shivered. We parted at the corner, Dennis turning toward the Enfield Inn, me toward campus and my no-doubt snow-buried car. I thought about having to dig it out. I thought about the long drive home—and the long drive back to Enfield again in the morning. I thought about Dennis, warm and snug at the Enfield Inn. I thought.… Then I remembered. “What about that door?” I called after him.

  He turned back. “What door?”

  “The one Peggy used.”

  “Oh, that. Just a service stairs. Goes into the stacks.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I forgot to set the alarm clock, overslept, then hustled through a shower and into a grey wool pant suit. The snow had stopped sometime before dawn, and the roads were passable. On campus snow blowers roared and shovels scraped against concrete as the grounds crew cleared the walkways. A massive snowball battle on the quad pitted female students against male. The men occupied a lopsided snow fort in the center of the snowy quad. The women, led by a small, fierce black girl in a red parka, had launched a major offensive. I watched, amused, as I climbed the wide granite stairs to Emerson Hall behind two other conference stragglers.

  Suddenly, without a word of warning, a blow on the back of my head slammed me straight into the closing door. What the hell? Hard-packed snow shattered around my shoulders and fell with a soft whomp to the newly shoveled stairs. Stunned, then angry, I spun around. Claudia Nestor was packing another hardball, ready for a second assault. I glared at her. She paused, stared at me blankly, then, unexpectedly, giggled and whipped the missile directly into the center of the student melee. Someone yelped as the snowball hit home; the conference director had a powerful arm.

  At least Claudia had shown up in time to introduce the morning’s panelists. Last night she’d been in meltdown; this morning she was high as a kite. On their own, the little pink pills Rachel had given her couldn’t possibly account for this euphoria. She made her opening remarks with a manic flippancy that set a bizarre tone for the scholarly presentations.

  The lecture hall was tiered, with half-circle rows of seats. My hand gave a slight tremor as I bent the microphone toward me. The hundred scholars didn’t faze me, but Sunnye Hardcastle did. She was seated in the third-row center-aisle seat, with Dennis O’Hanlon one seat over behind her. Both Sunnye and Dennis were pros when it came to dealing with crime—more specifically, the P.I. writer, and the P.I. Their presence made me feel like a fraud. Who was I to speculate about murder in history? But then, in my own way, teasing life from the dry bones of historical texts, I was a pro, too. A habit of obser
vation, I recalled. A certain set of suspicions. I took a deep breath, cleared my throat, and opened my mouth. Words came out. They seemed to make sense. At least people weren’t squirming in their seats. Greg Samoorian gave me a thumbs-up from front-row center where he sat next to Jill Greenberg. Earlene Johnson smiled encouragingly from the fourth row. Rex Hunter watched me inscrutably from his seat next to Harriet Person. A dozen or so students clumped together toward the back, listening intently. Avery Mitchell wandered in late.

  I settled into the rhythm of my talk. Sunnye took notes, much to my surprise. Even Dennis seemed interested, although it was hard to tell just exactly what he was interested in. Halfway through, I realized I was enjoying myself.

  As I glanced up from the final page and out over the audience, I noted a face staring at me from the back of the auditorium, a face that didn’t belong in this academic setting. A familiar face, but set on an unfamiliar body. Who was it? I squinted; I’d left my glasses in my jacket pocket. Could it be Charlie’s partner, Felicity Schultz? I concluded my talk: “Thus nineteenth-century working-class discourse on homicide

  re-envisions the class hierarchies of patriarchal power structures, but, given cultural biases, leaves intact the oppressive hermeneutics of race and sex. With such characters as Ned Buntline and ‘Old Sleuth,’ the iconic tough-guy sleuth was born in nineteenth-century American fiction for the masses. But it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that racial and gender barriers became sufficiently permeable for characters such as Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Sunnye Hardcastle’s Kit Danger to flourish in the popular imagination.

  “Thank you.”

  The applause seemed genuine, but I wasn’t paying much attention. The familiar face in the back of the room was giving me the familiar eye. What the heck? Then a hand rose in a peremptory gesture: Come. Sergeant Felicity Schultz of the Massachusetts State Police wanted me, and wanted me now. Schultz was eight months pregnant with what from the size of her looked to be quintuplets, but was, I knew, just a single boy. She was so big, it was a wonder she could still walk. But what was this homicide cop doing here in the middle of a very tame scholarly panel at the beginning of an equally tame academic conference?

  Suddenly, my heart stopped. Had something happened to Charlie? Was Schultz here to break the news? Abruptly nodding my apologies to the other members of the Murder in History panel, I descended the steps from the podium and hurried down the narrow side aisle to where she waited. The sergeant gripped me by the elbow and hustled me out into the hall. Shultz was wearing a green gabardine pup tent, and her fingers, normally short and stubby, had swollen to the size of kumquats.

  “Charlie?” I queried, anxiously.

  “Not here yet,” she replied.

  Huh? What would Charlie be doing here? “He’s okay?”

  “Of course, he’s okay. It’s just that he was way the hell down in Springfield when the call came in.”

  “The call? What call?”

  Schultz shot a narrow cop look at a student who was kicking a lobby vending machine, trying to get it to release his soda. Then she turned back to me. “The call about the body in the library.”

  ***

  I stared down at the pale figure sprawled awkwardly between the PR and the PS sections of the closed stacks. There was no blood, no particular sign of violence. Just the twisted body in that awful blue suit lying snug against the rows of shelves, its head bent at an unnatural angle against PS / 3515 /.A34. A half-dozen volumes lay toppled open around him.

  Long aisles stretched across the cavernous, windowless room. From twelve-foot ceilings, fluorescent tubes cast anemic light on ecru walls and scarred oak shelves. Countless books in the brown leather bindings of bygone centuries were lined up in rows, spines straight. A set of library steps on wheels blocked the aisle at an oblique angle to the shelves. It looked as if it had skittered there under some propulsive force. Had the dead man fallen? Had he been shoved?

  Two town cops stood near the body, shifting from one foot to another. The heavy bald man gripped the butt of his gun, as if a killer might materialize at any second, weapon drawn. The short, young guy bit his thumbnail, then jammed his hands deep in his uniform pockets. A uniformed trooper interviewed two college security guards while his partner strung yellow crime-scene tape.

  “His name is Bob Tooey,” I said, after a moment of shocked silence. “What happened to him?”

  “That’s what they said—Tooey. What do you know about Mr. Tooey?” Schultz was good at evasion.

  “Not much. He’s a researcher here, on leave from some community college…someplace out in the mid-west. How did this happen?” I was in that blank state of emotional denial that follows any horrific event. Even my tongue was numb.

  “Lake Superior College?”

  “I think that’s it. How’d he die?”

  “Too soon to tell. So, you ever talk to him, this…Tooey?” She took a notebook from the pocket of her voluminous green dress.

  “No.…well, yes. Once. Was he…murdered?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the sprawling body. By the time I’d arrived at the coffee hour in the Emerson Hall lobby earlier that morning, the only pastries left were prune Danish. Now I felt the sour bile of half-digested prune rise into my throat.

  “Can’t say yet. What’d you talk about?”

  I swallowed. “For God’s sake, Schultz, we talked about the weather! He told me it was going to snow! What the hell happened to the man?”

  Schultz gazed at me, her eyes narrowed. “You’re looking kind of punky, Karen. Let’s get you away from this…Mr. Tooey.” Her kumquats gripped my elbow, and she steered me toward a door in the wall.

  “Get me away?” I shook her hand off my arm. Then I relented, took her hand and held it for a minute. “What about you? You’re the one who’s about to go into labor any second. What’re you doing here, anyhow?” I cast a sidelong glance at the pathetic corpse. “This can’t be good for the baby.”

  “The baby doesn’t know anything about it.” She opened the door and we walked directly from the stacks into Rachel Thompson’s empty office. Where was Rachel anyhow with all this excitement happening on her turf? She should be right here in the center of it. Schultz lowered her bulk into the desk chair. Then she untied the laces of her brown leather boots and eased them off. Her feet in green socks had the shape and definition of over-ripe zucchini. “And if you think I’d give those boys in there,” she tilted her head toward the big room behind the door, “the satisfaction of having to leave the job one second before I pop with this kid, you’re not the feminist I thought you were. Ooof!” Her hand flew to her swollen belly.

  “Felicity? Are you—”

  “It’s nothing. He kicked me, is all.” She laughed. “He’s gonna be a soccer player, the little bruiser.”

  A voice outside said, “It’s right in here, Lieutenant.” The office door opened. Charlie Piotrowski walked in. He stopped short at the sight of me and frowned. “Karen! What the hell are you doing here?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Felicity Schultz stuffed her feet back into her boots and intervened.

  “My call, boss,” she said, pushing herself up from the chair. “Karen’s the only one we really know here, and there’s some question about the I.D. on this victim.”

  I furrowed my forehead at her. First I’d heard of it.

  “Thought she might be able to tell us for sure who he is.” She placed both hands on the small of her back and stretched to ease the strain. “Now, what I’m thinking is this isn’t necessarily a homicide. Guy fell off a…” she glanced at me, “whatyacallit?”

  I shrugged. “A set of rolling library steps—you know, with the little wheels.”

  Intent on Schultz’s report, Charlie nodded without glancing over at me.

  “So, I’m thinking suspicious death. Could be it’s an accident, but there’s a couple of odd things we gotta look into, just in case.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, number one, what
was the guy doing here in the first place? He’s been dead, oh, I’d say maybe five, six hours. That puts it in the middle of the night.”

  I broke in. “And how’d he get in, anyhow? It’s a restricted area, and he’s not a library employee. No way he had permission, let alone a key.”

  “Hmm.” Charlie finally looked at me.

  “Plus, number two,” Schultz continued, “there’s some question about his identity.”

  “He’s—he was—Bob Tooey,” I interjected. “I told you that.”

  She ignored me. “So, maybe the steps did just slip out from under him, or maybe—”

  “Not likely,” I said. “Library steps are made to be stable. Look….” I could see a set of steps out in the reading room. I pulled them toward us, and they rolled smoothly on their little wheels. Then I climbed onto the first step. We heard a click as my weight activated a locking device and the steps became immobile.

  Schultz gave a little push; the steps held firm under me.

  “No way these babies are going to skitter across the floor with anyone on them,” Charlie said. “You’re right, Sergeant. We’ve gotta treat this as a suspicious death, possible homicide, until we find evidence otherwise.”

  My heart sank. Was there a killer among us, here, in the library? A place I considered to be sacred space.

  “So, Schultz, who’ve you talked to so far?”

  “No one, really. We haven’t located the head librarian for this department, yet…the, ah, curator. And the woman at the desk…” She glanced down at her notebook. “Ah, Nellie Applegate…I gotta say it, she’s useless. Just whimpers on and on about not being in charge. A student worker found the body first thing this morning and came running out to this Applegate woman, who went into some kind of meltdown, so the student called Security and waited around—”