Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  I walked over and reached out to pluck a volume off the staircase’s fifth riser. Then before I touched it I hesitated and glanced at Charlie.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  I took down the book. It was a mystery novel, The Leavenworth Case, by Anna Katharine Green, a late nineteenth-century American writer. Crossed keys were embossed in red on the green binding. On the title page the seal of the Oberlin College library was impressed into the paper.

  “This is a copy of Anna Katharine Green’s first novel,” I reported. “It seems to have belonged at one time to Oberlin College.”

  “Uh huh. Now take a gander at the one next to it.”

  I pulled the book out. It was another copy of The Leavenworth Case, only this one was in a much finer binding, black cloth, with red leather spine and corners.

  “Open it,” Charlie directed. I did. On the title page was imprinted the seal of the Smith College Library.

  “Another library book,” I said, something gnawing at my consciousness. Something I hadn’t had a chance to tell him earlier. Then, “Oh, my God!” I grabbed another book from the staircase, then another. All early copies of novels by Green. All of them with library ownership clearly indicated in the volume. I pivoted around and yanked a book off another shelf: The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, seal of Indiana University Library. Another: The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler, no seal, but a New York University Library Special Collections card poking out with the book’s archival call number inked in black. I opened to the publication data on the back of the title page: 1943. A first edition?

  “The book thief!” I exclaimed. “Tooey—or Elwood—or Potato Face—or whatever the hell the guy’s name is—was the goddamned book thief! I’ve got to tell Dennis O’Hanlon!”

  “Book thief? Dennis O’Hanlon?” Charlie wrinkled his brow in puzzlement. He looked just a little bit like a boxer dog. Then he remembered. “Oh, book thief. You mean the guy who knocked you down that night by the library?”

  “Yes,” I said. Impatiently. That was old news. “And the guy who’s relieved said library of a half-million dollars in rare books. And the guy who just this week stole the only extant manuscript of The Maltese Falcon from the Enfield College library.” I ran my eyes over the shelves until I spotted a solid line of matching burnt-orange paper bindings: “And, whatd’ya know, here’s the goddamned Beadle’s dime novels I was looking for! All three hundred twenty-one volumes of them, I bet.”

  “Dime novels? A half-million dollars? That doesn’t compute. What the hell are you talking about, Karen?”

  I looked around for a chair. “This is going to be a long story.”

  Charlie pushed a set of library steps in my direction. “The guy didn’t go in for furniture,” he said. “So, tell me your long story.” He leaned against the living-room doorway, prepared to listen until doomsday, if that’s what it took. “And who’s this Dennis O’Hanlon?”

  I could hear footsteps upstairs, at least two sets. “Your officers?”

  “Yeah.” His size thirteen boot tapped impatiently against the wide pine floor boards. “Come on, babe, talk!”

  Babe? I narrowed my eyes at him. “‘Talk?’ You mean, as in ‘Spill the beans’? ‘Cough it up’? ‘Spill your guts’? So, tell me, where’s the other cop, the good one? Where’s the bright lights? The rubber hoses?”

  “Very funny, babe,” he said. “Just tell me, will you? Please?”

  “Well—”

  “Wait!” He raised a hand. “Schultz,” he called, “come here. I want you to hear this.”

  Felicity Schultz came waddling out from what I assumed was the kitchen, looking for all the world like a pale eggplant. I stood up and offered her my seat on the rolling steps. She sighed and—to my surprise—sat down without protest. She even thanked me.

  I told them about the books that had been stolen from the library. I told them about my talk with Avery. I told them about Dennis O’Hanlon and his investigation.

  “Christ,” Charlie grumbled. “What the hell was Mitchell thinking? That kind of money, he should have reported it to us. Just what we need, some private bozo snooping around, screwing up the evidence.”

  “It wasn’t a murder investigation then,” I said, reasonably. “And, besides, he’s not like that.”

  “Who? This private guy? You’ve met him?”

  “Well, yes. Avery sent him to talk to me. And, actually…”

  “Actually, what?”

  “Actually…I knew him in high school.”

  “You what?”

  “Remember that class reunion I went to a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, I remember. You didn’t want me along.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You made it clear.”

  “I did not!”

  Schultz’s head was swiveling from side to side, as if she were watching the U.S. Open.

  “So,” Charlie said, his face devoid of expression, “you went to the reunion to meet this…O’Hanlon.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I simply ran into him—”

  “You ran into him—”

  “Ahem,” Schultz said, looking at us with weary eyes, “about these book thefts? A lot of money involved here?”

  Grateful for the change of subject, I surveyed the shelves, recalled Avery’s estimate of Enfield’s losses alone. “God, yes. Millions, maybe.”

  “Millions!” Schultz’s eyes met Charlie’s. “You know what that means.”

  Charlie was all business again. “Yeah. We’ve gotta definitely treat Munro’s death as a possible homicide. What could have been a simple fatal accident, now has major criminal factors—false identity, evidence of grand theft….”

  Unconsciously Schultz rubbed her belly. “Possible motives for murder: Might be an accomplice wants to cover up complicity. Might be murder for gain. Lots of money on the hoof here.”

  “Millions of dollars worth of stolen books…” Charlie mused. “It complicates everything.” He turned to me abruptly. “And you,” he ordered, “are not to say word one about any of this to that O’Hanlon guy.”

  I was sobered by what I was seeing here. Biblio-larceny on a vast scale. And, now, the death of the book thief. “Okay,” I agreed. “Mum’s the word.”

  ***

  Trooper Deirdre Flynn, a slight woman with straight blond hair, pale eyes, and a long thin nose, provided a deluxe guided tour, from basement to attic, of what I’d come to think of as the Book House. My initial impression of chaos was quickly dispelled. What had at first seemed to be disorder on a gargantuan scale was nothing of the sort, merely an attempt to house a multitude of books in a tight space, three floors of the old farmhouse and a finished basement. Everything was surprisingly clean and orderly, even the bathroom, which was stacked with comic books on both sides of the toilet. Trooper Flynn first took me down a narrow set of stairs leading from the kitchen into the basement. The cleanliness of this makeshift library was explained by a big boxy climate-control and air-filtration system worthy of a professional archive. Whoever Elwood Munro was, he certainly had cared about books, not only enough to take the risk of stealing them, but also enough to take good care of them once he had.

  “Equipment like this doesn’t come cheap,” I told the young officer. “This climate-control setup alone must have cost a bundle.”

  “That’s what the lieutenant said,” she replied. “Only he phrased it differently.”

  “I’ll bet he said it ‘cost a shitload.’”

  She gave me a sideways glance. She knew I was the boss’s girlfriend: She must have been thinking she’d better watch her words.

  The first floor was the real treasure trove. Mystery fiction, which seemed to be Munro’s larcenous specialization, filled the place: hallway, living room, and dining room. All three rooms now glared with light. Someone must have sent out for two-hundred-watt bulbs to replace Munro’s deliberately dim illumination. Bright light is not good for books, and he would have known that. I stifled the i
mpulse to protest.

  Following instructions to touch as little as possible, I scanned the spines of shelved books. Munro’s collection was wide-ranging and impressive: not only the classic hard-boiled American writers—Chandler, Hammett, Spillane—but also the newer authors—Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Tony Hillerman. There was something thrilling about seeing all these books together, many of them in their original dust jackets. A familiar volume caught my eye, and I eased a copy of Sunnye Hardcastle’s Rough Cut from its niche. The bright jacket with its hot-pink, chartreuse, and black design was identical to the one on my own misplaced copy. I opened the book to the back of the title page. Yep, first edition. What had Sunnye said this could go for? Three thousand dollars? A single book out of this huge collection, I mused, three thousand dollars. Suddenly it struck me, the full extent of what I was looking at. This whole bizarre scene—the remote farmhouse, the expensive equipment, the thousands of purloined volumes—represented possibly one of the world’s major collections of American mystery fiction. The bright lights, the police officers, my own intrusive presence, were merely tangential to the massive controlling obsession that had gone into planning and carrying out the acquisition of these books. This unique collection had been built risk by risk by risk.

  What was it Dennis O’Hanlon had called the perpetrator of the Enfield book thefts? A biblioklept? Bibliopath would be more like it: a crazed intelligence focused on books—not necessarily on the knowledge or stories they contained, but on the books themselves as objects of desire. Literary archives are locked, guarded, and alarmed, but Elwood Munro had somehow found his way into the stacks. Now he was dead, and his collection remained as a perverse testimony to one man’s tastes, interests, and knowledge. Was that what he was looking for as he gathered these books together, a kind of bibliographic immortality?

  Expecting more book stacks in the kitchen, I stood surprised in the doorway: no shelves at all. A long room with speckled grey linoleum on the floor and makeshift counters of some weird prehistoric Formica. Two long metal folding tables were stacked with volumes of various sizes, seemingly in the process of being sorted and classified. An old-fashioned oak card-catalog cabinet stood incongruously next to a 1930s gas stove with curved chrome legs. I leafed through cards. “Not Library of Congress classification,” I told Flynn, who wrote everything down as if I knew what I was talking about, “and not Dewey Decimal System.” Munro had gone in for some eccentric, seemingly self-invented classification system. Using his cards, I wouldn’t have been able to locate a single thing in the collection, but the books themselves on the shelves had seemed logically enough organized.

  In a large pantry off the kitchen, there awaited another surprise: a worktable stocked with the tools of book repair—Exacto knives, glue, large needles, binding thread, tape, a book press. If any of Elwood Munro’s stolen books were sick, he knew how to heal them.

  The trooper and I climbed the steep back stairs from the kitchen. Two bedrooms housed a collection of books on American politics that seemed sketchy compared to what I’d seen downstairs; another was devoted to nineteenth-century cookbooks and domestic advice manuals. The attic featured Civil War history, and memorabilia such as uniform buttons, regiment insignias, confederate currency, and letters from the front. A small cabinet tucked under the eaves provided a refuge for nineteenth-century erotica.

  “Whoa!” Trooper Flynn said, as she opened the covers of a pop-up book picturing a couple in sexual congress. The man was on top, and flipping the pages revealed rather energetic activity on the part of a rather large male member. “I didn’t know the Victorians went in for pornography.”

  The stairs creaked loudly, and Charlie’s head appeared in the stairwell. Deirdre Flynn slapped the smutty book shut without regard for its moving parts. As she slid it back into the unlocked case, Charlie asked, “What’ve you got there?”

  The trooper’s fair skin turned strawberry pink. “Just m-more of the same,” she stuttered. In spite of the uniform, the gun belt, the badge, she was still very young.

  Charlie wrinkled his forehead at her quizzically, then turned to me. “You about done here, Karen? There’s sandwiches and fresh coffee outside in the van.”

  “I’ve given it all a once over, but, Jeez, Charlie, I don’t know.… This is big time—an absolutely extraordinary collection. Way over my head. We’re dealing with a highly esoteric collector here. Obviously, he specialized in American books, and from a populist perspective.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He collected books published for the masses, not for the literati. Look, detective fiction here. Upstairs, military stuff, cookbooks, erotica.” Trooper Flynn was still transcribing my every word.

  “Erotica? Really?”

  “I’m not versed in book-collecting, per se, you know, just literature. You need to get specialists—rare-book dealers and curators. People with a comprehensive overview of this field. They’ll be able to tell you what you’re looking at here.”

  “I thought we’d start tomorrow with your Ms. Thompson from the library. She could identify the books that were stolen from Enfield College.”

  “Rachel? Hmm. That’s a good idea. She knows this stuff.”

  “But we’ve got to get a crime scene team in here first, before the evidence gets completely screwed. Munro may be dead, but, who knows, maybe he wasn’t working alone. Maybe he had an accomplice.”

  “Ah!” I said, “that’s why you wanted to preserve those tire tracks, in case someone else is in on this.”

  “Hmm,” he replied. He grinned at me. “That’s a good idea.” Then he got serious again. “Now, anything else you notice about this place that you haven’t mentioned?”

  “Aside from its isolation out here in the boonies?” I checked around. “No. Nothing in particular.”

  Charlie chewed his lip. “Think about it. Nothing here but books. No food in the fridge. No toiletries. No clothing. Where did the guy actually live?”

  ***

  I sat on one of the folding chairs the cops had brought in and ate a dried-up roast-beef sandwich while Deirdre Flynn sealed the doors with crime-scene tape, and Charlie gave orders: Schultz was to wait for him in the Jeep. Try to get a little rest while he finished up here. Flynn and her partner were to keep watch on the house until the SOC technicians arrived.

  Before we left, I took one last stroll through the downstairs. Once the experts were called in, and the business of cataloging the collection and finding the true owners of the books began, I wouldn’t be let anywhere near the place. I stood in the living-room doorway: With its tightly pulled window shades and tightly packed shelves, the room, and the dining room beyond, seemed, in the hallucinatory forensic light, like some bookworm’s phantasmagoric wonderland: Red Harvest; Devil in a Blue Dress; Edwin of the Iron Shoes; The Big Sleep; “A” is for Alibi; Some Buried Caesar; Bitter Medicine.

  In the kitchen, I perused the piles of books awaiting Munro’s classification. Christ! From under a mint-condition Nancy Drew I plucked a worn copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales. Eureka! 1845: a first edition. Poe is the father of detective fiction. If I remembered correctly, this was the first book to contain all three of his C. Auguste Dupin stories. Yes, here they were, listed in the table of contents: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter.” I handled the book reverently. Better tell the cops we had a piece of the American canon here. But, then, would that make any difference to them? Just another stolen book.

  Then, turning to leave, I was stopped cold by the sight of a vaguely familiar object tucked between the card-catalog cabinet and the chrome-legged stove. It was a beat-up canvas backpack with a grungy little Pink Panther doll attached to its army-green strap. I stared at it in disbelief. Unless I was badly mistaken, the last time I’d seen that bag was yesterday morning when Peggy Briggs had visited me in my office.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The classic teacher’s nightmare: wandering through instituti
onal corridors, searching for the right classroom. Haven’t prepared. Don’t have my books. Don’t even know what the course is. I open a door. Twenty-five heads turn in my direction. Twenty-five hands reach for pens. This must be it. I stride to the front of the room with as much authority as I can muster wearing a pajama jacket that doesn’t quite cover my nether regions. I open my mouth to begin the lecture.

  Then I’m awake. It’s eight a.m., and the phone is ringing.

  “Uhhh?”

  “Babe? You get home okay?”

  “Umm.”

  “Listen, you were a big help last night. Did I tell you that?”

  “Uggh.”

  “You got us on the right track with all that book-collecting stuff. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known what the hell we were looking at.”

  “Ufff.”

  “So, listen, babe. I’m gonna be tied up all day with the Munro case. And you’ve got that conference thing. So maybe I’ll see ya around campus.” A little chortle, like water over smooth stones; he seemed to think that was funny.

  “Unhuh.”

  “You okay, babe? You sound wasted. Oh, shit—there’s the other phone. Gotta go.”

  God, I hate a morning person.

  It was Friday, the second full day of the crime fiction conference. I was scheduled to teach my freshman class at four p.m. I wasn’t prepared, but at least I knew what the course was. With any luck, I could cobble together a discussion outline during office hours this morning. Then I’d be free to attend an early afternoon conference session. The choices were: “Dead Blondes in Red Dresses: Whiteness Studies in American Crime Fiction” and “Beowulf to Nero Wolfe: The Curriculum and the Crime Novel.” After a shower and coffee I donned a teal jacket and black skirt, more appropriate classroom wear than a butt-baring pj jacket. By 9:12 I was in the car and on the road. A spring sun was shining, and the Subaru’s wheels splashed through puddles of melting snow.

  All the way into campus I worried about Peggy Briggs. The poor kid: Her sister had been killed, what, four, five years ago. The last thing she needed now was to be dragged into another homicide. Short of stealing her backpack, thus tampering with evidence, there was nothing I could have done to help her last night except what I actually did do, and that was to keep my mouth shut and buy her some time. In that cluttered house, the backpack was only one item among thousands, but the police would look at it early in the investigation. They’d think it was Elwood Munro’s; perhaps they’d even conjecture that he’d used it to spirit books away from libraries. But they’d soon identify the pack as Peggy’s. And, since she was still living at her mother’s house, Charlie would know precisely where to find her.