Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  “Karen,” she said, her dark grey glance not quite meeting my eyes, “I’ve never been very good at asking for help, or very gracious about accepting it. But I want you to know I appreciate what you’ve done for me—braving those reporters, providing a refuge, interceding with the cops. So, here—” With a mock flourish she pulled out a hardcover book in a hot-pink dust jacket, a copy of her first novel, Rough Cut. “This is for you, Karen. It’s a first edition,” she said. “I’ll sign it if you like.”

  I was stunned. “Sunnye, I can’t take this.” Hadn’t she said these things went for three thousand dollars?

  “Why not? You told me you lost yours.”

  “But this is much too valuable.” My head was spinning.

  “Nonsense. Look, I’m signing it. From Trouble—with Love.” At the sound of his name, Trouble raised his head and adored Sunnye with his very best doggie gaze. “Now, don’t go and give this copy to the Salvation Army.”

  “But, but, Sunnye, I can’t—” I was itching to get my hands on the gaudy volume.

  “Mom, shut up,” Amanda interjected. “Take the book, and say thank you very much to the nice lady.”

  ***

  It was late Sunday afternoon before I heard from Charlie again. In a quick, hushed call he told me to dress rough and warm and meet him at the Blue Dolphin. And not to ask questions. When I bridled at his officiousness, he suggested in the gentlest of manners that I might be forever sorry if I didn’t do as he asked. So I shut up, pulled on jeans, an Enfield sweatshirt, an old denim jacket, and the ubiquitous Springtime-in-New-England mud boots.

  “So, what’s up?” I asked as I slid into the diner’s narrow booth across from him.

  “Hello, babe,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “Did you? I’m glad. Me, too. You.” But I attempted to read his eyes, looking for signs of trouble. Something lurked there. Not trouble, though. Could it be—mischief?

  “Good. Let’s get something to eat. Then we’re gonna take a little ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “You’ll find out.” He gave me a crooked smile, and said, cryptically, “You should be able to figure it out, anyhow. You seem to know everything.”

  Even when we’d finished hot roast beef sandwiches, and were on our way…somewhere…in his Jeep, Charlie wouldn’t tell me where we were going. “Just call it a little mystery trip,” he said, and chortled. We didn’t travel far. He pulled to a halt in a weedy field adjacent to a secluded old house on the outskirts of Enfield. A patrol car and two plain grey vans were parked in the dry, overgrown field. The vans just about broadcast themselves as government issue. The house was stone and stucco with a portico and two turrets. At one time the residence had aspired to a welcoming elegance, but the overgrown hard-pan-dirt driveway with its narrow parallel ruts suggested that its days of hospitality had expired with the demise of the carriage trade.

  I sat in the Jeep, transfixed by the sight of the building in front of me. “Christ Almighty, Charlie. Is that what I think it is?”

  “Depends on what you think it is.”

  “The second Book House, of course.”

  “Yep.” He was grinning at me. His little surprise. “Thanks to you and your hunch. Remember that call I got on the cell the other morning? That was Agent Mathes of the FBI team that’s handling the Chesterfield site. I’d told Mathes what you said about another house. She confronted O’Hanlon with it, and he gave it up right away. Seemed to think cooperating with the Feds is gonna make things go easy for him.” He laughed. “Must have helped that, somehow, he got the idea he was in the frame for Munro’s death.”

  “My God, the place is enormous.” This impressive dwelling was three or four times the size of the little white house in Chesterfield. “You think they’re going to let me in there?”

  “Damn well better.” He spoke with feeling. “Without you we would never have found it. Would’ve sat here moldering until O’Hanlon served his time and came back to plunder it.”

  I paused with my hand on the Jeep’s door handle. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  He gazed at me quizzically. “He should go away for a good long time. It seems he’s been nothing but trouble his whole life, your old classmate. And, now, add grand theft, breaking and entering, menacing, assault with a firearm.” He gave me an intent look. “Do you care?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t think he intended it to happen, but in the end he probably would have killed us all. And, for what? The greedy bastard!” I sat for a few seconds, still gripping the door handle. Maybe it wasn’t quite true that I didn’t care. “But, Charlie, the hell of it is, I really did want to believe in him. He played the macho private-eye so…beautifully. And, besides, we were kids together. He ate at my mother’s table. We were in the same Goddamned home-room! I wanted to believe he’d made it out of the cesspool we were born into through hard work and smarts—and honesty. Like I did.” I gave an abrupt laugh as the irony hit me. “God, I’m so stupid. He told me nothing’s ever what it seems to be, but I wanted to think he was…the real thing.”

  “The real thing?”

  “You know. Like a character in a book.”

  Charlie’s brow furrowed, as if there was something contradictory about what I’d just said.

  I went on. “A tough-guy P.I. A…shamus with a hard-boiled code of honor.”

  “A male Kit Danger?” Charlie laughed.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  He still had the quizzical expression. “That’s all, huh? You sure? He’s a damn good-looking son-of-a-bitch, that O’Hanlon. Women must—”

  My eyes grew wide with indignation. “What do you think I am, Charlie Piotrowski?”

  He just continued to look at me.

  Okay. I was a woman. Nuff said. I glanced over at the conspicuously inconspicuous government vans. “You really think the FBI will let me—”

  His hand sliced the air straight across. “Don’t worry about the Fibbies. I fixed it. You’re not really here. Okay? Get out of the car. We have two hours.”

  ***

  Twelve rooms full of books, but the crown jewel for me was the collection of British detective fiction that filled the mahogany-paneled library. I walked into the room wearing latex gloves, gawking and gaping like a bibliophilic tourist. It was a grand, if threadbare, space, strikingly different from the modest farmhouse parlor that held Munro’s American collection: fourteen-foot paneled ceilings, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with sliding ladders, recessed leaded windows with worn red-velvet cushions on the window seats, a crystal chandelier, begrimed and dripping with cobwebs, a Persian rug the size of the New York Public Library. And books, of course. Row upon row of books. From nineteenth-century triple-decker classics bound in lustrous morocco to lurid 1950’s paperbacks.

  Here was an original set in green wrappers of Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress by Charles Dickens, 1838. I was in such awe, I didn’t dare touch it. On the same rank of shelves stood rows of flimsy yellowbacks, cheap nineteenth-century editions published to be sold in railroad stations. Carefully I plucked out a thin saffron-colored volume: Recollections of a Detective Police Officer, by someone who called himself “Waters.” Eighteen pence. It was in immaculate shape, still in its paper wrapper. A cheap read, all right, but somehow preserved for fifteen decades. A cherrywood bookstand boasted a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. Its bright red cover with a silhouette in black of a massive dog hunched dramatically against a rising moon highlighted a full shelf of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Early twentieth-century editions in hues of orange, blue, green, and yellow were shelved against the end wall: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, also by Christie. The adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey, Monsieur Hercule Poirot, and Miss Jane Marple. Further down the shelves I pulled out an Ian Fleming first edition, Goldfinger, its paper dust-jacket featuring a skull with golden coins in its eyes and a red ros
e in its mouth. Bond. James Bond.

  I turned a beautiful Graham Greene in my hands. I’d read somewhere that a first edition of Brighton Rock with a perfect dust jacket had sold for £50,000. It hadn’t made any real impact at the time. But that was then. This was real.

  “Well?” Charlie queried, after my initial perusal.

  I placed the Greene back on its shelf. I had tears in my eyes, not so much because of the books, but because Charlie had actually brought me here despite all the misgivings he’d expressed about involving me in his work. “Thank you,” I said. “This is wonderful. Thank you, thank you. I know it couldn’t have been easy, getting me into this place. But you trusted me enough to bring me to see this…it’s…it’s…” I reached up and stroked his cheek, truly at a loss for words.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  We spent the night at Charlie’s little yellow house in Northampton. What else could we do, we asked ourselves, but love and respect each other and try to work things out? I left very early, while he was still asleep, and drove back to campus to pick up an anthology I needed for my class prep. Love and crime and books were all very nice, but I still had to earn my living. It was almost six when I entered the quad from the parking lot. Everything was hushed and motionless, as if a neutron bomb had just depopulated the campus. The pale peach sun was rising behind the turreted roofline of the library. I stopped, transfixed by the exquisite sharp contrast of stone and light. Next to the beautiful old building, the foundational walls of the new library under construction stretched away into the shadows. This fifty-million-dollar edifice was about to rise into being as a state-of-the-art, twenty- first-century electronic information-technology center. Oh, yes, and as a repository for that soon-to-be-outmoded information technology, the book.

  My hours with Charlie had put me in a mellow and meditative mood. I stood there alone in the dawn and mused. The Book, as book historians called it, as if there were a single entity that somehow transcended individual volumes. My thoughts went back to the mystical feelings I’d had the night I’d illicitly entered the stacks. All those minds preserved in all those books, long-dead, but still vigorous and alive: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, of course, the usual suspects, their names stamped in gold on leather spines. But also humbler fare: Chandler and Hammett and Anna Katherine Green. Even the pseudonymous authors of the ephemeral press, such as Ned Buntline and Bertha M. Clay. All of them inscribed in ink on paper and held in trust for the present and the future. And who had done the keeping? Librarians with lost names, nowhere stamped on book spines. Generation after generation of custodians of the book. Decades, centuries of individuals dedicated to transmitting the accumulated cogitations and imaginings of the collective consciousness. Dim, dusty, ghostly, now, those librarians of the past, but, then as now, with absolute power over books. Live, vivid people like Rachel, as well as insubstantial wraiths like Nellie Applegate. Nellie, who was so…interested in… Elwood Munro, book thief extraordinaire. Wait a minute! Nellie! Had anyone seriously questioned Nellie?

  ***

  I called Charlie from my office and woke him up.

  “Where’d you go, babe?” he asked groggily.

  “What about Nellie Applegate?” I demanded.

  “Huh? Applegate? The librarian? That little grey woman who looks like—”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  “What about her?”

  “Couldn’t she be the one who stole the manuscript? She’d have access to all the library keys and to Rachel’s office. She would know how sloppy and shortsighted Rachel is—that she might not even recognize the manuscript in all that junk on her desk. And Nellie’s been behaving so oddly lately…”

  “Like how?” He seemed to be at least half-awake now, maybe even shifting himself up out of those tangled sheets.…

  “Almost…distraught. She was infatuated with Elwood Munro—Bob Tooey, as we knew him. He was an inoffensive-looking little man, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She ogled him from the reading-room desk as if he were Apollo descended from Olympus. If he did have an accomplice in stealing those books—”

  “Applegate would have been perfectly placed to get him what he wanted,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah. I think the library has pretty good security against intruders, but I’d be surprised if they worried about their own staff.”

  “I think it’s time,” Charlie said, sounding as if he had actually gotten out of bed, “that we had a little talk with Ms. Nellie Applegate.”

  ***

  Charlie surprised the hell out of me by asking me to ride along to Nellie’s place on Hill Street. He wanted someone who knew the librarian in case she freaked out. He’d asked Rachel first, and she would only go if I went. I rode with Rachel in the BMW. Paul Henshaw’s BMW actually, she confided to me, lent to her while the Nissan was in the shop. It was six, and the sky was beginning to lighten over the Pelham hills to the east. Nellie lived on a narrow commercial street in a seedy part of town. I’d never been there before, but the neighborhood made me feel right at home: the turned-over garbage cans, the shabby corner grocer’s, the three-story frame houses with their rickety ranks of porches. We climbed a narrow set of stairs to Nellie’s apartment above Pratt Liquors. A blotchy orange cat streaked past us as we reached her landing. Schultz rang the bell set into the doorframe. When there was no response, she pounded on the door. “Police business, Ms. Applegate. Open up.”

  From inside came a sudden high scream that increased in volume and shrillness, then, just as suddenly choked itself off. The cops glanced at each other. I could feel a sudden spurt of tension in the drab vestibule. Charlie waved Rachel and me peremptorily toward the stairs. Rachel quickstepped halfway down. I descended two or three steps, then halted well within the line of sight.

  “Ms. Applegate, you all right?” Charlie called. No response. He rattled the doorknob. Locked. Gripping the knob, he put his shoulder to the door and shoved. It didn’t budge. He turned to the hefty trooper who had accompanied us. “Kick it in.”

  The beefy blond grimaced, but squared off anyhow. Before he could launch himself, the door opened from inside, and Nellie Applegate stood there with a still-steaming teakettle in her hand. She wore a grey bathrobe in some pilled fabric and pink slipper socks. She looked like a walking nervous breakdown, her face blotched and strained, the greying hair unkempt.

  “It was the freakin’ teakettle,” Schultz tittered in nervous relief. “And here I thought someone had a knife at her throat.”

  Nellie set the hot kettle down on the polished surface of a maple bookcase. “What do you want?” she whispered.

  “We need to ask you a few questions, Ms. Applegate. Can we come in?”

  Silently Nellie stepped aside, and the three cops entered, leaving the door open. I slid into the small living room behind them. Rachel remained on the stairs.

  “Ms. Applegate…” Charlie gazed at her, slit-eyed, assessing. “We understand you knew Elwood Munro, the man who was found dead in the library stacks.”

  Nellie didn’t respond. This policeman’s massive bulk seemed to terrify her.

  “We already know all about you and Munro, Nellie,” Charlie continued in an off-hand manner. He leaned toward her, suddenly paternal, consoling. Good cop. “You might as well get it off your chest. You’ll feel a lot better.”

  She slid, boneless, into an armchair and cowered there, trembling. Who could tell what this brute of a man might do?

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” Charlie assured her. “Just answer our questions and you’ll be fine.”

  She sank further into the cushions, as if her body were anticipating total meltdown.

  I nudged him aside. He balked; I could feel the resistance in his arm muscles. I treated him to a wide-eyed stare: Let me handle this. After a second or two, he shrugged, strolled over to the window, and stared down at the cracked sidewalks.

  “Nellie,” I said, “I know you knew Mr. Munro, because I saw you talking to him.” I hadn’t, but she could
n’t know that. “He was a handsome man. So strong and…powerful.” I grinned: Just us girls together. “At least I thought he was attractive. Didn’t you?” I hoped I wasn’t piling it on too thick.

  She nodded. “I loved him,” she whispered.

  I nodded back and perched on the padded arm of the chair, making my next remark exquisitely casual. “So, how long ago did you find out he was stealing books?”

  Her eyes were fixed on mine. “It wasn’t until he asked me to—” She broke it off, her expression suddenly horrified, and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “You helped him, didn’t you?” I kept my voice sympathetic.

  Her mouse-brown eyes were riveted to mine. She nodded again. “He was the first man who ever really loved me.”

  That pissed me off. I may be naive, but I like to think that the library is the one pure institution we have left, the one that still exists solely to serve the public, the one we can trust absolutely to pass on knowledge from one generation to another. Now here was this weak, dishonest…seduced… librarian. This custodian of the book who’d failed her trust. I had to bite my tongue, but there was one more thing I needed to ask while I still had her talking. I barely managed to keep my voice even. “How could you love a man who stole books, Nellie? Or did you stop loving him when you found out he was a crook?”

  Her eyes widened.

  Speculatively, I said, “Maybe that’s why you killed him.”

  She jumped out of the chair and squeaked. “I didn’t kill him! He fell!”

  Charlie pivoted on his heel and strode back toward us. Nellie cringed. “He fell, did he?” Charlie said. “Tell us about it.”

  Nellie Applegate had indeed caused Elwood Munro’s death, but completely by accident. The night preceding the library reception, at his instruction, she’d stolen the Maltese manuscript from the showcase in the foyer and had “hidden” it on Rachel’s desk. After the reception, she’d arranged to meet Munro in the closed stacks and hand the manuscript over to him. When she entered the stacks, he was balanced on the very top of the movable library steps, stretching to reach a volume on the highest shelf.