“I called his name,” she choked. “I guess I startled him. He turned toward me—fast. I keep seeing it over and over again. He’s on the top of the steps trying to get one of those Erle Stanley Gardners. When he heard my voice, he swiveled. He just swiveled. It goes over and over in my head like a bad movie. It happened so fast. He didn’t even yell. Just grunted and went down. Then there was that awful crash—like a crate of books. I never heard anything so horrible in my life.
“I ran over to him, but he was…gone. Gone. Just gone. I keep seeing it—his neck at that weird angle. I can’t stop seeing it.” The tears started then.
Charlie handed her one of his ubiquitous packs of tissues. “Why didn’t you report it?”
She flinched at his expression. “He was…gone.” She mopped her eyes, but it didn’t stanch the flow. “There was nothing anyone could do for him. And I was afraid…”
Charlie remained silent, but his lips were tight. Bad cop, now?
“Afraid of what?” I asked. Schultz and the trooper were mere onlookers. Rachel stood inside the open doorway, gaping at the scene.
“Afraid the police would find out that I’d stolen that manuscript from the showcase. Afraid I’d lose my job. Afraid…I’d be charged with murder. But it wasn’t my fault. He just swiveled and—” She was back into the rewind.
“Tell us about the stolen books,” Charlie said. “You help Munro with that, too?”
She nodded. “Until I met him, I thought love was something that just happened in stories.” Then Nellie couldn’t speak for sobbing.
“But you didn’t even report his death? Jeezus Christ!” Charlie’s face was a study in shades of incredulity. He was neither good cop nor bad cop now, just his own person. And appalled. He turned away from Nellie Applegate and motioned to Schultz with his thumb. “Take her in. She’s got more talking to do.”
The body in the library: A murder that wasn’t a murder. A killer who wasn’t a killer. A librarian who stole books. A private eye who was really a crook. And Sunnye Hardcastle, crime novelist, who had been bold, and brave, and strong—and had gotten the story all wrong.
Epilogue
The door to my office opened, and Charlie Piotrowski walked in. He held a Starbucks cup in each hand. “You busy?”
“Not if that’s for me.” I held my hand out for the coffee. “Come on. Give it over.”
He handed me the cup with a grin and settled into the green chair. They fit each other nicely, big man, big chair. He unzipped his dark-blue jacket, shrugged out of it, and picked up his own coffee cup from the side table. “So…I spent the morning talking to that pathetic little woman. You want to hear her story?”
“Nellie Applegate? Sure.” I sipped the steaming dark brew.
“Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it—Munro’s death was an accident. It’s nuts, really. What a freaky way to die. The guy could leap across shattered factory skylights, but he broke his neck falling off a three-foot high set of rolling library steps.”
“What’s going to happen to Nellie?”
“She’ll be charged with grand theft, unlawful failure to report a death. Manslaughter? I doubt it. All depends on the grand jury findings. It’s sad, really. The whole thing is damn sad. Munro, too. Applegate told me the weirdest stuff about him.” He took two brown packets out of his jacket pocket, ripped them open, and stirred raw sugar into his coffee.
“Oh, yeah?” This I wanted to hear.
“Seems the guy was an orphan. His mother committed suicide when he was a baby. Applegate didn’t say anything about a father, so maybe there wasn’t one in the picture. Munro was raised by his grandmother, some kind of religious nut. They lived one of those narrow, shriveled-up lives some people seem to need. The only book Grandma allowed in the house—that little place in Chesterfield—was the Bible. I mean, I’m no shrink, but this has got to mean something, right? She monitored all his reading, even his school books. Publicly humiliated him in front of his schoolmates by screaming at his English teachers about the books they assigned. She thought—I’m quoting Applegate—‘indiscriminate reading exerted an evil influence on innocent souls.’” He sipped coffee. “When Munro was in his teens, Grandma died, and, surprise, surprise, she had money stashed away—”
“That’s where his trust funds came from.”
“So he dropped out of school and started buying books. He ran out of space, so he bought another house. When the money was no longer enough to support his habit, he figured out a way to get books without paying for them.”
“He became a biblioklept.”
“If that’s what you call a book thief. So Applegate’s statement ties things up pretty good as far as BCI is concerned.” More coffee. “But there’s one loose end that worries me. None of this explains what happened to Peggy Briggs.”
“Oh!” I slapped my forehead. “I didn’t tell you. She’s okay. She showed up here Friday.” I recounted Peggy’s story.
“Well, good, that clears that up. By the way, you’ll be happy to know that, according to Applegate, Peggy’s out of the scene as far as any involvement with Munro goes.”
“I knew that all along,” I said. I heard voices in the hallway and remembered that my office hours started in a few minutes. “But what was her backpack doing at his place? I didn’t ask her.”
“Ms. Nellie stole it for her sweetie. Munro wanted Peggy’s car—get this—because of the bumper stickers. The bumper stickers! He was gonna steam them off, put them in a scrapbook he had.”
“I’d rather be reading,” I recalled slowly. “It makes a crazy kind of sense.”
“The guy had gone big-time squirrelly. That’s the way I see it. To get the car, he needed Peggy’s keys. Which were in the pack. Which Ms. Applegate pinched for him.” He shook his head. “That poor deluded woman even drove the stolen car out to his place for him.” He put the Starbucks cup back on the table. “You know, in my work I see a lot of crap, but this is one for the books. Here’s this sad little mouse of a librarian, and she falls big time for a book crook, breaks the law for him, puts her livelihood in jeopardy, then accidentally gets him dead. Now she’s going to jail. The things people do for love.” He shook his head, this strong, smart man, baffled by the mysterious transgressions of the human heart. “Who was it said, ‘I won’t play the sap for you’?”
I looked over at him with a half-grin. “Don’t worry, Charlie. I won’t ever ask you to.”
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