Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

  Then, immediately, the convulsions set in again, and this time the whole body is affected. A hand flies up into the air and the gun explodes. Lenore sinks into a shooting crouch, arms extended up, gun sighted and ready to fire, but she realizes before squeezing off that the girl is just helpless to her own muscles and firing harmlessly in the air.

  “For Christ sake,” she hears, and then Zarelli is beside her trying to yank her backward.

  “You dumb fuck,” she screams, and refocuses on the pole just in time to see Vicky unconsciously drawing down on Zarelli. Then she hears that unmistakable noise, that one-in-a-million sound, gun-shot. Lenore takes air in and before she can think, she pumps out two bullets. Both of them enter Vicky’s chest left of the breastbone. Heart shots.

  Vicky’s body heaves, weaves backward away from the pole, hangs a second, and then drops, dead weight, a mute stone, to the ground.

  Things seem to start moving in a spastic, slow motion for Lenore. She hears a voice from the police line behind her yell, “Hold fire, hold fire,” and it sounds like it’s coming from the top of a third-world mountain, hundreds of miles away. She looks down at Zarelli, who’s lying flat on his back, arms crossed and up, covering his face. There’s no blood. He’s unharmed.

  Lenore runs to the body, instinctively puts her fingers to Vicky’s throat, waits the useless extra half-minute. There’s no beat, no pulse, no trace of an even fleeting life. The body is in an odd position, as if Lenore had discovered it in bed, in the middle of a humid night, trying any placement of arms and legs in an effort to find comfort.

  Lenore ignores procedure and rolls the body onto its back so that she won’t have to view the gaping hole of the bullets’ exit path. She can’t help seeing the two entrance’s bull’s-eyes, however. And then she sees something else. Situated in Vicky’s cleavage, lodged securely between her breasts, is the letter Q. It looks like a jewel, a small charm that fell from a broken and lost necklace.

  Lenore hears the running footfall coming down the alley behind her. She takes the Q from Vicky’s chest, hides it in her hand, feels the rubbery, shiver-making texture of the item. She swallows hard, rises to her feet, and turns to face the troops.

  Peirce sits in the Swarms’ library, surrounded by books. The room is in darkness. She hasn’t bothered to turn on a light. She finds herself wondering what will be done with all the books. Will they be donated to some library or one of the city’s colleges? Will they be inventoried and appraised and then sold off to some dealer, the proceeds given to the state?

  She’d like to think of the books as orphans, but their size and bulkiness and lack of color prevent her. They have the look of textbooks, tomes that only a dozen people in the world can read the whole of.

  The Swanns had no other family. Just each other. Why did two people need such an enormous house? A house like this should be filled with a noisy, multigenerational clan. It should be filled, regularly, with the sound of huge dinners that take hours to prepare and even longer to eat.

  The silence in this place must have been awful.

  Then again, maybe she’s got it all wrong. Maybe the house was like a huge fortress for the two of them. Leo and Inez locked up in paradise, every need taken care of and plenty of room to spread out.

  It’s possible. She can picture herself making a home in a place like this. With Victor. Rolling around on the oriental carpets, foolish in this enormous private palace. The thought makes her reach for the recorder.

  A little Alka-Seltzer and the girl is as good as new. You’re not going to believe this but Charlotte is getting hungry again. You’re either home by now or on your way. The Mrs. has supper on the table, right? What’ll it be tonight, Victor? It really doesn’t matter. She’s such a great cook, everything’s wonderful, huh? [Pause] I said I wouldn’t do this. And besides, now that I think of it, you’ve got a City Council meeting. So you’re probably grabbing a quick sandwich in the office with the amazing Carol, secretary of the decade. It’s getting pretty pathetic, Victor, when I’m losing it over your wife and secretary. Swear to me that all you guys are doing right now is going over new budget proposals. [Pause] I’m sitting in the library of the lovely but dead Leo and Inez Swann, in the Swann mansion up on Grimaldi Drive. In the ritzy Windsor Hills section. I knew I should’ve been a real estate broker, boss. Let’s see—“This charming fifteen-room Tudor …” No, wait. “Charming” is the wrong word here. “Stately.” You’d have to use “stately.” I read the Sunday real estate ads. Sometimes they call the houses up here “magnificent.” It’s a kick just walking through a place like this. A little spooky in this case, you know? I was a poor kid, Victor, grew up on the south side of the district, all those good blue-collar folks that return you to office year after year. Now and then, my old man would drive me and my brothers and sisters up around here. We’d take a quick look and bang—out again. You always had the feeling up here that there were servants looking out the windows at your old broken-down station wagon, that there were these butlers, hidden behind enormous drapes or something, with a gold-plated telephone receiver in their hand, calling the cops. Like “Intruder alert. South-siders trespassing in Windsor.” This was where all the Yankee doctors and judges and the publisher of The Spy lived. It was like another world. A place I was always curious about, but scared of at the same time. This place where all the power in the whole city lived. And as a kid, maybe I got this from my dad, I don’t know, but it was never good power. Never something that was going to make things better. At least not for us. And sitting here now, in this house that’s ten times too big for the Swanns, I feel the exact same way. All over again. [Pause] Have you ever been in this house, Victor? Well, I guess you’ve been in a lot like this one. I know you’ve had dinner up at The Spy publisher’s house, what’s his name, Welch. My old man used to say about him, “More money than God and a whole lot slicker.” You know, for a second I thought it was funny that you didn’t live up here. Mayor of Quinsigamond and all. But then it hit me. You’re really just a civil servant like me. We’re in the same class, Victor. There’s one thing we’ve got in common. I felt like a criminal just walking up the path to this place. I clipped my badge to my belt in case any neighbors were watching. We’ve still got the yellow police line practically wrapped around the whole house, roping it off. I ducked underneath instead of breaking it, but I’ll tell you, something about that yellow plastic material. I hate touching it. It’s like it’s infected with death or something. It’s like this glaring symbol, you know. Don’t cross this line, stiff on the other side. [Pause] I’ll tell you one thing, these two had expensive tastes. There had to be money in at least one of their families, and I’m betting Leo. He just looks the type. And you don’t live like this by being a researcher or scientist or whatever. At least I don’t think so. I know there’ve been three different investigations though this place and teams of lab guys and all, but I wanted to take a look for myself. It’s weird, Victor. It’s like living in some old English movie, I swear. How do you live in a place like this? Yeah, I know the answer to that. But it’s like, you walk into this huge, I mean enormous, foyer and it’s all this shining ancient wood everywhere. Walnut or mahogany. I don’t know this kind of crap. But the walls are so glossy you could go blind. And on either side of the foyer are these two stairways, wide enough for about six people across. And they both run up and meet at this balcony. And out in front of the balcony is this gigantic chandelier. I mean they had to have gotten this thing out of some landmark hotel in New York. [Pause] Listen. I got here hours ago, Victor. And I spent the first hour just wandering through. Not touching anything. Not even looking for anything. Just taking it all in. Just trying to see if I can get a better feeling for what kind of people Leo and Inez were. For me, it’s always best to work from instinct. I know you probably disagree with that. You’re the ultimate manager, right? Everything scheduled. Look at all the options. No, all the proposals. Weigh it all. Use a system. See what fits best. Maybe you’re right. I mean, look
how far I’ve gotten in this life by following my feelings. I can bitch and moan with the best of them, Victor. I’d like to live in this house for just one week. With you. Like a married couple. Like Leo and Inez. Me, in the gourmet kitchen with the butcher-block island and the overhead copper rack for hanging pots and pans that don’t look like they’ve ever been cooked in, and I’m in a white terry-cloth robe, and I’m packing the kids’ lunches for the day, straightening your tie, giving you a little tip on how to deal with the school committee. [Pause] The Swanns both had a library, a study. I’m in Inez’s right now. I spent an hour in Leo’s. A man’s room. Big power desk. Dark leather chairs. The walls lined with books. Inez’s room is different. In all the ways you’d guess. Pastels. Antiques. Her desk is so small. Too small for me. Prints on the walls. Who’s that guy? French, I think. Painted all the water lilies? Anyway, I’ve been sitting here, my legs curled up underneath me, on this small uncomfortable couch. I’ve been trying to picture them, Leo and Inez, alone, late at night, in this ark of a house. Two people alone in this giant house. They’re in their studies. They’re separated. They’re reading, writing down notes, trying to think. Figuring out work problems. And then I think about Lehmann telling us at the briefing about their dinner with Gennaro Pecci. At Fiorello’s. And it doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t go together. I think Leo and Inez were the type of folks who would have turned up their noses at a local wise guy like Pecci. Even if he is second or third generation. And I know drugs and money make the weirdest kind of bedfellows. But the Pecci angle doesn’t make sense to me. Even if it fills in a lot of holes. [Pause] I pulled every book down off Inez’s bookshelf, Victor. A lot of old books alongside new ones. Some of them might be rare or something. I don’t know books. They have names like A Psycholinguistic Study of the Angkor Wat “Wild Child” and The Berlin Symposium on HyperKinesics and, yeah, here’s a good one, A Statistical Analysis of Leberzunge-Therapy, Buchenwald, 1943. Plus a bunch of stuff in German and French and maybe Russian that I can’t even pronounce. Real page-turners. Best-sellers. Now, I’m taking it for granted that somebody already did this, looked through every book. But in one book, love this name, Deconstructing the Fifth: Advances and Abuses Within the Cohn Group’s use of “J.M.’s Langley-Catacomb Cocktail,” 1949–1950, there was a bookmark, actually just a stub of paper used as a bookmark. It looks like the bottom half of one of those little pink “While You Were Our” slips. Printed, in pencil, in these small, perfect block letters is the word “Paraclete.” I don’t know if that rings any bells for you, but I’ve got nothing. [Pause] It’s getting creepy in here, Victor. I’ll talk to you later.

  Ephraim Beck’s Mystery Bookstore has operated in the same location for over one hundred years. It has not always been exclusively a mystery-book store. It has, on the other hand, always been owned by the Beck family. The Becks are something of a local myth in Quinsigamond—the bloodline cursed with the incurable affliction of bibliomania.

  Ezekiel Beck, Ephraim’s grandfather, started the store around 1890, according to the myth, when his Victorian home was structurally threatened by the sheer weight of his library. He was a genuine book nut, manuscript mad, addicted to bound paper and ink. The floors of his house were buckling, the walls beginning to bulge. His wife warned of divorce and scandal. Zeke quit his growing law practice, moved the family to the second and third floors of the house, and set up shop on the first. His logic was that this would stabilize and maybe even reduce the number of volumes under his roof.

  He did not physically alter the family home in any way. In some instances, he did not even bother to move furniture. The dining room, for instance, was turned into the philosophy section, and Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the rest overran the tables, china cabinets, and buffet. The pantry was devoted to poetry, and Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Whitman lined the shelves that had housed sugar and flour and coffee. The small music alcove was crammed with theology. The front parlor loaded with contemporary fiction, a rolltop proprietor’s desk, and a tin-scrolled cash register.

  Ephraim, the grandson and last of the bloodline, fifty years old now and still a bachelor, lives in three rooms on the second floor of the house. The top floor is used for storage. And the first floor, still outfitted in its original Victorian decor, houses an extensive and often idiosyncratic collection of mystery literature, from rare Poe first editions to fading pulp paperbacks. Ephraim switched to an exclusively mystery stock the week after his father died. He issues a catalogue twice a year that he mails to customers “as far away as Melbourne.”

  Now, drinking a European tea spiked with a cheap rye, Ike studies Ephraim’s attire and attempts to calm himself. Whenever he’s rattled, Ike has found that an hour’s browse through the rooms of Ephraim’s home will settle him down, give him perspective. He has known Ephraim for almost ten years and he has recently given up on determining if his chronic manner of dress—black wool pants, threadbare white shirt with tiny turn-down collar, maroon suspenders, maroon bow tie, cowl-collared grey cardigan—is natural or an affectation, a manifestation of Ephraim’s idea of how an eccentric Yankee bookseller, feigning pennilessness, would dress. Now, when Ephraim lights up a bowlful of tobacco in one of his grandfather’s ancient, hand-carved pipes, Ike just smiles and takes in the pleasant smell of apples.

  Over the years they have engaged in hundreds of hours of battle over the merits of the classical English puzzle-box mysteries of the elite class versus the more character-oriented morality plays of the desperate American individual. Ephraim is the Anglophile. Ike, surprisingly, likes his book crimes hard-boiled and urban. Neither one of them knows what to make of the new wave of déco noir books from France where there is no hero, little plot, and just page after page of random, bizarre violence.

  “Did you try the book idea out on your sister yet?” Ephraim asks offhandedly, jamming a felt cleaner into the end of one of the pipes.

  “Haven’t found the right moment,” Ike says.

  The shop just isn’t having the calming effect today. He feels jittery, tentative. His lungs feel constricted. He should have taken the mutilated fish as an omen.

  A phone upstairs begins to ring and Ephraim pulls himself out of his chair and starts up the stairs, saying to Ike, “Tend the shop for a second.”

  Ike finishes his tea and rye with a single, long swallow, then gets up and starts to pace. Eventually, he begins to walk in a large circle through the whole of the first floor, dining room to pantry to kitchen to parlor to music alcove to living room to front hall, back to the dining room. He wonders as he walks what it must have been like to grow up in a house that was literally filled, wall-to-wall, with books. Do you end up appreciating them in a way that the average person cannot? Or do you take them for granted, expect their continued presence the way debutantes expect money and attention?

  He moves through the circle again, pausing this time in the parlor, inspecting, again, all the first editions inside the nowantique, glass-door mahogany bookcase that rises as high as the eleven-foot ceilings. Most of the books in the case have been for sale as long as Ike has been coming to the shop. They’re very high priced, mint collector’s quality, fairly rare. Ike has suggested that Ephraim alarm the store for the sake of these volumes alone. He stares at the spines of the ones he’d love to possess, reads the authors’ names—Chesterton, Collins, Hornung, Futrelle, Morley.

  Ike takes a step back from the case, stands silent, and listens. He rarely gets moments alone like this and though he knows Ephraim wouldn’t be pleased, he tells himself that possibly handling one of these treasures might turn things around for him, salvage the day a bit. Besides, his hands are clean and all the money he’s spent in the shop should entitle him to at least hold the first edition of Red Harvest for a minute.

  He slowly pulls open one of the doors and is impressed by its weight. He reaches in and pulls down a Chesterton—The Club of Queer Trades. Written in 1905, Ike guesses, and opens the volume to prove himself right. He hears Ephraim move upstairs,
gets nervous, slides the book back into place on the shelf, and closes the case door. He hasn’t felt this kind of jumpiness since he stopped taking that asthma medication fifteen years ago.

  He walks into the huge kitchen, lined recently with library-style shelving to create cramped mini-aisles. Ephraim has pulled the “True Crime” section out of the basement where it was getting a little musty, and given it a full aisle in the kitchen. Ike browses it now and just the names off the spines make him uneasy. They’re all here, all the famous and most depraved murderers in the collective history of our worst fears—Torquemada, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Richard Speck, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and, of course, Manson. Manson gets almost an entire shelf to himself.

  Ike does not read true-crime books. He doesn’t see the entertainment, can’t understand how someone could squeeze any enjoyment out of them. But he continually browses them, pulls them down off the shelf and studies the dust jackets. Sometimes he’ll force himself to open to the photographs and take a quick peek. It’s become a small test he makes himself endure every few visits to the shop.

  He settles now on a title he’s never seen before: Matamoros— Devil’s Playland. It’s a fat volume, maybe two inches wide at the spine and jacketed in glossy black with blood-red block lettering. Ike would bet his life that there are plenty of photos and more than one will be ridiculously lurid.

  He reaches up and grabs the volume, pulls it out from its neighbors with a little effort, and lets out a shocked scream. Through the space left between the books he can see Eva’s head.

  Eva screams back at him.

  Ephraim’s feet come running across the upstairs floor and he’s yelling, “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  Eva comes around to Ike’s aisle and they face each other, breathing like they’ve finished sprinting a lap around the city.