Hound

by Vincent McCaffrey

  Henry said, “Enough. That was where her love was."

  Albert seemed satisfied with that. Tim had gone back to his corner by the radio. Henry looked out at the sun-sharpened movement of cars on the street as his thoughts faded.

  Albert said, “What's your move?"

  The queen could be lost. The bishop was ready. Henry moved his forward pawn again to take the pawn that still guarded and pinned Albert's castle. Albert could never resist a queen.

  Albert took her with his knight, while already working on another distraction. “You said O'Connor didn't give anything away when he called back. That might be a good sign. If he had no questions, it means he already had some answers. They are on to something. Arthur Johnson was in a contest with his mother over the estate. Now this guy, Peter Johnson, is a wild card. Inheritance is a big motivator in this world. It's the money angle all the way. When my brother Daniel's father-in-law died, they found out they had relatives they never heard of. At least a dozen. And that old man didn't bother to marry some of his women. Daniel and Mina had to hire their own lawyer just to stay out of the mess. When it was done, that whole strip of buildings on Washington Street that the old man had put together with his poker money after World War Two was sold just to pay the lawyers. God help me, Alice brings it all up every time we have Daniel and Mina over to dinner."

  "And hate,” Tim interjected. “Where there's love, there can be hate."

  Both Henry and Albert looked toward the end of the bar, where Tim huddled on a stool.

  Henry said, “Why aren't you married, Tim?"

  His friend answered, “You know why."

  Henry raised both arms. “That was almost twenty years ago."

  Tim said, “To me, it's just like yesterday."

  Albert arose and took the stool at the end of the bar. “I know a sweet little girl who handles my insurance. She's single. She's pretty. She's smart. About thirty years old, I'd say. And she told me the other day she's paying some goddamn dating service just to find the right guy. You know, a guy who brushes his teeth and changes his underwear at least once a week.... You don't spit. You don't smoke. I seldom hear you cuss. I could get you her number. I could set up a date. I could have you both over for dinner some night. You know Alice would like that. She loves to play matchmaker. She's already trying to find a girl for Junior. How about it?"

  Tim put his fist in his cheek and leaned on the bar. “I'm just too old and ugly now. I've got my ways set."

  Henry took the next stool. “I know a redhead you'd like. I mean it. I know you go crazy for redheads. And she's as sappy as you are. I've seen her cry."

  Tim's eyes looked up. “Is she ugly? False teeth?"

  Henry shook his head vigorously. “She's a good-looking woman. She's divorced, with a couple of kids."

  Tim said, “She probably snores."

  Henry shrugged. “I wouldn't know. You might try to find out."

  Tim drew a circle with his finger on the bar top. “You know what happened when I went on that date last year."

  Albert protested, “She was a mental case. That's not your fault."

  Tim said, “But the worst part was, she snored."

  Albert returned to his chair by the chessboard, his face hung with a look of sad resignation for his lovelorn friend. His expression twisted itself into disbelief as he took a new look at what he had done. Henry followed and remained standing as he moved his bishop across to checkmate.

  Albert studied the catastrophe, then looked up at Henry, his face blank now—dismissing his own foolishness.

  "Who's the redhead?"

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  Chapter Twelve

  Y'ever find money in a book?"

  Her black eyes watched him the way pets often did when he was in a house to look at a collection of books.

  Henry truncated the top twenty hardcovers from a stack which towered precariously against a wall and set them aside.

  He lied because he was sure a positive answer would lead to another question. “No."

  Miss Galiano shifted her position from the small couch to a chair, moving closer to where Henry worked. Her eyes went repeatedly to the open door as if worried that her words would be heard by someone else. Henry knew the building was empty now, at midday, except for them.

  She said, “I found a hundred dollar bill once."

  She was not yet seventy. Robert, her now-sainted brother, had turned seventy shortly before his death, and she was the younger sister. Yet her confidence reminded him of a little girl's whisper.

  Henry had made his way through three rooms piled with books as she talked to him incessantly. Every corner had been filled waist-high into embankments of volumes. Most furniture hid clots of books beneath. Henry did not respond to her revelation. He feigned a deeper interest in the titles he scanned now below a table. His knees were already sore from several hours of digging through one cache after another.

  Miss Galiano's cheeks pinched backward to expose the perfect fence of her dentures. “I found it in a library book. Robert said I should keep it. I was afraid. What if they came looking for it, and it was missing? They could find out who borrowed the book and find me."

  Henry decided this was a harmless trail of conversation. He had worried she might tell him still more about the funeral and her brother's long illness.

  "What did you do?"

  She spread her fingers over the fabric of the dress covering her knees. “I gave it to St. Anthony."

  She seemed very pleased with her solution to the problem and now folded her hands in her lap. Henry shifted a short pile toward the center of the room so that he could gain a better look at the stacks behind the couch.

  He had asked her why her brother had never built shelves. She had answered, “He was claustrophobic. He thought it made the rooms feel too small."

  The rooms were, in fact, small, condensed to allow a four-story nineteenth-century brick apartment building to fill the lot of a two-story eighteenth-century merchant's house. The older wood structures of the North End had been replaced to achieve some safety from fires when the moneyed of Boston were moving into the newly created Back Bay. Few of these buildings offered the luxury of extravagant space or the detail of an architect's care.

  Robert Galiano's single passion had been films, and the books all related to that subject in some way. Henry had so far ignored the videotapes which puddled on most upper surfaces, lined windowsills, and reached head heights from the surfaces of tables and appliances. The dark, outsized screen of a television set reflected Henry's movements from the opposite side of the room.

  Miss Galiano's high voice picked up the strand of her thought as if she were swallowing some amount of pain. “People put things in books.... I found a flower once."

  Henry nodded without answering or looking up from his work. Perhaps this line of conversation had its own problems.

  She paused, looking for a word. “Sender-ipity. You never know what you might find."

  It was apparent that whatever Miss Galiano found in books, it was not on the page. Henry sighed at his own cynicism. Only then did he realize she might be trying to tell him something else.

  He asked, “Should I be looking for anything in particular? Are you missing something?"

  She shook her head, answering too quickly. “No ... Just a picture."

  Her eyes went up to the door again. Was this just a habit? Or had she been looking out for her brother's intrusions for so many years that this watchfulness had become a reflex?

  He had to ask. “What was the subject? What was the picture of?"

  She shrugged, lifting her arms and hands with her shoulders. “Just a picture.... A boy ... a boy I knew once.... Robert took it from me and hid it. He said he put it in a book and forgot which one. I never did find it."

  What made him curious? Was he bored? Not enough happening in his own life? Still, he had to ask for more. “When was that?"

  She spoke quickly again, the answer already in
mind. “1959."

  This forced Henry to look up at her face again. He could not quite glimpse the twentysomething-year-old woman she had left behind. Perhaps her cheeks had been fuller then, her lips not so narrow. The recessed shadow of her eyes would not have been so deep.

  Henry felt compulsive. What good was there in pursuing this? Why did he want to know? Nevertheless, he asked, “Was he your boyfriend?"

  She did not smile at the inquiry or hesitate with her reply. “I had many boyfriends."

  She quieted after this, and Henry turned back to his job. He told her, “I'll watch out for it."

  He had counted over a thousand titles, mostly oversized picture books from common publishers covering the careers of film stars and the production of film studios. All of them were in fine condition despite being on the floor in most places. The rooms were dry. The sturdy North End brick had been well-built, at the very least.

  Her bedroom door was closed, so he had no idea of what might be kept there, but through the other rooms he had found very little trace of this woman. It was if she had been a guest in her brother's house for over forty years.

  A large black-and-white photograph in a simple metal frame hung by the entry door. This picture of a young man in dark uniform standing behind a pretty woman in a pale dress sitting in a chair with her hands folded in her lap was the only show of personal history amidst the similarly framed lobby cards from dozens of movies which occupied any open stretch of wall between windows and doors. The uncomfortable poses of long-dead film stars captured in their candy-colored prime beneath glass made Henry think of the butterflies in the Natural History Museum at Harvard.

  Henry restacked the last of the books as he had found them. Almost all of it was fairly saleable material, with perhaps a third of the titles in frequent demand, but not the kind Henry could afford to catalogue, with a few exceptions. One book, an oversized limited edition of the Saturday matinee B-movie serials from the thirties and forties, was of significant interest.

  The calculation was fairly simple. She wanted all of it removed. He asked to use the phone and called Barbara at Alcott & Poe. This was good shelf stock for an open bookshop, and Barbara would do well with it. Barbara agreed. He told her he would call back in a few minutes.

  He said, “I would like to offer you three thousand dollars for the lot."

  The woman squinted at him and shifted her teeth in her mouth before speaking. “How about the videotapes?"

  He knew it was best to keep it simple. “I'm sorry, we can only buy the books."

  Her face showed nothing of her thoughts. “How about thirty-three hundred?"

  He had not expected to bargain. To this moment Henry had worried that the sister had been so protected by her dead brother that she might not be able to take care of herself. Miss Galiano's expressionless face changed his opinion. The price was still within range.

  "Sure."

  He called Barbara back and set up an appointment for her to come by with the store van and pick up the rest of the books.

  Miss Galiano took Henry's check for the books he wanted to take with him as a deposit on the remainder. She squinted twice at the check and then back at him before speaking again. “Before you go, I want to know just one thing."

  Her voice was suddenly animated by some new interest. She was standing at the front door, half hiding behind it, girllike, and as if he had just arrived.

  Henry shifted the loose books in his hands. “What's that?"

  She squinted at him now as she had at his check. “I want the truth, now.... What's the best thing you ever found in a book?"

  The true answer to this was too long to give. He shortened it.

  He said, “A poem."

  She shook her head. Her squint becoming a frown of disappointment. “No. I mean the most valuable. Worth the most."

  He smiled. “Truly. It was a poem."

  Her frown deepened to folds in her forehead and cheeks. Loosened dentures slurred her speech.

  "That's just words. Words aren't worth anything."

  He was trying too hard. He wished there was some way to communicate to this woman what he meant, but he did not see a way to that.

  "Sometimes they're all that matter,” he answered.

  She shook her head and closed the door without saying good-bye.

  He was suddenly caught by the sadness of it. This woman had several cousins who lived somewhere—she was not sure where. She had no children and had never married. The father had died sometime long before. The mother had lived on in the apartment with them for years, but she too was long gone. The brother had managed a package store on Hanover Street. The sister had worked in department stores like Stern's and Gilchrist's, finally “retiring” at Jordan Marsh after it was sold to Macy's. All of these facts amounted to far less than a portrait of a human being.

  She had not asked what the poem was. She was not at all intrigued by his answer, because it did not involve money. And that, in essence, was what was wrong with his business.

  Henry's mother might have been this woman's age just now, had she lived. And she often put things in books as well: newspaper clippings about the death of an author she liked, and bits of magazine stories that must have intrigued her. But Henry had thought before that the most valuable thing he had ever discovered in a book was a poem, and in those few words he had in fact found his father.

  Once, when Henry was still living at home, he had been sitting on the parlor floor, wishing for just a moment that his mother were close by again in her chair. By that time, his sister Shelagh had already run off with Rick, and it was just Henry and his father left. Even their long-time boarder, Maureen Williams, had moved on. It was a day when summer rain beat upon the house with a growl. His mother had often remarked how she especially liked rainy days, and perhaps this had heightened his own sense of it. She had explained how this was her chance to read indoors without the guilt of losing the precious sun.

  Because he was never comfortable sitting in her chair, he had found the same place on the hard polish of the wood floor below the shelves as he had always done when she was alive. When she would sit in her chair by the floor lamp and read her Yeats, he would lie near with a pillow from the couch beneath the crook in his arm, elbow to the floor and hand against the side of his head, reading some book of his own. And until that moment long after she was gone, he had not thought to open the blue cloth volume she liked the best. Henry believed that the book had never been moved from the space where he had placed it on the shelf the morning of the funeral four years before.

  Henry did not hear his father's approach. He had left the old man in the kitchen boiling an egg for lunch. Avoiding conversation was the habit between them after Shelagh was no longer there to mediate their disputes. Henry had wandered to the front of the house toward the din of sound made by the rain on the roof of the front porch. With the floor light off, the books on the shelf were small, dark ribs, but Henry reached for the Yeats at the instant his eyes met the spine—as if it were about to fall into a void and needed saving—and his legs buckled beneath him as he opened it.

  Henry sat there on the floor and read what opened to him in his hand, a page indelibly marked within the thread of the binding by repeated use. Unconsciously he had begun to read the passage aloud.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer...

  It was then, just beyond those first lines, that his father's voice cut into the crowding anger of the rain, making a sudden silence about them. Henry looked up.

  The old man did not have a reading voice. Henry had never heard him recite anything out loud other than a prayer. But his father said those next words then as if in answer to some hidden question.

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned ...

  The g
ray figure in the frame of the door did not move for the time it took the sound of the rain to swallow that strange silence once more, and then he turned back to his chore in the kitchen.

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  Chapter Thirteen

  Fred was leaning against the brick wall that separated the rear parking area of Morgan's building from the one next door. The cigarette perched in the man's mouth allowed him to read the newspaper with both hands. Henry had rung the superintendent's bell at the front several times over the previous week and gotten no answer.

  Henry's “Hello” felt awkward, but he could think of no other opening.

  The paper dropped a few inches, and the head tilted back to study Henry. Fred did not answer.

  Henry started again. “You might remember me. I used to help Mrs. Johnson out with the books."

  Fred kept his eyes on Henry as if expecting something more. When he spoke, his lips barely moved the cigarette. “Her boyfriend. I told the cops you were her boyfriend."

  Henry nodded, and smiled just enough to seem unconcerned by the revelation. A good offense was needed. “And I told them you were the dishonest superintendent that was probably stealing stuff on the side."

  Fred folded his paper, then laughed with a loud “Ha!"

  Henry tried to smile a little more broadly. “Would you mind talking to me for a minute? I know you don't have to. I just need a little help."

  Fred studied Henry long enough to create some doubt that there would be a reply before finally speaking.

  "What do you need to know?"

  Henry had to be careful with this. He had to make this man want to speak to him. But he could not afford to be coy. “What the cops won't tell me. I need to know who else came by to see Morgan that day."

  Fred folded the paper one more time. “No one—when I was here. The elevator never moved when I was here. But I was gone before noon. I wasn't back until four-thirty. I think they said it took place sometime in the middle of the day."