Into the Lion's Den

by Linda Fairstein

  “I’ve never seen a piece of it,” Liza said, sifting through the assorted papers.

  “I hadn’t, either. There isn’t even a sheet, I don’t think, in the entire Puzzle Palace. But my mother used to know this great secretary at the city prosecutor’s office—she’s got to be in her seventies—and Mom remembered that she still kept a box in her desk drawer, just for nostalgia.”

  “So red-and-silver metallic and kind of purplish blue. I’m looking. Okay, what’s the second one?”

  “The day I went downtown to pick up the carbon paper at the courthouse, I had another idea for an unusual piece of paper,” I said. “A grand jury subpoena.”

  “What’s that, exactly?”

  “It’s a small piece of paper, in this case you’re looking for something about eight inches long by four inches high, and it’s green.”

  Liza was nodding as she reapplied herself to looking for the subpoena.

  She didn’t seem to get the direction I was heading in, which was probably a good thing.

  “That must have been interesting for the other kids. Did anyone else have a parent who used to be a prosecutor?”

  “Nope. It was the first time all of them had ever seen one.”

  “Here’s the carbon paper,” Liza said.

  “Watch out. That ink on the bottom side will get all over your hands,” I said. “Now find the subpoena and we’re good to go.”

  “What is it that a subpoena does?”

  “It’s a court summons, ordering a person to appear at a trial. Once you get served a subpoena by a district attorney or a police officer, you have to show up or the judge can punish you.”

  “Don’t tell me you think you’re actually going to serve it on the thief if we run into him?”

  “Not a bad idea at all, Liza, but that’s not my plan.”

  “I’ve got it!” Liza said, practically shouting at me, waving the paper in my face. “It says Subpoena Duces Tecum.”

  “How’s your Latin?”

  “Pretty good, actually. I had to learn it for church.It’s a subpoena for the production of evidence.”

  “That should work perfectly.”

  “Work for what?” Liza asked.

  “Like I said, there is another kind of subpoena that directs a person to appear and testify at trial. We don’t need that type, Liza.”

  “Because … ?” She had that puzzled frown dragging down her entire face.

  “I just want to show this one so the Map Division librarian gives us the actual book—that would be the production of real evidence—that the thief tore the page from. You know what a call slip is?”

  “Of course I do,” Liza said, almost in a whisper.

  I didn’t want her going all limp on me, losing her backbone just when we needed to stand tall together.

  “In order to get a book in that library, you have to fill out a call slip, with the title of the volume and the author’s name on it. I wish the books were just lying around on shelves like they are at an ordinary library.”

  “But we don’t even know the name of the book,” Liza said, standing up.

  “Yes, but we do know the date and the exact time the man got the book yesterday afternoon. This is a piece of cake,” I said. “With that subpoena, I just get to pretend that I’m part of the summer education program they run at the DA’s office.”

  “What will you do with the book?”

  “The lab that does all the city’s DNA work for the police department is at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I’ve been there dozens of times with my mother. The head of the lab actually came to Ditchley with me to show the biology class how DNA is extracted from evidence and used to solve crimes. I’ve got lots of buddies at the lab.”

  Liza couldn’t even look me in the eye.

  “All we have to do is put the book in a large brown supermarket shopping bag—never put evidence in plastic—and we take it to the lab. We’ll get it jumped to the front of the line for examination. C’mon.”

  Liza didn’t budge.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “First of all, we promised your mother and Sam that we wouldn’t do anything more about the book thief, okay? That’s the most important thing.”

  “I agree with you. There’s nothing more important than my relationship with my mother. But I don’t think you get how much she really values independence, that she likes me to make decisions for myself and then act on them.”

  “Well, it’s pretty clear she wants us to drop our investigation.”

  I shook my head. “I think she only meant I shouldn’t do anything dangerous, you know, like chasing the man into the train station.”

  “Dev, that’s not a fiblet. That’s just a bald-faced lie,” Liza said. “And so is handing a subpoena to a total stranger and pretending to work for the district attorney. What do you plan to do, write the prosecutor’s signature on the document on top of all that?”

  “Not necessary,” I said. “That would be forgery. If you look at the bottom right side of the green paper, you’ll see it already has his signature stamp on it. District Attorney Cyrus Chance. I’d never monkey with that.”

  “But you’re not in a summer program in his office.”

  “I could have been, Liza. The kids get to sit in court and watch trials, which I was really keen to do, but then my mother insisted on summer school. We get speedy action from the DNA lab and the scientists forward the results to DA Chance. He and my mother’s crew will make the case.”

  I held my hand out for the paper, but Liza wouldn’t give it to me.

  “Third,” she said, “is to remind you that if the book is so valuable that someone is stealing pages from it, you think we’re going to walk out of the secure library and get on the subway with it, without an armed guard? It’s probably worth thousands of dollars.”

  Liza was three for three in her arguments. Nobody ever said she was stupid.

  “Now what are you doing, Dev?” Liza said in a voice that barely hid her frustration with me.

  “I’m texting Booker Dibble,” I said, punching in the letters to say where RU? “To meet us at the library after we have lunch, if he’s around.”

  “But why?” Liza said in a voice a little too close to a whine for my taste.

  “A fresh set of eyes on the situation, Liza. That’s always a good thing.”

  The text balloon opened with Booker’s reply. Just finished tennis camp. U?

  Meet me and my friend at the NYPL at 2:30? Need help with a case.

  C U. there. So the game is afoot, huh?

  I laughed as I texted him yes.

  “What’s so funny?” Liza asked as we retraced our steps to the door of Ditchley.

  “Booker and I love the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. We both like to solve things the way Sherlock Holmes would. He texted me back that the game is afoot. I’m just laughing cause that’s so Sherlockian.”

  I watched out of a corner of my eye as Liza folded up the subpoena and put it in her pocket.

  “That’s a Shakespearean phrase, actually. From Henry IV,” Liza said. “Long before Conan Doyle used it.”

  “You may be right about the subpoena, Liza,” I said. “But you don’t have to be right about everything.”

  8

  Liza and I stopped for a sandwich on Eighty-Sixth Street before getting on the subway to go downtown to the library.

  “So is Booker Dibble your boyfriend?” Liza asked as we walked from Grand Central to the feet of the library lions.

  “What is it about you getting up into everyone’s business about boyfriends? First my mother, now me. I’m way too young to have a boyfriend,” I said. “Why, do you?”

  “No, but I think about it a lot. Too much, maybe, my mother says.”

  “Even when I think about it, it’s kind of hopeless. Like the way I said nobody wants to do sleepovers because Tapp runs a background check on them? Imagine a guy invites me to go to a movie with him, while some uniformed cop comes
along for the date. Besides, every guy our age, except Booker, is at least a head shorter than I am. We have dances every year with the all-boys’ schools. I might as well bring along a giraffe if I want to do a slow dance.”

  “So, what should I know about Booker?”

  “Like I said, he’s my best guy friend. He’ll be thirteen in December, so even though he’s only six months older than me he thinks he’s way cooler.”

  “Which boys’ school does he go to?”

  “He doesn’t. Booker and his brothers have all gone to Hunter, a magnet school.”

  “Is his mother a lawyer, too?”

  “Nope. Both his parents are doctors. His father’s a neurosurgeon and his mother’s an orthopedic surgeon. My mother jokes that the reason she likes us going on ski vacations with the Dibbles is that they’d be in charge of all my survival needs,” I said. “I’m a really lousy skier.”

  “I’ve never skied,” Liza said. “What’s your sport?”

  “Swimming’s my favorite. The Ditch has a great pool, and a mediocre swim team. But I’m on it. You?”

  “Soccer’s my best. I’m a pretty fast sprinter, too. I tried out—”

  “There’s Booker!”

  “Where?”

  “The tall African American kid at the top of the steps in the baseball cap and jeans.”

  “Now I see him.”

  Maybe Liza was a sprinter, but she seemed glued to her spot once she took a look at Booker. So I dashed up the steps to greet him.

  “Hey! I’m so glad you could shake free to meet me here.”

  “Hey, Dev! What’s up?” Booker said, wrapping one of his long arms around my back, pulling me into a hug.

  “Same old, same old.” I turned to reach out a hand to Liza. “I want you to meet my new friend, Liza de Lucena. Liza, this is Booker.”

  Her eyes lit up and Liza pumped his hand, clearly happy to meet an almost-teenaged boy.

  “What’s the problem?” Booker asked.

  “Come inside to the lobby and we’ll explain.”

  It only took a few minutes to brief Booker on the situation. Just as I expected, he was completely ready to be part of our team.

  “Show Booker the subpoena, Liza.”

  She withdrew it from her pocket—reluctantly, it seemed to me—and handed it to him. Booker studied the legal language, then held the subpoena in front of my face and ripped it in half.

  “Booker!”

  “Not happening, Dev. Liza’s right.”

  “She’s only afraid that we’ll get caught doing something wrong. You can’t live just being driven by fear.”

  “I’m not afraid, Dev. I’m just telling you to do the right thing,” Booker said. “Is your moral compass out of whack for the moment? You can’t serve a real subpoena when you’re a twelve-year-old kid with no legal authority.”

  “I thought it was a bold idea,” I said, smiling at both of them. “Creative.”

  “Haven’t you got a backup plan?”

  “Calling you was my backup plan, Booker. We always seem to figure something out,” I said, scratching my head. “Wait, something’s growing on me.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How about we try a straight approach to the librarian who runs the Map Division? Liza and I will go into the room with you. There’s this famous globe that she’s writing her school paper about. It’s in a glass case, and we can create a diversion by making a big deal about it.”

  “Cool project,” Booker said, flashing a grin at Liza. I thought that the glue holding her braces in place might melt. Booker is like a brother to me, but there’s no question he’s totally hot to most other girls.

  “You go to the librarians’ desk. Liza thinks there’s a large ledger where you sign in if you’re going to request books. If that’s on the counter, you can check the names from yesterday and write them on a pad, and sign yourself in, too, to be safe.”

  “Easy enough. What book am I going to request?” Booker Dibble always wanted a real plan.

  I looked at Liza. “You know the names of any important map books? We’ll need a cover for Booker to be working with.”

  She reached for her cell phone and clicked on its search engine. “I’ll pull up a few titles in the library’s collection.”

  “What else?” Booker asked.

  “It depends on how many names are on yesterday’s list. If there are just three or four people who were in there doing research, maybe Liza and I can figure out which one might be our tall man by the time of day he was here. If there’s a long list, we have to narrow it down to identify the right man—and the book he defaced. The lady will probably give you a pair of cotton gloves before she lets you handle any books.”

  “Gloves?”

  “Everything in the map collection is rare and valuable. They’re written and drawn on vellum or really old paper that’s very delicate. Act like you’re used to using gloves, like you’re a scholar.”

  “Got it, Dev.”

  “Okay. Now let’s go into the gift shop for a minute,” I said. The NYPL had the neatest gift shop in the lobby, selling all kinds of things with book designs on them or related to reading. “We need a few props.”

  “Like what?” Booker asked.

  “You need a notebook and—”

  “A pen.”

  “Pencils only in the Map Division,” Liza said.

  “She’s right. These research libraries make you do all your note taking in pencil, so there is no chance of getting ink stains on the paper.”

  “Okay, so what else?”

  “They sell reading glasses. Eighteen dollars.”

  “You know I don’t need glasses, Dev,” Booker said.

  “Right now you look like a total jock,” I said. “You need to put spectacles on the tip of your nose, so you look more like an earnest student.”

  “How much money do you have?” Booker asked me.

  “Twenty-two dollars.”

  “I’ve got fifteen,” Liza said.

  “I’ve got eighteen,” Booker said. “We’re good for glasses, I guess.”

  When we came out of the shop, I ripped the tags off the glasses—serious-looking black frames—and armed Booker with his pad and pencil.

  “Give us three minutes,” I said. “The Map Division is at the far corner of the hallway here, on the right. It’s not very big at all. The librarians stand behind a counter to your right. There are only ever one or two of them, and we’ll be very close by, across the room.”

  “Globe-trotting,” he said with a nod to Liza.

  “Right.”

  “Is there a reason that I’m doing this and not you?” Booker asked as he adjusted the glasses on his nose.

  “Of course there is.”

  “Because I’m smarter than you are, Devlin Quick. Right?”

  “How dare you say that to a Ditchley girl?” I asked with mock outrage. “It’s because you’re charming. I’m capable of being charming, Booker, but I can’t always pull it off at will. And in addition to that rare combination of intelligence and charm, you’ve got several inches of height on me. That will allow the librarian to take you seriously and believe you’re familiar with—give us some titles, Liza?”

  “Gerard Mercator’s Atlas of the New World. Two volumes. Ninety-five maps, including every country known in the seventeenth century except for Transylvania. You could ask for that one,” she said. “It’s one of the library’s great treasures. Or anything by Johann Bayer. Like his Atlas of the Celestial Spheres.”

  Liza reeled off four other names, and Booker took a moment to enter the list into his cell phone.

  “Can you be familiar with those?” I asked Booker. “And hand me your baseball cap. I’ll keep it in my tote.”

  “I can’t believe how bossy you are,” Liza said as Booker handed over the cap.

  “Bossy? Haven’t you met Dev’s mother yet? There’s nothing about Dev that I can’t handle, but my aunt Blaine? We’re not even really related, but she still orders me a
round more than my mom.”

  That description sort of surprised Liza. I could tell by the expression on her face.

  “By the way, Dev,” Booker asked with a smile, “do I know you?”

  “Never saw you before in my life,” I said, turning my back to him. “We’re going in.”

  I stuffed the cap in my tote, and Liza and I marched down the long hallway to the Map Division. I pulled back on one of the two heavy doors, and she followed me inside.

  I looked to my right and saw one librarian behind the desk. There were six or seven people spread out at the long tables in the center of the room, each of them studying maps or books. I paused while Liza passed by to lead me to the empty end of one table that was closest to the glass-encased globe that she had chosen to study.

  A couple of minutes later, Booker walked into the room. He glanced around and then went directly to the desk. I couldn’t believe how grown up he looked with his new glasses on and the collar of his polo shirt turned up.

  The room was dead quiet, as a library should be. But I couldn’t hear him speak to the woman at the desk, so I stood up and got closer, examining a large wall map of 1878 Manhattan.

  “Do you have your student identification?” the woman asked Booker. She was about my height, with frizzy brown hair and glasses that hung from a chain around her neck.

  “Sure,” he said, removing it from his wallet and handing it to her.

  “Hunter College High School,” she said, looking up from the photograph to stare at Booker’s face, smiling broadly as she did. “Well, that tells me you must be bright, which is a good beginning for our relationship, Mr. Dibble. Bright students and curious ones are my favorite patrons.”

  Even though he was only about to enter eighth grade, the school run by Hunter College and the city’s Department of Education started in seventh grade, but was called a high school.

  Way to go, I thought. It hadn’t occurred to me that just the name of the institution would add years to Booker’s presentation.