“Just some general questions about what books were shelved where.”
“Which you pointed out to him.”
“Of course. That’s what we’re here for. Mr. Grace believes that service to the public is very, very important.”
“So he didn’t head straight back to the aisle of the stacks where he was found.”
“I don’t know. The Halloween party in the children’s department ended, and there was so much confusion with the children running around and screaming and trying to find their mothers. I just didn’t pay attention anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Well, you couldn’t have known that he was going to be murdered.” Susan stuffed the last of the roll in her mouth; that goose was beginning to look slightly menacing. “Do you remember anything else that he said—anything at all?”
“No. And I thought about it all night long! Mr. Grace doesn’t like the staff to gossip—he says it’s a demeaning habit—but I couldn’t help but listen to what’s being said this morning, and more than one of the librarians noticed him wandering around yesterday morning.…”
“You mean he was here for a while?”
“I probably saw him at the desk half an hour before you found him,” Marion answered. “And he could have been here before that. I didn’t see him enter the building. He could have been here ever since we opened the doors at nine o’clock, for all I know. It was a very confusing day. Do you think that goose is going to attack us?”
Both women stared as the hissing animal stretched out its wings and elongated its neck. “He doesn’t look too happy, does he? Maybe we should move,” Susan suggested, grabbing up her lunch and the half-full picnic basket.
“Yes.” Marion threw the last three rolls at the animal, grabbed the cloth they were sitting on, and they fled.
“We could just sit here. On the edge of the bridge,” Susan suggested as they came to that landmark. “Or maybe we should keep moving?”
“I think we gave him enough food to keep him busy for a while. I just wish I hadn’t wasted all last night making potato rolls. Store-bought would have been good enough for a bird.” She took the basket back from Susan as they strolled. “Have a cookie.”
“Thanks. Have you spoken with Charles Grace about any of this?” Susan asked, munching on a lemon bar.
“ ‘Spoken with’ him?”
“Asked him if he was the murderer?”
“Of course not! How could I ask that?”
“But you’re accusing him of …”
“No, I’m trying to protect him. We have to figure out a way to make sure someone else is convicted of this crime—or no one. Murders go unsolved. Why can’t this be one of those?”
Susan saw tears in her eyes. “Is this why you were crying in his office yesterday? Because you thought he had killed the man?”
“Of course not. I told you. I don’t deal with this type of thing very well. I’ve always hated the sight of blood.”
Susan got the impression that perhaps Marion wasn’t being completely truthful, but now wasn’t the time to push. She had already gotten a lot of information for one day. “Look, as much as I appreciate the lunch, I don’t think I can help you. I want to find the truth. And if Charles Grace is the murderer, then he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
Marion grabbed Susan’s hands. “But there’s that homeless person who confessed. Now, if we all just sit back and do nothing, he can take the blame—and he probably deserves it. You don’t spend as much time around homeless people as I do. When I first wanted to be a librarian, libraries were sacred places … repositories of knowledge, my favorite college professor used to say. Now they’re filled with all these smelly people who probably can’t even read. They sit around all day pretending to look through magazines and books, they listen in on what everyone says, they even use our bathrooms to bathe in! It’s disgusting. They would be better off in prison. They belong in prison, away from decent people. Away from …”
Susan had heard enough. She handed Marion the basket. “That was a wonderful lunch, and I appreciate you sharing it with me, but I don’t agree with you. Who knows why that poor man is homeless? Who knows what things he has had to endure that you and I probably, fortunately, can’t even imagine? If he confessed to a crime that he did not commit, he still shouldn’t be convicted of it. And I am going to do anything I can to help him.” She turned and started back up the hill to the parking lot.
Susan was furious. She was as confused as any person living in the nineties. Recession, inflation, drugs, violence … she read the papers, she knew about them all. Sometimes she even managed to accept her own inability to sort out the problems, to contribute in some way to the solutions. But she had not become numb, and she had no intention of ignoring this obvious injustice—and stupidity. She was still fuming when David Pratt flagged her down.
“Hey, slow down. Or are you getting in some extra jogging time today?”
Susan slowed down. “I’m sorry, Dave. I didn’t see you. I was … I was thinking about something.”
“About the murders, I’ll bet. Everyone in town knows that you’re our favorite amateur sleuth.”
It sounded a little like the promo for one of a dozen TV shows. Susan was still trying to think of a response when one became unnecessary.
“I have to run. I’m late for a meeting with Charles. We have to figure out what sort of public statement to make about the body in the stacks yesterday.”
It sounded like a mystery novel, but Susan had another question. “Why you?”
“Me? I’m chairman of the library board, didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t know you were chairman. You’re going to have some job, aren’t you?”
“Oh, it won’t be so bad. This is going to be an overnight sensation. Good thing that homeless man confessed, though, isn’t it?”
SIX
Susan was ushered into a minuscule room containing two folding chairs and a battered metal cabinet. The cabinet’s doors were slightly ajar, and she spied rolls of toilet paper and bottles of fluorescent commercial cleanser.
“This is usually used for storage. Hancock is too small for an interrogation room. And, happily,” Brett added, “there’s not much call for one either.”
Susan smiled nervously. She was beginning to regret the upcoming interview. Just what had she gotten herself into? Why was she so avidly defending a man with whom she had exchanged less than a hundred words, a man apparently unwilling or unable to fit into society, a man who had confessed to two murders that she was convinced he did not commit?
“You don’t have to go through with this, you know.” Brett had rightly interpreted her mood.
Susan smiled at him. “I think I do. The poor man has been locked up here.…”
“Hey, don’t feel too sorry for the guy. This isn’t San Quentin, you know. He’s been staying in a room bigger than this one with a portable TV and a radio. He has clean sheets on his bed, a daily shower if he wants one, and three decent meals a day. It was so busy last night that he got my dinner—I’d sent out for shrimp in lobster sauce from a Chinese place someone recommended. We all stop in to talk with him. In fact, he and the night dispatcher are involved in some sort of endless chess game. Believe me, this man probably hasn’t lived so well in years.”
“And he won’t live this well if he’s convicted of a murder,” Susan reminded him.
“True. And, I have to admit, he won’t be living like this for much longer. The only reason he’s here and not in the county jail is some sort of construction problem that they’re having over there. Soon as that gets cleared up, we’ll be sending him out of town to await trial.”
“Where he won’t get Chinese food and chess games.”
“Probably not,” Brett admitted. “But, you know …”
“I know. He just might be guilty.”
“You’re the only person who insists upon his innocence, you know. Even the public defender will probably be trying for some sort of varia
tion on a manslaughter conviction.”
“What about everyone here? What about the chess player?”
“They all think he did it—even the chess player. The guy doesn’t talk much about his past, but when he does, it appears to be a tale of minor brushes with the law, drug and alcohol abuse, time spent in some of the Northeast’s less enlightened public mental institutions. Sadly enough, there’s nothing new or unusual about his story in this day and age.”
“Surely most people who go through what he’s been through don’t become murderers,” Susan insisted.
“Of course not, but most don’t confess to it either. Look, no matter what he does, no matter who he’s talked to, he hasn’t changed his story. He still says that he killed both men.”
“And he still won’t talk about how he is supposed to have done it—at least that’s what you said on the phone,” Susan reminded him. “He won’t explain how he got hold of the knives, doesn’t explain how he selected his victims.…”
“No. You’re right. He only says that now he’s confessed, and it’s time for us to get to work and discover what actually happened and convict him of it. He may just be very clever, you know. Unless we learn an awful lot during this investigation, there’s no way we’re going to get a conviction on this one.”
“And you’re hoping that whatever I learn from talking with him—if I learn anything talking with him—will help your case?”
“If he did do it, do you want him to go free?” Brett calmed her rising indignation.
“No. I guess not.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“He’s not a very appealing guy—you’re not romanticizing him, are you?” Brett asked. “Because if you are, you’re going to be disappointed.”
“I’ve seen him around. I talked to him in the library. I don’t think …” Susan began.
“I’ll be in the room with you,” Brett announced. “I can’t trust this guy.”
“But that won’t work! How will I get him to admit that he’s lying about the murders when you’re here?”
“Look, we can try it with me standing out in the hall with the door slightly cracked. But I think you’re taking an unnecessary risk.”
“Why unnecessary?”
“Because this guy isn’t going to change his story for you. He wants this investigation to go on. He’s probably enjoying the attention or something. I suppose a psychiatrist could explain it. And if this gets to court, probably a half dozen are going to get a chance to.” He stood up.
“Why do you keep calling him ‘this guy’? Why don’t you use his name?”
“Because,” Brett began, opening the door, “he won’t tell us his name. I’ll get him now.”
Susan had about five minutes alone in the room to think about the man who had said everyone would blame him for the murder in the library, who had confessed to two crimes that she was sure he didn’t commit … the man who refused to disclose his name.
She shouldn’t have been surprised to find his ragged clothing replaced with clean jeans, a chambray shirt, and running shoes. His hair was still long, still shaggy, but shampoo had revealed reddish highlights, and it was tied back in a ponytail. Shaved and rested, he looked as if he belonged in suburbia. Susan, mannerly as ever, smiled.
It wasn’t returned. The man sat down in the empty chair, took a fresh pack of Newports from his pocket, and lit up.
Susan, slightly unnerved, heard herself start to babble. “Thanks for seeing me.”
He shrugged, cigarette ash falling to the floor. “I’m not too busy these days.” His tone was sarcastic.
“I wanted to talk to you—to understand what you said to me in the library yesterday after the first body had been discovered. I don’t know why you’ve confessed—unless you were beating them to the punch or something—why would you confess to murders that you didn’t do?”
“Didn’t I?” The man neither smiled nor frowned, and his voice was flat, as nearly without expression as possible.
“I don’t believe you did,” Susan insisted, appalled at how artificially hearty she was sounding.
“You weren’t there when he died. How could you know?”
“He?” Susan paused on the word. “Are you saying now that you only killed one man?”
“I ain’t saying that at all. I confessed to killing two men, so I must’a killed two men. And that’s all I’m saying about that.” He flicked the still-lit cigarette into the corner, where it hit the cement floor and was left to smolder.
Nothing was going to catch fire. Susan successfully resisted the impulse to get up and stamp on it. The man lit another. Susan took a breath and decided to try a different track.
“How long have you lived in Hancock?” she asked, just as she would have a newcomer at a neighborhood cocktail party.
“ ‘Lived?’ ” A slight wrinkling around the eyes might have suggested either amusement or anger at the question. “Are you under the impression that I am the type of man who is content to sleep in the same bed each night? To wake up looking out the same window each morning?”
“I …” She began apologizing immediately. Her stupid questioning had offended him. She was furious at herself.
“Don’t worry, lady. Guy I used to know in a New York shelter used to talk like that. Me … I’m glad for any bed anyplace. My life doesn’t need more adventures.”
“Then …”
“But I’m not confessing to murders that I didn’t do just to get a place to sleep. I’m not that desperate. Not at this time of year.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Now, middle of February’s something else again,” he mused.
Susan waited, hoping he’d continue.
“So why all this interest in me? You one of those do-good women who makes big pots of smelly soup and brings them down to the shelters on weekends? This your way of doing something about the homeless problem?”
“I …” In fact, Susan had been cooking for a shelter for a couple of years now. The fact that he seemed to know unnerved her, and she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Listen, lady. I got a chess problem to work out, so if you’ve got nothing better to do than ask me questions that I ain’t going to answer, that don’t mean I have to sit here and listen to them.” He got up.
Susan wondered where he had learned to play chess. She must have been thinking about that when she heard herself ask another question. “Have you ever lived anyplace nice? Someplace pretty?”
That stopped the man, and as he seemed to think about an answer, Susan envisioned him as a small child, eating an after-school snack at a table with a blue-and-white-checked cloth, geraniums in the background.… But he was answering.
“Sure did.” He almost smiled. “I hate them shelters—disgusting places full of crime and idiots—and soon as it got a little warm last spring, I made myself a house along the highway. Some truck had dropped a big pile of flattened, waxed corrugated boxes near the side of the road, and I took a couple of dozen of them up to this clearing under the trees and built a nice little hut. It was even waterproof, because of all the waxing, see?” He was staring at a blank wall as he spoke. “Well, one night it got pretty warm, really warm, in fact, and in the morning I woke up early ’cause there was all this bright light around me. When I pushed back the piece of board covering the front of my hut, I found I was in the middle of a garden of sorts, surrounded on all sides, and even up above, with branches covered with yellow flowers. They smelled real sweet, and I could see the sun shining on the Hudson River through spaces in the flowers.” He stopped for a moment to remember. “That was beautiful, real beautiful. You see”—and he looked straight at Susan—“things ain’t always as bad as people think.” And, without another word, he walked from the room.
When Brett returned after the few minutes it took to lock up his prisoner, he discovered Susan still sitting, staring at the chair where the homeless man had been. “Not quite what you expected?” he asked, touching her gently on the sh
oulder.
“I …” She took a deep breath. “You expect me to have changed my mind, but I didn’t. I still don’t think he’s a murderer.”
“Well, if you find some absolute proof to the contrary, you will let me know, won’t you?”
Susan heard the dismissal in his voice. She didn’t agree with him and she had wasted his time; she didn’t blame him for being annoyed with her. “Of course,” she said quickly, standing up. “I’ll let you know anything I discover—even if it convicts him.”
Brett smiled, and together they walked to the front door. “You know, there is one thing I don’t understand here.…” Susan slowed down, looking at him curiously. “Who mugged you on the Armstrongs’ front porch? This man had already confessed to the murders. He claims complete credit for the stabbings.…”
“You think my purse being stolen wasn’t a coincidence?”
“I don’t like coincidence. Especially not in a crime as serious as murder.” He looked at her sternly. “I’m not saying I agree with you about this; I’m only saying it’s something that bears thinking about.
“Now you take care of yourself,” he added, opening the door for her. “And thanks again for taking Rebecca Armstrong in. Having her here in town might actually speed up this investigation.”
Susan hurried down the steps and toward the parking lot. She had gotten the message. Start her investigation with the mugging and work quickly. She climbed into her car and put the key in the ignition. She had only one question: How?
Well, she decided, the scene of the crime was the classic place to start, and since she didn’t have any other ideas, it was as good a place as any other. She headed home; she would have to think of an excuse to get the key from Rebecca.
Possession of the key was the last thing she should have worried about; it was in her hand almost before she got through her front door. That and a list of items that Rebecca apparently needed to make it through another day. Susan didn’t even bother to nod to the network people (who had multiplied and were beginning to crowd her living room) before she set off on her hunt.
All Hallows Evil Page 10
