Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript
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Authors: Joanne Dobson
Tags: #Mystery: Cozy - English Professor - Dashiell Hammett - Massachusetts
| Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript | |
| Karen Pelletier [5] | |
| Joanne Dobson | |
| Poisoned Pen Press (2003) | |
| Tags: | Mystery: Cozy - English Professor - Dashiell Hammett - Massachusetts Mystery: Cozy - English Professor - Dashiell Hammett - Massachusettsttt |
Little does she expect a priceless manuscript to be stolen from the college library, the thief to be found dead in the library's closed stacks, and her famous client to be suspected of both crimes. All this occurs smack dab in the middle of the conference, and Karen must use her investigative skills to detect which of the many conferees has set out to Deconstruct Death.
The Maltese Manuscript
A Karen Pelletier Mystery
Joanne Dobson
www.JoanneDobson.com
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2003 by Joanne Dobson
E-book Edition 2012
ISBN: 9781615953141 epub
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Contents
To Nicholas Kohomban
Many thanks to:
John Hench, Priscilla Juvelis, and Anne Poe Lehr, for their expertise on rare books and libraries.
Diana Healy and Marie-Laure Degener, for the encouragement and the writing critiques.
Sandra Zagarell and Eve Sandberg, for the readings.
Nicholas Basbanes, for the vivid portraits in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.
Louis Cristantiello, for the loan of The Maltese Falcon.
Deborah Schneider, for her constant advocacy.
Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald, for their vision and daring.
Phyllis Spiegel, for being there.
Dave Dobson, for everything.
The detective novel does constitute escape…
not from life, but from literature.
—Marjorie Hope Nicholson
“The Professor and the Detective” (1929)
The door to my office opened, and a dame walked in, bringing Trouble with her. The dame was Sunnye Hardcastle, celebrated crime novelist, and Trouble was her dog, a big Rottweiler with teeth like boning knives. I recognized them both from the author photo on the back cover of
Tough Times
, the latest novel in Hardcastle’s edgy Kit Danger series. I’d purchased the book a week earlier at Smith’s Bookshop, but hadn’t had time to do more than look over the jacket.
My class notes went flying as I jumped up from the green vinyl chair. “Sunnye Hardcastle?” Ms. Hardcastle was tall with red hair in a modified poodle cut, tight curls trimmed close to the head. She was in her fifties and fit, with a runner’s sinewy slenderness. She wore leggings and a black leather jacket cut close to the body, and Trouble dogged her heels, kept up short on a wide leather strap.
“Yes. And you’re Professor Karen Pelletier.” The writer’s eyes were dark and opaque, her eyeliner a gunmetal grey. “Or so the secretary said.” Monica Cassale, the Enfield College English Department secretary, hovered in the hallway, mouth agape. She was a big Hardcastle fan.
“Right. I mean, yes, I am.” I pushed the door. It didn’t quite shut. “Won’t you sit down, Ms. Hardcastle?” I gestured toward the chair I had just vacated, and when she glanced at it and hesitated, I snatched up the scrawled-over class notes and deposited them in a clump on my desk. Sunnye Hardcastle graced the green chair with a visceral glamour the likes of which this office had never before seen. Her large leather shoulder bag rested next to the chair, within easy reach; rumor had it Hardcastle didn’t go anywhere without carrying a weapon. Trouble lay at her feet. His muzzle rested on one heavy-soled leather boot. His vigilant brown eyes assessed me.
Good dog
, I thought.
Stay
.
“I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this, without notice.” The writer fixed me with her dark unsmiling gaze. It didn’t much matter whether I minded or not; she was there. She let go of the Rottweiler’s leash, laying it loosely across her lap. Trouble glared at me. A rumble emanated from a region deep in his throat. Vladimir Litvintsev, my linguistics colleague down the hall, would have called that sound a glottal rumble. The dog’s owner didn’t seem to hear it.
“Not at all.” I ventured a sidelong glance at Trouble.
Stay!
“Sorry if I seemed rude, Ms. Hardcastle, but you’re the last person I would have expected to see here.” I made an all- encompassing sweep with my hand, signifying the plush encapsulated milieu of privilege that is Enfield College. She took my gesture as an invitation to scrutinize the room.
My office was spacious and professorial in the conventional manner, book-laden and a bit shabby. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls. A recessed seat beneath leaded casement windows. A large oak desk with an antique wooden swivel chair I avoided whenever possible. A matching conference table. Polished wood floors half-covered by a green needlepoint rug. All these glories had been bequeathed me by previous occupants going back to the 1830s when Dickinson Hall was erected. Nothing individual. Nothing mine—except for the life-sized black-and-white Humphrey Bogart poster plastered to the back of the door. Nonetheless, I inhabited the room comfortably. It was a Professor’s office. I was a Professor. I was anything but complacent about that fact.
“I was in the area,” Sunnye Hardcastle said, her gaze migrating back in my direction. “Book tour. I stopped by on an impulse because I wanted to talk to you.” She glanced down at her fingernails. They were short and rounded, painted the bright red of heart’s blood.
“To me?” What could this world-renowned crime novelist want with an English professor? From across the hallway I heard the English Department office door slam shut, then click as the key turned in the lock. Footsteps vanished down the hallway. I checked my watch. 2:07. Why was Monica leaving so early when her idol was within arm’s reach?
The writer gave a short laugh. It was not what I would describe as a particularly joyous sound. “On my way to Boston I was looking over the preliminary program for a crime fiction conference I’ve been invited to appear at here in…when
is
it? March?”
“Oh,” I said. “The Women’s Studies conference.”
“That’s right—Women’s Studies.” The words did not roll off her tongue with the familiarity of use.
“Are you planning to attend?” Sunnye Hardcastle’s participation would be a coup for the conference organizers.
“I’m thinking about it.” As if it were of no import, she flicked away her possible appearance with the tips of her bright red nails. “But when I saw the topic of
your
talk, I told the driver to take a detour to Enfield.”
The bell rang to announce the changing of classes. Ms. Hardcastle broke off and looked out the window.
It was mid-January, the first day of the spring semester. Students hurried by in noisy clumps on their way to classes: American Ethnic Literatures, Principles of a Pluralistic Polity, Great Books by Women. The weather was grey and mushy, and a girl in a red plaid jacket picked her way carefully around a big puddle just outside my window. L. L. Bean boots are expensive. No sense in getting them wet.
Then Peggy Briggs trudged by, plowing right through the center of the puddle in her K-Mart duck boots, weighed down by a canvas backpack that looked like Viet-Nam-era Army surplus. Peggy was a “mature student,” the administration’s designation for anyone over twenty-four. She was a stocky woman of about thirty, a single mother on welfare plucked from the graduation rolls of Greenfield Community College as part of Enfield’s half-hearted efforts to diversify its student population. Among the sleek children of privilege, she stood out like an inflamed thumb.
“Obviously you’re not teaching right now,” Sunnye Hardcastle said. I had her attention again, and her confident tone set my teeth on edge.
You’re not teaching right now.
As if I were simply sitting around on my duff waiting for celebrity writers to drop by.
“My American Popular Fiction seminar meets in an hour, Ms. Hardcastle. I’m free until then.” To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have minded something to distract me. It was an honors seminar, and I had a bad case of the first-day jitters.
“Popular fiction? You mean like crime fiction?”
I nodded.
“You’re kidding. I didn’t know they actually taught that stuff in colleges.” Trouble nudged her leg. She scratched the big dog behind his ears. Her grey eyes assumed a distant expression, as if she were contemplating anything but the vagaries of college curriculum. Then, outside the window, a student yelled, “Hey, George, whatup?” and Sunnye Hardcastle snapped back to the moment.
“Professor Pelletier, I’ll be brief.” Her tone became brusque. “I’m just beginning a new book—a complete departure from the Kit Danger stories—”
A Hardcastle novel without Kit Danger? I couldn’t imagine it.
“—and I could use some expert advice.”
Expert advice? From me? The world of the Kit Danger novels was, as you might expect, a perilous place. Dysfunctional families destroyed their children. Corrupt civil servants bled communities dry. Corporations conducted massive cover-ups of deadly products. Brutal gang members terrorized neighborhoods. The wealthy preyed upon each other, and upon the poor. And Kit Danger, private eye, took under her wing the most vulnerable of the weak and needy, restoring a momentary justice at the end of each venture, most often in spite of the wiles of treacherous, alluring men. I certainly had no expert advice to offer her creator.