Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (17 page)

“That’s what the lieutenant said,” she replied. “Only he phrased it differently.”

“I’ll bet he said it ‘cost a shitload.’”

She gave me a sideways glance. She knew I was the boss’s girlfriend: She must have been thinking she’d better watch her words.

The first floor was the real treasure trove. Mystery fiction, which seemed to be Munro’s larcenous specialization, filled the place: hallway, living room, and dining room. All three rooms now glared with light. Someone must have sent out for two-hundred-watt bulbs to replace Munro’s deliberately dim illumination. Bright light is not good for books, and he would have known that. I stifled the impulse to protest.

Following instructions to touch as little as possible, I scanned the spines of shelved books. Munro’s collection was wide-ranging and impressive: not only the classic hard-boiled American writers—Chandler, Hammett, Spillane—but also the newer authors—Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Tony Hillerman. There was something thrilling about seeing all these books together, many of them in their original dust jackets. A familiar volume caught my eye, and I eased a copy of Sunnye Hardcastle’s
Rough Cut
from its niche. The bright jacket with its hot-pink, chartreuse, and black design was identical to the one on my own misplaced copy. I opened the book to the back of the title page. Yep, first edition. What had Sunnye said this could go for? Three thousand dollars? A single book out of this huge collection, I mused, three thousand dollars. Suddenly it struck me, the full extent of what I was looking at. This whole bizarre scene—the remote farmhouse, the expensive equipment, the thousands of purloined volumes—represented possibly one of the world’s major collections of American mystery fiction. The bright lights, the police officers, my own intrusive presence, were merely tangential to the massive controlling obsession that had gone into planning and carrying out the acquisition of these books. This unique collection had been built risk by risk by risk.

What was it Dennis O’Hanlon had called the perpetrator of the Enfield book thefts? A
biblioklept
?
Bibliopath
would be more like it: a crazed intelligence focused on books—not necessarily on the knowledge or stories they contained, but on the books themselves as objects of desire. Literary archives are locked, guarded, and alarmed, but Elwood Munro had somehow found his way into the stacks. Now he was dead, and his collection remained as a perverse testimony to one man’s tastes, interests, and knowledge. Was that what he was looking for as he gathered these books together, a kind of bibliographic immortality?

Expecting more book stacks in the kitchen, I stood surprised in the doorway: no shelves at all. A long room with speckled grey linoleum on the floor and makeshift counters of some weird prehistoric Formica. Two long metal folding tables were stacked with volumes of various sizes, seemingly in the process of being sorted and classified. An old-fashioned oak card-catalog cabinet stood incongruously next to a 1930s gas stove with curved chrome legs. I leafed through cards. “Not Library of Congress classification,” I told Flynn, who wrote everything down as if I knew what I was talking about, “and not Dewey Decimal System.” Munro had gone in for some eccentric, seemingly self-invented classification system. Using his cards, I wouldn’t have been able to locate a single thing in the collection, but the books themselves on the shelves had seemed logically enough organized.

In a large pantry off the kitchen, there awaited another surprise: a worktable stocked with the tools of book repair—Exacto knives, glue, large needles, binding thread, tape, a book press. If any of Elwood Munro’s stolen books were sick, he knew how to heal them.

The trooper and I climbed the steep back stairs from the kitchen. Two bedrooms housed a collection of books on American politics that seemed sketchy compared to what I’d seen downstairs; another was devoted to nineteenth-century cookbooks and domestic advice manuals. The attic featured Civil War history, and memorabilia such as uniform buttons, regiment insignias, confederate currency, and letters from the front. A small cabinet tucked under the eaves provided a refuge for nineteenth-century erotica.

“Whoa!” Trooper Flynn said, as she opened the covers of a pop-up book picturing a couple in sexual congress. The man was on top, and flipping the pages revealed rather energetic activity on the part of a rather large male member. “I didn’t know the Victorians went in for pornography.”

The stairs creaked loudly, and Charlie’s head appeared in the stairwell. Deirdre Flynn slapped the smutty book shut without regard for its moving parts. As she slid it back into the unlocked case, Charlie asked, “What’ve you got there?”

The trooper’s fair skin turned strawberry pink. “Just m-more of the same,” she stuttered. In spite of the uniform, the gun belt, the badge, she was still very young.

Charlie wrinkled his forehead at her quizzically, then turned to me. “You about done here, Karen? There’s sandwiches and fresh coffee outside in the van.”

“I’ve given it all a once over, but, Jeez, Charlie, I don’t know.… This is big time—an absolutely extraordinary collection. Way over my head. We’re dealing with a highly esoteric collector here. Obviously, he specialized in American books, and from a populist perspective.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He collected books published for the masses, not for the literati. Look, detective fiction here. Upstairs, military stuff, cookbooks, erotica.” Trooper Flynn was still transcribing my every word.

“Erotica? Really?”

“I’m not versed in book-collecting, per se, you know, just literature. You need to get specialists—rare-book dealers and curators. People with a comprehensive overview of this field. They’ll be able to tell you what you’re looking at here.”

“I thought we’d start tomorrow with your Ms. Thompson from the library. She could identify the books that were stolen from Enfield College.”

“Rachel? Hmm. That’s a good idea. She knows this stuff.”

“But we’ve got to get a crime scene team in here first, before the evidence gets completely screwed. Munro may be dead, but, who knows, maybe he wasn’t working alone. Maybe he had an accomplice.”

“Ah!” I said, “that’s why you wanted to preserve those tire tracks, in case someone else is in on this.”

“Hmm,” he replied. He grinned at me. “That’s a good idea.” Then he got serious again. “Now, anything else you notice about this place that you haven’t mentioned?”

“Aside from its isolation out here in the boonies?” I checked around. “No. Nothing in particular.”

Charlie chewed his lip. “Think about it. Nothing here but books. No food in the fridge. No toiletries. No clothing. Where did the guy actually live?”

***

I sat on one of the folding chairs the cops had brought in and ate a dried-up roast-beef sandwich while Deirdre Flynn sealed the doors with crime-scene tape, and Charlie gave orders: Schultz was to wait for him in the Jeep. Try to get a little rest while he finished up here. Flynn and her partner were to keep watch on the house until the SOC technicians arrived.

Before we left, I took one last stroll through the downstairs. Once the experts were called in, and the business of cataloging the collection and finding the true owners of the books began, I wouldn’t be let anywhere near the place. I stood in the living-room doorway: With its tightly pulled window shades and tightly packed shelves, the room, and the dining room beyond, seemed, in the hallucinatory forensic light, like some bookworm’s phantasmagoric wonderland:
Red Harvest
;
Devil in a Blue Dress
;
Edwin of the Iron Shoes
;
The Big Sleep
; “
A” is for Alibi
;
Some Buried Caesar
;
Bitter Medicine
.

In the kitchen, I perused the piles of books awaiting Munro’s classification. Christ! From under a mint-condition Nancy Drew I plucked a worn copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s
Tales
. Eureka! 1845: a first edition. Poe is the father of detective fiction. If I remembered correctly, this was the first book to contain all three of his C. Auguste Dupin stories. Yes, here they were, listed in the table of contents: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter.” I handled the book reverently. Better tell the cops we had a piece of the American canon here. But, then, would that make any difference to them? Just another stolen book.

Then, turning to leave, I was stopped cold by the sight of a vaguely familiar object tucked between the card-catalog cabinet and the chrome-legged stove. It was a beat-up canvas backpack with a grungy little Pink Panther doll attached to its army-green strap. I stared at it in disbelief. Unless I was badly mistaken, the last time I’d seen that bag was yesterday morning when Peggy Briggs had visited me in my office.

Chapter Fifteen

The classic teacher’s nightmare: wandering through institutional corridors, searching for the right classroom. Haven’t prepared. Don’t have my books. Don’t even know what the course is. I open a door. Twenty-five heads turn in my direction. Twenty-five hands reach for pens. This must be it. I stride to the front of the room with as much authority as I can muster wearing a pajama jacket that doesn’t quite cover my nether regions. I open my mouth to begin the lecture.

Then I’m awake. It’s eight a.m., and the phone is ringing.

“Uhhh?”

“Babe? You get home okay?”

“Umm.”

“Listen, you were a big help last night. Did I tell you that?”

“Uggh.”

“You got us on the right track with all that book-collecting stuff. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known what the hell we were looking at.”

“Ufff.”

“So, listen, babe. I’m gonna be tied up all day with the Munro case. And you’ve got that conference thing. So maybe I’ll see ya around campus.” A little chortle, like water over smooth stones; he seemed to think that was funny.

“Unhuh.”

“You okay, babe? You sound wasted. Oh, shit—there’s the other phone. Gotta go.”

God, I hate a morning person.

It was Friday, the second full day of the crime fiction conference. I was scheduled to teach my freshman class at four p.m. I wasn’t prepared, but at least I knew what the course was. With any luck, I could cobble together a discussion outline during office hours this morning. Then I’d be free to attend an early afternoon conference session. The choices were: “Dead Blondes in Red Dresses: Whiteness Studies in American Crime Fiction” and “Beowulf to Nero Wolfe: The Curriculum and the Crime Novel.” After a shower and coffee I donned a teal jacket and black skirt, more appropriate classroom wear than a butt-baring pj jacket. By 9:12 I was in the car and on the road. A spring sun was shining, and the Subaru’s wheels splashed through puddles of melting snow.

All the way into campus I worried about Peggy Briggs. The poor kid: Her sister had been killed, what, four, five years ago. The last thing she needed now was to be dragged into another homicide. Short of stealing her backpack, thus tampering with evidence, there was nothing I could have done to help her last night except what I actually did do, and that was to keep my mouth shut and buy her some time. In that cluttered house, the backpack was only one item among thousands, but the police would look at it early in the investigation. They’d think it was Elwood Munro’s; perhaps they’d even conjecture that he’d used it to spirit books away from libraries. But they’d soon identify the pack as Peggy’s. And, since she was still living at her mother’s house, Charlie would know precisely where to find her.

***

On campus the snow was heavy and wet, the walkways a half-inch deep in murky water. Remnants of yesterday’s towering snow fort sagged on the quad. This morning the scene around the library seemed normal: no crime-scene tape, no police vehicles. Three tall students I recognized from the basketball floor lounged on the steps, basking in the sun’s rays. From an open dorm window came the voice of Lucinda Williams singing about this sweet old world.

I called Peggy from the office, but the man who answered the phone at her house said he didn’t know where the hell she was, and, no, he wouldn’t take a message, he wasn’t no goddamned secretary.

I looked up her e-mail address in the directory and sent a message:
Peggy, get in touch. It’s important.

Not that I was about to clue her in on the location of her missing backpack; she’d get that bad news soon enough. My good news—Sunnye Hardcastle’s research proposition—wouldn’t really counteract it, but, then, an offer of money never comes amiss to a scholarship student.

Or to anyone.

***

I was deep into preparing a spontaneous class discussion on liberty and self-determination in
Jane Eyre
when I sensed a scrutinizing presence. I looked up. Harriet Person, in a black pantsuit under a navy wool coat, loomed in the open doorway. In her short dark hair, the white blaze had widened strikingly.

“Karen, the a.m. sessions have already started. If we leave now we’ll make the end of the first paper.”

I laid down the green pen and pushed the desk chair back. “Sorry, Harriet, I can’t go this morning. I have a class to prepare.”