Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (22 page)

Claudia built to a crescendo: “A hermeneutics of equality charges feminist scholars to interrogate the subtext of the ideological bunko scheme that constitutes modernist and postmodernist literary strategies. Thank you.”
Applause
. Hastily I scrawled Dennis O’Hanlon’s name and connected it to Munro’s with a line labeled
Library Investigation
. In the
To Do
column I wrote:
4.) Call Denny
. I’d ask the private investigator what he’d found out about the book thefts before Avery took him off the library case.

Or, before he’d dropped out of it himself. I was still confused about that.

People began to leave the auditorium. I stood up. Two men in denim and a woman in black edged past me. The woman said something to the shorter man about “the necessity in any neofeminist model of self-agented subject position to address the implicit cultural inscription of essentialized female culpability.” I sat down again and settled into my seat. I wrote
Rachel Thompson
on the sheet and labeled her connection:
Stolen Books
. What did the librarian know about how the book thefts were carried out? Then I went back to my
To Do
list:
5.) Talk to Rachel.

The room was now empty except for me and my busy little pencil. I sighed. Was all this frenetic investigative planning truly necessary? Or was it related to my need to convince myself that Charlie Piotrowski had no right to call the shots about whether or not I could “aid and abet” Sunnye Hardcastle? Or was it perhaps a way of forgetting what had just happened between us in the diner. All Charlie had said was that maybe we should take a break until the investigation was completed. Then I had to go and blurt out that maybe we shouldn’t see each other again, period. Should I call him and tell him I didn’t mean it. That my remark was nothing but knee-jerk pigheadedness? That I loved him and didn’t want to risk losing what we had together?

Someone lowered the lights in the auditorium and closed the door. I jumped up; the last thing I needed was to spend the weekend locked in Emerson 101. I slid the pad into my bag and headed for the exit. It was Saturday morning. I had to teach again on Monday. When was I going to get any of this Goddamned sleuthing done?

In the lobby, coffee and bagels provided traveling sustenance to departing conferees. I decanted coffee from an urn and looked around. Anyone here from my
To Do
list? Rachel Thompson was off in a corner deep in conversation with Paul Henshaw, the antiquarian book dealer. I headed toward them. The librarian’s complexion was even more rubicund than usual; her plump hands were flying. She was excited about something. And so was Paul. He was leaning forward, listening hard. As I approached them, I was struck by his intensity, the knowledgeable passion of the connoisseur oddly out of sync with the rugged features, the once-broken nose.

When she saw me coming, Rachel exclaimed, “Ohmigod, it’s you, Karen!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me into their conversation. “You saw that house! That cop told me you were there.” So Charlie had followed up on our conversation and called Rachel out to look at the books. “Wasn’t it the most extraordinary experience?” In Rachel’s excitement, her Texas twang had intensified. “I thought I’d fallen down a rabbit hole! Book theft on such a massive scale, they’ve actually called in the FBI.”

“Really?” Charlie hadn’t mentioned that to me at the diner, but, then, he had other things on his mind. “The FBI? Why?”

“Illicit interstate commerce—or something like that.”

Paul turned to me, eyes avid. “You were there? In Chesterfield? Why, Karen? You’re not in the book trade.”

“No, but I…I know the police working on the case. I helped them out before….” I left it vague.

“Oh.” He studied me as if I were a volume being priced: collectible but slightly chipped. “And you think Rachel’s right, that the contents of that house are priceless?” He ran his tongue over his lips, as if anticipating something tasty.

“Well, yes. But, of course, nothing’s for sale,” I continued. “It’s all got to go back to where it came from.”

“Of course,” he said, “but what an amazing collection. I’d give anything to see it before they break it up.” He showed teeth, a wolf’s grin. “You say you know the investigators? Could you get me in there?”

“Well, they are going to need a rare-book expert. Why don’t you call and mention your credentials?”

“Hmm,” he said, “I’ll do just that. Thanks.”

Rachel turned to me. “Paul knows about the theft of
The Maltese Falcon
manuscript. I told him.”

“Oh.”

He laughed. “That’ll be a hot item. In more ways than one. Not the kind of thing you could tout on the Internet, but word’ll get around among the cognoscenti if it’s put up for sale. It’s unique, to say the least. And with Hammett’s corrections, in his own hand? Invaluable. An irresistible lure to just the right person.”

“Who would that be?”

He shrugged. “Some mega-wealthy collector, who’d horde it for his own private delectation.”

“Delectation?”

“His own private pleasure. Word of this gets around, they’ll be coming out of the woodwork, oil sheiks, media moguls, Internet billionaires.”

“How much do you think?”

He smiled with an insider’s secret knowledge. “Might start out at a hundred thou, but something like this, there’s no telling where the ceiling is. You get a bidding war going, and it all depends on how badly someone wants it.”

***

This entire exchange had taken place in lowered tones. We must have looked like huddled conspirators planning a political coup. As far as I could tell from the conference buzz as I’d passed through it on my way to Rachel and Paul, news of the cache of stolen books was not yet circulating. But, given the rumor dynamics of Enfield College, it would be common knowledge before the day was out.

As it happened, we didn’t have to wait that long.

The TV local-news crew was setting up on the wide steps as I exited Emerson with Rachel and Paul. “Professor Karen Pelletier,” yammered the same blow-dried blonde who had waylaid Sunnye outside Mai Thai, “we have information that you’ve been helping the cops solve the college homicide. Is that true?” She thrust the microphone at me.

I was stunned. Academics are hardly newsworthy; I’d never before had a TV camera pointed directly at my face. It was a moment before I could respond. “N…no comment,” I said. Brilliantly.

“And how did you feel when you saw all those stolen books at that house in Chesterfield? Can you tell our viewers what it was like to actually be in that house, surrounded by a fortune in rare books?”

I gathered my wits and took a deep breath. “You shouldn’t split infinitives on the air,” I said. Pivoting on my heel, I slammed back into the building. Claudia Nestor passed me on her way out. Before the heavy door closed behind her, I heard Claudia say to the reporter, “Oh, how wonderful! You’ve come to do a piece on the conference? What can I tell you?”

I knew Earlene was often on campus on the weekend, so I hotfooted it upstairs to the Dean of Students’ office. The door to the outer office was open. The light was on in the inner room. “Earlene,” I wailed, “help. The vultures are after me.”

***

Earlene took me home with her. Her house is a small yellow colonial four blocks from campus in the center of the faculty residential district, otherwise known as the faculty ghetto. The houses are mostly nineteenth-century neoclassical, colonial, and Gothic revival, built on small lots shaded by hundred-year-old oaks and maples. Earlene lived next door to Rachel Thompson, back-to-back with Claudia Nestor, one down from Sally Chenille, and across the street from Miles Jewell. I didn’t envy her the lack of privacy and the gossip-ridden neighborhood, but today the near refuge was more than welcome. Earlene had gutted the original cramped rooms and rebuilt the house on an open plan, with kitchen and bathroom in the rear and sleeping lofts reached by a spiral staircase. The result was a generous light-filled space, which she had furnished in black and golden brown and hung with vivid African weavings.

“Catch me up on what’s been happening,” she said, as she measured freshly ground coffee into a filter pot.

I sat on a high wooden stool at her butcher-block kitchen counter and brought her up to date. When I got to the part about my visit to the Briggs house with Sunnye, Earlene paused in the middle of pouring boiling water into the pot. “You mean not even her family knows where Peggy is?”

“Not unless she came home last night, they don’t.”

“That’s not good, not at all. You know, I think it’s time for the Dean’s office to look into this.”

I slumped in one of her comfortable armchairs with a mug of black coffee while she called Peggy’s home number. When she didn’t get an answer, Earlene said, “Usually at this point I would talk to the roommate, but Peggy doesn’t have one. What about friends? You have any idea who she hangs with?”

“I’ve seen her with Stephanie Abrams a few times. They seem tight.”

“Really? Hmm. That’s an odd couple.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Stephanie comes from such an illustrious family. Her father’s the novelist, C. Lawrence Abrams. Her mother’s also literary, something in the book business, can’t remember exactly what. And Peggy…she’s so…rough around the edges.”

“Yeah? Well, education’s the great leveler.”

“I thought
death
was supposed to be the great leveler.”

“That, too.”

Earlene called the dorm and left a message on Stephanie’s voice mail. Then she sat by the phone with the college directory still open, tapping the oak desk with slim brown fingers. It seemed to me that she had something more on her mind than she was admitting.

“How about her car?” I asked. “We could keep an eye out for that. Do you know what she drives?”

She snapped back from wherever her thoughts had taken her. “No, but Security will. They get that info for the parking permit.” Earlene called the Security office. It took her a while to get through to someone who knew something. I glanced around. It was so comfortable here, I could stay forever. Earlene’s living room, dining area, and study nook flowed together without disruptive barriers, and in the sun-flooded space with its wide-board floors and exposed beams, ordinary objects such as plates and vases became almost luminous.

Earlene hung up the phone. “Peggy got a parking permit in September for an orange 1984 Chevrolet Citation.”

“Oh, that’s hers, huh? It’s hard to miss. It’s got ‘I’d Rather Be Reading’ bumper stickers plastered all over it. Not many of those around anymore.”

“Or many Citations. It’s a wonder the thing still runs.” She went back into the kitchen and returned with a platter of black bread, Jarlsberg cheese, and Granny Smith apples.

The food looked good, but I was worried about Peggy. Why hadn’t I told Charlie that the backpack in Munro’s kitchen was hers? Okay, so I wanted to shield her from being hassled, but that was before I knew she’d dropped out of sight. Her disappearance threw a whole new light on everything.

“Listen, Earlene, I need some advice. There’s something I haven’t told you about Peggy.”

She nodded, attentive.

“That guy who died in the library? Elwood Munro?”

“Yeah? This is about
Peggy
?”

I hesitated. Charlie had sworn me to silence on Munro’s stolen book collection, but obviously someone else had leaked it to the press. “Yes. I was up at Munro’s house night before last—”

“His house? Did you
know
him?”

“Of course not.” I told her about my visit to the Book House.

“Oh…I see. Charlie.”

“Yeah. Charlie.” Earlene raised an eyebrow at the tremor in my voice. “And the very last thing I saw before I left that house was Peggy’s backpack. It was just sitting there on the kitchen floor.”

“Her backpack? In the victim’s house?”

“Uh huh.”

“How’d you know it was hers?”

“The stuffed Pink Panther hanging from the strap.”

“Oh. Yeah, I’ve seen that. You pointed it out to Charlie, of course.”

“No.”

“My God, Karen, why not?”

“It was stupid. I realize that now. At the time I was certain there must be a logical reason for it being there. Peggy’s had it so rough, I didn’t want any suspicion to fall on her. But, surely the police must have looked at it by now. And those kids carry so much junk in their bags—her name would be on everything.” I let my head drop into my hands. “Charlie’s going to be pissed I didn’t tell him at the scene.”

“Uh oh.” She gave me her Wise Woman of Enfield look. “Trouble in paradise?”

Her words galvanized me. My mouth fell open. I leapt up from the deep chair. “No, in my office!”

“Huh?” Earlene placed a hand on my arm.

“I’ve got Trouble in my office,” I explained, grabbing for my coat.

“Karen?” Her grip tightened.