Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (35 page)

I turned a beautiful Graham Greene in my hands. I’d read somewhere that a first edition of
Brighton Rock
with a perfect dust jacket had sold for £50,000. It hadn’t made any real impact at the time. But that was then. This was real.

“Well?” Charlie queried, after my initial perusal.

I placed the Greene back on its shelf. I had tears in my eyes, not so much because of the books, but because Charlie had actually brought me here despite all the misgivings he’d expressed about involving me in his work. “Thank you,” I said. “This is wonderful. Thank you, thank you. I know it couldn’t have been easy, getting me into this place. But you trusted me enough to bring me to see this…it’s…it’s…” I reached up and stroked his cheek, truly at a loss for words.

Chapter Twenty-eight

We spent the night at Charlie’s little yellow house in Northampton. What else could we do, we asked ourselves, but love and respect each other and try to work things out? I left very early, while he was still asleep, and drove back to campus to pick up an anthology I needed for my class prep. Love and crime and books were all very nice, but I still had to earn my living. It was almost six when I entered the quad from the parking lot. Everything was hushed and motionless, as if a neutron bomb had just depopulated the campus. The pale peach sun was rising behind the turreted roofline of the library. I stopped, transfixed by the exquisite sharp contrast of stone and light. Next to the beautiful old building, the foundational walls of the new library under construction stretched away into the shadows. This fifty-million-dollar edifice was about to rise into being as a state-of-the-art, twenty- first-century electronic information-technology center. Oh, yes, and as a repository for that soon-to-be-outmoded information technology, the book.

My hours with Charlie had put me in a mellow and meditative mood. I stood there alone in the dawn and mused. The Book, as book historians called it, as if there were a single entity that somehow transcended individual volumes. My thoughts went back to the mystical feelings I’d had the night I’d illicitly entered the stacks. All those minds preserved in all those books, long-dead, but still vigorous and alive: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, of course, the usual suspects, their names stamped in gold on leather spines. But also humbler fare: Chandler and Hammett and Anna Katherine Green. Even the pseudonymous authors of the ephemeral press, such as Ned Buntline and Bertha M. Clay. All of them inscribed in ink on paper and held in trust for the present and the future. And who had done the keeping? Librarians with lost names, nowhere stamped on book spines. Generation after generation of custodians of the book. Decades, centuries of individuals dedicated to transmitting the accumulated cogitations and imaginings of the collective consciousness. Dim, dusty, ghostly, now, those librarians of the past, but, then as now, with absolute power over books. Live, vivid people like Rachel, as well as insubstantial wraiths like Nellie Applegate. Nellie, who was so…interested in… Elwood Munro, book thief extraordinaire. Wait a minute! Nellie! Had anyone seriously questioned Nellie?

***

I called Charlie from my office and woke him up.

“Where’d you go, babe?” he asked groggily.

“What about Nellie Applegate?” I demanded.

“Huh? Applegate? The librarian? That little grey woman who looks like—”

“Yeah. Her.”

“What about her?”

“Couldn’t she be the one who stole the manuscript? She’d have access to all the library keys and to Rachel’s office. She would know how sloppy and shortsighted Rachel is—that she might not even recognize the manuscript in all that junk on her desk. And Nellie’s been behaving so oddly lately…”

“Like how?” He seemed to be at least half-awake now, maybe even shifting himself up out of those tangled sheets.…

“Almost…distraught. She was infatuated with Elwood Munro—Bob Tooey, as we knew him. He was an inoffensive-looking little man, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She ogled him from the reading-room desk as if he were Apollo descended from Olympus. If he did have an accomplice in stealing those books—”

“Applegate would have been perfectly placed to get him what he wanted,” Charlie said.

“Yeah. I think the library has pretty good security against intruders, but I’d be surprised if they worried about their own staff.”

“I think it’s time,” Charlie said, sounding as if he had actually gotten out of bed, “that we had a little talk with Ms. Nellie Applegate.”

***

Charlie surprised the hell out of me by asking me to ride along to Nellie’s place on Hill Street. He wanted someone who knew the librarian in case she freaked out. He’d asked Rachel first, and she would only go if I went. I rode with Rachel in the BMW. Paul Henshaw’s BMW actually, she confided to me, lent to her while the Nissan was in the shop. It was six, and the sky was beginning to lighten over the Pelham hills to the east. Nellie lived on a narrow commercial street in a seedy part of town. I’d never been there before, but the neighborhood made me feel right at home: the turned-over garbage cans, the shabby corner grocer’s, the three-story frame houses with their rickety ranks of porches. We climbed a narrow set of stairs to Nellie’s apartment above Pratt Liquors. A blotchy orange cat streaked past us as we reached her landing. Schultz rang the bell set into the doorframe. When there was no response, she pounded on the door. “Police business, Ms. Applegate. Open up.”

From inside came a sudden high scream that increased in volume and shrillness, then, just as suddenly choked itself off. The cops glanced at each other. I could feel a sudden spurt of tension in the drab vestibule. Charlie waved Rachel and me peremptorily toward the stairs. Rachel quickstepped halfway down. I descended two or three steps, then halted well within the line of sight.

“Ms. Applegate, you all right?” Charlie called. No response. He rattled the doorknob. Locked. Gripping the knob, he put his shoulder to the door and shoved. It didn’t budge. He turned to the hefty trooper who had accompanied us. “Kick it in.”

The beefy blond grimaced, but squared off anyhow. Before he could launch himself, the door opened from inside, and Nellie Applegate stood there with a still-steaming teakettle in her hand. She wore a grey bathrobe in some pilled fabric and pink slipper socks. She looked like a walking nervous breakdown, her face blotched and strained, the greying hair unkempt.

“It was the freakin’ teakettle,” Schultz tittered in nervous relief. “And here I thought someone had a knife at her throat.”

Nellie set the hot kettle down on the polished surface of a maple bookcase. “What do you want?” she whispered.

“We need to ask you a few questions, Ms. Applegate. Can we come in?”

Silently Nellie stepped aside, and the three cops entered, leaving the door open. I slid into the small living room behind them. Rachel remained on the stairs.

“Ms. Applegate…” Charlie gazed at her, slit-eyed, assessing. “We understand you knew Elwood Munro, the man who was found dead in the library stacks.”

Nellie didn’t respond. This policeman’s massive bulk seemed to terrify her.

“We already know all about you and Munro, Nellie,” Charlie continued in an off-hand manner. He leaned toward her, suddenly paternal, consoling. Good cop. “You might as well get it off your chest. You’ll feel a lot better.”

She slid, boneless, into an armchair and cowered there, trembling. Who could tell what this brute of a man might do?

“No one’s going to hurt you,” Charlie assured her. “Just answer our questions and you’ll be fine.”

She sank further into the cushions, as if her body were anticipating total meltdown.

I nudged him aside. He balked; I could feel the resistance in his arm muscles. I treated him to a wide-eyed stare:
Let me handle this
. After a second or two, he shrugged, strolled over to the window, and stared down at the cracked sidewalks.

“Nellie,” I said, “I know you knew Mr. Munro, because I saw you talking to him.” I hadn’t, but she couldn’t know that. “He was a handsome man. So strong and…powerful.” I grinned: Just us girls together. “At least I thought he was attractive. Didn’t you?” I hoped I wasn’t piling it on too thick.

She nodded. “I loved him,” she whispered.

I nodded back and perched on the padded arm of the chair, making my next remark exquisitely casual. “So, how long ago did you find out he was stealing books?”

Her eyes were fixed on mine. “It wasn’t until he asked me to—” She broke it off, her expression suddenly horrified, and covered her mouth with her hand.

“You helped him, didn’t you?” I kept my voice sympathetic.

Her mouse-brown eyes were riveted to mine. She nodded again. “He was the first man who ever really loved me.”

That pissed me off. I may be naive, but I like to think that the library is the one pure institution we have left, the one that still exists solely to serve the public, the one we can trust absolutely to pass on knowledge from one generation to another. Now here was this weak, dishonest…seduced… librarian. This custodian of the book who’d failed her trust. I had to bite my tongue, but there was one more thing I needed to ask while I still had her talking. I barely managed to keep my voice even. “How could you love a man who stole books, Nellie? Or did you stop loving him when you found out he was a crook?”

Her eyes widened.

Speculatively, I said, “Maybe that’s why you killed him.”

She jumped out of the chair and squeaked. “I didn’t kill him! He fell!”

Charlie pivoted on his heel and strode back toward us. Nellie cringed. “He fell, did he?” Charlie said. “Tell us about it.”

Nellie Applegate had indeed caused Elwood Munro’s death, but completely by accident. The night preceding the library reception, at his instruction, she’d stolen the
Maltese
manuscript from the showcase in the foyer and had “hidden” it on Rachel’s desk. After the reception, she’d arranged to meet Munro in the closed stacks and hand the manuscript over to him. When she entered the stacks, he was balanced on the very top of the movable library steps, stretching to reach a volume on the highest shelf.

“I called his name,” she choked. “I guess I startled him. He turned toward me—fast. I keep seeing it over and over again. He’s on the top of the steps trying to get one of those Erle Stanley Gardners. When he heard my voice, he swiveled. He just
swiveled
. It goes over and over in my head like a bad movie. It happened so fast. He didn’t even yell. Just grunted and went down. Then there was that awful crash—like a crate of books. I never heard anything so horrible in my life.

“I ran over to him, but he was…gone. Gone. Just gone. I keep seeing it—his neck at that weird angle. I can’t stop seeing it.” The tears started then.

Charlie handed her one of his ubiquitous packs of tissues. “Why didn’t you report it?”

She flinched at his expression. “He was…gone.” She mopped her eyes, but it didn’t stanch the flow. “There was nothing anyone could do for him. And I was afraid…”

Charlie remained silent, but his lips were tight. Bad cop, now?

“Afraid of what?” I asked. Schultz and the trooper were mere onlookers. Rachel stood inside the open doorway, gaping at the scene.

“Afraid the police would find out that I’d stolen that manuscript from the showcase. Afraid I’d lose my job. Afraid…I’d be charged with murder. But it wasn’t my fault. He just swiveled and—” She was back into the rewind.

“Tell us about the stolen books,” Charlie said. “You help Munro with that, too?”

She nodded. “Until I met him, I thought love was something that just happened in stories.” Then Nellie couldn’t speak for sobbing.

“But you didn’t even report his death? Jeezus Christ!” Charlie’s face was a study in shades of incredulity. He was neither good cop nor bad cop now, just his own person. And appalled. He turned away from Nellie Applegate and motioned to Schultz with his thumb. “Take her in. She’s got more talking to do.”

The body in the library: A murder that wasn’t a murder. A killer who wasn’t a killer. A librarian who stole books. A private eye who was really a crook. And Sunnye Hardcastle, crime novelist, who had been bold, and brave, and strong—and had gotten the story all wrong.

Epilogue

The door to my office opened, and Charlie Piotrowski walked in. He held a Starbucks cup in each hand. “You busy?”

“Not if that’s for me.” I held my hand out for the coffee. “Come on. Give it over.”

He handed me the cup with a grin and settled into the green chair. They fit each other nicely, big man, big chair. He unzipped his dark-blue jacket, shrugged out of it, and picked up his own coffee cup from the side table. “So…I spent the morning talking to that pathetic little woman. You want to hear her story?”

“Nellie Applegate? Sure.” I sipped the steaming dark brew.

“Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it—Munro’s death was an accident. It’s nuts, really. What a freaky way to die. The guy could leap across shattered factory skylights, but he broke his neck falling off a three-foot high set of rolling library steps.”

“What’s going to happen to Nellie?”

“She’ll be charged with grand theft, unlawful failure to report a death. Manslaughter? I doubt it. All depends on the grand jury findings. It’s sad, really. The whole thing is damn sad. Munro, too. Applegate told me the weirdest stuff about him.” He took two brown packets out of his jacket pocket, ripped them open, and stirred raw sugar into his coffee.