by Dorien Grey
Logic said it had to be something with his work, and with his cataloging. But I had a hard time imagining how the papers of a notorious fundamentalist preacher of the 1920s and 1930s and his son could possibly get him killed. Whatever it was Taylor had found, if he’d found anything at all, I doubted it could hardly be considered “Stop the presses!’ news after all this time. Still, I’d check it out.
But first I wanted to give Dave Witherspoon another call. I remembered I hadn’t left my home number, and he may have gotten home after I’d left work. I called him again.
Same machine, same message. I once again asked him to call me and left my home number this time.
Not two minutes after I put down the receiver, the phone rang again, and I was surprised to hear Tim Jackson’s voice:
“You called, Master?” he asked, giving me a quick mental flashback to the time before Tim met Phil or I met Jonathan, when Tim and I used to get together for a little horizontal recreation. My crotch gave a small nostalgic sigh, but didn’t say anything.
“You’re in early,” I said.
“Yeah, Phil had an early morning photo shoot so I got up when he did,” he said. “You wanted to know about Taylor Cates?”
“Yeah. Anything peculiar in the autopsy? Exactly what was the cause of death? Somebody suggested a broken neck?”
“No. Severe head trauma consistent with a fall down a set of metal stairs. A really nasty blow to the skull just behind the right ear, where apparently he hit a sharp corner on the way down. That was probably the one that did it.”
“Any signs of a struggle?” I asked, grabbing for straws.
“None. Were you expecting there might be?”
“Other than the fact that one doesn’t normally just fall backwards down a flight of steps, not really,” I admitted. “Just checking.”
“Ah, okay,” he said. “Anyway, the M.E. listed it as an accidental death, which will probably mean the police will close the case.”
My pause to think his information over was interrupted by Tim saying, “Well, I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got a probable drug overdose waiting for me and I’d best get to it.”
“Thanks, Tim,” I said, then quickly remembered the benefit. I filled him in quickly and he said he’d check with Phil and call us back that night.
I next put in a call to the Burrows and asked to speak to Irving McGill.
“Yes, Mr. Hardesty,” McGill’s deep voice said. “What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if I might come over and take a look at the Butler papers.”
There was a significant pause before he spoke. “I…uh, I suppose. May I ask the reason? Are you looking for something in particular? And there are at least a dozen boxes of the Butlers’ papers.”
“I believe I’d be most interested in Morgan Butler,” I said, “since you said they were the ones Taylor was working on when he died. If I could just come have a look at them I might know what I’m looking for if I find it.”
You want to try that one again? several mind-voices asked in unison. But before I could rephrase it, McGill spoke.
“Well, I’m of course happy to give you my full cooperation,” he said, his reluctance coming through loud and clear. “But I’m sure you understand you won’t be able to take anything out of the cataloging area. We are not only understaffed at the moment, but very busy, and…”
“I understand completely,” I said, “and I’ll try not to either get in the way or keep anyone from their work any longer than necessary. So would it be possible for me to come by today?”
Still another pause just long enough to clearly indicate he’s just as soon I didn’t, before he said, “Of course. I’ll be expecting you.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” I said. “I appreciate it. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
We exchanged good-byes and hung up.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk to read the paper.
*
I’d never been in the cataloging room before and I was reminded of a gigantic rummage sale, except instead of lamps and end tables and macramé plant holders, there were boxes—boxes of all sizes and shapes filled most of the center of the large space, stacked on the floor in no discernable order that I could see. McGill, who had escorted me in, noticed my reaction.
“I know,” he said with a sigh. “After the fire at the estate, we were desperate to get the collection out. We had to resort to putting things in whatever containers we could get. Normally, we would never use anything but archival boxes, which are made of acid-free material to slow down the deterioration process of the papers.” He gestured to one side of the room, where there was a huge stack of new, identical black boxes measuring about a foot tall by a foot wide by two feet deep. Most of the boxes scattered around the room were similar but older and looking a bit battered. “Most people would be amazed at how truly fragile paper can be,” he continued, “and how fast it can deteriorate, depending on its composition, the ink used, etc. So it’s important that we get everything into the archival boxes as soon as possible.”
As on the main floor, the center of the room was flanked by row upon row of floor-to-ceiling shelf units, most of them empty. A few were beginning to be filled with neat rows of the new archival boxes, neatly labeled, as order was made out of the chaos in the rest of the room.
Three college-age women and a man in his fifties—the on-duty catalogers, I assumed—were seated at long tables piled with open boxes and stacks of papers, letters, and what looked to be manuscripts. McGill escorted me in and led me to one of the young women, seated at the table closest to the door.
“Janice, this is Mr. Hardesty,” he said as the woman looked up at our approach. “He would like to look through Morgan Butler’s papers, and perhaps you could help him find what he’s looking for.”
Yeah, like I knew, I thought.
He turned to me. “Janice has been doing a thorough review of all the Butler papers to see if anything might be missing,” he said, indicating a stack of about twelve older-looking archival boxes on the floor flanking her chair, and two open on the table in front of her. I remembered that McGill told me Evan Knight had done some cataloging at the Burrows estate—I wondered if the Butler papers might have been among them. “Everything seems to be in order thus far,” he continued. “Still, we want to be thorough.”
He glanced around the room, then at his watch. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I have some matters which must be attended to. I hope you find what you’re looking for. Let me know if there are any problems.”
“I will,” I said. “Thank you again.”
He nodded, turned, and left, closing the door behind him.
I looked at the stacks of paper Janice was apparently working on.
“These are the last of Jeremy Butler’s private correspondence,” she said. “I’ve not yet started on his son’s, which aren’t completely cataloged yet.”
She nodded toward the boxes on the floor beside her. “Box #12-A,” she said, “is Morgan’s personal correspondence. 12B is nearly empty; just a few articles he’d written for some educational journals, and a couple of apparently unpublished book manuscripts.”
“Manuscripts? Fact or fiction?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “As I say, Taylor hadn’t yet gotten all the way through everything when he…fell. His list should be in there.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?”
“Of course,” she said, and indicated a chair at the other end of the desk. “There’s some clear space down there. Please try not to get them out of order, though.”
“I won’t,” I promised. As I bent over to pick up the two boxes, I noted that they were apparently older versions of the new archival boxes stacked against the wall. A large white stick-on label on one end identified its contents. One said, in large, neat handwriting: “Butler, Jeremy: Son Morgan, Correspondence 19381953,” the other “Butler, Jeremy: Son Morgan Misc. Writings 194819
53.” Apparently once cataloged, the material would be put in the newer boxes for storage on the shelves.
Setting them on the floor by the chair at the far end of the table, I opened the “Correspondence” box first. Heavy, tabbed cardboard dividers separated the material by year. On top of them was a lined yellow notepad that appeared to be a list of the contents of the box. I sat down and carefully pulled out those behind the divider marked 1953.
I idly leafed through the letters I’d pulled out and was surprised to realize they were all apparently carbon copies—and almost all handwritten! Who makes carbon copies of handwritten letters? However, when I started reading quickly through the neat script, I could immediately see how Taylor could have gotten so distracted from simply cataloging letters and papers. These were bits and pieces of a human being’s life. The paper had once been blank, and the words that filled it now had been placed there, albeit through a sheet of carbon paper, one after the other, by a living entity, inhaling and exhaling as he wrote, transferring parts of himself through his fingertips to the paper, to be carried across the years.
I had to force myself not to be drawn into the vortex of actually reading each letter, and tried to just skim them, like a stone skipping across the pond of time. I found it interesting that the few typed letters—also carbon copies, of course—were to his wife (I assumed) and to his father. Now that was pretty interesting, I thought. He handwrites letters to his friends and types them to the two people who one might suppose were closest to him? I also noted that the majority of the letters to his wife and father tended to be short and from what little I saw, quite dry, while those to various friends and colleagues—I gathered he was a high school English teacher—were quite lengthy and showed both intelligence and wit. Apparently he had been in the navy in WWII, and of the last twenty letters or so, most were to someone then still in the service named Scot—one t. I skimmed them, and they seemed pretty innocuous from a quick-scan point of view. Probably an old service buddy. There were no letters from Scot to Morgan.
Making sure the letters I’d read were all neatly back in the order I’d gone through them, I replaced the lid and exchanged the box for the one on the floor. Opening it I noted it contained some manila file envelopes and a stack of a dozen or so thick spiral notebooks like high school and college kids use for classes. I went quickly through the manila folders first, which contained a number of relatively short typewritten manuscripts of articles he’d apparently done for educational publications and a few short stories. From my cursory scan, they all appeared to be well written and seemingly very authoritative. Whether they’d been published or not, I couldn’t tell. Returning them to the box, I pulled out the stack of spiral notebooks, which I gathered were the book manuscripts. They were numbered, “1-9” and “1-4.” Neither book was titled, though the last page of notebook 4 had the word “Trash!” scrawled across it. I had no idea if this was to be the title or whether it was Morgan’s assessment of his own work. Perhaps that was why there were only four. I started with notebook 1 and skimmed through it. The plot, from what I could tell, seemed to be along the lines of a 20th Century The Scarlet Letter…there was a conflicted preacher and a young woman and the overall impression I got was that while the writing was good, the plot and the characterization were…well, perhaps summed up by Morgan’s own note. There was no clue as to when it had been written.
The second, interestingly, appeared to be the narrative of a sailor returning from WWII to confront his domineering father’s plans for his future. Obviously it had been written sometime between 1945 and Morgan’s death in 1953. It was told in the third person and I assumed was fiction. From what little I read, it seemed to be really well done, in that I had to consciously pull myself away from it. Flipping through the last notebook, number 9, I saw the writing ended abruptly about two pages into Chapter 9. I kept thumbing through the blank pages, hoping there might be something else written there, but there was not. I did note that a couple of pages apparently had been torn out at the very end.
On a whim, I took another look at the last twenty or so letters in the first box, dated from May 12th to August 11th of 1953—a few days before he died. The last letter to his wife was dated the 10th. She and their son were apparently on an extended visit to his wife’s parents, and gave absolutely no clue that he was about to kill himself. The only possible sign was in the last line of the letter, in which he said, “Tell Collin I love him very much.” Other than that, it, like every letter to his wife, was pretty bland; almost impersonal. Aside from that note to Collin, I didn’t get much of a sense of…well, warmth. There were hints of something beneath the surface, and I wondered if perhaps they were having marital problems. (Well, if Morgan was indeed gay, that there might have been marital problems wouldn’t have been surprising.)
But it was the letters to Scot that I read more closely, and while they appeared to be nothing more than just friendly letters to an old buddy, I could definitely sense something a little less casual between the lines. There were some sidelong references to Morgan’s military days and frequent, obviously fond, reminiscences on things the two had done together—a trip to Rome, for example, was written of with much warmth. And, in the last few letters particularly, there was somehow an almost tangible feeling of…again, what? Tension, of desperation and sadness. Probably just my own Scorpio-romantic nature, seeing these things which were not specifically stated, but I could sense the words were some sort of carefully constructed dam behind which huge volumes of confined feelings were pressing. The last letter to Scot was dated August 11, 1953. It was also apparently the last letter he ever wrote.
I really wanted to know more about Morgan Butler.
You’ve got a lover, one of my mind-voices reminded me gently. You don’t need another one; and especially a long-dead one. You’re supposed to be working on a case here, not running off on some sort of romantic tangent.
It was right, of course; my mind-voices usually are. But I somehow felt that in this case, the two were not mutually exclusive…that in some way, Morgan Butler was linked to Taylor Cates’ death across all those years.
*
I spent far more time at the Burrows than I had intended to. I found it interesting that there were no references in any of his letters to any novels, including the ones in front of me. And while I couldn’t find exact dates for either book manuscript, I had the strong feeling that it was his death that interrupted completion of the second one.
I came away from the library with a determination to find out whatever I could about Morgan Butler.
*
I arrived home before Jonathan and Joshua, who were stopping for a haircut, and had fixed myself a Manhattan and just sat down to turn on the TV when I happened to glance at the bookcase by the door. I noticed several books were missing and, puzzled, I got up and went to see if I could figure out which ones they were. Well, actually, I pretty much knew before I got there. The four missing books were those by Evan Knight. Jonathan must have taken them with him to work and brought them to Knight’s house for signing.
So? a mind-voice asked.
So why hadn’t he mentioned it? I wondered.
What? the mind-voice asked, much more sharply. Since when does he have to report to you on everything? Jeezus, Hardesty, what’s going on with you?
I was afraid I knew, and I wasn’t the least bit happy about it. This whole thing with Evan Knight and Jonathan had been poking at the worst part of my Scorpio nature. That I knew Knight was a predator was one thing, but combining that with my sense that Jonathan had been acting a little strange lately…no, I didn’t like it at all.
Luckily, the phone interrupted my little toe-dip into the Depression Pool.
“Hello?” I said, picking it up. I’d at long last broken myself of answering with my name.
“Is this Dick Hardesty?” the male voice asked.
“Yes…” I said, not quite sure who was on the other end of the line.
“This is Dave Witherspo
on. Sorry I didn’t reply sooner, but we just got back into town.”
“I’m glad you called, Mr. Witherspoon. I’d very much like to talk with you about Taylor Cates. I am trying to find out whatever I can about him, and since you two worked together…”
“Yes,” he said. “Taylor. I assumed that’s what you wanted when I heard the ‘Dick Hardesty Investigations’ part of your message. Unfortunately, I don’t really know what I can tell you. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course…as I’m sorry for anyone’s death, but we weren’t exactly close.”
“Well, would it be possible for us to get together for an hour or so? I do have some questions I think you could help me answer.”
He sighed. “I suppose. But it can’t be until next Monday, I’m afraid. My lover and I are leaving town again for a few days.”
“Monday will be fine. What time would be convenient for you?”
There was a slight pause, then, “Well, we’re flying back Sunday evening. Let me call you at your office Monday morning and we’ll see what my schedule is.”
“Thanks. I’ll look forward to seeing you then.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Monday, then.” And we hung up.
*
I’d returned to the couch and was staring at the TV when Jonathan and Joshua came in. Getting up for our group hug, noting how hot Jonathan looked with his new haircut—he’d gotten it cut really short, which was sexy as all hell. Joshua seemed a bit subdued, and I noticed his hair looked the same as it had when he’d left for day care. I asked Jonathan about it, and he gave Joshua a rather stern stare.
“Joshua decided he didn’t want his hair cut. He decided it loudly and at great length, and since there were a lot of other people in the shop waiting, I figured ‘the heck with it.’ But we had a long talk about it in the car, and I don’t think we’ll be going through that same little number again. Right, Joshua?”