Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  The tinny telephone voice said, “Emergency Operator. Hello? Emergency Operator.” I dropped the receiver and jumped up. “Get back in here, Amanda,” I ordered.

  Behind me, I heard Rachel’s voice breathlessly informing the operator of gunplay in the college library.

  “Get. In. Here.” My voice was commanding, but to no avail. My daughter crouched behind the wounded book truck, then slunk out of sight around the shelves.

  “A-man-da!” I shrieked. But she was gone. “Goddamnit.”

  Another shot. A book flew off a shelf and landed broken-backed at my feet.

  I snatched up the phone again and called Charlie on his cell. “College library. Dennis O’Hanlon.” Another bullet pinged off a metal shelf. “He’s got a gun.” I slammed down the receiver and dived under the desk.

  A period of silence ensued: Thirty seconds? A half-hour? Amanda was out there. I had to do something. I crawled from the cover of the desk toward the office door and peered out into the enormous chamber that housed the stacks.

  Manuscript pages littered the side aisle, marking Dennis’s flight like a trail of incriminating footprints. Sunnye lurked at the far end of the center aisle. I could see her, in Kit Danger’s lethal demi-crouch, silhouetted in the lurid red light of the Exit sign. Trouble skulked at her side. Shadows hung from the high shelves, and the close air choked with silence. Spotting her prey, Sunnye steadied her arm and took aim. Before she could fire, a detonation sounded from the far side of the room. I saw a flash, heard a bullet whiz by. Sunnye dodged behind a shelf and vanished from my sight. The bullet clunked into the concrete wall where only seconds earlier she had stood. Once again, silence.

  Amanda! Where was Amanda? I slipped off my shoes and padded noiselessly down the side aisle in my thick socks, keeping close to the wall. I checked each rank of books as I passed. I had to find my daughter. Suddenly I was brought to a halt. A loaded book truck blocked my progress. In the dim light of a sixty-watt bulb, I could see it was marked Reshelving.

  Then I spotted him. At the end of the nearest rank, Dennis waited, braced against the wall, for Sunnye or Amanda to make a move. He was all muscle and stealth. Then a slender silhouette materialized in the semi-light of the office door. Amanda! The gunman aimed, but Sunnye stepped around the edge of the tier and distracted him. “Over here, O’Hanlon!” He swiveled toward her. His reflexes were swift, but I saw it in slow motion, his balance altering as he shifted weight to his left foot and swung himself smoothly around, pistol at the ready. I felt my breath quicken and my shoulder muscles tense. I lurched toward the book truck and gave it a mighty shove. It sped toward Dennis O’Hanlon like a bullet from a .45 Magnum and slammed him off his feet, books flying in every direction. Then, a snarl. A massive shadow launched itself from Sunnye’s side. Dennis screamed only once as Trouble brought him down.

  “Gotcha!” cried Sunnye Hardcastle. Kit Danger triumphs again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “I almost lost him among all those books,” Sunnye said. The police had commandeered the librarian’s lounge for interviews, and Sunnye had enthroned herself in a comfortable armchair. The room was illuminated by ceiling- mounted fluorescent tubes. Someone had made coffee, then burned it, and the bitter scent hung, nauseating, in the air. Rachel, Amanda, and I sat lined up on a low yellow plastic couch like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. I just wanted to take Amanda home and put her to bed. Her earlier burst of energy had dissipated. She was wan, with dark smudges shadowing her eyes. But there was no getting out of this little party. A hastily awakened Avery Mitchell had pulled up a chrome-framed chair across the room, and the presidential frown was aimed directly at me like a marksman’s rifle; I was in big trouble now. Charlie Piotrowski and a uniformed trooper had also commandeered a couple of the bent-chrome chairs with their brown upholstered backs and seats. Schultz, so ripely pregnant she almost sent me into sympathy labor, was perched on a plain oak bench. She’d have difficulty rising from anything more comfortable.

  An ambulance had taken Dennis O’Hanlon to Enfield Regional Medical Center to be treated for dog bite. Dennis would live; Sunnye had called the Rottweiler off before he could do serious damage. But for now the P.I. was mildly sedated, capable of answering only the most rudimentary questions. Rachel had scurried to gather up the Maltese Falcon pages, a number of which were creased and dirty from being trod on during the gunfight or sprayed with blood from the outlaw P.I.’s wounds. I didn’t want to think about what these forensic traces would do to the manuscript. But who knew? Maybe the blood spatters—and the story that went along with them—would render it even more valuable.

  Sunnye had held Dennis at gunpoint until the first troopers arrived, refusing to relinquish him even to the campus security officers. She was bold, brave and strong, and everyone was extremely impressed. As she narrated her story of derring-do in the closed stacks, I sighed and stared out the narrow, leaded casement window of the lounge. “Maybe Dennis O’Hanlon didn’t do it,” I said. Sunnye’s voice halted. Schultz ceased taking notes. Every head in the room swiveled toward me.

  “Well, of course,” I elaborated, turning back to the group, “he did try to steal the Maltese Falcon manuscript last night. No question about that. But what if that was simple opportunism? He was prowling around, heard us talking about the manuscript, decided to commandeer it. What I mean to say is, what if Dennis didn’t kill Elwood Munro?”

  “Wha—?” Sunnye jerked forward in her comfortable chair. “But he said—”

  “He didn’t say anything about killing anyone. You’re much too quick to jump to conclusions, Sunnye. This is not one of your novels.”

  She widened her grey eyes at me, affronted.

  “Keep talking, Karen,” Charlie Piotrowski said. He’d arrived on campus three hours earlier, greeted me with an enormous sigh, ran a hand once over my disheveled hair, then treated me with the same professional detachment as he accorded everyone else in the room.

  “That, tonight? That gunplay? I don’t think he planned that. He didn’t expect any resistance from us—three helpless women—just wanted to get away with his loot. As it turned out, he might well have ended up killing us.” I shuddered, then returned Charlie’s straight gaze. “But murder aforethought? I don’t know.” I paused to organize my thoughts. “No matter how much money Dennis could get for that Hammett manuscript, it couldn’t possibly be enough on its own to make murder worth his while. Munro’s, or ours. He’d have to vanish, work up a new identity—”

  “Not if he’d succeeded in killing us,” Sunnye interrupted. “Not if he got away with it. Who would have connected him—a private eye from Lowell—with the bodies of four women in the Enfield College library? He could have just gone on with his life and sold the manuscript at his convenience.”

  “He didn’t start out with the idea of killing us,” I replied, though I couldn’t be absolutely certain about that. “The gun was just for intimidation until he could escape.”

  “Those were fake bullets zipping past my head?”

  “No, they were all too real. But by then he had no choice. You fired first.”

  “You did, Ms. Hardcastle?” Charlie’s voice lacked all inflection.

  Sunnye bit her lower lip as she tried to recall the exact sequence of the night’s events. “I thought he shot first.”

  “He shot the computer.” Amanda spoke up for the first time. “After I pulverized it.”

  “I heard what you did with that tape dispenser, Amanda,” Schultz said. “That was quick thinking.”

  My daughter shrugged off the praise. I fervently hoped she’d gotten the notion of a career in police work out of her system.

  “When Dennis showed up in my office the morning the conference began,” I said, “he told me it was his first time on campus. Ever. That was a lie. He’d been hanging around, checking things out, at least a couple of weeks before that. Monica Cassale saw him in the library.”

  An utterance something like hrrumm escaped Avery’s l
ips. I glanced over at him. He frowned, then gave me a magisterial nod: Continue.

  “What if he’d already identified Munro as the biblioklept, followed him to Chesterfield, and found that enormous stash of books? He was a…greedy man. Stealing—especially from a thief—wouldn’t tax his conscience at all.”

  “That would account for those unidentified tire tracks in the driveway,” Charlie mused.

  “Last night he inadvertently let something drop.” I paused to think it through. “When I said the collection Munro had assembled was extraordinary, Dennis blurted out that I’d only seen one of the houses. Then he shut up fast. So what I’m thinking is—what if there’s yet another hoard of purloined volumes in yet another Book House?”

  “A second Book House?” Charlie spoke first, then Avery, so it sounded like an echo in the room.

  “I’m just saying, what if? Depending on what Munro had collected there, if Dennis found it and was the only one to know about it, he might have had multiple millions in found money, hundreds, maybe thousands, of rare books just waiting for him to cash in on them whenever he wanted to. That would make it worth his while to disappear, to become someone else. He could put together quite a nice life on the illicit proceeds. Trust funds, he said.” I paused. “But even if that is the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the killer.”

  Sunnye broke in. “But, if you’re right, and O’Hanlon didn’t know about the manuscript on Ms. Thompson’s desk until he heard us talking about it, who put it there?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  ***

  It was after eight o’clock when my daughter and I were allowed to leave the library. The campus was just stumbling to life for the day. A bleary-eyed fair-haired kid on his way to breakfast would have collided with Amanda if she hadn’t straight-armed him out of the way. I sidestepped two young women holding hands, deep in conversation. We were halfway to the parking lot when I abruptly recalled that I didn’t have a car on campus. I stopped cold. “Shit. No car.”

  “Wha…” Amanda paused in mid-step. “God, was that just last night when Sunnye and I picked you up? It feels like a millennium. How the hell are we gonna get home?”

  A familiar hand gripped my shoulder. “I understand you need a ride,” Charlie said.

  I turned around. We stared at each other. There was a whole lot remaining to be resolved between us. A moment half as long as death ticked by. “Yeah,” I said. “You offering?”

  He hesitated. “I can’t do it,” he said finally. “Got to talk to Ms. Thompson some more. I’ll get a patrol car to drive you. But I just wanted to say—”

  His cell phone rang. He grimaced, checked the read-out, shrugged at me in apology, and answered. “Yeah?” He listened intently, then frowned and glanced over at me out of the corner of his eye. “You’re shitting me? No kidding? Well, I’ll be…Okay. Right. Got it.”

  He tucked the phone back in his jacket pocket. Then he took a deep breath and shook his head as if life were sometimes too much to believe. “Karen…” he said, and gave Amanda a sidelong look. She developed a sudden all-consuming interest in a border of crocus shoots pushing their way through damp earth and wandered away. Charlie placed his hands gently on my arms. I wasn’t cold, but I shivered anyhow. His eyes as they looked straight into mine had the warmth and color of fine brewed coffee. “What I said yesterday? About maybe not having room in my life for a woman like you? I want to apologize. I don’t know what got into me—I should get a mouth transplant. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s just that…I don’t know. Sometimes it scares me, what it all means.…”

  “Me, too,” I replied, and swallowed. My throat was very dry.

  “Yeah?” He smiled at me, but he had that far-away look he gets when he’s thinking hard. Absently, he fingered the cell phone in his pocket. “You know, I just got an idea… maybe some way to let you know how sorry I am. Big-time. But I need a couple of days. I gotta get things cleared up here. Karen, babe, can you give me, say, the weekend to work it out? And then…after that…then we’ll really talk about us.”

  ***

  I barely made it home, showered, donned clean clothes, and ate a tuna sandwich Amanda threw together, before it was time to rush back to campus and teach. When I returned to my office after class, Peggy Briggs was waiting for me in the hallway, holding Triste by the hand. Peggy had had her hair cut extremely short by someone who knew how to do it right. She and the little girl wore matching pale-green sweaters. They looked well-fed and relaxed. They did not look like people who had at any time been in mortal danger.

  I gawked at her. “Where the hell have you been, Peggy?”

  She gave me a newly confident smile. “May I come in, Professor?” I opened the door, and she stepped into the room. Triste bounded over to the green vinyl chair, her blond curls flying. Her slight body was nearly swallowed up by the soft cushions, but she bounced twice, then settled down in the big chair with dignity. “Stephie said you were looking all over for me. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

  I motioned Peggy to the Enfield-crest-embossed captain’s chair. “Are you okay?” Somehow Peggy’s self-assurance made me feel presumptuous about ever having been concerned.

  “I’m more than okay. I’m…wonderful.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ve been in Manhattan, Triste and I, staying with Stephie’s parents. Did you know her mother is a literary agent?”

  I thought back to a conversation with Earlene. “I knew she did something in publishing.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s great. I wrote this book?…about my sister?…”

  “I know.”

  “You do?” She frowned.

  I nodded. I wasn’t about to let her know Earlene had told me.

  “Well, Stephie sent her the manuscript, and she actually read it. Then she called Steph and told her to get me down there—to New York. She thought the book was a…a hot property. She was going to auction it off, and she wanted to meet me. And I just, well, I just stayed.…I didn’t tell anyone where I was, because I couldn’t really believe it was all going to work out.”

  I stared at her. I could feel a grin begin to curve my lips. “She sold your book, didn’t she?”

  Peggy grinned back. Triste bounced on the chair. “It’s going to be published next year.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “I got a big advance. We’re going to move out of my mother’s place. I’ve already found a new apartment. Triste can have her own room. I can quit my job in the library and concentrate on my studies. But…” She glanced at me sideways. “I’m afraid I’m going to fail your course. I missed two classes.”

  “Three, I think.” I furrowed my brow. “But maybe we could call your visit to Manhattan a field trip, or ‘distance-learning.’”

  “Seriously?” She was fumbling in a big, bright canvas bag.

  I nodded. “Seriously.”

  “That would be wonderful, if it could all work out. You know, it’s so funny—at the hospital when my sister.… Well, some preacher started quoting scripture at me. He was this little thin wizened-up guy with a sour puss on him like you wouldn’t believe. So he comes into the ER waiting room right behind the doctor. The doctor tells me Megan’s dead. I’m screaming and wailing, and the parson starts mealymouthing at me. “‘Miss Briggs,’ he says. ‘You must remember that the Good Book tells us that all things work together for good to those who love the Lord.’ I wanted to rip his head off!”

  “Of course you did. I would have, too.” I could feel the ripping impulse in my own fingers.

  “But you know, Professor, I think in a way that preacher turned out to be right. If I hadn’t gone into such a black funk…what the shrink called a clinical depression…after Megan died, I would never have ended up in counseling, would never have signed up at GCC, would never have gotten the scholarship to this fancy school. Would never have written this book. So for me and for Triste things are going to be much better because she died. In a
n…ironic way, I guess ‘all things do work together for good to those who—’”

  “To those who make them work together for good,” I interrupted. “Give yourself some credit, Peggy. You made this all happen.”

  She looked at me, slant-eyed, as if she suspected that might be true but was afraid to quite believe it. Then she retrieved a bulky manuscript from her bag and held it out to me. “Would you like to read this?”

  “Oh, yes.” I took it from her.

  On a cold Thursday afternoon in November, when the air was so damp she could feel it in her bones, a young woman—no more than a girl, really—slid back three brass bolts and opened the side door of a women’s shelter in Framingham, Massachusetts. The shelter was in a large wood-frame house that had recently been painted a creamy white and fitted with new green shutters. The young woman peered out into the street, saw no evidence of danger, and took a tentative step. The bullet hit her cleanly in the chest, severing her aorta, sending a vivid red spray onto the grey cement of the sidewalk, spattering the frosted late-autumn grass with crimson blood.

  She was my sister.…

  ***

  On Saturday night Sunnye, Amanda, and I indulged in one last retro meal, spaghetti and meatballs. In the morning I would drive Amanda back to school and probably not see her again until graduation. We hadn’t talked at all about what she would do then. She was twenty-two, a grown-up, as she kept insisting; I had to learn to keep my mouth shut about her life. Sunnye was going with us as far as Bradley International Airport, where she would catch a flight home to Colorado.

  When we finished eating, Sunnye stacked dishes and carried them into the kitchen; she could be surprisingly domestic when she wanted to be. On the far side of the pass-through window she stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands like a surgeon about to pick up a scalpel. Then she fetched her capacious bag to the table and reached into it.