by Richard King
The thump of the book hitting the floor woke me up for a second. I shifted my position and felt myself slipping into a dream. I was lying naked on a high rough oak table. There were candles in ornate bronze candle holders at each of the corners of the table. The candle holders were covered in the colourful wax drippings of hundreds of previous candles. Lady Macbeth, who I realized was Susan, approached the table. She was wearing a black hooded cloak and as she walked slowly toward me the cloak opened and I could see that she was naked under it. As I fell into a deeper sleep I remember thinking to myself that I was about to have an erotic dream about Susan and I felt myself getting hard. Lady Macbeth/Susan moved to the foot of the table and threw her head back causing the hood to fall off. She shrugged her shoulders and the cloak fell to the ground. She stood for a moment, her glorious body looking golden in the flickering candle light. She began to walk around the table and as she moved away from the foot of the table she turned into Ophelia and her cloak turned into pale blue. I could see the two goofy gravediggers from Hamlet leaning on their shovels beside a freshly dug grave. I became paralyzed with fear and couldn’t speak. As Ophelia/Susan moved around me she stroked my body but I couldn’t move. Suddenly, Ophelia/Susan had a sword in her hand which she held over her head and chanted, “For whom dost thou glisten, my wanton blade?” She brought the sword to her face and kissed it. “For me? Or for thee?” She then raised the sword over me, sharp point down, and I tried to scream to wake myself up but couldn’t. She walked slowly around the table repeating these lines and I noticed that the gravediggers were slowly digging the grave deeper. I couldn’t escape. Ophelia/Susan was standing directly above me now, and the sword began to descend. A terrified squawk woke me, breaking the spell of the dream: it was me trying to yell in my sleep.
I sat up, sweaty with terror, and realized that I had fallen asleep in my clothes. My heart was racing and it took me a moment or two to catch my breath and calm down. I looked at my watch and realized it was four in the morning.
I peeled off my clothes and, picking up Shakespeare from the floor, I stumbled to the warmth and protection of my bed, hoping to leave the nightmare in the living room. I truly did not want to know what it meant. But once there I couldn’t sleep; a second wind swept over me in a burst of nervous energy, and I got up again. It’s true, solving murders can keep you up at night. I read through most of Hamlet and half of Julius Caesar. At six o’clock I took a nap.
chapter eleven
At seven-thirty that same morning, feeling a bit spaced out but wide awake and ready to take on the day, I showered and dressed. I made it into work by about 8:15.
Our store is designed to give the customer a feeling of comfort and privacy. There are upholstered chairs scattered around so that customers can browse comfortably and the free-standing shelving units are over six feet high so that people don’t realize that they are in a store with lots of other people in other aisles they can’t see.
They can be heard, however.
I was at the service desk preparing and signing cheques, so that Jennifer wouldn’t have any more embarrassing experiences with publishers’ accounting departments, when I heard two familiar-sounding voices drifting over from the history section. At first I didn’t recognize the voices but I sure knew what they were talking about. The murder.
“Hi,” said a woman’s voice. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I don’t teach till one so I thought I’d browse for a while,” answered a man.
“Isn’t it awful about Hal?” the woman asked and my ears pricked up. Stealthily, I moved around the bookshelves so that I could see without being seen. It was Macauly Edwards, the chairman of the history department, talking with Sally Howard, one of the professors. Gaston had interviewed them at the faculty club. I tiptoed back to the service desk and eavesdropped.
“Do you think anyone in the department could have done it?” Sally inquired.
“Well,” he returned in a tone of slightly embittered amusement, “I can think of a couple of possibilities, can’t you? It could have been, well, the obvious person. Or someone somewhere else in the university. But I think suspicion is going to fall on us first.”
“Us? We didn’t do anything.” Sally Howard sounded a little concerned, a little panicky for someone who didn’t do anything.
“I don’t mean you and me,” Edwards explained. “I mean members of the department. Luckily no one said much to the cops about what’s been going on.”
Not for long, I thought to myself.
“What do you mean?” asked Sally.
“I don’t want to talk about it here,” said Edwards. “I’m meeting Carla for coffee at the Patisserie Belge. Join us and we’ll talk about it there. It’s more private.”
They left the store. For a moment I wasn’t sure what to do. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had to follow them to get the information they didn’t give when Lemieux interviewed them. I asked Nicole to cover the service desk, found Jennifer and told her what I was about to do. She was less than thrilled, and told me I should plan to hire some extra staff while all this was going on, and pay them out of my own pocket, because she was getting tired of covering for me. Then she gave me the evil eye, making sure I felt as awful as possible. She was right, of course, and I tried to look shamefaced to appease her, but nothing could have stopped me at this point with such a hot lead to check out.
I left, with her snarls following me out the door. I grabbed a Gazette on my way out so that I would have something to hide behind if necessary. By this time my quarry had a five-minute head start, but since I knew where they were going I didn’t have to actually shadow them.
The Patisserie Belge is a great little place on the corner of Milton and Park Avenue. When I’m heading that way I usually spend a minute or two looking in the window of the Word Bookshop, a second-hand bookstore at the corner of Milton and Durocher, to see which books have staying power. The owners, Lucy and Adrian King-Edward, change the window display on a daily basis. I didn’t have time to stop, but I did take a rapid glance as I hurried by: today it was various titles by Nietzsche.
When I arrived at the patisserie the professors were already seated in a corner behind a large plant. I was pleased they hadn’t decided to sit out on the terrace; they’d obviously chosen the corner for privacy. I took a table on the other side of the large plant and sat with my back to them so that I wouldn’t be spotted. The better to hear you, my dears, I thought. I ordered a latte and croissant in a barely audible whisper. The waitress must have thought I was loony or recovering from a throat operation, but I was afraid the profs might notice me if they heard my voice.
Sally Howard still seemed to be in the dark and I assumed from the conversation that she was a new member of the department. Carla Schwartz, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word indecisive. She was clearly in control of the conversation.
“We were right not to tell that cop too much,” she said. “But I can tell you that I’m surprised that Ron didn’t kill him at lunch the other day.” She must have been referring to Ron Michaels, another one of the group we interviewed at the faculty club.
“Why would Ron want to kill him?” asked Sally.
“Because Hal was about to publish a shitty review of Ron’s book,” Mac answered.
“You don’t kill someone over a bad review,” Sally protested.
“I’m only saying Ron might have wanted to kill him. I’m not saying he did. Ron doesn’t have tenure and he was depending on his book to get it for him. A bad review is bad enough; coming from a member of your own department it’s the kiss of death at tenure review.” Carla sounded angry. “Frankly, I felt like killing Hal myself I felt so terrible for Ron. He’s a nice guy and a decent historian. Hal should never have agreed to write that review, let alone say what he really thinks.”
“It hasn’t been submitted yet,” Mac said. “The version we saw was a draft. He was going to polish and submit this week. I thi
nk he was killed before he got the chance to send it along. And I hear that his computer is missing so the review is probably missing as well. Lucky break for Ron.”
“Lucky?” exclaimed Sally. “I hardly think that someone getting killed is lucky.”
The conversation continued in that vein for a while. Carla and Mac managed to convince Sally that it would be best not to volunteer any information to the cops about one of their colleagues benefiting from the murder. After all, Mac insisted, he hadn’t actually committed the crime. How can you be so sure? I silently asked him. From what I remembered of my own university days tenure was the brass ring on the academic merry-go-round. I was pretty sure that most of the academics I knew would kill to get tenure, or at least seriously contemplate it, if they thought that they could get away with it. Sally didn’t sound totally convinced that silence was the best policy but she agreed to go along with her two senior colleagues. They agreed that as they had informal conversations with department members they would try to get the point across, without actually being explicit, that omertà was the best policy—for now anyway.
I let them leave the restaurant ahead of me. I dawdled over my latte, croissant, and Gazette, paid my bill and left.
I thought it best to avoid McGill on my way back to the store so I walked down to Sherbrooke and flagged a cab.
I got back to the store to find Jen being confronted by a poet I knew all too well, a tall, undernourished-looking guy with oily blond hair and a stringy Ho Chi Minh goatee. He was trying to talk her into carrying his slim book of poems. Normally I would hide if I saw him come in, but I decided to rescue Jen this time to get on her good side.
“Ah,” she said gratefully as she saw me approach. “Here’s my partner. You know Sam, don’t you? He’s actually in charge of poetry. I’ll leave you to him. Sam, Simon has a new book of poetry that he’s sure will sell.” Giving me gleeful smile, she turned and scurried away.
Simon Lucas sensed that there was a subtext that he didn’t fully understand but he seemed happy enough, if happy is a term that can be applied to a poet, to tell me about his slim volume. He had a peculiarly loud singsong voice, like a man who’s used to not being listened to. “This is my best book ever. Some really fine poems. People will buy it, people who love poetry, good poetry, that is, not this commercial crap.” He lifted a volume by a “best-selling” (read: five copies a year) poet an inch off the shelf and then let it drop back, saying “Peh.”
I have never understood why poets can’t talk for ten seconds without getting a dig in at other poets.
All bookstores carry poetry. It’s not a real bookstore without it. But the sad fact is that supply far outstrips demand. Not only do we carry the classics and “commercial crap,” but we are approached by at least three poets a week who have self-published their poems and want us to carry their books. Simon Lucas was one of a series. Normally, I hand these guys off to Jennifer. She is the buyer after all, but this time I had allowed myself to be trapped. So I capitulated: I agreed to take a few copies of his book on a consignment basis for a couple of months. However, I stipulated that he was to come back in sixty days to pick up any unsold copies. He seemed pleased by this prospect and asked when he would get paid. He didn’t mind taking the money now if that worked out for me. I sighed inwardly and explained that “consignment” meant that he got paid only if and when his books sold. That was why he was to check back. He seemed disappointed at not becoming a paid poet on the spot, but agreed to my terms. I gave him a receipt for his books.
“I have one more question,” he said. “Do you know if other stores will carry my book?” He was a nicer person now that he was off his high poetry horse. Montreal booksellers are a pretty collegial lot and I didn’t mind recommending other stores for him to call on. I told him to try the Double Hook.
Judy Mappin, the stored charming owner and the doyenne of Canadian bookselling, feels pretty much as I do about consignment books of poetry, though we both consider it an important contribution to the community to carry these books. Unlike me she doesn’t try to evade the responsibility; she is very welcoming to the poets of Montreal and arranges readings for them in her store, which is devoted exclusively to Canadian literature in English. I find it somewhat ironic that the only Canadian city that is still willing and able to support such a bookstore is Montreal.
Simon left happily to call on the wonderful group of women who staff the Double Hook. I went to find Jennifer. I found her in the fiction section checking titles. We have a computer that keeps track of what sells, what is on order, and what should be returned to the publisher. Like all good buyers Jen uses the computer as a tool and check the books in the sections to ensure that we have the right balance and mix of titles.
“So?” she asked. “How did you make out with the people’s poet?”
“Just great. I’m sure we’ll sell tons of his stuff.”
“Great,” she said. There followed a long tense silence and I waited. I knew she was angry with me and I didn’t want to run off and leave any bad feelings unexpressed. Finally she spoke. “Sam, you can’t just vanish on the spur of the moment and leave me to do everything. It’s not right.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, looked her sympathetically in the eyes and said, “I know, Jen, and I’m sorry. But it’s kind of like living out a fantasy. Every young boy plays detective and I’m getting a chance to do it in real life.”
“Well, I have a fantasy, too. A fantasy that I’m actually going to make a living running a bookstore, and I can’t do it alone. I need you. And if not you I need you to make sure that there is enough staff so that I can get the things I think are important done. Understand?”
“You’re right. I want to stick with this case for as long as I can but I’ll make sure that you’re not left in the lurch. OK?”
“Fine,” she said. There was another silence and I waited to see if there was more anger to come. There wasn’t. She smiled at me and gave me a light punch on the shoulder, our private signal that whatever disagreement we were having was over. For the moment anyway. I returned the punch and went to work. The first thing I did was get on the phone to bring in extra staff so that Jen would not have to worry if I took off again. I then worked on receiving — ensuring that the invoices that come with the shipments of books and the contents of the shipment match.
I worked steadily until just after one-thirty when Jennifer stuck her head around my office door and said excitedly, “He’s here!” And and looked at me expectantly, waggling her neat eyebrows.
“Who’s here?” Jennifer is not impressed by famous writers. She is as able to estimate the potential success of a new Margaret Atwood as impartially as the work of a first-time novelist. But she is in awe of the writers whose work she likes, so I thought one of the few she venerates must have dropped by unexpectedly to sign a few copies of his or her new book. They all do that, big or small.
“The cop. The murder guy you’re involved with. What’s his name, Lemieux.”
“Gaston Lemieux is here to see me?”
“Yeah. Is it really true? Are you actually involved in a murder? It must be true, if he’s here.”
“I told you,” I replied testily. “Why do you believe me now?”
“Because he said so.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he had to see you about a little matter you were helping him out on. God, it’s so exciting — ‘a little matter’!”
“Jennifer, you surprise me. I’ve never seen you this hyper about something that didn’t involve good writing.”
“Well, it’s fascinating. More interesting than books, that’s for sure.”
“You’re right. It is. And I’m enjoying it. That’s horrible, isn’t it? To enjoy something associated with the death of someone?”
“You’re only human. Why shouldn’t you enjoy it? You didn’t kill the guy.”
“Thanks, Jen,” I said. I stood up to go to meet Lemieux. “You always know the right thing t
o say to cheer me up. Come on.” I took my Collected Works of Shakespeare with me.
I expected to find Gaston calmly browsing in fiction. Instead I found him pacing in the open area around the service desk, deep in thought.
“Gaston,” I said walking over to him. “You remember my partner, Jennifer Riccofia, don’t you?”
He took her extended hand and made a slight bow over it. For a moment I thought he was going to raise it to his lips. Apparently Jennifer did too, because I noticed that she was blushing.
“I apologize for taking Sam away from his duties. I hope I am not causing you too much inconvenience, but he is becoming a big help to me,” he told her.
“Oh, thank you for being so considerate. I’m sure I’ll be able to do without him for a while.” God bless you, Jen, I thought to myself. I owe you one.
“Now I must impose again,” said Gaston. “I gave Sam an assignment and I want to see if he completed it. Can I take him away for a few moments? I need to hear his report.”
From Gaston’s manner, you would think I had solved the case. All I had done was give up a few hours of sleep to read Shakespeare. I was apprehensive as we walked over to the Café Paillon. I hoped that what I had read really would be some help to him.
As soon as our lattes were placed before us I began to tell Lemieux what I had read in Hamlet. “This is one hell of a play. There’s enough violence, anxiety, revenge, scandal and general moodiness for an entire season of television. Hamlet is pretty depressed in act three scene one. In fact he’s pretty depressed throughout the play, but in that scene he gives the famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question,’ and later on in that same speech there’s the line about, ‘in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…’”
Gaston didn’t say anything, just nodded thoughtfully.