A Rare Murder In Princeton

by Ann Waldron

  “But on the whole he was a good client?”

  “Oh, yes, and I shouldn’t complain. I started billing him for telephone time, and he paid.”

  Dinner was finally over, coffee was served in the living room, and everybody left fairly early, complaining that the next day was a workday.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Dodo told them when they left. “George, I hope you enjoyed meeting Little Big. I thought it would be such a coup to bring you two together.”

  “It was, Dodo,” said McLeod. George said nothing.

  Twenty-four

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, McLeod read in the Times of Trenton that Nick Perry had held a brief press conference the day before. When reporters asked him if the murder of Philip Sheridan was a “cold case,” or otherwise abandoned, he replied, “Absolutely not. This case will never be closed.”

  “Do you think it will end up like the Jill Murray case—unsolved ?” a reporter asked.

  “Not at all,” Nick had said.

  “Does that mean you’re close to a solution?”

  “It means I think we’ll solve it,” said Nick.

  Good for Nick, she thought. Meanwhile, she had to get moving—this was Thursday, class today.

  When she met the class that afternoon, she talked about their new assignment: to write about a person involved in the arts.

  “Henry van Dyke said the two most important things in life are art and friendship,” she said.

  “Does that mean we have to write about a friend next time?” asked one of the students.

  “What a good idea,” she said. But for this assignment, they could write about people in the visual arts, or music, or the theater, she said, and she urged them to look for people who had not been publicized before. She pointed out that Clark Powell, who was in the class, was involved with the production of The Learned Ladies, which would open at Theatre Intime, Princeton’s student-run theater, that night.

  She went by herself to see the play, enjoyed the youthful actors in the performance, and paid a great deal of attention to the women’s costumes. It was fun to see the long-sleeved black velvet and the pale blue lace dresses being worn by young and beautiful “learned ladies.”

  With all this, it was Friday before she was able to get back to Rare Books.

  When she was on her way to the Reading Room, Buster Keaton came rushing out of his office and hailed her.

  “There you are!” he said. “I just tried to call you. Guess what you found!”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing more nor less than the Litzenburg Gospels.”

  “The what?”

  “The Litzenburg Gospels,” said Buster impatiently.

  “The Litzenburg Gospels?”

  “This conversation has a certain repetitive quality,” Buster said. “McLeod, you found the Litzenburg treasure. Come and look at these things again.”

  In Buster’s office, she saw arrayed on his desk the gilded book, the ivory box, and the crucifix. “These are the things you found in George’s garage—right?” Buster said.

  “Right.”

  “They are part of the Litzenburg treasure, very valuable objects missing from the Schatzkammer, the treasure chamber, of the cathedral in Litzenburg, Germany,” Buster said. “They’ve been missing since 1945, when they were apparently looted in the closing weeks of World War II. And here they are.”

  “How did you find out what they were?” asked McLeod.

  “I’d like for you to think it was only because of the sheer power of my brain that I figured it out,” said Buster. “But it wasn’t too hard. The International Foundation for Art Research in New York compiles data on stolen art, and I went through its online database. They listed several things from Litzenburg. Litzenburg is in what used to be East Germany, so not much was known about the missing pieces for a long time, but since Germany has been reunified, the people in the little town have publicized their loss.”

  McLeod looked from the objects to Buster and back at the objects.

  “Of course, thousands of objects lost or stolen during World War II have never been recovered—and never will be,” said Buster.

  “Tell me what you found out about the book?” asked McLeod.

  “Like I said, it’s a copy of the four Gospels. It is indeed ninth century. It’s lovely book, very high quality, and very, very valuable. The church at Litzenburg used to be part of a cloistered convent and a noblewoman was the abbess—she paid for this copy of the four Gospels to be written by a famous scribe.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said McLeod. “What about the box? Is it from Litzenburg, too?”

  “The box—and it is a reliquary—is from Litzenburg. So is the crucifix. Of course, neither one of them is as valuable as the Gospels,” said Buster.

  “I can’t take it all in,” said McLeod, shaking her head. “It’s absolutely dumbfounding.”

  “It’s so wonderful,” said Buster. “I can’t take my eyes off that book. Princeton has some valuable books and manuscripts, but this would certainly be right up there at the top—if it were ours. We can keep it for a while, can’t we?”

  “Buster, I have no idea. They don’t belong to me. They just turned up in a box I found when the handyman and I were cleaning out the garage one Saturday.”

  “And where was George? Why were you having to clean out his garage?”

  “George had to work. So Dante and I went ahead and did it. There were some boxes up on the rafters that Dante said dated from Jill Murray’s time, and we took them down and most of them were real junk. But one of them had several old dresses in it, and I couldn’t resist them. I took that box inside. As it happened, one of my students was very interested in the old dresses for costumes for the play he was directing for Theatre Intime—it opened last night, by the way, and it is very good. I brought them to my office and didn’t really look at them until just before he picked them up. That’s when I found the book and the box.”

  “The objects stayed in your office for some time, I believe,” Buster said.

  “Just a few days,” said McLeod.

  “Well, don’t take so long next time,” said Buster. “Anything might happen. We’ll put them back in the vault, shall we?”

  “I guess so,” said McLeod. “I guess that’s the best place for them right now.”

  “Don’t you want to give the Gospels to Princeton?” said Buster. “Just think of the tax deduction—it’s worth a million, I’d say.”

  “Those things don’t belong to me. Surely they must be returned to Litzenburg.”

  “They belong to George!” said Buster. “Surely he wants to donate them to his beloved alma mater.”

  “I’ll tell him about it,” McLeod promised.

  WHEN SHE LEFT Buster’s office, she ran into Celestine Swallow, who greeted her with great enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you came in today,” she said. “I wanted to see you—I have good news. Let’s go to lunch—can you?”

  “Sure,” said McLeod. “Let’s go to the Annex instead of Chancellor Green, if that’s all right.”

  Celestine agreed and they got their coats and purses and left the library, crossed Nassau Street, and went downstairs to the Annex.

  “This is cozy,” said Celestine Swallow. “I haven’t been here in years.”

  “It’s an old Princeton institution, isn’t it?” said McLeod. “I love the miscellaneous collection of things on the walls.” She waved a hand at the mirror on one wall, the stuffed fish and the huge, ancient smoky painting of a tiger on another wall, the still life of oysters and the hunting scene on the third. “I love the whole ambience. Have you found everything you were looking for at the library?”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Ledbetter—or Natty as everybody seems to call him—found the orchid prints. I was delighted.”

  “That’s great,” said McLeod. “Where were they? Did he say?”

  “I asked him and he just said, ‘Tucked away, dear lady, tucked away,’ ” said Celestine.

  �
��Anything new on the Fanny Mobley mystery?”

  “Everything I see confirms that she’s an alcoholic. Hung over in the morning, getting drunk—or tipsy, I should say—in the afternoon.”

  “Do you think anybody else knows about it?” asked McLeod.

  “I don’t see how they can help noticing. You and I did, and we’re not here every day.”

  “You know how nobody notices what’s before them every day, and then somebody comes in for the first time and whatever it is slaps them in the face.”

  “That’s true,” said Miss Swallow. “But I should think someone would notice her erratic behavior. It must interfere with her job.”

  “Apparently not,” said McLeod. “I guess if she set fire to some manuscripts or something, somebody would notice.”

  “The people on the staff are pretty odd, aren’t they?”

  “They’re under a strain,” said McLeod. “We have to cut them some slack. They had a murder just a little over a week ago, you know.”

  “Of course, you’re right,” said Miss Swallow. “In a way they’re heroic for soldiering on the way they do.”

  “I think so, too.”

  THAT NIGHT SHE told George that the treasure was from Litzenburg, and went on to tell him all that Buster had found out. “He wants you to give it to Princeton.”

  “McLeod, if what Buster says is true, they don’t belong to me,” George said. “They’re stolen goods. They belong to that church in Germany where they were stolen from.”

  “Of course. You’re right,” said McLeod. “Buster will see that, once he stops to think.” She took another sip of wine. They were sitting before the fire talking about where they would go to eat—it was Friday night, a bad night to eat out in Princeton, but neither one of them felt like cooking. “Buster is such a monomaniac about rare books that he loses all perspective,” McLeod continued. “And he’s persuasive, as well as fanatical. He’s like those curators in art museums who won’t return art that was stolen by the Nazis. You read about them in the newspapers all the time.”

  “It does seem to me that Natty should have realized who the owner is,” said George.

  “I didn’t even see Natty when I was there today,” said McLeod. “Nobody seems to be paying much attention to their jobs—except Buster, and that’s all he thinks about. But everybody else is thinking about the murder, I guess.”

  “What about the Annex for dinner?” said George.

  “I went there for lunch,” said McLeod.

  “Main Street?”

  “Too noisy and too crowded on Friday.”

  “What about going over to Lambertville?”

  “Too far in this cold weather,” said McLeod.

  “Oh, you Southern belles,” said George.

  “It is cold, and the forecast is for freezing rain,” said McLeod.

  They finally decided they might as well eat at home. George said he had steak in the freezer and could fry potatoes—George loved steak and potatoes—and McLeod said she’d make a huge salad.

  While they ate, McLeod wondered, but did not ask aloud, what had happened to Polly Griffin. Was she going to turn up again?

  To take her mind off Polly Griffin, she told George about Miss Swallow and the flower prints. “She must be eighty years old,” she said.

  George was mildly interested when she told him about Miss Swallow’s deductions about Fanny Mobley.

  “Is that a firing offense?” she asked him.

  “I don’t do personnel,” he said, “but I should think the question would be whether it interfered with her work in a major way or not.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said McLeod, but she resolved to find out if she could.

  After dinner, over coffee, she said, “You know I heard something the other night at Dodo’s house that I wish I could remember.”

  “What was it?” asked George.

  “I can’t remember—that’s it.”

  “It will come to you,” said George.

  “I hope so.”

  Twenty-five

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, McLeod woke up and remembered what it was that someone had told her at Dodo’s house, and she wrote it down before she went back to sleep.

  On Saturday morning, she reached for the piece of paper on her bedside table and groaned. She couldn’t read her writing. But the memory would probably come back, she thought. She had remembered it once and surely she would remember it again.

  By the time she got downstairs, she had resolved to call Chester and arrange to see him. Then she remembered what she had written down in the middle of the night: Lawrence letters. Mary Murray had said that Jill Murray had been a Lawrence, and weren’t those World War II letters she and Dante had found in the garage from a man named Lawrence to a woman named Lawrence?

  What had she done with them? She had brought the box into the house, intending to see if Jill’s Murray’s family wanted them, and never thought of them again. Had the burglar taken them? Am I sure I brought them inside? Maybe the box is still in the garage. No, Dante had cleaned it out thoroughly. Nevertheless, she went outside to the garage and opened the door and looked around. No sign of the box.

  She came back inside and peered, without much hope, around the hall and the dining room and the kitchen.

  “What are you looking for?” asked George, glancing up from the newspaper he was reading as he sat in one of the easy chairs in the dining room’s bay window.

  “A box of letters that Dante and I found when we cleaned out the garage.”

  “Oh, that box of letters,” he said. “I found it on the floor in the hall. I was trying to tidy up so I put it on the shelf in the coat closet.”

  Back in the hall, McLeod opened the closet door and saw the box, almost hidden under their collection of winter hats and scarves that were piled on top of it. She retrieved the box and took it to the dining room, where she sat in the other chair in the bay window. The letters, from Lieutenant Vincent Lawrence to Mrs. John Lawrence on Edgehill Street in Princeton, were arranged chronologically—someone had taken care with them. The letters weren’t very long, just large script on lined paper. Or later, V-mail pages. Each began, “Dear Mother,” and then Lieutenant Lawrence went on to describe in workaday fashion some of what he saw and heard and felt as a young American officer making his way across Europe in the closing months of World War II.

  It took McLeod a long time to read them. She wasn’t sure why she persisted, but she did. At one point, she got up to stretch her legs and walk around, wondering why she was willing to spend time reading the letters from one person she had never known to another person she had never known. Because I’m curious, she thought. It took some time before she got to the good part.

  Lieutenant Lawrence had been part of the field artillery unit that occupied Litzenburg, Germany, at the end of the war. He described searching the war-torn countryside for weapons and ammunition and other contraband in the spring of 1945. Then he wrote his mother about some beautiful objects that he had found abandoned in an old mine shaft.

  In the next letter he said he was mailing the beautiful things home to her and urged her to take care of them for him. In later letters, he frequently referred to the “beautiful things” he had mailed home, begging to know when they arrived safely. Soon Lieutenant Lawrence began to write that he was coming home, and then the letters stopped.

  “This is dynamite!” she said to George. “Guess how the Litzenburg treasure got to Edgehill Street! Vincent Lawrence mailed it home to his mother. And his mother was Jill Murray’s mother.”

  George read the relevant letters. They agreed it was sensational.

  “All that happened in 1945—that’s a long time ago,” said George.

  “And it was twenty years ago that somebody—I guess it was Jill Murray—put the treasure in the box of old dresses,” said McLeod.

  “It must have been Jill Murray,” said George. “I can’t think that somebody else would hide valuables in one of those boxes. It’
s amazing if she did it, but even more unbelievable if somebody else did it. It’s lunchtime. Would you like a sandwich?”

  “Sure,” said McLeod.

  “What kind?”

  “Anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “I’ll eat anything. I’m thinking.”

  So she ate her peanut butter and jelly sandwich—George’s looked much more imposing, she noticed, but she didn’t care. She liked peanut butter. And she was indeed thinking.

  “Dante Immordino put those boxes up on the rafters and he didn’t sound like it was fifty years ago, either,” she said when she had finished her sandwich. “We don’t know when she hid the treasure in the garage, and we don’t know why she did it. It wasn’t a very safe place, certainly. But somehow—thanks to Little Big’s indolence in not cleaning out the garage—it survived all these years.”

  When George brought her an Eskimo Pie for dessert, she thanked him. “I love Eskimo Pies,” she said. “I didn’t know there were any in the freezer. So if the burglar was looking for the treasure, it was somebody that knew the treasure was here in the first place, right? Somebody in the family? At least, somebody who knew the family?”

  “It would seem so,” said George.

  “After he found out about the burglaries, Nick said he wanted to talk to Dante. I wonder if he did.”

  “Ask him,” suggested George.

  “I’d like to talk to Dante myself.”

  “You should see him soon. There’s supposed to be heavy snow tomorrow. I’m going to the grocery store for more blizzard supplies. In fact, I think I’ll call Dante and book him in advance for shoveling when the snow’s over.”

  “I’ll call him for you,” said McLeod. “And you can go to the grocery store.”

  “I know you’re dying to talk to him. I’ll be off as soon as we make a list.”

  The next few minutes were very pleasant, as they discussed what they’d eat if they were snowbound for a while.

  “Remember the Friends’ dinner is tonight,” George said. “But what can we have tomorrow and Monday, if it really snows hard?”