A Novel Death (28 page)

At the hospital, Clarisse was reinserting an IV for a patient, so I waited by the counter at the nurses' station. Today she remembered who I was.

"How's our friend?" she asked, rubbing her hands automatically on her flowered smock.

"Not so good." I did not want to talk about Margaret.

"No?"

"Do you have a minute to listen to something?"

She shook her head. "I don't get a break for another hour."

"This is really important," I pleaded.

"Oh, okay. You know what? You look like hell."

"I know. I'll need an outlet to plug something in."

"Okay"

I followed her into what appeared to be a patients' lounge, which had a wall of windows, tan vinyl easy chairs, and two square tables with built-in seats.

Clarisse gestured at an outlet and I knelt and plugged the machine in. Looking up at her I said, "Remember how you said you'd recognize the voice of the man who was calling about Margaret?"

"Uh-huh. I said that." She hunkered down beside me.

"Just listen and tell me if any of these sound familiar." I had erased all but three messages. Pressing PLAY, I watched her face.

At the end of the final voice, she said, "Do it again."

This time she stopped me at the one she recognized.

I knew that Frank Marselli worked in Hauppauge where most of the county offices were located. But because I wasn't sure which building was his, I called first.

"Marselli." His voice was flat.

"Oh great, you're there. I have to see you!"

"I don't have time this morning."

"It's really important."

As Clarisse had, he recognized something desperate in my voice. "Okay." He gave me directions to the buildings on Veterans Highway.

The police offices were located in an uninspired Suffolk County building, two-story brick, with a border of generic evergreens. Inside were pale green walls, gunmetal desks, and a complete lack of posters or decorated coffee mugs. The reception desk was a raised wooden block.

I spoke to an officer no older than Alex Kazazian.

When Frank appeared to escort me in, he was wearing the same white shirt, grimy now, the sleeves crushed halfway up his arms.

"We have to make a phone call," I said. "Can you tape it?"

He looked exhausted, his chin pinpricks of stubble. "No. I can listen."

"Haven't you been home at all?"

"We still haven't located Ms. Weller. That's not why you're here, is it?"

"No.

I followed him, not to his desk as I had expected, but into a small interview room with a scratched wooden table, several metal folding chairs, and two phones. The only thing on the pastel wall was a building evacuation diagram. We sat down facing each other. Then I reached into my pants pocket and took out the number I had copied down from the tape.

"What's this about anyway?" But he seemed at a level of fatigue where it did not matter.

I hesitated, and then started pressing in numbers. Marselli picked up his own receiver.

Be there, I prayed.

"Hello?" I recognized the rich, confident tone at once.

"Jack? It's Delhi Laine."

"Delhi! Hi. You have something for me?"

"Sort of. But I just wanted to know if you wanted your doll back."

"My doll?"

"Your Barbie."

"Delhi, what are you talking about?"

"Somebody left a package at my house yesterday with a mutilated doll. As a warning. I thought it was you."

"Is this a joke? I haven't been near your house. I don't know where your house is."

Marselli gave me a weary look.

But it was an old parental trick I hadn't used for some time: First accuse a child of something he did not do-the doll was not Jack's style-and he'll confess to whatever he has done.

"But you knew I had the book. You were the only one who picked up the Kipling connection on BookEm." It wasn't only that. I remembered how, at the Oyster Bay sale, Jack had goaded me into going to the shop to look for Margaret to make her explain her "great find" to me. I had been meant to find her body instead.

"So? I've already written a piece about the book. It was an author's proof with an original painting by Helen Bannerman! And a Kipling connection. It's one-of-a-kind. The article's been accepted. It'll introduce the book, and I'll get a small commission when it's sold. Nothing wrong with that."

"So what went wrong?"

"You tell me." His book-snatching voice.

"Okay. Amil Singh wanted his book back. And you and Margaret didn't want to give it to him."

The sound of breathing. "He sold it to her fair and square!"

"When you went to the shop Friday night, you had a fight with him about it."

"Now wait a minute, Delhi! When I got there he was already-out of it. Evidently he'd gotten violent with Margaret, and she'd knocked him against the fireplace in self-defense. At least that's what she told me. But I didn't do anything wrong"

Frank Marselli put his finger to his lips to warn me not to contradict Jack, and I nodded. "But then you knocked her out"

"That was her idea. To make it look like a robbery, both of them just lying there. I didn't hit her hard. I know, it sounds crazy" Rueful now. "But you'd have done the same if you'd seen her so upset. She and I were friends for ten years."

"But why did you-"

Frank was shaking his head frantically at me. I stopped.

"-change things around?" was what I was going to ask.

"Delhi? This conversation didn't happen. I'd love to have the book, but I didn't do anything wrong. I offered to pay you for it, you know. I still will."

"I know. But I don't have it anymore." The damaged book I had was not the one he wanted.

"What the hell are you talking about? Margaret said-"

"Sorry."

"If you're playing games-" But the phone crashed down in my ear.

Frank Marselli's olive face seemed more bewildered than anything else. "Who is this guy?"

"Jack Hemingway. He collects books and writes about them."

"But how did you know he was there?"

Instead of telling him about Clarisse and the voice identification, I said, "I think he did hit her hard. If she died he could just keep the book himself. Even if she didn't, he switched things around so she couldn't claim she was the victim of a robbery. And he could hold Amil's death over her head." Little Black Sambo would probably have been his price. I remembered how implacable he had been when he wrested the Chan book from me.

Frank squinted at me. "Maybe he killed Amil and wanted her to take the fall."

I shivered at the specter of Margaret's innocence. But she needed Amil dead more than Jack knew. She could not have risked his telling anyone that the inscription and the painting were forgeries. It would devalue the book; Margaret's reputation for integrity would be ruined. There would be scandal and disgrace. She could especially not let Amil tell Jack, who believed the book was genuine. Maybe she had lured Amil to the shop Friday night by promising he could have the book back, even altered.

I sighed. "No, I think she killed him, and then panicked and called Jack. Maybe Russell did follow him to the shop and try to get in-how else would Margaret know what he looked like? Maybe seeing him trying to get in even gave her the idea for the robbery. She just didn't know that Jack would have a plan of his own." It must have driven Jack crazy searching the shop and her house and not finding the book. Those e-mails meant to frighten me had started after my post to BookEm about Kipling.

"Sounds like Mr. Hemingway and I should have a conversation. Maybe I should pick up a search warrant first."

"Maybe you should shave first."

He almost smiled.

"But how about Lily Carlyle? How does she fit in?" I said as he started to stand up.

He sat back down. "She doesn't. Not to this anyway. When we interviewed her coworkers at the Metropolitan about her being depressed, they were shocked. She'd already resigned from the museum and taken a curator's job in Atlanta that she was excited about. She was supposed to start the following Monday."

"But I thought she left a note." That Margaret had not been allowed to see. "Was that a forgery?"

"Oh, no. It was in her handwriting."

"But...11

He relented. "It's in the evidence room. It said something like, `Margaret, I'm sorry to disappoint you. But I have to go. Love, Lily.' We just misinterpreted where she was going. When we checked their finances, though, we saw it would bankrupt Ms. Weller if Lily stopped paying the mortgage. But the will left her everything. Generous, considering they weren't related."

Had everything been a lie? "They weren't sisters?"

"Just old friends. But it was a good cover story for Becca Pym. You don't think of someone living a respectable life with her sister as being a fugitive." This time he did stand up.

At the double front doors, he opened one and stopped to let me pass, but I didn't.

"Jack said something odd. When he talked about being friends with Margaret, he used the past tense. He said they were friends for nearly ten years."

"People use bad grammar sometimes." But he was listening.

"Not Jack. He taught college literature."

"I'll see what calls there were to his line last night. Or if he's made any trips to Montauk lately."

Margaret's body was found the next morning when a garbage truck was emptying a dumpster behind the Amagansett shopping center and a worker saw a flash of skin. The side of her head had been smashed in. The tiger's pounce had turned fatal.

There was no funeral for either Lily or Margaret. But in the way of the twenty-first century, candles, notes, and literary stuffed animals-Paddington Bear, The Cat in the Hat, Winnie the Poohbegan to crowd the doorway of The Old Frigate. A real village idol. I still mourned our friendship, the times we had laughed together in understanding. But whenever I approached the bookstore, my stomach would turn over and my throat start to feel sore.

I had no sympathy for Jack. When Frank Marselli called to say they had found a saw in his garage with bits of fresh sawdust that matched the wood and tooth marks from the library ladder, and they arrested him for her murder in Montauk, I savored the taste of vindication. Evidently she had survived the Atlantic, reversing her direction and swimming slightly west, and then called on Jack once again for help. But saving Margaret was not in his best interest. He claimed he had hit her in self-defense. After all, she was the killer, wasn't she?

I worked hard to rekindle my passion for selling books. But there was no joy. When the phone rang Thursday morning of that week, I answered on the fifth ring, "Secondhand Prose."

"Good morning. This is Howard Riggs." Something in his tone indicated that he did not want to recognize me as a person by using my name, that he would not even be calling if there had been any alternative.

But I was tired of that. "Hello, Howard." You Howard, me Jane.

"Yes, well, I've had a letter from Margaret Weller. She said to open it. If she passed."

A letter? When had she had time to write a letter? I didn't believe him.

"It seems she's left me her books."

Right. "Congratulations."

"But you still have one?"

No! My eyes stung unexpectedly with tears. Hadn't she liked me at all? "What did she say?"

"What is it?"

"It's ... nothing."

"I mean, what is the book?"

"She didn't tell you?" That was odd. "What did she say about it?"

"Are you going to tell me what the book is, or not?"

But the time for being intimidated by a "real bookseller" was over. "Not until you read me what she wrote."

"It's a letter to me."

"Fine. I have to go now."

"Wait. Just wait, will you? She mentions you having this book. That's all."

"Read me what she says." I was not turning over Sambo until I heard Margaret's own words ordering me to do it.

He sighed and took his time, rustling papers. "'Please tell Delhi Laine that she should keep the book of mine she has. I hope it's the find she's always wanted. Maybe it will make up for that stupid doll. I just started feeling paranoid about getting the book back.' That's it."

I had been so primed to hear him read, "Please tell Delhi Laine to give you the book she's holding," that I couldn't say anything for a moment. "She's giving it to me."

"So she says. But I have to make sure that it's not part of the store stock that's mine."

I felt a familiar red heat creeping up the back of my neck. "Wait a minute, Howard. If you're going to accept the part of her letter giving her books to you, you have to accept the part giving that book to me."

"Not if it's part of the store stock she's given me!"

The red tide exploded. "Well, I can set your mind at rest. It was never in the store."

"Was it her so-called find?" Out in the open now.

"Not that valuable." I paused. "What if I said it was a first printing of Ulysses, but only the paperback-in white paper covers, by Shakespeare & Co." I expected him to know that there had not been a hardcover printing, that this was the true first of 750 copies. "What makes it so interesting, though, is that Picasso made a little sketch of Gertrude Stein on the inside back cover, probably when he was getting ready to paint her portrait. Maybe he thought that signing his name would give the book some value." I gave a laugh. "Little did he know." As I heard Howard's gasp, I added, "Sorry, someone's here," and hung up.

Well, I hadn't said I had such a book. But of course Howard would think that the book had to be real, since I would be too dumb to know those details myself.

The phone rang again immediately, and then a few more times. I let the machine in the house pick up the calls.

Then I gave myself time to think about what Margaret had done. Sambo was really mine.

So why wasn't I dancing around the barn? Selling the book would finally give me some financial security. Katie's father might or might not be interested, but Roger Morris, The Bookie, certainly would. So would any of the others, for that matter; Marty, the Hoovers, though they couldn't afford it, dealers I didn't even know. Jack, of course, would be spending his disposable income on a lawyer.