A Rare Murder In Princeton (17 page)

“With a razor blade,” said Diane.

“How did he do all that with you sitting here?”

“That’s what they all kept asking me,” said Diane. “And I said I had never, never left him in here alone. He always gave me the heebie-jeebies, so I watched him. Finally, we figured out he could have slipped a book under that robe while I had my back turned for a second. Then he would go to the men’s room and cut out the pictures.”

“Good heavens! That’s an amazing story.”

“It is, isn’t it?” said Diane with a satisfied air. “But that’s how he did it—he admitted it.”

“Is the university going to press charges?”

“I don’t think so. He said he was sorry. But they told him he never could come back here. But I bet if Molly leaves and I leave, he’ll just come straight back and come right in and get himself some more pictures.”

“Don’t ever leave, Diane,” said McLeod.

“If I get a better job, I’ll have to.”

“That Greek Orthodox priest. I’d love to see him in here in his patriarchal robes and a hat—didn’t he wear a tall black hat?”

Diane laughed heartily. “I never saw him in a tall hat.”

“So people do steal things if they can?” said McLeod. “That’s why you take all these precautions and keep these records.”

“That’s it. They sure do steal things if you don’t watch them like hawks. I saw a student take a Scott Fitzgerald letter and put it in his pocket one time. I asked him if he had meant to do that and he was flabbergasted. But he was like the priest—sorry—and he said he was just absent-minded, so I didn’t do anything about it. I did ask one of the curators to check the box he had been using and see if anything else was missing. That’s harder to do with letters —every single letter is not listed in the index. But I think that’s all that student took. It’s a good thing he wasn’t wearing long black robes, isn’t it?”

“I’m amazed,” said McLeod. “Who was the curator who discovered the woodcuts were missing?”

“It was Mary Woodward.”

“Mary Woodward? I don’t know her. I’m realizing there are lots of people here I don’t know. How many curators are there?”

“Five or six, and then there’s all the conservators.”

“These are people who could have stayed late last Tuesday ?”

“That’s right,” said Diane. “The professionals usually stay after we close. The clerical help—me and Molly and the others—we leave as quick as we can.”

Jeff, the page who wrote novels, brought McLeod’s box up from downstairs just then, and she turned her attention to the folders inside.

She took a few notes on the letters about “The Other Wise Man,” but her heart wasn’t in it. It was clear, she thought, that she was more interested in the murder than she was in van Dyke. But van Dyke was her best excuse to be in Rare Books.

She put the letters back in the folder, started to put the folder back in the box, and to her annoyance, dropped her mechanical pencil into the box. She groped around in the box looking for the pencil and couldn’t locate it. She started taking folders out.

“Just take one folder out at a time,” warned Diane, in a much more official voice than the one that she had used to tell about the thieving priest and student.

“I dropped my pencil down in there,” said McLeod.

Diane got up. “I’ll get it out,” she said and came over to the table where McLeod was working, and peered down into the box. Then she began taking folders out. “What’s this?” she said. “This isn’t your pencil.” She held up a slim ivory knife.

“That’s the murder weapon!” said McLeod. “That’s Philip Sheridan’s paper knife. Put it down. Don’t touch it again. Get that proctor out there.”

“You get the proctor. I’ll wait here. I can’t leave you alone with the papers . . .” McLeod was gone before she could finish, and back in seconds with the proctor.

The proctor looked long and hard at the knife. “I need a plastic bag,” he said.

“The conservators must have something,” said Diane. She rang for a page and, when Jeff came, asked him to get a plastic bag from the conservation room downstairs.

While they waited, the proctor called the Borough Police on his cell phone. “Lieutenant Perry will be here as soon as he can,” he said.

The page returned with a conservator, whom Diane greeted as Oscar. Oscar carried a large plastic envelope. The proctor told him to put it down on the table. “We’ll just wait for the lieutenant,” he said. Nobody left.

“How did it get in that box I was working on?” asked McLeod. “That’s what I want to know.”

Nobody answered. They had to wait for perhaps twenty minutes before Nick Perry came rushing in. He nodded at everyone, thanked the proctor, listened to what he had to say, and finally focused on the knife lying on the table.

“Did you touch it?” he asked McLeod.

“I did not,” she said.

“I touched it,” said Diane. “I didn’t know what it was.”

Perry took a card from his pocket, carefully nudged the knife into the plastic envelope, and left it lying on the table. Then he sighed and looked at the people again. “What happened here?”

“This is supposed to be a quiet room,” said an angry voice. “What’s going on in here, Diane?” It was Fanny Mobley at her most unpleasant. Today she wore a heavy gray sweater over a navy blue sweater and long black skirt with a fringe around the bottom.

“We found the murder weapon,” said Diane.

“You found what? Are all these people signed in properly?”

“This is the policeman and this is a proctor,” said Diane. “And you know Oscar from conservation and Jeff the page. And Ms. Dulaney is signed in.”

“Oh,” said Fanny.

“Nick Perry, lieutenant, chief of detectives with the Borough,” said Nick.

“Oh, yes,” said Fanny. “I see. I see. And that’s the weapon that the murderer used?”

“It may well be,” said Nick Perry. “I need to ask these people a few questions. Will it be all right if we sit in here?” He waved his hand to indicate the Reading Room.

“No, this is supposed to be a quiet room. Please use the work area,” said Fanny.

“Too much coming and going,” said Perry patiently. “If it’s all right, I’d like to get this done. It shouldn’t take long.”

Fanny frowned at Diane, nodded at Perry, and said, “As you please, Lieutenant,” and swept from the Reading Room.

“Let’s sit down. We can see each other if we sit at the front desks. Tell me what happened here,” said Perry.

“Nick, I dropped my pencil in this box of van Dyke papers, and then I couldn’t get it out,” said McLeod.

“She was taking all the folders out of the box and that is not allowed,” Diane interrupted. “So I came over to help, and when I had most of the folders out, I saw this knife. I pulled it out and I said, ‘This is not your pencil, is it?’ And she said, ‘Don’t touch it. Put it down. That’s the murder weapon.’ So I put it down right then. And she went to get the proctor and I sent for a page to go get a plastic envelope from conservation. And then you got here. That’s all.”

“And I brought the plastic envelope,” said Oscar. “From conservation.”

“I see,” said Perry, and went back over it, asking more questions this time.

How does he stand it? McLeod asked herself. Listening to the same story over and over.

“All right, everybody,” said Perry. “Very good. Let me get your names and addresses and let me call somebody to come get everybody’s fingerprints. Nobody else touched the knife? Good. All right.” He wrote down names and addresses for Diane, Oscar, and Jeff, and thanked them, asking them to make themselves available when the fingerprint man arrived. “And thank you, Miss Diane, for the use of your space. Now I need to know who had access to this box. Who could have put the knife in it?”

This was the question McLeod had asked just before he arrived, so she waited for the answer.

Diane hesitated. “I guess you should talk to Miss Mobley. The manuscript curator. She was just in here.”

“I will,” said Perry. “But you tell me who you think could have done it.”

“Any of the curators could have done it,” said Diane. “A conservator. A page. Anybody who has access to the vault.”

“You could have done it?”

“I don’t go to the vault myself,” said Diane. “I could have done it only when the box was up here in the Reading Room.”

“How long has it been in the Reading Room?”

“It just came up a few minutes ago this morning. It hasn’t been up here since Ms. Dulaney was working with it a couple of weeks ago.”

“Before the murder, you mean?” asked Perry.

“That’s right,” said Diane.

“Is that right?” Perry asked McLeod.

“Yes,” said McLeod, annoyed that Nick seemed not to take Diane’s word for it.

“Who could have known that McLeod would be using this box?”

Diane shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Actually, everybody,” said McLeod. “They keep such careful records here. They can look up and see what day any researcher came to the department and then look at call slips for that day and see what boxes he looked at. It’s truly amazing how they track everything.”

“Interesting,” said Perry. “We’ll have the medical examiner look at this knife and see if they think it was the murder weapon, and then send it to the state police laboratory so the forensics folks can look at it and tell us what they can find out, and maybe we can get somewhere. Thank you. Now, Ms. Dulaney, can I talk to you? Maybe in that conference room we used before? Let me make sure that’s all right with Mr. Ledbetter. I need to ask him a few questions, too.” He left, returning very shortly with Natty Ledbetter chugging along beside him like a gray tugboat.

“Go right ahead, Lieutenant, and use the conference room,” Natty said. “I’m anxious to get to the bottom of this nastiness.”

“Will you be around?” Perry asked the proctor. “Will you tell the fingerprint man where I am? And Mr. Ledbetter, I guess I’d better tell you a fingerprint man is coming to get fingerprints from several people. Maybe we should just go ahead and do the whole staff while he’s here, if no one has any objections.”

“I don’t think anyone will object—everyone wants to get this solved and behind us,” said Natty. “But, Lieutenant, we would like to keep the Reading Room open for use. People are here from out of town and we were closed most of last week.”

“I understand. I don’t see any reason why it can’t be used. We went over it before. I think, though, I’ll ask the university if another proctor can sit in there.”

“All right,” said Natty.

Perry thanked him and led McLeod to the conference room.

“HOW ARE YOU, McLeod?” Nick Perry said after they sat down at the table in the conference room. “And how about this murder? You’re becoming a key player. You found the body and then you found the weapon.”

“Actually, Diane found it. But it’s not definite that it
is
the weapon, is it?”

“No, of course not. So what made you so sure it was the murder weapon?”

“Chester had told me about Philip Sheridan’s paper knife, and he thought somebody had taken it to kill Sheridan with,” said McLeod. “Didn’t he tell you that?”

“Yes, he did tell us,” said Perry. “And we looked high and low for that knife or for anything that could have been used for a weapon. We did not, however, go so far as to search every box in every collection of papers in the vault. Perhaps we should have.”

“Why would the killer, or anybody for that matter, put it in a box that I was using? Is it just coincidence?”

“I don’t think it’s coincidence,” said Perry. “He or she could have done it for any number of reasons. He might have wanted to incriminate you. On the other hand, maybe the murderer thought you were through with that box and would not be looking at it again, that the knife would never be found. Or perhaps he or she simply wanted it found but didn’t want to give it to us himself, or herself. And then there’s always the possibility that it’s not the murder weapon at all and somebody is trying to confuse the issue.”

“Why don’t you ask Chester if this knife is indeed Philip Sheridan’s?”

“I certainly intend to do that,” said Nick. “I just saw Chester at home, as a matter of fact.” (So that’s why it took him twenty minutes to get here, thought McLeod.) “I’ll talk to him again,” Nick was saying. “But tell me first how you’ve become so involved in this case.”

“I’m not so involved in this case,” said McLeod. “I just happened to be acquainted with some of the people that work in Rare Books and Special Collections, and I got interested in them, especially Chester. And you know how people talk to me—I always say it’s my white hair—but people have told me a whole lot of things.”

“Like what?” asked Perry. “What have they told you?”

“Nothing sensational,” said McLeod. “Lots of it is nonsense. If anybody had told me anything remotely important, I would have told you. I haven’t talked to everybody in the department anyway.”