The Paper Mirror (26 page)

A look of mild distaste crossed his face. “My grandfather was a prominent figure in the religious movement. He was an important man. A leader. A visionary. My father was…not. The University would have no interest in them, I’m sure.”

“Then you would leave them at the Burrows?” Again, I was watching his reaction.

“Of course not!” he said, making no attempt to hide his contempt. “I do not intend to have the Butler name in any way associated with such a place.”

“Were you aware that Taylor Cates was cataloging your father’s papers at the time of his death?”

“I had no idea,” he said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Coincidence, perhaps. But I believe his death was related to your father’s missing papers in some way, in spite of the fact that he was working on them for only a short time before he died.”

Butler looked taken aback. “So you’re telling me that just anyone wandering around that…place…has ready access to my family’s private papers? That’s outrageous!”

“Access to the private papers in the Burrows Collection is under strict supervision. There was as far as I know only one other cataloger working with them. Taylor took over from Dave Witherspoon, the original cataloger. To the best of my knowledge, no one else worked with them. They are really quite professional at the Burrows.”

My explanation did little to change his mood.

A grandfather clock somewhere chimed the quarter hour. Butler, still agitated, looked in its general direction and said, “Our time is up. I’m expecting a call from Bob Jones University any moment.”

I was in no hurry to leave. “I understand you are up for a seat on their Board of Trustees.”

“I have no idea how you might know that, but yes, I am. It’s a great honor and I’ve worked very hard for it.”

“Well, I wish you luck.”

He looked at me dismissively. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

I got up from my chair, and he remained seated.

“Thank you for your time,” I said, stepping over to extend my hand again. He took it and gave it a cursory shake.

“Mrs. Barlow will show you out,” he said.

He must have had some sort of buzzer on his desk, for the door opened and the same woman who had met me at the door appeared.

As I followed her into the foyer, I heard a phone ringing.

CHAPTER 11

Thinking back over our meeting as I drove back to the office, the one thing that struck me about Collin Butler was his seemingly total lack of a personality. I’m sure he had to have one, but he certainly hid it well. He reminded me, in a way, of Morgan’s letters to Collin’s mother and grandfather: efficient, but almost perfunctory. The only emotions I had witnessed in him seemed to be variations on displeasure. The Butler name—his
grandfather’s
name, that is—was obviously very important to him, as was his anticipated appointment to his alma mater’s Board of Trustees. But I wondered if, like his father, he might not have an awful lot going on beneath the surface that he would or could not allow himself to express. I still didn’t know if there might be a
Mrs.
Collin Butler, though I certainly didn’t get even the most remote hint that he might be, like his father was before him, locked in a closet.

On reflection it also occurred to me that, while Collin strongly resembled his father and was therefore a very nice-looking man, I didn’t find him the least bit sexually attractive. I hadn’t really thought much before about the relationship between sex appeal and personality, but I realized that for me, at least, there was a definite link. Odd how the mind works.

It was pretty obvious, too, that Collin Butler really didn’t know very much about his father, and from what he said about never having seen photos of himself with Morgan, that said quite a bit. He may have been lying about not knowing about Morgan’s writing, and that he didn’t know about any of Morgan’s manuscripts, but I tended to believe him, especially since I’d pretty much come to the conclusion, even before I went to see Collin, that Morgan hadn’t made copies. But I had to check. And I was fairly sure that, considering the gay nature of the books and Collin Butler’s reported homophobia, that if Collin did know about them, he’d have reacted to my question a little more defensively.

I wondered again just how much Collin might know about his father’s death, or the reason for it. I thought of that terribly sad last note Morgan had written Scot. What a waste! What a waste!

*

And suddenly I found myself heading not for my office but for the Burrows. My mind was doing it again…it knew something I didn’t, and it wasn’t telling me exactly what it was. But I knew it had something to do with Morgan’s last notebook….

I did not bother stopping to call ahead to let Irving McGill know I was coming, or when I got to the library, going up to his office. Instead, I went directly downstairs and rang the bell to the cataloging room. I saw, through the wire-meshed glass of the door, Janice glance toward me and turning to say something to someone else. A moment later, the cute redhead came to the door and opened it.

“Well hello, Dick Hardesty,” he said with a big grin.

Any other time, my crotch and I would have been delighted that he remembered my name, but I had no time for that at the moment.

“I need to see Morgan Butler’s papers,” I said as he held the door open for me and closed it behind me. “Box 12-A,” I added.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll go get it. You can use that table over there.” He nodded toward a small empty table next to the one at which Janice was working on a stack of manila folders. She smiled, nodded a hello, and went back to her work.

While I waited, I looked around the room for Dave Witherspoon, but didn’t see him.

“Is Dave here today?” I asked Janice.

She stopped writing on her note pad and looked up. “No,” she said, “He was here this morning, but left a little after noon. He had a doctor’s appointment.”

And I suddenly remembered the shiny new Datsun 280zx that had almost hit me as I pulled out of my parking lot at work. I wondered if I had been right, and it
was
Dave Witherspoon who was driving. If so, I wondered how he could afford a new car and a trip to Cancun on a cataloger’s salary.

The redhead brought the box and set it on the table, handing me a sign-in sheet and a pencil. “Now that we’re getting organized,” he explained.

“I’ll just be a minute,” I said as I signed the paper and returned the pencil to him.

“Shall I wait?” he asked with a more-than-slightly sexy smile.

Please do!
my crotch said, ignoring my resolve to get to what I’d come in for.

“If you’d like,” I said. “As I say, I’ll just be a minute.”

I opened the box, pulled out the notebooks, and went quickly to the last one. Opening it to the last page, I studied the small strip of paper left where the page had been torn out. Sure enough, there wasn’t one torn strip, but two!

Morgan had made a copy of his farewell note!

He’d sent the original to Scot…so
where was the copy
? Probably removed with the other letters, and probably by Evan Knight.

I put the notebooks back in the box, closed the lid, and took the pencil the redhead handed me with another smile. I signed the check-in/out sheet and gave the sheet and the pencil back to him.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked.

“Not right now, thanks,” I said, getting up from the table, and I was so preoccupied that not even my crotch picked up on it until I was halfway up the stairs.

*

The very idea that someone might make a copy of their suicide note really got to me, but then from what I knew of Morgan Butler, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The question was, where was it now? Would Morgan have torn it out of the notebook and put it with the other copies of his letters? For some reason, I doubted it. This wasn’t
like
his other letters, for one thing. It was the most revealing thing Morgan Butler ever wrote about himself. No, I had the strong feeling that he would have left the note right there in the notebook. His novels were a secret part of himself; I believed Morgan would have wanted his final note to be the coda to his secret life. Evan found it and took it, like he had taken everything else.

The more I thought of how Evan Knight had systematically gone about erasing as much as he could of another human’s identity, the angrier I became. That last note had been Morgan’s only direct admission of being gay. He had, albeit in one of his last acts on earth, finally opened his closet door. And Knight had robbed him even of that.

I wondered if Evan Knight ever gave one split-second’s thought to what he had done to another man’s dignity? I doubted it. He simply had done his best to remove any possible link between Morgan and the books Evan had published under his own name, and Morgan’s being gay was one of those links.

To be honest, I really wouldn’t have thought Knight was that smart to go to all that trouble. If there was only one copy of the manuscripts, and he had them, why should he care if someone found out Morgan was gay? Granted, there were a few oblique links between the letters and the books—and the little-old-lady-in-the-fog story, of course—though the chance of anyone picking up on them was extremely remote. It wasn’t as though people would be standing in line to read the letters of some to-all-appearances average Joe. His father’s papers would get a lot more attention simply because of who Jeremy Butler was. As Collin Butler had said, his grandfather was an important and famous man. His father was not.

But I realized, too, that Morgan Butler’s papers just might have attracted more interest if it were known that he was gay, and the chance was therefore greater that someone might stumble on Knight’s secret as Taylor Cates apparently had. So maybe Knight was sharper than I gave him credit for being. But part of me still doubted it.

*

I had a message from Glen O’Banyon’s secretary waiting on my machine when I returned to the office, asking me to call, which I did immediately. I was told he was in a meeting with a client, but would call me back as soon as he was finished.

I hung up the phone, sat back in my chair, and let my mind take over.

This was probably one of the most convoluted and ultimately frustrating cases I’d had in a long, long time.

And as so often happens with me, a new thought bubbled to the surface of my mind, like a gas bubble in a tar pit.

Taylor Cates was dead, and I had been going on the assumption, all this time, that he had been murdered, most probably by Evan Knight, to cover up Taylor’s somehow-discovery that Knight had stolen Morgan’s work. But the fact that Cates had been working on the Butler papers…and, specifically from what I could tell, on Morgan Butler’s papers…for only about a week and a half before he was killed finally sank in. What could he have found in that time, especially since the missing letters had obviously been taken long before he even started? Taylor couldn’t have taken them…Dave Witherspoon had been working on them first, and I’d checked both his and Taylor’s cataloging notes against the remaining letters, and everything matched. Even if he had, as Dave Witherspoon said, been nosing around Morgan’s papers while Dave was working on them, it’s unlikely he would have risked trying to take anything.

So it was entirely possible that Taylor’s death had nothing to do with Morgan Butler’s papers.

Great!
Now
you think of it!
my mind said with more than a touch of disgust.

I didn’t have a single shred of direct evidence to prove that Knight was the murderer. I did have pretty solid proof that he had stolen Morgan’s work, but what could I do with it? The only person who had a legal right to go after Knight for plagiarism, as far as I could tell, was Collin Butler, and I strongly suspected that he would want nothing whatever to do with claiming any rights to his father’s books, even though a considerable amount of money was involved. On the contrary, I was pretty sure his homophobia would keep him from wanting it even known that his father wrote them.

For Taylor to have deduced from his reading of the letters remaining in the file that Morgan was gay is hardly surprising. I think anybody good at reading between the lines would easily make the connection. Even if none of the letters were missing, it would be impossible to say with certainty. But Morgan’s last note was the “smoking gun,” which removed any doubt.

So if Knight had taken the last note with the rest of the missing letters, why would he have had to kill Taylor? Taylor might have figured out enough to have caused Knight considerable embarrassment, and might even have been able to make himself a considerable nuisance. But I just couldn’t see it as a solid motive for murder. I know, murderers often have their own peculiar logic, but still…

The ringing of the phone jolted me back to the real world.

“Hardesty Investigations.”

“Dick, Glen. How are things going with the investigation?”

I sighed. “Funny you should ask,” I said, and gave him a Reader’s Digest version of where things stood at the moment. I tried to keep it limited to the facts and leave out my ruminations, but the end result was the same: I was pretty much going nowhere fast.

“Ah,” O’Banyon said when I’d finished. “I was afraid of that. We had a board meeting last night, and Zach Clanton was demanding we pull the plug. That man acts as though every nickel the Burrows spends is coming directly out of his own pocket. He keeps pointing to the fact that if the medical examiner and the police consider Taylor’s death an accident, we should accept it and get on with our lives. I told the board I’d call you today to check. So what do you think?”