The Paper Mirror (9 page)

“Did you ever meet the writer?” I asked.

“Yeah, one time. I wasn’t impressed. The guy was a real arrogant asshole—the kind of guy who thinks his shit don’t stink.”

“Any idea why they stopped seeing each other?”

“Nope. I guess Taylor just got wise to him. I don’t know…he never said.”

“And did you notice anything different about Taylor in the couple of weeks before he died?” I asked.

A longer pause. “Not really. After he got that new job, I saw even less of him than I had before. But that last week or so, he
was
a little…I don’t know how to describe it…wound up, maybe? Like he’d been drinking too much coffee, ya know?”

“But he never gave you a clue as to what about?”

“Nope. Like I said, we shared the apartment but not much else.”

I decided I’d kept him about as long as I needed to. “Well, I appreciate your talking to me,” I said. “I’d like it if you’d keep my number, and if you think of anything, please give me a call.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s it?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so,” I said, and I heard the click of the receiver as he hung up.

*

Well, that was helpful
, I thought as I replaced the phone on its cradle
…but not very.
Other than coming to the conclusion that Taylor Cates was black—which had absolutely no bearing on anything except my tendency to too often assume things that turn out to be incorrect—and reinforcing my opinion of Evan Knight—there really hadn’t been much there. Another teasing tap dance around the strong probability that
something
was going on in Taylor Cates’ life toward its end, but without getting one inch closer to what that something might be.

Logic said it had to be something with his work, and with his cataloging. But I had a hard time imagining how the papers of a notorious fundamentalist preacher of the 1920s and 1930s and his son could possibly get him killed. Whatever it was Taylor had found, if he’d found anything at all, I doubted it could hardly be considered “Stop the presses!’ news after all this time. Still, I’d check it out.

But first I wanted to give Dave Witherspoon another call. I remembered I hadn’t left my home number, and he may have gotten home after I’d left work. I called him again.

Same machine, same message. I once again asked him to call me and left my home number this time.

Not two minutes after I put down the receiver, the phone rang again, and I was surprised to hear Tim Jackson’s voice:

“You called, Master?” he asked, giving me a quick mental flashback to the time before Tim met Phil or I met Jonathan, when Tim and I used to get together for a little horizontal recreation. My crotch gave a small nostalgic sigh, but didn’t say anything.

“You’re in early,” I said.

“Yeah, Phil had an early morning photo shoot so I got up when he did,” he said. “You wanted to know about Taylor Cates?”

“Yeah. Anything peculiar in the autopsy? Exactly what was the cause of death? Somebody suggested a broken neck?”

“No. Severe head trauma consistent with a fall down a set of metal stairs. A really nasty blow to the skull just behind the right ear, where apparently he hit a sharp corner on the way down. That was probably the one that did it.”

“Any signs of a struggle?” I asked, grabbing for straws.

“None. Were you expecting there might be?”

“Other than the fact that one doesn’t normally just fall backwards down a flight of steps, not really,” I admitted. “Just checking.”

“Ah, okay,” he said. “Anyway, the M.E. listed it as an accidental death, which will probably mean the police will close the case.”

My pause to think his information over was interrupted by Tim saying, “Well, I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got a probable drug overdose waiting for me and I’d best get to it.”

“Thanks, Tim,” I said, then quickly remembered the benefit. I filled him in quickly and he said he’d check with Phil and call us back that night.

I next put in a call to the Burrows and asked to speak to Irving McGill.

“Yes, Mr. Hardesty,” McGill’s deep voice said. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if I might come over and take a look at the Butler papers.”

There was a significant pause before he spoke. “I…uh, I suppose. May I ask the reason? Are you looking for something in particular? And there are at least a dozen boxes of the Butlers’ papers.”

“I believe I’d be most interested in Morgan Butler,” I said, “since you said they were the ones Taylor was working on when he died. If I could just come have a look at them I might know what I’m looking for if I find it.”

You want to try that one again?
several mind-voices asked in unison. But before I could rephrase it, McGill spoke.

“Well, I’m of course happy to give you my full cooperation,” he said, his reluctance coming through loud and clear. “But I’m sure you understand you won’t be able to take anything out of the cataloging area. We are not only understaffed at the moment, but very busy, and…”

“I understand completely,” I said, “and I’ll try not to either get in the way or keep anyone from their work any longer than necessary. So would it be possible for me to come by today?”

Still another pause just long enough to clearly indicate he’s just as soon I didn’t, before he said, “Of course. I’ll be expecting you.”

“Thank you for your cooperation,” I said. “I appreciate it. I’ll see you in about an hour.”

We exchanged good-byes and hung up.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk to read the paper.

*

I’d never been in the cataloging room before and I was reminded of a gigantic rummage sale, except instead of lamps and end tables and macramé plant holders, there were boxes—boxes of all sizes and shapes filled most of the center of the large space, stacked on the floor in no discernable order that I could see. McGill, who had escorted me in, noticed my reaction.

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “After the fire at the estate, we were desperate to get the collection out. We had to resort to putting things in whatever containers we could get. Normally, we would never use anything but archival boxes, which are made of acid-free material to slow down the deterioration process of the papers.” He gestured to one side of the room, where there was a huge stack of new, identical black boxes measuring about a foot tall by a foot wide by two feet deep. Most of the boxes scattered around the room were similar but older and looking a bit battered. “Most people would be amazed at how truly fragile paper can be,” he continued, “and how fast it can deteriorate, depending on its composition, the ink used, etc. So it’s important that we get everything into the archival boxes as soon as possible.”

As on the main floor, the center of the room was flanked by row upon row of floor-to-ceiling shelf units, most of them empty. A few were beginning to be filled with neat rows of the new archival boxes, neatly labeled, as order was made out of the chaos in the rest of the room.

Three college-age women and a man in his fifties—the on-duty catalogers, I assumed—were seated at long tables piled with open boxes and stacks of papers, letters, and what looked to be manuscripts. McGill escorted me in and led me to one of the young women, seated at the table closest to the door.

“Janice, this is Mr. Hardesty,” he said as the woman looked up at our approach. “He would like to look through Morgan Butler’s papers, and perhaps you could help him find what he’s looking for.”

Yeah, like I knew
, I thought.

He turned to me. “Janice has been doing a thorough review of all the Butler papers to see if anything might be missing,” he said, indicating a stack of about twelve older-looking archival boxes on the floor flanking her chair, and two open on the table in front of her. I remembered that McGill told me Evan Knight had done some cataloging at the Burrows estate—I wondered if the Butler papers might have been among them. “Everything seems to be in order thus far,” he continued. “Still, we want to be thorough.”

He glanced around the room, then at his watch. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I have some matters which must be attended to. I hope you find what you’re looking for. Let me know if there are any problems.”

“I will,” I said. “Thank you again.”

He nodded, turned, and left, closing the door behind him.

I looked at the stacks of paper Janice was apparently working on.

“These are the last of Jeremy Butler’s private correspondence,” she said. “I’ve not yet started on his son’s, which aren’t completely cataloged yet.”

She nodded toward the boxes on the floor beside her. “Box #12-A,” she said, “is Morgan’s personal correspondence. 12B is nearly empty; just a few articles he’d written for some educational journals, and a couple of apparently unpublished book manuscripts.”

“Manuscripts? Fact or fiction?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “As I say, Taylor hadn’t yet gotten all the way through everything when he…fell. His list should be in there.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Of course,” she said, and indicated a chair at the other end of the desk. “There’s some clear space down there. Please try not to get them out of order, though.”

“I won’t,” I promised. As I bent over to pick up the two boxes, I noted that they were apparently older versions of the new archival boxes stacked against the wall. A large white stick-on label on one end identified its contents. One said, in large, neat handwriting: “Butler, Jeremy: Son Morgan, Correspondence 1938

1953,” the other “Butler, Jeremy: Son Morgan Misc. Writings 1948

1953.” Apparently once cataloged, the material would be put in the newer boxes for storage on the shelves.

Setting them on the floor by the chair at the far end of the table, I opened the “Correspondence” box first. Heavy, tabbed cardboard dividers separated the material by year. On top of them was a lined yellow notepad that appeared to be a list of the contents of the box. I sat down and carefully pulled out those behind the divider marked 1953.

I idly leafed through the letters I’d pulled out and was surprised to realize they were all apparently carbon copies—and almost all handwritten! Who makes carbon copies of handwritten letters? However, when I started reading quickly through the neat script, I could immediately see how Taylor could have gotten so distracted from simply cataloging letters and papers. These were bits and pieces of a human being’s life. The paper had once been blank, and the words that filled it now had been placed there, albeit through a sheet of carbon paper, one after the other, by a living entity, inhaling and exhaling as he wrote, transferring parts of himself through his fingertips to the paper, to be carried across the years.

I had to force myself not to be drawn into the vortex of actually reading each letter, and tried to just skim them, like a stone skipping across the pond of time. I found it interesting that the few typed letters—also carbon copies, of course—were to his wife (I assumed) and to his father. Now that was pretty interesting, I thought. He handwrites letters to his friends and types them to the two people who one might suppose were closest to him? I also noted that the majority of the letters to his wife and father tended to be short and from what little I saw, quite dry, while those to various friends and colleagues—I gathered he was a high school English teacher—were quite lengthy and showed both intelligence and wit. Apparently he had been in the navy in WWII, and of the last twenty letters or so, most were to someone then still in the service named Scot—one
t
. I skimmed them, and they seemed pretty innocuous from a quick-scan point of view. Probably an old service buddy. There were no letters from Scot to Morgan.

Making sure the letters I’d read were all neatly back in the order I’d gone through them, I replaced the lid and exchanged the box for the one on the floor. Opening it I noted it contained some manila file envelopes and a stack of a dozen or so thick spiral notebooks like high school and college kids use for classes. I went quickly through the manila folders first, which contained a number of relatively short typewritten manuscripts of articles he’d apparently done for educational publications and a few short stories. From my cursory scan, they all appeared to be well written and seemingly very authoritative. Whether they’d been published or not, I couldn’t tell. Returning them to the box, I pulled out the stack of spiral notebooks, which I gathered were the book manuscripts. They were numbered, “1-9” and “1-4.” Neither book was titled, though the last page of notebook 4 had the word “Trash!” scrawled across it. I had no idea if this was to be the title or whether it was Morgan’s assessment of his own work. Perhaps that was why there were only four. I started with notebook 1 and skimmed through it. The plot, from what I could tell, seemed to be along the lines of a 20th Century
The Scarlet Letter
…there was a conflicted preacher and a young woman and the overall impression I got was that while the writing was good, the plot and the characterization were…well, perhaps summed up by Morgan’s own note. There was no clue as to when it had been written.

The second, interestingly, appeared to be the narrative of a sailor returning from WWII to confront his domineering father’s plans for his future. Obviously it had been written sometime between 1945 and Morgan’s death in 1953. It was told in the third person and I assumed was fiction. From what little I read, it seemed to be really well done, in that I had to consciously pull myself away from it. Flipping through the last notebook, number 9, I saw the writing ended abruptly about two pages into Chapter 9. I kept thumbing through the blank pages, hoping there might be something else written there, but there was not. I did note that a couple of pages apparently had been torn out at the very end.