A Novel Death (8 page)

Cutting the pizza circle into four pieces, I thought about the different ways you can say the same words. You can express sympathy and concern. You can sound excited, hoping for the inside dirt. Or you can demand answers in a tone that suggests that the person you are calling has, once again, screwed up.

Even if Patsy had sounded as compassionate as Florence Nightingale, I didn't feel equal to a conversation with my sister. Instead I poured a glass of Chardonnay, ate my pizza, and read the rest of the Sunday Times.

The phone woke me at 4:25 A.M.

After four or five rings, when I realized it was not the dismissal bell for the exam I was failing, I pawed at the bed table frantically. In my panic, I grasped the receiver by the wrong end and had to twist it around. "Hello?"

"Hello?" The voice was soft and male. "I have something you might be interested in."

Wonderful. An obscene phone call. I was about to slam down the receiver when the enticing voice continued. "A signed copy of Emily Dickinson poems?"

Was this the mystery bookseller? I struggled into confused consciousness. "But-Emily, she never published any books, did she? Just a few poems in a local newspaper. So what did she-"

The answer was the smash of his receiver in my ear, jangling me awake.

I lay back in the fading darkness, breathing as hard as if I had just finished a 1OK race. Raj, my aging Siamese, gave a little mew and I stroked him. It actually hadn't sounded like the yokel who had called me Friday morning. This voice, though disguised, was more cultured. Could it have been Amil? Maybe it was a joke, that he had hoped I would recognize his voice and let him explain what had happened to Margaret. If Margaret's find was a lost book of Dickinson poems, printed privately during her lifetime, what a treasure that would be!

Moving my face to the cooler side of the pillow, I pictured the block-long lines of bibliophiles, Emily Dickinson fans, and university curators who would batter down the doors of The Old Frigate.

But damn! For the second time in a week, a potential treasure had slipped from my grasp. Then I remembered Jack Hemingway grabbing Charlie Chan. Make that three.

I was too agitated, my thoughts too wild, to get back to sleep. At five A.M. I went downstairs, made coffee, and started the day.

At 8:10, I dialed the precinct.

Second ring. "Alexander Kazazian here."

I had a quick, mean image of him checking his name bar before answering.

"Hi, this is Delhi Laine. We met at the bookstore Saturday?"

"Roger."

"Did you get the information I left you about Amil Singh?"

"Yeah, thanks. I'll get a statement from him. But there was nothing in her office records about him. You're sure he worked there?"

I wanted to laugh. "He worked there. Do you know how she is?"

"Nah. Domestic accidents, we don't follow up:):'

I took a breath. "Would it be a problem if I kept the shop open for her?"

"The shop?"

Maybe he hadn't had his coffee yet, I thought charitably. Or his daily brain transplant.

"The bookstore. Margaret will need the income." But as soon as I said that, I wondered if it were true. Although she was always complaining about money and how much everything cost, Margaret never looked as if she wanted for anything. She and Lily owned one of the most beautiful houses in Port Lewis and both drove silver Volvos.

"It's not like it's a crime scene or anything," he pointed out. "We don't condemn houses when people fall off ladders."

Good point. "Well, I just wanted to make sure it was okay. I have the key," I added. I had finally unearthed it at the bottom of a kitchen drawer, under packets of soy sauce and used birthday candles. This time I made sure to put it on my key ring.

"Okay. Just let me know if that Indian guy shows up. And stay off those ladders!"

"Hah"

Next I called the hospital and found that Margaret was still in intensive care, her condition critical.

By 9:50 I was standing inside The Old Frigate, fantasizing that the beautiful store belonged to me. At Christmas I would preside over a wassail bowl by the fireplace. Tom Wolfe and Toni Morrison would exchange witticisms, and Colin and Patsy would stop by to apologize for ever doubting my success.

Quickly I walked through the shop, switching on the lights in each of the three book rooms. The shop was laid out railroad-car style, with one room opening onto the next and no side windows. Every volume was neatly categorized and shelved. I glanced over at the ladder with the broken rung. If you had an armload of books to shelve and were not really holding on, I could see how you could be thrown backward if the step under your foot gave way. But where were the books?

I looked at the Nike that had been kicked to one side by the ambulance squad. The crumpled rag was still laying in the aisle where Margaret had been, and made me feel squeamish. But I couldn't leave them on the floor looking like the debris of a car crash.

I moved toward the rag, expecting that it would be blood-caked from Margaret's head wound. But when I lifted it gingerly by a clean edge and shook it out, the rag became a tan golf shirt with a small blue-embroidered polo player on the pocket and no stains at all. My God! Amil's? It looked familiar. If he had returned to the shop, crept up behind her, and hit her harder than he intended, he might have pulled off his own shirt to stem the flow of blood. Except-there was no blood. And Dr. Gallagher had said Margaret was struck from a different angle.

Was it possible Amil had come into the shop after Margaret had fallen and found her on the floor? He might have cushioned her head, and left a shoe pointing toward her so she would be found, but not wanted to implicate himself by calling for help.

Picking up the Nike by a shoelace, I pulled down the tongue to look for the size. It was a U.S. men's 8, which might fit Amil. I carried both items to the back door and out onto the cement stoop to the small silver garbage can. Removing the top, I looked in. The can was filled with shredded papers. I hesitated about putting the shoe and shirt on top of them and in the end left them neatly against the wall.

Back inside, I noticed the wooden door in the left-hand corner that led to the basement. I considered going down, but my curiosity about the books Margaret had stored there was dampened by old terrors. I was afraid of basements. As a child I refused to go into our dirt-floored 1790 cellar in Princeton by myself. Only one faint bulb hung from the ceiling and did not reach into the dark corners where my brother David Livingstone liked to hide and jump out.

Basement scenes in fiction haunted me too. The most terrifying was from Salem's Lot, in which all but the top two steps had been removed, plunging visitors into the darkness to be impaled on a row of upended knives. Every horror story writer, from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, seemed to have a favorite cellar scene.

This basement had the faint sweetish odor that I associated with thrift store clothes and books. But I closed the door firmly and walked back to the front.

My first customer came in at 10:25. All I saw was a puff of dyed black hair and red harlequin sunglasses before she disappeared into the paperback section. When she emerged carrying a paperback historical romance that I was surprised she had found in The Old Frigate, I saw she was wearing a red-checked playsuit. Everything from her cheeks to her upper arms drooped softly.

"Good morning!" I said. Glancing at the price I halved it and gave her the penny. "That's two ninety-nine plus tax."

"How can that be?"

"The cover price is five ninety-nine and it's half off."

"But I never pay more than fifty cents for a romance novel. My store at home sells them for a quarter!"

"All paperbacks are half the cover price."

"But it's just a romance!"

That triggered several thoughts: Why don't you wait until you get home and buy twelve of them for three dollars? If it's "only a romance," why bother reading it at all?

Reading part of my mind, she whined, "I left my book on the ferry. I have nothing to read on the trip home."

When that didn't move me to lower the price, she demanded, "Is this the only bookstore in town?"

"No. There's another one just up the street. Howard Riggs Books."

"Where up the street?"

I gave her directions. I was happy to send here there. Howard Riggs and I had a history, and it wasn't War and Peace.

I first met Howard years earlier when I entered his shop to sell him some books. The shop had had a military outpost feel, with dusty wooden floors, books on metal shelves like you'd expect in a Pentagon office, and others imprisoned in glass cases. The front window read Fine First Editions and Rare Art Titles, and the window display showed them attractively. But when you stepped inside, you were in front of a rickety sale table of mistakes labeled FUTURE TREASURES.

In those days, Howard Riggs had been a wiry man in his early thirties, with sandy hair that was rapidly decamping. He surveyed the world sourly through gold-rimmed glasses.

I entered the shop hesitantly and asked if he was buying books. It was before I was selling books myself.

He waved an arm. "Show me what you've got" So I brought in three boxes from my car and put them on the floor in front of his sale table. I realize now that they were not books any dealer would be thrilled to see. But even so ...

After slipping on a pair of thin white vinyl gloves, Howard knelt and poked at the books like a proctologist, burrowing in with one finger to see the spines beneath. I expected him to tell me they had hemorrhoids. But his diagnosis was worse. Straightening up and peeling off the gloves, he gave me a scathing look. "Don't ever waste my time like this again." As he was heading back behind the counter, he added, "And take this dreck with you!"

As if I would try to sneak a few onto his sale table.

I didn't know then that we were far from finished with each other.

I ordered lunch from the deli three doors down, and a few other customers came in and bought books. None of them questioned the price. I found several books under the counter with credit card slips inside, mail order purchases waiting to be sent out and, after locating the packing supplies in the side room, wrapped them quickly. Margaret had foam peanuts for filler, which I disliked but used anyway.

At four thirty P.M. Marty Campagna, Finger-Spitzengefuhl in tow, bustled through the door.

His black eyes rapidly scanned the locked glass cases behind me, taking in the better books, and then came to rest on mine. "Someone told me about Margaret. Bummer. She going to be okay?"

"I don't know. I hope so. She's still in intensive care."

"Jeez." He moved a powerful shoulder in a red T-shirt, which had the cuffs tightly rolled. I could imagine a pack of cigarettes in one. But Marty also gave the impression of being involved in the most exciting venture in the world. Books were his life, but not for the money. His grandfather had invented the first waste-dissolving process on Long Island. You still saw Campagna cesspool trucks prowling the roads with their old slogan, YOUR WASTE IS OUR GOLD-but it was the patent for the process that had secured the family fortune.

"Jack told me Margaret had made a big find," I said immediately. "That you knew about."

He blinked at the change of subject. "I knew she was researching something. She called to ask me about source books"

"She called you?" It sounded more insulting than I intended.

But he only laughed, running his hand along the bristly edge of his black hair. "Hey, Blondie, I research everything. I have a ton of reference books."

"Margaret didn't ask you to look anything up for her?"

A curiously tense moment.

He shook his head. "You didn't find it in here?"

"I didn't look."

He made a disbelieving face, eyebrows raised above the frames of his black glasses, a knowing smile.

"Why would I look? It doesn't belong to me" Yet as I said it, I felt the stirring of book fever, those glowing coals ready to flare up at any gust of information. I doubted though that she would leave it in the store anyway. "She didn't tell you anything?"

"It's American. I think."

Emily Dickinson. But I said, "Gee, that narrows it down."

"Hey, kid, it's a big world out there. Could have been Rackham or T. S. Eliot."

"Tell me honestly: did you ever read T. S. Eliot-or any other poets-before you got into the business? Do you read them now?"

His smile disappeared; he actually looked annoyed.

Why had I said that? Was it my way of showing that I had an equal, though different, claim to books? But before I could apologize, the bell over the door tinkled again. We both looked over and saw Howard Riggs. Today he wasn't wearing his white vinyl gloves and had actually gotten a summer tan. But the receding hairline and petulant expression were unmistakable.

I thought he had come to yell at me for sending the romance reader to his shop.

Instead, he and Marty eyed each other with an enmity I found chilling. Finally Howard turned to me. "Where's Margaret?"

I started to explain about the accident, but Howard waved that aside. "I know all that; I don't live in a bubble! I thought she'd be back by now. Where's that assistant?"