A Rare Murder In Princeton (14 page)

“Well, neither am I,” said McLeod. “Do I have to be a member to come to the annual dinner? I guess so. How much are the dues and how much is the dinner?”

When Natty told them, she gasped. “It must be awfully good food,” she said.

“It’s a fund-raiser, dear lady,” said Natty. “You’re a user of the collection, and George, you’re an official of the university. You both must join immediately and come to the dinner.”

“Oh, all right, Natty. I’ll send you a check Monday,” said George.

“Me, too,” said McLeod.

“It’s getting late,” said Natty. “I’ d better get home to bed. Dear boy, thank you so much for having me to dinner. And McLeod, thank you for asking me, and for cooking,” he added hastily. “I certainly enjoyed talking to you and I hope I didn’t snap at you too fiercely.”

“Of course you didn’t,” said McLeod, laying her knitting aside and rising. “I’ve been snapped at by much fiercer dragons than you, Natty.”

“You mean my august presence doesn’t terrify you?”

“Natty, I’m in awe of you, but not terrified.”

Natty looked pleased, and unexpectedly kissed her cheek. “Good night, dear girl,” he said.

McLeod headed for the kitchen with their brandy glasses and left George to see him out. When George joined her to help clear the dishes and load the dishwasher, she apologized. “I hope Natty’s not mad at me. I didn’t mean to annoy him.”

“Of course you didn’t,” said George. “He’s not annoyed with you. He’s afraid you’re annoyed with him. He said he hoped you wouldn’t give up on van Dyke because you were mad at him.”

“Oh, van Dyke,” said McLeod. “Phooey. Actually, I like Natty. Has he ever been married or is he gay?”

“He’s not gay. He’s married right now.”

“What?”

“He’s married. His wife has Alzheimer’s. She’s in an institution. Natty doesn’t talk about her, but he goes to see her nearly every day.”

“That’s awful, but I love it that he’s loyal. You know, we forgot about the break-in Thursday. Do you suppose the police found out anything about it?”

“Not that I know of,” said George. “I don’t think that little break-in has a high priority with them right now.”

“I guess not, but it is unnerving when you think about somebody rummaging around in your things.”

“I’m sure it is,” said George, appearing not at all unnerved. “Actually, I shouldn’t think it would be as unnerving as finding a body.”

“That was unnerving,” McLeod conceded. “But so was finding the house had been burgled. This has been a high crime week. And then we’re living in what they call the murder house.”

“Be brave, McLeod. This, too, will pass. By the way, don’t expect to ever get a look at Natty’s books and pictures. He never asks people to his house.”

“He goes out a lot. Doesn’t he have to pay people back?”

“He takes people to restaurants from time to time. But he’s such an amusing old goat that I think he gets all the invitations he can handle without doing anything in return.”

“What a life!” said McLeod.

“I know. Are we all through in here? Good.”

WHEN SHE WAS in Princeton, McLeod occasionally went to services at Nassau Presbyterian Church, but on this Sunday morning, she decided that she would go to the university chapel. The chapel was Gothic and huge, not as cozy as the classic white Presbyterian Church, but she liked the service, which was interdenominational, although leaning in an Episcopal direction. She liked the prayer for Princeton University that the congregation always recited in unison, and she liked the choir, filled with fresh-faced students in black robes with the Princeton orange stoles.

After all that had happened in the past week, she found it very soothing to sit in that lofty nave and let the music wash over her. The chapel was not nearly full, but the empty spaces made it more peaceful. During the sermon, her mind wandered—McLeod always found church a great place to mull over problems—and tried to make sense of the kaleidoscopic events of the past week. There was the horrible murder in the library, of course, and then there was the burglary of George’s house and the pillaging of her own belongings, not to mention the long-ago murder of Jill Murray in that very same house. Good heavens—it was all too much for one small, beautiful college town. It couldn’t be true. But it was.

The sermon was over—it had seemed mercifully short—and she stood for the final hymn, piping away with the others, “Let there be light, Lord God of Hosts, let there be wisdom on the earth . . .” Let there be light and wisdom, indeed, she prayed silently.

As she moved out of the pew into the aisle, she was surprised to run into Buster Keaton, looking somewhat better groomed than he did at the library, but just as dark and gloomy.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m astonished to see you here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t see how anybody can take the Church seriously in this day and age.”

“But you’re here,” she pointed out.

“Oh, yes, I’m here, but I never take it seriously.”

“I see,” McLeod said.

“Actually, I’m here because my wife is the world’s biggest religious maniac. She insists on it.”

“Oh, where is she? I’d like to meet her,” said McLeod politely.

“She’s helping with the coffee hour—you know, where everybody is supposed to mingle in Christian fellowship after the service. All six of us.”

“Oh, there were more than six people here this morning.”

“Not many more. No matter.” By now they were in the narthex, and McLeod noticed the volunteer ladies fluttering around the table with the big coffee urn and cookies on it.

“Which is your wife?” she said.

“That’s her,” said Buster inelegantly as he waved toward the urn. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.” He led her to a fiftyish woman with curly brown hair beginning to go gray. “Amelia, this is McLeod Dulaney. She’s working on Henry van Dyke.”

Amelia looked up from the coffee urn she was manning and smiled at McLeod. “So nice to meet you. Will you have some coffee? Cookies? They’re homemade.”

“I thought I’d take McLeod off to some place where we can sit down. I’ll be back by the time you’re through. Okay?” Buster said to Amelia.

“Sure,” said Amelia. “Have a good time.” She looked past McLeod to the man behind her. “Coffee?” she asked him.

“Come on to Small World,” Buster said to McLeod. “The coffee’s much better there than here. I can’t go home until Amelia gets through anyway.”

And he might as well kill time with me, thought McLeod; he really knows how to make a girl feel good. But why not? At least he had the sense to know Small World was better than Starbucks. “Sounds good,” she said and walked with him across the courtyard and along Nassau Street to Witherspoon and the Small World coffee shop.

She ordered latte and he a cappuccino and they took their cups to a small table by the window where they could watch the passersby.

“Well, what do you think about our murder?” Buster asked her. “Or have you forgotten it?”

“How could I forget it?” McLeod asked, thinking what an oaf Buster could be, even when he was dressed up for church.

“That’s right—you’re the one who found the body,” he said. “Too bad you had to notice it—look at all the trouble you’ve caused. I haven’t been able to get any work done since you did it.”

Was he serious? McLeod wondered. Just in case he was serious, she replied that surely it wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t been able to get any work done. “Somebody would have eventually looked in the window at the Belcher stuff,” she said.

“I know that,” he said. “I’m not a fool, although I know I look like one sometimes. But I’ve got enough sense to know that. I was trying to be cheerful about all this and tease you a bit. But I guess you can’t joke about murder, can you?”

“It’s hard,” said McLeod. “Although I appreciate the effort.” McLeod stirred her latte and Buster sipped his cappuccino. “It’s really a particularly horrible murder because Philip Sheridan was such a nice man.” She looked at Buster to see his reaction to this.

“Oh, he could be very, very nice,” he said. “But he had a darker side. I guess we all do, don’t we?”

“Really? What was his darker side like?”

“Oh, he was like a lot of very rich people,” said Buster. “He wanted to control everything. And he used his money as a tool. Oh, don’t misunderstand me—I got along famously with him. I certainly should have, since I always kowtowed like a crazy man, and it was ‘Yes, Philip,’ ‘No, Philip,’ ‘Whatever you say, Philip.’ That collection of his—any rare book curator in the world would kill for it. I wasn’t about to let it get away from me.”

McLeod thought briefly of Clement Odell, Buster’s predecessor, who was responsible for acquiring the Sheridan collection. “But it was already yours, wasn’t it? I mean, it was Princeton’s—he’d made it over to the university, hadn’t he?”

“Not exactly. It was to come to us as a legacy. It will be Princeton’s now, but he loved those books so much he couldn’t let them go while he was alive.” Unaware that he had a bit of cream from the cappuccino on his chin, he beamed blissfully. “But now that he’s dead, they belong to Princeton. It’s wonderful.”

Buster was a man who took happiness where he could find it, McLeod thought. Here was the benefactor, not cold in his grave, not yet even
in
his grave, and Buster was exulting over a legacy. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is this: Who would want to kill that nice man? It happened Tuesday and I haven’t heard about anybody yet with a real reason to kill Philip Sheridan.”

Buster shrugged. “Everybody has enemies.”

“Who was Philip Sheridan’s enemy?” asked McLeod. “Name one.”

“I don’t know that she was Philip’s enemy, but he was certainly hers. I mean Fanny Mobley, of course. The dame of the British Empire and the doyenne of manuscripts.”

“Is she really a dame?”

“Don’t be so literal,” said Buster. “I was just alluding to her ethnic heritage—upper-class Brit, she is, and proud of it. Well, upper middle class, at least.”

“But why would she kill Philip Sheridan? Wasn’t he a benefactor to manuscripts as well as books?”

“Of course he was. But Fanny wasn’t as diplomatic—or as deferential—as some of us. She didn’t fawn over Philip—and perhaps she should have. He disapproved violently of some of the things she did with manuscripts, for instance. They had, shall we say, heated discussions about it. Actually they were dreadful shouting matches.”

“What did she do with manuscripts that he disapproved of?” asked McLeod.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Buster, lapsing into uncharacteristic vagueness. “I think he thought she didn’t appreciate some of the things he had given the university.”

“That’s not a really terrific motive for murder, is it?” asked McLeod. “That Fanny would kill Philip because he thought she didn’t appreciate the value of manuscripts he brought in. I mean, what can you do with manuscripts? Put them in acid-free boxes if they’re books or stories or poems. If they’re letters, you sort them and put them in acid-free folders in acid-free boxes. And then you wait for researchers to come and use them, and watch like a hawk to make sure they don’t mark them or steal them.”

“You describe our life work so beautifully,” said Buster. “Still I think there was enough bad feeling there to justify a little investigation on the part of the police. I may have a talk with that nice lieutenant.”

“Do,” said McLeod. “The police will sort it out. But what about Chester? He and Philip Sheridan got along very well, didn’t they?”

“I suppose,” said Buster. “But who knows what goes on inside a relationship like that? Who depends on whom? Was Chester a masochist who put up with Sheridan’s domination? Or did Chester have some sort of hold on Sheridan ? Did he know something that gave him power? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”

McLeod thought it was an outlandish question, but she had to admire Keaton’s imagination. He should write fiction, she thought. She decided to ask one more question. “And Dodo? How did she and Philip Sheridan get along?”

“Like a house afire,” said Buster. “That is to say that they were always hot with irritation at each other, believe me. Dodo wanted to use Philip for fund-raising purposes and he wouldn’t let himself be trotted out for things like that.”

That wasn’t exactly the way Natty had put it, McLeod realized, but she was interested to see that Buster could find faults—and motives for murder—in everybody she mentioned. Still, enough was enough. “I really must go. Thanks for the coffee. And your wife must be waiting for you.”

“Don’t worry about Amelia,” said Buster. “She’ll be all right. She always stays at the chapel, talking to every single person who stops for coffee. Then she helps with the cleanup. I’ll amble back toward the chapel, though. Are you going that way?”

“No, I walked from Edgehill, so I go in the other direction. See you soon.”

Buster Keaton really could be quite awful, she thought as she plodded toward Edgehill Street, but this was the only time she had ever seen him stay off the subject of books for such a long time. She noticed that it had turned cloudy since she had left home that morning and it looked as though it might snow again. Horrors.