Library of the Dead (28 page)

He wasn't much of a reader and he wasn't sure he remembered the last time he wandered the stacks of a library--probably at college, probably chasing a girl rather than a book. Despite the drama of the day, he was postprandial and drowsy and his legs were heavy. He weaved through claustrophobic rows of tall metal bookcases and inhaled the stale cardboard smell. Thousands of book titles blurred into one another and his brain started getting fuzzy. He had an overwhelming desire to curl up in a dark corner and take a nap, and was on the brink of going fully numb when he snapped back to alertness.

He was being watched.

He sensed it first, then heard footsteps, to his left in a parallel row. He turned in time to see a heel disappearing at the end of the stacks. He touched his holster through his jacket then hurried to the end of his row and made two quick rights. The row was empty. He listened, thought he heard something farther along, and crept quietly in that direction, another two rows toward the center of the room. When he wheeled round the corner, he saw a man scuttling away from him. "Hey!" he called out.

The man stopped and turned. He was obese, with an unruly speckled black beard, and was dressed as if it were winter, in hiking boots, a moth-holed sweater, and a parka. His upper cheeks were pocked and irritated and his nose was bulbous and textured like an orange peel. He had wire-rim glasses with a thrift-shop pedigree. Even though he was in his fifties, he had the petulance of a child caught doing something wrong.

Will approached him cautiously. "Were you following me?"

"No."

"I think you were."

"I was following you," he admitted.

Will relaxed. The man wasn't a threat. He pegged him as a schizophrenic, nonviolent, controlled. "Why were you following me?"

"To help you find a book." There was no modulation. Every word had the same tone and emphasis as the last, each one delivered with complete earnestness.

"Well, friend, I can use the help. I'm not big on libraries."

The man smiled and showed a mouthful of bad teeth. "I love the library."

"Okay, you can help me find a book. My name is Will."

"I'm Donny."

"Hello, Donny. You lead, I'll follow."

Donny joyfully hurried through the stacks like a rat who had mastered a maze. He led Will to a corner then down two flights of stairs to a basement floor where he burrowed deeply into the new level with a sense of purpose. They passed a library assistant, an older woman pushing a cart of books, who smiled slyly, pleased that Donny had found a willing playmate.

"You must have a really good book for me, Donny," Will called out to him.

"I got a really good book for you."

With plenty of time on his hands, Will found the escapade diverting. The man he was chasing had all the hallmarks of chronic schizophrenia with maybe a touch of retardation thrown in, and by the look of him, was on big-time meds. Deep in a library subbasement, he was in Donny's house playing Donny's game, but he didn't mind.

Finally, Donny stopped midway down an aisle and reached over his head for a large book with a worn cover. He needed both sweaty hands to wriggle it free before offering it to Will.

The Holy Bible
.

"The Bible?" Will said with a fair bit of surprise. "I've got to tell you, Donny, I'm not much of a Bible reader. You read the Bible?"

Donny looked down at his boots and shook his head. "I don't read it."

"But you think I should?"

"You should read it."

"Any other books I ought to be reading?"

"Yes. One other book."

He scooted off again, Will following, lugging the eight-pound Bible under his arm, pushed up against his holstered gun. His mother, a meek Baptist who endured his son of a bitch father for thirty-seven years, read the Bible incessantly, and just then he cloyingly remembered an image of her at the kitchen table, reading her Bible, holding onto it for dear life, her lower lip trembling, while his old man, drunk in the living room, cursed her out at the top of his lungs. And she plumbed the Bible for personal forgiveness when she too turned to the bottle for release. He wouldn't be reading the Bible anytime soon.

"The next book going to be as profound as this one?" Will asked.

"Yes. It's going to be a good book for you to read."

He couldn't wait.

They went down another flight of stairs to the lowest level, an area that didn't look like it saw a lot of foot traffic. Donny suddenly stopped on a dime and dropped to his knees at a shelf filled with older leather-bound books. He triumphantly pulled one out. "This is a good one for you."

Will was keen to see it. What, in this poor soul's view of the world, would match the Bible? He braced himself for a revelatory moment.

NY State Municipal Code--1951
.

He put the Bible down to examine the new book. As advertised, it was page after page of municipal codes with a heavy emphasis on permitted uses of land. It was probably a minimum of half a century since anyone had touched the volume. "Well, this sure is profound, Donny."

"Yep. It's a good book."

"You picked both these books randomly, didn't you?"

He nodded his head vigorously. "They were random, Will."

At five-thirty he was sound asleep in the reading room with his head comfortably perched on the Bible and the Municipal Code. He felt a tug on his sleeve, looked up and saw Nancy standing over him. "Hi."

She was checking out his reading material. "Don't ask," he pleaded.

Outside, they sat in her car talking. He figured if he was going to be taken down, it would have happened already. It looked like no one had connected the dots.

She told him that back in the office all hell was breaking loose. She wasn't in the loop but the news was spreading fluidly within the agency. Will's name had been added to the TSA's no-fly list and his check-in attempt at LaGuardia had triggered multiagency pandemonium. Sue Sanchez was feverish--she'd spent all day behind closed doors with the brass, emerging only to bark a few orders and generally be a pain in the ass. They'd questioned Nancy a few times about her knowledge of Will's actions and intent but seemed satisfied that she didn't know anything. Sue was almost apologetic at having forced Nancy to work with him on the Doomsday case and assured her repeatedly that she wouldn't be stained by the association.

Will sighed deeply. "Well, I'm grounded. I can't fly, I can't rent a car, I can't use a credit card. If I try to get on a train or a bus I'll get picked up at Penn Station or the Port Authority." He stared out the passenger-side window, then put a hand on her thigh and patted it playfully. "I'll have to steal a car, I guess."

"You're absolutely right. You're going to steal a car." She started the motor and left the parking lot.

They argued all the way to her house. He didn't want to involve her parents, but Nancy insisted. "I want them to meet you."

He wanted to know why.

"They've heard all about you. They've seen you on TV." She paused before finishing, "They know about us."

"Tell me you didn't tell your parents you're having an affair with your partner who's almost twice your age."

"We're a close family. And you're not twice my age."

The Lipinski abode was a compact 1930s brick house with a steeply pitched slate roof on a stubby dead-end street across from Nancy's old high school, its flower beds brimming with cascades of orange and red roses that made it look like the structure was being consumed by fire.

Joe Lipinski was in the backyard, a small man, shirtless with baggy shorts. There were sprouts of silky-white hair everywhere--sparse on his sunburned scalp, tufted on his chest. His round, impish cheeks were the fleshiest part of his body. He was kneeling on the grass, pruning a rosebush, but shot up with a youthful spring to his legs and yelled, "Hey! It's the Pied Piper! Welcome to Casa Lipinski!"

"You have a beautiful garden, sir," Will offered.

"Don't sir me, Joe me. But thanks. You like roses?"

"Sure I do."

Joe reached for a small bud, pruned it off and held it out. "For your button hole. Put it in his button hole, Nancy."

She blushed but complied, threading it in place.

"There!" Joe exclaimed. "Now you two kids can go to the prom. C'mon. Let's get out of the sun. Your mother's got dinner almost ready."

"I don't want to put you out," Will protested.

Joe dismissed him with a what-are-you-talking about look and winked at his daughter.

The house was warm because Joe didn't believe in air-conditioning. It was a period piece, unchanged since moving day, 1974. The kitchen and bathrooms had been updated in the sixties but that was it. Small rooms with thick mushy carpets and worn lumpy furniture, a first-generation escape to the suburbs.

Mary Lipinski was in the kitchen, which was fragrant from simmering pots. She was a pretty woman who hadn't let herself go, although, Will noted, she was on the thick-hipped side. He had an unpleasant habit of divining what his girlfriends might look like in twenty years, as if he'd ever had a relationship that lasted more than twenty months. Still, she had a tight, youthful face, lovely shoulder-length brown hair, a firm bosom, and nice calves. Not bad for her late fifties, early sixties.

Joe was a CPA and Mary was a bookkeeper. They had met at General Foods, where he was an accountant, about ten years her senior, and she was a secretary in the tax department. At first he commuted up from Queens; she was a local girl from White Plains. When they married, they bought this small house on Anthony Road just a mile away from the headquarters. Years later, after the company was acquired by Kraft, the White Plains operation was closed down and Joe took a buyout. He decided to open up his own tax business, and Mary took a job at a Ford dealer doing their books. Nancy was their only daughter, and they were thrilled she was back in her old room.

"So that's us, the modern day Joseph and Mary," Joe said, concluding a brief family history and passing Will a plate of string beans. A Verdi opera was softly playing on the Bose radio. Will was lulled into a contented state by the food, the music, and the plain conversation. This was the kind of wholesome shit he never provided for his daughter, he thought wistfully. A glass of wine or beer would have been nice but it appeared the Lipinskis weren't serving. Joe was zeroing in on the punch line: "We're just like the originals, but this one here, she was no immaculate conception!"

"Dad!" Nancy protested.

"Would you like another piece of chicken, Will?" Mary asked.

"Yes ma'am, I would, thank you."

"Nancy tells me you spent the afternoon in our fine public library," Joe said.

"I did. I came across a real character there."

Mary grimaced. "Donny Golden," she said.

"You know him?" Will asked.

"Everyone knows Donny," Nancy answered.

"Tell Will how you know him, Mary," Joe prodded.

"Believe it or not, Will, Donny and I went to high school together."

"She was his girlfriend!" Joe shouted gleefully.

"We dated once! It's such a sad story. He was the most handsome boy, from a nice Jewish family. He went off to college, normal and healthy, and got very sick during his freshman year. Some say it was drugs, some say it was just when he developed his mental problem. He spent years in institutions. He lives in some kind of supervised house downtown and spends all his time in the library. He's harmless but it's painful to see him. I won't go there."

"He doesn't have such a bad life," Joe said. "No pressures. He's oblivious to all the bad things in the world."

"I think it's sad too," Nancy said, picking at her food. "I saw his yearbook pictures. He was really cute."

Mary sighed. "Who knew what fate had in store for him? Who ever knows?"

Suddenly, Joe turned serious. "So, Will, tell us what's in store for you. I hear there's some funny business going on. I'm concerned for you, certainly, but as a father, I'm very concerned for my daughter."

"Will can't talk about an ongoing investigation, Dad."

"No, listen, I hear you, Joe. I've got some things I've got to do but I don't want Nancy getting caught up in this. She's got a brilliant career ahead of her."

"I'd rather she was doing something less dangerous than the FBI," her mother said, chiming what sounded like a constant refrain.

Nancy made a face and Joe dismissed his wife's worry with a wave. "I understand you were close to making an arrest but both of you were yanked off the investigation. How does something like this happen in the United States of America? When my parents were in Poland, these things happened all the time. But here?"

"I want to find that out. Nancy and I put a lot of time into this case, and there are victims who don't have a voice."

"Well, you do what you have to do. You seem like a nice fellow. And Nancy is quite fond of you. That means you're going to be in my prayers."

The opera was over and the station was doing a news summary. None of them would have paid any attention if Will's name weren't mentioned:

"And in other news, the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has filed an arrest warrant for one of their own. Special Agent Will Piper is wanted for questioning for irregularities and possible criminal wrongdoing related to the investigation of the Doomsday serial killer. Piper, a nearly twenty-year veteran of law enforcement, is best known for being the public face of the still-unsolved Doomsday case. His whereabouts are unknown and he is considered armed and potentially dangerous. If a member of the public has any information, please contact local police authorities or the FBI."

Will grimly stood up and put his jacket back on. He fingered the rosebud in the lapel. "Joe and Mary, thank you for dinner and thank you for your hospitality. I've got to be going."

There wasn't much city-bound traffic this time of day. They had stopped first at a convenience store on Rosedale Avenue, where Nancy hopped out to buy provisions while Will fidgeted in her car. Two bags of groceries were on the backseat, but no, she had said emphatically, she would not buy him booze.