In A Strange City

Chapter 10

The Enoch Pratt Free Library always lifted Tess’s spirits, and she was in need of a lift when she walked through its doors later that day. She had wasted much of the morning, trying to run down Yeager ‘s tantalizing clue about the other two related cases. She had even given the tip to Herman Peters at the Blight, hoping to steal Yeager’s scoop from under him, but the young police reporter had been indifferent to her gift, sighing so heavily into his cell phone that it sounded as if he had entered a wind tunnel.

“I hate a red ball,” he muttered, from some alley in West Baltimore where he was watching police pack up the year’s latest murder victim, a young black man who had been shot to death. The anti-red ball, if you will. “I hate the fact that all these reporters think they know everything about homicide investigations, because they watch NYPD Blue and Homicide reruns.

They even try to talk the talk. And this guy Yeager is the worst, with his “bunky‘ this and ”skel’ that when he’s trying to score points with the cops. I think Rainer hates him more than he hates you.“

“Great,” Tess said. “But just because he’s irritating doesn’t mean he doesn’t know anything. He said there are two more cases, Herman. What of it? Are there other beatings? Homicides?”

“I know there aren’t any homicides linked to either of these cases,” he said adamantly, as if he had memorized every case file on every homicide-and perhaps he had. “In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s no relationship between the attack on Shawn Hayes and this Poe shooting. The cops told me off the record what happened-Hayes went cruising, picked up the ultimate rough trade, things got ugly. It happens. But whoever beat Shawn Hayes didn’t then buy a gun and stake out the Poe grave. It’s a ridiculous theory.”

“And yet it’s a theory that came from someone in the police department.”

“So your other friend says. My guess is that Rainer is setting up a gay detective, giving him false information about sensitive cases to see if he’ll blab. Watch for that shoe to drop in a few weeks.”

“Would Rainer do that? Sounds positively Mc-Carthyite.”

“A cop’s first loyalty is expected to be to the department. Rainer’s capable of double-crossing a Baptist to see if he’ll leak information to his congregation. He may be homicide, but he belongs in Internal Affairs if you ask me.”

Ah, it was her fault for listening to a television talking head. Why had she believed Yeager?

So she hung up the phone and went to the Pratt, because of a note left in her mailbox by some crank. She really ought to become a little more discerning. Especially given that no one was actually paying for her services.

But Tess would go a long way out of her way to end up at the Pratt. She loved everything about it, beginning with its name, which came from the merchant who had poured his fortune into it. Once, Baltimore had been full of places with similarly idiosyncratic names. Memorial Stadium, whose gigantic letters had promised it would stand forever as a tribute to veterans, was scheduled for demolition, the letters slated for storage. The airport had shed the delicious name of Friendship to become the boringly mundane BWI- Baltimore Washington International. Tess thought this was the saddest civic change since the Bromo-Seltzer Tower had lost the bottle at its top.

But the Pratt remained the Pratt and managed to hold on to its dignity, even as it moved into the computer age and tried to bring its ancient branches up to code. Tess liked the soaring atrium here at the Central Library, one of the few places that made her feel small. She liked the gold leaf, the portraits of the Lords Baltimore, the hidden treasures of the Maryland Room. Best of all, the Pratt wasn’t a hushed, somber place. Sounds bounced from the ceiling to floor and back again-respectful, librarylike sounds, but sounds nevertheless. In all her years of coming here, Tess had never heard a librarian say “Hush.”

She also had never met a librarian quite like the young man who sat at the Information Desk on this particular day. Her aunt Kitty had been a school librarian, so Tess was not given to bun-and-bifocal stereotypes. Still, she was not prepared for this ruddy-faced young man, who would have looked more at home on a rugby field or in a bar afterward, lifting a pint. Sweetly rumpled, with light brown curls that looked as if he had just gotten up from a nap, he brought to mind the bookish heroes Tess had encountered in her childhood reading. He was Louisa May Alcott’s Laurie, Maud Hart Lovelace’s Joe Willard, Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Johnny Malone, Jules from the All-of-a-kind Family books. His shirt was half in, half out, his fisherman-knit sweater was fraying at the collar, and Tess would bet anything one of his shoes was untied.

“My name is Tess Monaghan,” she began, in her sweetest, most optimistic manner. She had learned that if you acted as if a request was reasonable, it became just that. “I’m a private investigator, and my client”- well, sort of, maybe-“has suggested I do some research in the Poe room.”

His baritone was warm and friendly. His words were not.

“The Poe Room, like the Mencken Room, is reserved for scholarly research,” he said. “It’s closed, except for special events. I’m afraid private detectives don’t make the cut, although I’m sure whatever you’re doing is quite interesting. How does one become a private detective, anyway?”

“Look-I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

He thumped his nameplate. “Daniel Clary.”

“As in the creator of Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and Ellen Tebbits?” Tess had loved those books when she was a child.

“She’s Cleary. I’m Clary.”

“Oh.” He may not look like the clichéd librarian, but he admonished like one. “Well, who has the authority to decide if I can have access?”

“I have the authority. I’m a librarian, not a receptionist. And there are other people waiting.”

He indicated the growing, restless line behind her.

“Of course, of course,” Tess said, trying to smooth things over. “I know I’m asking for special treatment, and I assumed someone in administration would have to make the call. Think of it as an appeal, through the court system. Who has the final say?”

“Our director, Carla Hayden, I suppose.” The court analogy appeared not to sit well with him. Daniel Clary still looked like a boy who had awakened from his nap, but now he was a grumpy one.

“Could I-” Tess reached a tentative hand toward his telephone.

“I’ll call,” he said swiftly, and punched in the numbers, turning in his wheeled chair so his back was to Tess and he could speak without her eavesdropping. She listened, instead, to the sighs of the people in line and remembered how she felt whenever she was stuck behind someone demanding special treatment.

“Tell her my name, Tess Monaghan,” she whispered to Daniel’s back. “And tell her what I do.”

He looked surprised when he revolved back in his chair. “She says you can go up, but under supervision. She seemed to know you.”

Tess smiled, but volunteered nothing. Daniel Clary didn’t need to know that the library director often shopped at Kitty’s store. Or that she was a dedicated mystery reader whose fascination with fictional crime had led her to quiz Tess on her professional life, when their paths crossed in Baltimore’s strange little social world. Crow had a theory that there were only a hundred people in Baltimore, maybe two hundred, and they were always running into each other: in the produce section at Eddie’s, the lobby of the Lyric Opera House, and Kitty’s store.

A silver-haired woman appeared at the desk and Tess assumed she was to be her guide. Instead, the woman took Daniel’s chair, and he grabbed a ring of keys from a drawer. Tess had been wrong about the shoes-both were tied, although one was held together with electrical tape-but she had been right about the shirttail, which was partially out of the baggy brown cords.

“I wasn’t trying to pull rank,” she said.

“But that’s what you did, isn’t it?” There was no malice in his voice, no residue of irritation, but he wasn’t going to allow her to alter the facts. He pushed the button between the two elevators, then noted that both were on the top floor, according to the old-fashioned dials above them. “Let’s walk.”

Tess still felt a need to appease him. “How long have you been at the Pratt?”

“Ten years.”

“It’s competitive, isn’t it, getting a job here?”

They were at the top of the stairs. He turned back to smile at her, pleased at the suggestion that his job was something to covet.

“Yes, the Pratt is still a desirable posting, even with private industry going after librarians. Most people don’t realize it, but trained research librarians are very much in demand right now. I could make a lot more money working somewhere else. But I became a librarian because I love books. And anyone who cares about libraries has to be thrilled, working at the Pratt.”

Tess knew the door to the Mencken Room was a lacquered sky blue, like a door in a fairy tale. But the Poe door was an ordinary glass one that opened into a somewhat ordinary room, a large study suitable for sipping sherry. Folding chairs were set up to create a makeshift auditorium, and Tess remembered she had been here just a few months back, for a reading by Baltimore’s unofficial poet laureate, Ralph Pickle.

“What do you need to see?” Daniel asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, suddenly feeling foolish. A note from some anonymous crank had pointed her in this direction and Tess had followed, meek and stupid as a sheep. “What’s here?”

“We have a few things on display, but it’s really a glorified meeting room,” Daniel said, indicating a glass case with a few Poe books and artifacts. “The archives are available only to scholars, as I told you downstairs. If you wanted something specific, I could arrange for you to see it. But you’d have to relinquish your backpack and any ink pens, and I’d have to stand guard while you read.”

“Of course.” She walked around, trying to look purposeful. “I guess even a scholar can be a crook. Especially a scholar.”

Daniel held his finger to his lips, playfully mocking his own profession. “We don’t like to talk about such things here. Libraries are in denial about the theft problem, in part because they can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s a great attitude.”

“A truly fail-safe security system is cost-prohibitive for a public library. And there are philosophical problems, too. It is a public library, after all, supported by tax dollars. How far do you want us to go, protecting our precious wares from the public who underwrites us? And even if you could keep the public from ripping you off, there are always going to be librarians who steal. No one likes to talk about it, but it happens.”

“Makes sense,” Tess said, although she had never thought about the issue before. Every profession harbored its miscreants: doctors, journalists, lawyers. Why should librarians be exempt from sin?

“Do you know about Stephen Carrie Blumberg?” Daniel asked as she continued to wander the room, wondering what she was doing there.

“No. Should I?”

“Not by name. But he’s the most infamous library thief of contemporary times. A bibliokleptomaniac.”

“A librarian?”

“No, yet he was better at taking care of things than some of the libraries from which he stole them. But he was sick, clinically. He actually entered a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea in his trial.”

“Did it work?”

“He was sent to federal prison. He got out a few years ago, and they wanted to make it a condition of his release that he announce himself to the staff whenever he visited a library or archive. I think someone figured out it was unconstitutional. Unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

“You sound almost as if you admired him,” Tess said.

“Me? No, not particularly. In fact, I know about him only because one of our librarians here was obsessed with the subject, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my former colleague, for obvious reasons. He rattled on about Blumberg all the time. Eventually, I became so curious I read A Gentle Madness, the Nicholas Basbanes book about bibliomania.” Daniel shrugged.

“I like books, but not that much. Sometimes I wondered if my former colleague was similarly inclined. Now I guess we’ll never know.”

“Excuse me?” Tess had only been half listening as she studied the books and artifacts, trying to think why her Visitor had sent her here. But she sensed the conversation had taken a turn she needed to follow.

“I’m sorry. I just assumed, when you said you were a private detective, that you knew…” Daniel looked embarrassed. “After all, the police have already been here, although no one could tell them much. They wanted a crash course in Poe, but Jeff Jerome at the Poe museum is better suited to that task. The thing is, no one here remembers Bobby ever speaking about Poe. H. L. Mencken was his passion-and his downfall.”

“Bobby Hilliard worked here? The paper never mentioned that.”

“His employment was kept quiet, for obvious reasons.”

“Obvious reasons?” Tess was beginning to feel like a parrot.

Daniel Clary looked around uneasily, although they were alone in the Poe room. “There was a confidentiality agreement, binding to both parties. I’m not supposed to talk about it, and I definitely shouldn’t be talking about it here. For obvious reasons.”

“Daniel, nothing about this is obvious to me, but I’d like to change that.”