In A Strange City

Chapter 32

Outside the Belvedere Hotel, TeSS took Daniel aside.

“The titles that Bobby stole from the Pratt-could you get me a list?”

He needed a second to understand what she wanted. “There is no list, remember? Bobby would never admit to stealing the books, only the pillbox. Over the years, the staff has discovered that some rare titles are missing, but it’s not like we catalog them. What would be the point? They can’t be replaced.”

“Didn’t the library director ever make a report to the board? I assume the trustees would have had to be informed.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed his chin. “That never occurred to me. I guess I can poke around and see if there’s such a thing. When do you want it?”

“As soon as possible.”

“It’s bound to be a confidential document, for obvious reasons. I’m not sure I can just hand it over to you on the main floor of the Pratt.”

“I’ll come to your house tomorrow night. Then we can go over the titles together.”

“You think there’s a clue in the titles of the books Bobby stole?”

“Something like that.”

She returned to Daniel’s little carriage house shortly after eight the next night, bringing takeout from the Helmand, an Afghan restaurant, and a bottle of Chilean white wine. Daniel struggled to look brave, like a well-reared little boy who knew he must not make faces at the strange food on his plate. Tess had thought the meatballs of lamb and ground beef were a good compromise between his plebeian tastes and her need for something exotic.

“I told you I’d provide the food,” he said.

“Nonsense. You’re doing me a favor. Now let’s see the list.”

He looked embarrassed. “I couldn’t get it. I didn’t want to ask anyone for it, because it’s a confidential document and I couldn’t figure out where such things are kept. Probably in the director’s office.”

“I guess I could file a FOIA,” Tess said, sampling the aushak, raviolis filled with leeks. “But that would take forever.”

“A foya?”

“Freedom of Information Act. The library can’t sit on a document just because it’s embarrassing. We could force the board to release the list of the missing books, but that would take weeks.”

“You can’t do that,” he said, a nervous edge creeping into his voice. “They’d fire me. They’d know I was the one who told you.”

“But you told the cops, too, right? I mean, I could have learned about the list from someone else. And I’d have one of my newspaper friends put the request in. I think regular citizens can file FOIAs, but it packs more punch coming from a newspaper.”

“The thing is”-Daniel seemed calmer, now he knew the story of Bobby Hilliard’s thefts couldn’t be traced to him so easily-“the thing is, the existence of a list was pure conjecture on your part. Don’t you need to know a document exists before you can”-he paused, enjoying the new bit of jargon-“before you can FOIA it?”

“Good point.” Tess sipped a little of her wine, which Daniel had poured into an old jelly glass. He was drinking a Yuengling out of the bottle. She hated to be finicky, but the right stemware did help wine reach its full potential. What she really craved was a glass of water. Daniel had built a fire, but it was almost too hot; the small house felt ovenlike. Perhaps it was her imagination, but the spines of the books all around them seemed to swell slightly from the heat, which made the room feel that much smaller.

“You know what? I don’t need the list anyway. I’ll just start writing down the names of all the titles in your library here, then take them back to the Pratt and check to see how many of them were stolen.”

Daniel’s piece of aushak fell into his lap. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, I assume some of them really are from flea markets, while others were stolen from the library. But is it half? Only a third? It will take a while to put the list together, but I have plenty of time.”

A pounding sound filled her ears and she was tempted to believe it was Daniel’s telltale heart, the beat rising in a sudden, wild panic at the realization he had been found out. But the pounding was her own heart, her own blood. Daniel, if anything, had grown eerily calm, pushing away the plate of barely touched food and taking another swig of his beer.

“The last thing you have,” he said, “is time.”

Now it was her turn to say, “Excuse me?”

“You don’t have time. I would give you four hours at the outside, maybe three. After all, it’s not an exact science, burying someone alive.”

Tess stood up so quickly she knocked her chair over and backed away, her gun out of her trench-coat pocket. That was part of the reason she was so hot. She hadn’t dared remove her coat, because she might not have been able to get to her gun.

After all, she had known all along she was making a date with a killer. As the movie at the Poe Museum said, you could always find the answer in the books. Daniel had paraded his stolen goods, making them appear legitimate.

“You’re not burying anyone, alive or otherwise, Daniel. You’re going to go to your phone, call nine-one-one, and say you want to turn yourself in.”

He looked up, his boyish features as mild and bemused as ever. “Too late.”

“It’s not too late, it’s your only choice. People know I’m here, Daniel. I wouldn’t have come here without telling someone what I suspected.”

“No, I mean it’s too late because I’ve already buried her. I had to take the day off-I called in sick, because I knew you were on to me, or going to be-and put her someplace where she should keep for a few hours. She’s my insurance policy.”

“Who?” Tess had visions of a small child, snatched from the streets in some urban neighborhood where such a disappearance wouldn’t merit the attention it might receive in more suburban climes.

“Cecilia. I would have preferred Crow, or even Whitney, because I think you care more for them. But I needed someone I could overpower. Besides, I liked Cecilia the least. I don’t much like noisy people, people who call attention to themselves. Never have.”

Tess continued to hold her gun on him, wishing her experience at bluffing was based on more than card games with her family. “There’s nothing to be gained by harming someone else, Daniel. You’re flirting with the death penalty now. I told Rainer and Tull that I think you killed Yeager and Bobby. You attacked Shawn Hayes, too, didn’t you? Like the purloined letter, you left everything in plain sight. The books you stole-not Bobby, you-even the weapon used to beat Hayes. It’s over there, in the corner, and I bet anything Shawn Hayes’s blood is still on it. I thought it was a walking stick the first time I was here.”

They both looked to the corner, where the six-foot pike leaned against the wall, as innocent as any object could be-considering it had almost killed a man.

“A six-foot walking stick with a point on one end? I thought you were smarter than that, Tess.”

“But that was your intention, wasn’t it? Put a Winans pike next to your cross-country skis and your bicycle, and it takes on the cover of its companions. Put your stolen goods on display, and everyone assumes they must be yours. A lawyer once told me that drunks work in bars, child abusers work in day-care centers, and elephant fetishists join the circus. I guess book thieves inevitably are drawn to libraries. Then again, you said as much, the first time I met you.”

Daniel clasped his hands and leaned forward. Tess reflexively took a few steps back.

“I’m not silly enough to wrestle you for your gun,” he said. “As I said, I have my insurance policy. I went over to the Medical Arts building, where Cecilia keeps an office. I told her I wanted to talk about some discrimination issues at the Pratt and asked her to come outside with me so I could show her the documentation I had in the trunk. It was so easy to push her in and then to take her-well, to take her to the place I had prepared for her. I wonder if her girlfriend has started to miss her yet.”

There was something in the way he said “girlfriend”-a tone of sneering distaste-that hit Tess’s ear hard.

“You don’t much like gay people, do you?”

“I don’t mind them, as long as they leave other people alone. But they don’t, do they? They’re always trying to… recruit.”

He seemed to be speaking from personal experience, or his twisted version of personal experience.

“Bobby?”

“No, Bobby was okay.” Daniel’s face was tight with some memory, and color rose to his face.

“Shawn Hayes.” Not a question this time.

“Look, you don’t have much time,” Daniel said impatiently. “Don’t waste it talking. This is what I need from you. First of all, I need money, a lot of it. I’m guessing your bitchy friend Whitney can put her hands on quite a bit of cash, even at this time of night. And I need that damn dog, Miata.”

“Miata?”

“Well, not the dog, just her collar.” He laughed, and the sound was startling precisely because it was so hearty, so natural sounding. “Talk about things in plain sight. I have to give Bobby his props; he managed to pull one more double-cross before he died. He hung the locket on Miata’s collar, then passed the chain and the bug to the Visitor. It’s white gold and he turned it backwards, so it looks like just another ID tag. Why do you think I was so buddy-buddy with Crow? I kept looking for a chance to get that locket off the collar, but Miata would never sit still long enough. I don’t think she likes me much.”

“You tried to kill her master,” Tess pointed out.

“The dog doesn’t know that. Bobby had taken her for a walk. Remember, I offered you that scenario just the other day? I couldn’t bear to hear you nattering on about the whole thing anymore, when it should have been obvious what happened. Jesus! I don’t know how you make a living, doing what you do.”

“What did happen, Daniel?”

He pointed to an old-fashioned mantel clock. “You don’t have time for this. Or, I guess I should say, Cecilia doesn’t have time for this. You need to get me money, and you need to bring me the locket. I’m resigned to never having the gold bug, and I understand I have to leave most of my things behind, but I’m not going without the locket. I’ll have something to show for all I’ve been through.”

“All you’ve been through? You killed two men and left another near death, all for a couple of pieces of jewelry that may or may not have belonged to Edgar Allan Poe.”

Daniel stretched his long arms over his head, lacing his fingers and then cracking his knuckles with a hideous sound.

“I gave Cecilia a mild sedative before I buried her. She’s sleeping now, her breathing slow and regular, her heartbeat slower than usual. But she’ll be coming awake soon. Waking up in a small cramped space where she can’t see, can’t move. Imagine how terrified she’ll be. It’s a nightmare come true. Her heart will start to race and she’ll begin breathing in deep, frightened gasps, wasting so much energy and air.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tess said. “The ground is too hard to bury anyone this time of year.”

He produced a wallet, flipped it open to show Cecilia’s driver’s license.

“It’s possible to steal someone’s wallet without her even knowing it,” Tess said.

“Yes, but it’s much harder to remove all her jewelry.” He put two small turquoise studs on the table and the silver ring that Cecilia wore on her ring finger, a sign of her commitment to Charlotte.

“I can’t leave here until I know she’s alive and where she is.”

“But I’m not telling,” Daniel said. “So go ahead, shoot me. I don’t know how you’ll justify it to the cops, but I won’t be here to worry about it. But if I die, she’ll die too. Wouldn’t it just be easier to give me what I want?”

Tess still didn’t put her gun down.

“What do you want, an explanation, a confession? It’s not like I’m going to be here to face charges, but- fine, I confess. I stipulate to everything. I beat Shawn Hayes. I killed Bobby because he double-crossed me- claiming to have given the jewelry away when he had it on him all along. I went to the grave that night because I planned to follow the Visitor home and rob him. But when I saw the second figure, and realized how Bobby had deceived me, I couldn’t help myself.”

“And Yeager? Did you fall for Yeager ‘s claim that he had Bobby’s black book? Because he didn’t. It was just a stupid prop.”

“Yeager?” Daniel repeated, as if he couldn’t quite recall the man. “Yeager. I killed Yeager-I killed Yeager because I could. Like a special at one of those cheap men’s clothing stores-buy one suit, get a second pair of pants for free. Yeager was a freebie, and he helped me frame the Visitor.”

In the silence that fell, Tess became acutely aware of breathing, hers and Daniel’s. Breathing is one of those odd things people take for granted-until they lose it. The air comes in, the lungs fill, the air goes out, the lungs deflate. Where was Cecilia? Was she still breathing? He had said four hours, maybe three. She cautioned herself to use the time, not rush from the room in a blind panic to do his bidding.

“You and Bobby were partners in this. You helped him pull off these burglaries.”

“Not all of them. I didn’t start out to do most of what I did, but who does? I ran into Bobby at the Midtown Yacht Club last spring, and he was flashing all this cash. He was dying to tell someone what he was doing. It was gossip to him, nothing more. It was my idea to start stealing things back. Rare items belong to the people who truly appreciate them, who can care for them. That’s why I had to liberate all these books from the library. I couldn’t stand to see other people touching them, defiling them. Someone had to protect them. I thought the Pratt was close to figuring it out, back when Bobby stole the pillbox. So I ratted on him. He never knew. Bobby was such an innocent in some ways.”

“So you were involved in the burglaries at Ensor’s house, and Pitts’s?”

“Of course,” he said, laughing at her. “Do you think Bobby Hilliard could carry a thirty-one-inch television by himself? Not likely.”

“What went wrong at Shawn Hayes’s house?”

Daniel’s laugh died abruptly. “That was Bobby’s idea. The security system was too elaborate; we couldn’t break in. It was his idea that we should go to a local bar that Shawn Hayes frequented, strike up a conversation, go home with him. You see, Shawn didn’t know me, and Bobby said I was his… type. ”He likes Eddie Bauer boys’ was how he put it. I was to get Shawn to give me a tour of the house while Bobby walked the dog. He pocketed the items on the way out, and it was his plan to hide them somewhere, a place where we could get them later. It was easy enough. After all, Pitts had bragged about the rare things he and his friends owned, told Bobby where Shawn kept the bug and the locket.“

Daniel fell into an abstracted silence, chewing his bottom lip. Tess assumed he was thinking about that night. It was the night he had crossed over, when his carefully rationalized crimes of “liberation,” as he would have it, had entered a violent territory he had found all too pleasing.

“Shawn Hayes made a pass at you.” She tried to make it sound as a statement of fact, as if she knew what happened.

“Not exactly. He asked me if I was interested, and I said no. He seemed unfazed but a little offended. He called me a tease and said it wasn’t the first time. He said… he said he had met other men like me. Like me, as if he knew anything of me! ”Fence sitters’ was his term. He said, “You’ll be happier when you admit what you really are.” But I’m not-I would never-and I didn’t have to take that from some sick fag. A fag who was a thief, who stole from his friends, who wanted to own everything worth owning. Who was he to have all those wonderful things? That’s what made me angry. I could steal the locket and the pin, but he would still have so much, so much more than I could ever have. If I could have owned what he owned-but I couldn’t. I don’t. It’s not fair, when such coarse people can own such fine things.“

His fists were clenching and unclenching at his side, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Tess worried that she had pushed him too far. She wanted him to feel cornered but not desperate.

“Daniel, I don’t know how much money you need, but Whitney, Crow, and I together couldn’t get more than nine hundred dollars. ATM accounts have three-hundred-dollar limits, and the banks are closed.”

“But Whitney is rich,” he said.

“Her family is rich. It’s not like they have big boxes of cash sitting around.”

Daniel looked surprised, as if he had assumed wealthy people did have currency scattered around the house-stuffed in the upholstery, brimming out of wastebaskets.

“I’ll settle for the locket and a head start. Bring me the locket and I’ll go; then I’ll call you within an hour, from the road, to tell you where she is.”

“I can’t do that, Daniel. How do I know you’ll keep your word? I won’t even risk leaving you alone.”

“Then call Crow and tell him to bring the dog here. Once I have the locket, I’ll tell you where she is.”

Tess shook her head. “No deal. Look, you killed Bobby on impulse. Even Yeager’s death can be manslaughter, if your lawyer’s smart enough. It’s Cecilia’s death that will get you death by lethal injection in this state.”

“Frankly, I don’t care if some dyke suffocates.”

“I know,” Tess said. “You don’t care about anyone. But I know what you do care about.”

She switched her gun to her left hand. She had been foolish to think she could bully Daniel or scare him. His regard for human life was so low he didn’t even value his own. She walked over to the shelves, trying to remember where he kept his Poe books.

“This poetry book, the one you consulted the other night.” She found it on the shelf. “It’s stamped enoch pratt. Did you steal it?”

“Not necessarily,” Daniel said, licking his lips, his face pale. “Many of my books were obtained legitimately, when they were discarded or put up for sale.”

“Well, I guess there’s only one way to know.” Tess threw the book in the fireplace flames. Daniel kept his seat, although it appeared to take some effort. He was literally holding on to the chair, keeping himself in place.

“Hmmm, I guess that wasn’t a rare one. I’ll have to keep tossing volumes until you tell me what I want to know.” She ran her fingers along the spines of the old books, slightly sick to her stomach about what she intended to do. She found a book so dusty and cracked that it either had to be extremely valuable or practically worthless, except for the words inside. She chucked that one into the fire and it almost smothered the flames, then caught and went up in a blast that was more blue than orange, as if the fire were consuming the old ink. Daniel didn’t move. She picked another Poe book, an old copy of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. This one burned red. Still Daniel sat, his face so full of hate she was almost scared to look at him, lest he turn her into stone.

Her fingers closed on a slender book, really more of a pamphlet, with a single story printed inside, “MS in a Bottle.” It appeared to be a special printing of that first award-winning story, or perhaps the pages had been taken from the Saturday Visiter and bound in leather on some later occasion. It was small and light, and tossing it into the fire was as easy as throwing a Frisbee.

“You bitch!” Daniel plunged into the fire headfirst, trying to grab the book before it ignited, and his sweater seemed to explode with flames. Indifferent, he yanked the book out and rolled back and forth on the floor. It wasn’t clear to Tess if he had the presence of mind to remember the old rule for how to put out a fire or if he was in some childish tantrum.

“She’s under us, okay?” he said, sobbing. “She’s been here all along, under the floorboards. I wish I had killed her. I wish I had killed you.”

“Beneath the floorboards? Where, Daniel? How?”

He didn’t reply, just continued rolling frenziedly It was impossible to know if the low, keening sound he made was for his own pain or for the singed book he held to his chest. Tess looked around wildly, and her glance fell on the Winans pike in the corner. With great deliberation, she drove the pointed end into one of the gaps between the planks and used it as a pry. The pine boards came up easily. After all, they had already come up once that day. She found Cecilia beneath the table where she had pretended to eat. Her eyes were wide, her features stretched with a strange combination of terror and relief. If she had been drugged, the effects had worn off long ago. She must have heard everything. She had probably feared that Tess was going to leave her here or allow the house to burn with her in it.

Tess ripped the handkerchief from Cecilia’s mouth and began to untie her limbs, rubbing her wrists and ankles to stimulate circulation. After a few choked breaths, Cecilia looked over at Daniel, still rolled in a ball, and shook her head.

“Why?”

Tess echoed the answer Daniel had given earlier, when asked about Yeager’s death.

“Because he could.”

“So you were right?”

“And you too, in your way.”

Everyone had been right, Tess realized. Cecilia had been right that Hayes had been attacked by someone who was intensely homophobic. But Yeager had been right when he guessed Hayes’s attacker was driven by envy as much as anything else-he had just named the wrong man. Together, they had all the pieces. Even Mi-ata had known something all along.

Gretchen let herself into the house. “It’s been thirty minutes, so I called Rainer as you told me to and they’re en route. Jesus, he had a lot of fucking books,” she added, looking around the room, doing a double take on Daniel, rolling and babbling, and at the wide-eyed Cecilia, as ethereal as any of Poe’s necrophiliac objects of love. “Why would anyone want to have this many books? They’re dust catchers. So, what’d you do, torture him with a hot poker? Did he give it up?”

“In his own fashion,” Tess said. “He gave it up because he couldn’t give it up, if that makes any sense.”

Now all three women stared at the man, whose skin seemed to blister before their eyes. The room was heavy with horrible smells-burnt hair, burnt wool, burnt paper, burnt flesh. The only sound was Daniel Clary’s rough sobs, and those were horrible, too.

He wept like a wounded animal, like a mother crying for a child. He wept, but not for himself and not for his pain. He cried for the damaged book in his arms.