Little Easter

Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth

For a guy who was trying to convert himself from an insurance investigator into a writer, I sure didn’t spend much time in libraries. I never had. I never would. It wasn’t that I hated little index cards. Oh, I did hate them, but it went deeper than that. It wasn’t that I didn’t get the Dewey Decimal System. I didn’t. It went back to sixth grade when I took two books-The Jackie Robinson Story and The Babe Ruth Story-that were months overdue and threw them down a sewer behind my elementary school. I didn’t have the money to pay for the late charges nor did I have the courage to ask my folks for the bread. I almost asked Larry Feld, but decided the sewer maneuver would cost me less in the end. I hadn’t had a public library card since. Guilt is a great mystery to me.

Like most of the older buildings in Sound Hill, the library bore a huge metal plaque on one of its flanks declaring it a sight of some historic importance. The Rusty Scupper had such a plaque. It had been a whalers’ meeting hall. The library building had once housed the whale meat, blubber and oil collected by Conrad Dugan’s fleet. Now it housed just so many copies of Moby Dick.

Once inside the old warehouse, I didn’t bother with the pretense of fumbling about and looking lost. I went straight to the front desk. The woman there was fortyish, somber and busy reading The Wasteland and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. Just some light and cheery stuff for a snowy winter’s day. I wondered if her idea of romance was dissecting small woodland creatures. No, I decided, nothing that fluffy.

She wasn’t a stranger to me nor I to her. In a village the size of Sound Hill, anonymity is just dreamed about. It’s probably the only aspect of New York City life Sound Hillians envied. Sometimes, like now maybe, it was the one thing I missed.

“You’re that Klein fellow,” she snapped and pointed, laying T.S. to rest with respect. At least she didn’t kiss the cover first. “You found the dead woman on Christmas Eve,” she raised an eyebrow, noticing I was without jacket or sweater or proper shirt.

“That’s me,” I winked, “Miss. . Emery,” I read off the engraved, black laminate nameplate, trying to ignore my T-shirt as an issue.

“Miss Emery passed on when I was in high school,” she tisked tisked me. “We keep that nameplate as a memorial to her years of dedicated service.”

Ain’t small town life a grand thing?

“Sorry, Ms. .” I reached around the corners of my memory. Just because I knew her face didn’t mean I knew her name, “Piper. Ms. Piper.”

“Miss Piper,” she fairly hissed.

I hadn’t killed O’Toole, but a few more minutes of this and the next stiff Mickelson and I chatted over would be a product of my handiwork!

“Look, Miss Piper, I need some help,” I pulled out the old newspaper clipping and laid it in front of her. “This is from the New York Times about twenty, twenty-five years ago-”

“It have anything to do with that murder?”

I almost asked which one, but realized she could only mean Azrael’s.

“Could be,” I winked again. I was a good winker. “Official stuff. Hush-hush,” I put my index finger vertically across my lips.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” Ms. Piper nearly flew out from behind her desk. “Come with me.”

I had her. She was hooked. Secretly, everyone thinks they’re Sherlock Holmes. I was kind of partial to Dr. Watson myself.

Out from behind the dark, burdensome desk, Miss Piper displayed a pert, gangly stride that would have been considered cute in her teens. Now it just seemed awkward. My secret Sherlock was pleasantly shaped, slightly bowed at the knees and a little long in the neck. Her face had never been called pretty by anyone besides her relatives, but no one had ever cowered in fear at the sight either. Her hair was mousy brown and wavy, falling here and there about her shoulders. Piper’s eyes were dull copper buttons and the left one sort of drifted away from her nose. She was the type of woman I could just as easily sleep with as walk past in the street.

“Here we go,” she beckoned me to sit before a blue-lighted screen. “All the issues of the Times are on these shelves. Your time-frame issues are in this group here. Let me show you how to work this thing.” Piper plucked out a sheet of microfilm, placed it on a tray beneath the screen and expertly manipulated the print. “You try.”

I tried, getting the hang of it rather quickly. She hung over my shoulder to make sure. I liked the way she smelled. God, I was easy.

“Good,” Miss Piper patted my back. Maybe I was going to get a gold star. “We had a reporter on the Times once,” she offered, her voice half full of pride. I couldn’t be sure about the other half. “Do you know Kate Barnum?”

“No,” I lied and played dumb. I was better at those things than winking.

“Are you certain you don’t know her? She writes for the Whaler now.”

“That’s quite switch,” I turned to Miss Piper.

“That’s a kind way to put it, Mr. Klein.” The other half of the librarian’s voice was sounding kind of nasty.

“How would you put it, Miss Piper?”

“I would call it more of a fall than a switch. Yes,” she seemed to be searching the ceiling for approval, “most decidedly a fall, a very big fall.”

I tended to agree and fed her a few syllables of encouragement: “That’s a shame.”

“You are too kind.” She was properly encouraged. “Kate Barnum has no one to blame but herself. The way she was with boys in school, it’s no wonder her first husband kicked her right out. Drove her second husband to suicide. Now I’m no gossip. .”

“Of course not,” I pushed a tad harder. Why is it that the guilty always deny the obvious?

“Word in town was,” Piper drew her cruel lips close to me, “the city police were trying to build a murder case against her. I don’t think she did it though.”

Yeah, sure she didn’t believe it. Little Missy Piper sounded as convincing as a hungry leopard swearing off fresh-killed gazelle.

“So that’s why the Times let her go?”

“I’m sure it had something to do with it. Her drinking too. But it was the Pulitzer Affair that did it,” the gangly madame let that hang in the air for a minute before going on. “Apparently, Katy was a lock for the Pulitzer Prize a while back. But out of the blue, she goes to her editor and admits to faking some research and using some questionable sources. Imagine the embarrassment.”

“Yeah, just imagine,” I turned my back on Miss Piper. Suddenly, I wasn’t liking the way she smelled. “Thanks for the help,” I choked on my words.

“If there’s anything else I can assist you with. .” she hinted hopefully.

“One thing,” I didn’t turn around. “Would I be way off if I guessed that this Pulitzer thing happened within a year, one way or the other, of her husband’s death?”

Miss Piper’s answer was this: “Are you sure you don’t know Kate Barnum?”

I didn’t reply. I listened to her footsteps fade away.

This microfilm thing was pretty tedious work. I mean I liked newspapers, but this was total sensory overload. I knew it was getting to me when I began rummaging through Mets’ boxscores from April of 1966. About two hours into the ordeal, I found the first articles relating to the trial. You know the kind of headlines; “Reputed Crime Boss Indicted,” “Underworld Trial Set To Begin,” “Government Witness Takes Stand Against Mr. Gandolfo,” “Jury Sequestered,” “Verdict In: ‘Not Guilty’. ” I garnered only inconsequential details from these additional readings. Apparently, Roberto Gandolfo liked to take long siestas in the courtroom and the pressure of testifying made Azrael nauseous and faint. Not very earth-shattering stuff.

Eventually I came to the clone of the article I found behind the snapshot of O’Toole’s deceased kid. And like I suspected there were accompanying pictures; the usual grainy, blurry, newspaper fare. There were headshots of the accused, their attorneys, the prosecuting attorney and of Azrael. Even in this photo you could see some of the life and beauty had already been bleached out of her. Azrael’s face was bloated and her eyes were full of only surrender. And in those eyes I saw the makings of the dead woman I discovered in the snow on Christmas Eve. But there was nothing in these pictures to explain why they had been ripped away from O’Toole’s copy. Maybe I just wasn’t seeing the obvious. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I rubbed my eyes, looked around and slipped the relevant sheets of microfilm into my pants. My ribs were probably sore, but my back hurt so much it was difficult to tell. I replaced the files, minus my deletions, and went for the door. Miss Piper had returned to her reading. When she stood to say her good-byes, I just waved her down, mouthed a silent thank-you and blew her an insincere kiss. Once outside, I removed the acetate sheets from my pants and thought about getting caught. I thought about Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth. It’s funny what you think about.