The Book of Air and Shadows

14

Being armed, Crosetti found, felt a lot like having a broken zipper on your fly, something that made you feel self-conscious and somewhat stupid, and he wondered how his dad had been able to stand it during his entire working life. Or maybe it was different for cops. Or criminals. When he arrived at work, he was torn between leaving the thing in his bag (It might get stolen! Someone might find it!) and keeping it on his person. At first he left it in the briefcase but found that having done so, he was reluctant to leave the briefcase out of his line of sight, and after an uncomfortable hour or so he removed it and clipped it to his waistband, concealed under the cotton dust-jacket he wore in his basement workspace.

Mr. Glaser had gone on an extended buying trip, and so Crosetti’s workload was rather light, except that he had to relieve Pamela, the non-Carolyn person, upstairs during her breaks. High-end rare books shops don’t get much walk-in business, even on Madison Avenue, and so Pamela spent most of her time on the phone with her friends, who were all top-of-the-line comedians to judge from the shrieks of fun that floated down the basement stairs, or cruising Craigslist for a better job, publishing, she had volunteered, unasked. Crosetti realized he was being something of an ass with her-it wouldn’t kill him to be a little friendlier-but he could not bring himself to generate an interest in a preppy girl who wanted to break into publishing.

On one of the changings of the guard that day she asked him to reach down a book from an upper shelf and he did so and heard her make a small sound of alarm. When he handed her the book she asked, eyes wide, “Is that a gun on your belt? I saw it when you reached up…”

“Yeah. It’s a dangerous business, books. You can’t be too careful. There’re people who’ll do anything for a Brontë first-anything.”

“No, seriously!”

“Seriously? I’m an international man of mystery.” A lame line, and he thought very briefly about saying he was just glad to see her, to see if she would pick up on the line from She Done Him Wrong and then he could ask her if she’d actually seen the film the line came from, that it was Mae West’s only Academy nomination and so on and so forth, his usual rap, but why bother? He shrugged, gave her a tight smile, handed her the book, and walked behind the counter.

When she came back from her lunch she seemed less interested in being friendly than previously, seemed a little frightened of him in fact, which suited Crosetti very well. He spent the rest of the afternoon calling people he knew about places to stay, and trolled the Web sites with the same intent. After work, he went by the likeliest place he had found, a room in a loft near the Brooklyn Navy Yard occupied by a friend from college, a freelance sound engineer, and his girlfriend, a singer. The tenant list was rich in media wannabes and the friend said the Navy Yard was destined to be the next Williamsburg. The building stank of old toxins but was full of pale ocher light from the huge, filthy industrial windows and so reminded him painfully of Carolyn’s place. As he was a sucking-on-a-bad-tooth sort of fellow, this alone was enough to make the sale, and Crosetti walked down the splintery stairs eight hundred dollars poorer and with a date to move in after Thanksgiving. He then followed a difficult multiple bus route back to the A line and the train to 104th Street, Ozone Park.

As he turned off Liberty Avenue onto 106th Street, where he lived, he passed a black SUV with tinted windows. It was not the kind of neighborhood that ran to new, shiny, $40K vehicles, and since he knew every car native to his street, and since Klim’s warning of the previous night instantly sprang to mind upon observing it, Crosetti was, if not exactly ready, not completely astounded by what happened next. As he hurried past it, he heard two car doors pop open and the sound of feet on pavement. He turned and saw two men in black leather coats moving toward him. Both were larger than he was and one was a whole lot larger. They had sweatshirt hoods drawn tight around their faces and their eyes were obscured by large dark glasses, which he thought was an indication of bad intent. Without much thought, Crosetti pulled out his father’s.38 and shot in the general direction of the larger man. The bullet went through this person’s leather jacket and shattered the windshield of the SUV. Both men stopped. Crosetti raised the pistol and pointed it at the head of the larger man. Both men backed up slowly and reentered their vehicle, which flew from the curb with screaming tires.

Crosetti sat down on the curb and put his head down below his knees until the feeling of wanting to faint and to vomit passed. He stared at the pistol, as at an artifact of an alien civilization, and dropped it into his briefcase.

“Albert! What happened?”

Crosetti swiveled around and saw a small gray-haired woman in a pink tracksuit and a heavy pale blue cardigan standing just outside the front door of her bungalow.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. Conti. Some guys tried to kidnap me and I shot one of them and they went away. It’s all over.”

Pause. “You want me to call 911?”

“No, thanks, Mrs. Conti. I’ll call it in myself.”

“Madonna! This used to be a nice neighborhood,” said Mrs. Conti and returned to her kitchen.

Crosetti picked himself up and walked on wobbly legs to his house. An elderly Cadillac hearse shone at the curb, and he regarded it sourly as he walked up the driveway to the back door. He wanted to slip through the kitchen, maybe pour himself a tumbler full of red wine and then up to his room for a nice rest, but no, Mary Peg was there twenty seconds after he had eased the door shut.

“Allie! There you are. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Don’t you respond to messages anymore?”

“Sorry, Ma, I was on the cell a lot.” He took a breath. “Actually, I was looking for dwellings. I think I found a place in Brooklyn, with Beck, you know, from school?”

Mary Peg blinked, nodded, and said, “Well, it’s your life, dear. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about, Bulstrode’s lawyer called here.”

“Bulstrode is dead,” he replied stupidly.

“Yes, but dead people have lawyers too. It’s the estate.” She gave him a closer look. “Albert, is there something wrong with you?”

Crosetti thought briefly of trying to conceal the events just transacted a block away but realized that Agnes Conti distributed information with a velocity that telecom engineers were still struggling to match, and would shortly be phoning to supply the details, real and imagined. He said, “Sit down, Ma.”

They sat in the kitchen, Crosetti had his glass of wine and told his story. Mary Peg heard him out and thought she took it rather well. Actually, she thought, it put her in a somewhat better position than she would have been, given what she now had to relate to her son.

“Ma! What did you do that for?” was Crosetti’s wail. “God! I hate when you pull stuff behind my back.”

“Like stealing your father’s guns and turning my home into an armed camp?”

“That’s not the same thing. It was an emergency,” said Crosetti without enthusiasm. He really wanted to lie down.

“Well, I too thought that some action was required, and since you were unavailable and too busy running away from home, or whatever, to answer messages…”

The sound of a car pulling up in front of the house stopped her short. “Oh, I bet that’s Donna,” said Mary Peg and went to the door. Crosetti poured another glass of wine. As Crosetti drained this, Radeslaw Klim came into the room, freshly shaved in a black uniform jacket and tie, and holding a shiny-peaked black cap.

“Want some wine, Klim?”

“Thank you, but no. I must drive shortly.”

“It’s dark already. They don’t have funerals at night.”

“No, it is not a real funeral. It is for vampires.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, is quite à la mode now, you know, rich young people pretend to be vampires and ride in hearses, and have a party in crypt of a former church. Ah, here is your mother. And this must be the daughter. How do you do?”

Donna Crosetti, or The Donna, as she was known in the family, was a skinny red-haired clone of her mother and an ornament of the Legal Aid Society of New York, a friend of the downtrodden, or a bleeding heart who sprung hardened criminals to run wild in the streets, depending on whether you were talking to her mother or her sister, Patsy. She was the youngest daughter, just a year older than Crosetti himself, and had a more than full measure of the middle child’s sense of cosmic injury, the focus of which had been, from the earliest dawn of consciousness, the slightly younger brother, the Irish twin, the object of hatred and resentment, yet also the creature to be defended from all threats, to the last drop of blood. Crosetti felt exactly the same way and was just as inarticulate about it: a perfect stalemate of love.

Klim introduced himself, shook hands with the rather startled Donna Crosetti, kissed Mary Peg formally on both cheeks, and took his leave.

“Who was that?”

“That’s the new live-in boyfriend,” said Crosetti.

“What?” exclaimed The Donna, who had not been consulted.

“Not,” said Mary Peg.

“Is too,” said Crosetti. “He drives a hearse.”

“At night?”

“Yeah, he says it’s for vampires. How are you, Don?”

“He’s not my live-in boyfriend,” said Mary Peg. “How could you say such a thing, Albert!”

“He is too,” Crosetti insisted, feeling the years slip away in a manner that was unpleasantly quasi-psychotic and comforting at the same time. In a minute Donna would be screaming and chasing him around the kitchen table with a cooking implement in her little fist and their mother would be yelling and trying to stop them and dishing out random smacks and threatening apocalypse when their father got home.

Donna Crosetti glared at her mother and brother. “No, really…”

“Really,” said Mary Peg. “He’s a friend of Fanny’s who’s helping us decipher a seventeenth-century letter Allie found. He was working late on it so I offered him Patsy’s room for the night.”

“Which was three nights ago,” said Crosetti. He wrapped his arms around himself and made kissing noises.

“Oh, grow up!” said his sister. Crosetti stuck his tongue out at her, she rolled her eyes at him and sat down at the kitchen table. Removing a leather portfolio from her capacious bag, she flipped it open with a businesslike snap and said, “If this guy’s coming at eight, we don’t have much time. Let’s have it, from the beginning.” Crosetti looked at his mother. “I don’t understand why we have to do this,” he grumped.

“Because you were cheated, and we’re here to see if you have a case against the estate, to make them pay you what the original was really worth, or get it back.”

“I don’t want it back,” said Crosetti, getting sulky as the wine fumes rose from his empty stomach to his head. “I want none of this ever to have happened. That’s what I want.”

“Well, my child,” said Mary Peg, “it’s a little too late for that. This has to be disentangled by a lawyer, and Donna is the lawyer in our family. And I’d think you’d appreciate her volunteering to help, especially since you just shot someone right outside our house-”

“What!” said the family lawyer. “You shot someone? Did you call the-”

“No, and I’m not going to. A couple of guys tried to kidnap me-”

“What! Who?”

“Donna, calm down,” he said, “you’re sounding like an Abbott and Costello act. You want the story or not?”

Donna took a breath or two and seemed to snap her professional persona into place. It took nearly the whole hour to spin out the tale, what with her questions and the backtracking and prevarications by the little brother, so typical and so maddening, and the elaborate explanations of the ciphers and Klim’s role in the household, and the peculiar case of Carolyn Rolly. By the time Donna was satisfied, the little kitchen was uncomfortably warm and the level in the gallon jug of red wine had descended two inches or more.

Donna riffled through her pages of notes and checked her watch. “Okay, let’s review a little before this guy gets here. First of all, you have no claim whatever on the Bulstrode estate for any purported swindle, because you had no right to sell that manuscript. Nor had your pal, Rolly. Both of you conspired to steal property rightly belonging to your employer. So the main thing I’m going to have to do is convince this Mishkin to forget the damn thing and go home. You really should’ve talked to me earlier.”

“Nobody stole anything, Donna,” said her brother. “I explained this to you. Sidney told us to break the books and we broke the books. He got full value for the maps and plates and the rest was fully insured. It was just like a junked car. The junk man pays ten bucks for it and if he finds a CD under the front seat, he doesn’t have to give it back.”

“Thank you, counselor. I see you went to a different law school than I did. Finders, keepers is only on the playground. If your junk man found a diamond ring in the wrecked car, do you think he could give it to his girlfriend?”

“Why not?” asked Crosetti.

“Because he had no reasonable expectation that the car would contain a diamond ring. If the legal owner happened to see the ring on the girlfriend he could sue for replevin and he’d win. When Glaser gave you those books he had no idea that they contained a manuscript worth serious money. When you found it your duty was to inform him of the increased value of his property, not convert it to your own use.”

“So if I find a painting in a yard sale and I know it’s a Rembrandt and the seller doesn’t, I have to tell her? I can’t just give her ten bucks and sell it for ten million?”

“A completely different situation. You’d be profiting from your superior knowledge, which is legit, and you would own the painting before you sold it. That, by the way, is what Bulstrode did to you. It’s sneaky, but perfectly legal. On the other hand, you never owned the books from which the manuscript emerged. Glaser did and does. In fact, I would suggest you contact him right now and tell him what’s going on.”

“Oh, get out of here!”

“Idiot child, focus on this! You stole an object worth between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. In a few minutes, a guy is going to show up who thinks that value is part of an estate he holds in trust. What do you think he’s going to do, as an officer of the court, when we have to tell him that this valuable object actually belongs to someone else, and did when you sold it to his client?”

“Listen to her, Albert,” said Mary Peg in a stern voice.

Crosetti rose from the table and stalked out of the room, seething. At some rationalizing level of his mind he had convinced himself that the whole manuscript transaction was something of a prank, on the level of swiping a stop sign from a pole, for which he had been duly punished by Andrew Bulstrode’s scam. Morally, he had argued to himself, the thing was a wash. But now he was sitting with two of the three women in the world he most wished to impress (Rolly being AWOL), and they were agreed that he was a colossal jerk and a felon, and here all the family weight bore down: the disappointment, however veiled by kindness, that he was not the hero his father had been, that he was not an achiever like his sisters, that he especially was not a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School like Donna. He was woozy with wine besides and thought that he might as well go upstairs with his gun and shoot himself, that would save everyone a lot of trouble.

But what he did instead, since he was in fact a decent young man from a loving family and not the tortured neurotic artist he sometimes imagined himself to be (as, briefly, now) was to pull out his cell phone and call Sidney Glaser in Los Angeles. He had Glaser’s cell phone number inscribed in his own device, of course, and Glaser answered on the third ring. An old-fashioned fellow, Sidney, but he made an exception for cell phones.

“Albert! Is there anything wrong?”

“No, the shop’s fine, Mr. G. Something’s come up and I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need an answer right away.”

“Yes?”

“Well, um, it’s sort of a long story. Can you talk?”

“Oh, yes. I was about to go down to dinner but I can talk for a little while. What is it?”

“Okay, this is in reference to the Churchill. The one that got ruined in the fire and you asked Carolyn to break it?”

“Oh, yes? What of it?”

“I was just wondering about the, ah, remainder. I mean the stripped books…”

A pause here. “Have you had a call from GNY?”

“No, it’s not really an insurance issue…”

“Because, ah, what they paid out wasn’t nearly what we could have got at auction and so, ah…look, Albert, if they call, if they ever call, please refer them to me, understood? Don’t discuss the breaking of those books, or what Carolyn did, or anything with them. I mean the prints and maps, the decorator backs, these are really quite trivial matters and you know how these insurance people are…”

“I’m sorry…decorator backs?”

“Yes, Carolyn said she had a customer for the backs and could she burnish them up and deodorize and so forth and sell them and I conveyed them over to her. There should be a paper bill in the files. But the main thing is-”

“Excuse me, Mr. G. When was this?”

“Oh, that day, the day after the fire. She came upstairs and asked me if she could play with the carcasses, the leather and so on. Did you know she was an amateur bookbinder?”

Mary Peg called out, “Albert? Come back here and talk!” Crosetti stuck his thumb over the microphone slits and yelled, “In a minute, Ma. I’m on the phone with Mr. Glaser.”

Resuming his conversation, he said, “Uh-huh, yes, sir, I did know that. And so you actually sold her the books?”

“Oh, yes, just the carcasses, net of the prints and so on. I think she paid thirty dollars a volume. I really don’t like to bother with that aspect of the trade and Carolyn made a little business of it for some years, sprucing up fine bindings off worthless books and selling them to decorators, who would then sell them, I imagine to illiterates for concealing their liquor cabinets. Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”

Crosetti made something up, a question about how he should handle the fire loss in their inventory accounting system, got a brief answer, and closed the conversation. He was both relieved and stunned by what he had just learned: relieved because this cleared up the legal ownership of the manuscript, stunned because Carolyn had allowed him to think there was something shady about the deal when there wasn’t. So why had she allowed him to take the manuscript for his own? Why had she pretended to be semi-blackmailed into letting him have it? Why had she used this supposed crime as an emotional lever to get him to sell it to Bulstrode? None of it made sense. And how was he supposed to get all that past his sister?

He went back into the kitchen and related the gist of the conversation he had just had, and, as expected, Donna was full of the objections that he just passed through his own mind. He cut her off, however, feeling rather more aggressive, now that he had right on his side. “Donna, for crying out loud, none of that matters. For all practical purposes I own the Bracegirdle manuscript. Carolyn isn’t here, and Glaser is not going to make a fuss because I got the impression he’s scamming the insurance company on the ruined volumes. He probably put in for the whole value and forgot to mention to them what he’d realized on the maps and prints, five grand or so. So that part’s fixed.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Donna. “The insurance company might have a case that they own the thing. They paid for it.”

“Then let them sue,” snapped Crosetti. “Meanwhile, do we have any chance of getting the manuscript back from the estate?”

“You could sue,” replied Donna with equal heat.

“Children,” said Mary Peg in a familiar tone, “calm down. If no one stole anything, we have a completely different situation, thank God. Why don’t we wait and see what this Mr. Mishkin has to say. What I’m a lot more worried about is this attempted kidnapping business. I’m going to call Patty. I think the police should be involved.”

With that, she went to the kitchen phone, but before she could dial, the doorbell rang. Mary Peg went to the door and admitted a very large man in a black leather coat. He had a close-cropped head and a bleak, hard look on his face, and for a panicked instant, Crosetti thought he might be one of the men who had just attacked him. But as he came forward to introduce himself, Crosetti saw that, despite the hard features, the man was not a thug, that there was a sad look in his dark eyes, reminding Crosetti of his own father, also a man with a hard face and a sad look.

Mary Peg declared that they would all be more comfortable in the living room (she meant: away from the disgraceful jelly glasses on the table and the reek of red wine), and so they all trooped off to the worn upholstery, the knickknacks, and the Portrait, and she said she would make some coffee, and could she take Mr. Mishkin’s coat?

When they were seated, Donna lost no time showing that she was in charge. She told the big man who she was and that she was representing the family temporarily and stated what she believed were the primary facts of the case: that her brother had gone to Professor Bulstrode in good faith for an assessment of a seventeenth-century manuscript he owned; that Bulstrode had abused his professional responsibility to provide an honest assessment, had, in fact, lied about the content of the manuscript, which was a valuable addition to Shakespeare scholarship, and had purchased the document from Albert Crosetti for a fraction of its value, a transaction that any court would find unconscionable. And what did Mishkin intend to do about it?

Mishkin said, “Well, Ms. Crosetti, there’s not much I can do about it. You see, I’m here under false pretenses, in a way. My personal involvement in this affair was prompted by the fact that Professor Bulstrode came to me shortly before his tragic death and deposited the manuscript he had bought from Mr. Crosetti here with our firm. He was seeking some intellectual property advice, which I provided. The manuscript was part of his estate at death, and when a woman appeared claiming to be his heiress, we accommodated her in our trust department. I personally am not handling that aspect.”

“So why are you here?” asked Donna, and then, as she registered the import of his phrasing, demanded, “And what do you mean by ‘claiming to be his heiress’?”

“Well, as to that: it seems we’ve been defrauded. This woman, the supposed niece to the decedent, Miranda Kellogg, made off with the manuscript. Her whereabouts are at present unknown.”

At this, astonishment. “You must be joking!” said Donna.

“I wish I were, Ms. Crosetti. And I admit it was entirely my fault. This person secured my confidence with an entirely plausible story and I gave her the document.”

Mishkin turned his sad eyes on Crosetti. “You asked why I came to see you. Tell me, have you or has anyone associated with you been threatened in any way?”

Crosetti exchanged a brief glance with his sister, then answered: “Yeah. As a matter of fact a couple of guys tried to snatch me a little while ago.”

“These were two men, one very large and one somewhat smaller, traveling in a black SUV?”

“Yeah, that’s right. How did you know?”

“They attacked me too, last week, and tried to steal the thing. I was able to fend them off at the time, but shortly after that, they, or someone else, invaded my home, knocked out my assistant, and made off with the manuscript and the woman who was posing as Ms. Kellogg. I had imagined that she was kidnapped, but it now seems that she was in league with the assailants. I can only suppose that the first attack was to establish a bond between me and the woman, to allay my suspicions. That, or we’re dealing with two separate antagonists. Speaking of which, Mr. Crosetti, I assume you know the person listed in Bulstrode’s appointment book as Carolyn R.”

“Yes! Yes, I do. Carolyn Rolly. She’s the person who found the manuscript in a set of books. Do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t, but Ms. Kellogg called me after she vanished and told me there was a person named Carolyn involved. Whether she’s a victim or working with the thugs I couldn’t say. But clearly, she understood that you did not part with the entire manuscript, and that there were still a number of pages, apparently in ciphered form, that you retained. Whoever’s behind this knows you have them and wants them.”

“But they’re useless,” Crosetti protested. “They’re indecipherable. Hell, whoever it is can have them right now. You want them? You can have the goddamn things…”

“I don’t like the idea of surrendering your property as a result of threats,” said Donna.

“No? Then why don’t you take it?”

“Take what?” said Mary Peg, entering with a tray full of coffee cups and a plate of biscotti.

“Albert wants to give his ciphered manuscripts to the thugs,” said Donna.

“Nonsense,” said Mary Peg as she handed out the coffee mugs. “We don’t give in to violence.” She sat down on the sofa next to her son. “Now, we all seem to be involved in this in various ways, so why don’t we all share our stories from the beginning, just like they do in the mysteries, and then agree on a course of action.”

“Mother, that’s insane!” cried Donna. “We should call the police now and turn this whole mess over to them.”

“Darling, the police have other things to worry about besides secret letters and attempted kidnap. I’ll let Patsy know what’s going on, but I’m sure she’ll agree. The cops can’t possibly put a twenty-four-hour guard on everyone in this family. We have to figure this out ourselves, which we’re perfectly capable of doing. Besides, my Irish is up. I don’t like it when bums try to muscle my people. When that happens I muscle back.”

At this, both of Mary Peg’s children stared at her, and for the first time in many years recalled certain mortifying events of their childhood. All the Crosetti children had gone to school at Holy Family down the street, and were part of the last generation of American Catholic children to be educated at least in part by nuns. Unlike the parents of all their friends, Mary Peg had taken no guff at all from the sisters and had often appeared in the chalky hallways to rail against some injustice or inattention or incompetence she had detected in their relations with her children, and continued despite all their pleas to stop. Yet at some level, they still believed that anyone who could take on a fire-breathing eleven-foot-tall Sister of Charity could handle any number of mere gangsters.

“Why don’t you begin, Mr. Mishkin?” she said.

“Jake,” said Mr. Mishkin.

“As in Chinatown,” said Mary Peg.

“I certainly hope not,” said Mishkin, withdrawing a small diary from his breast pocket. “Let’s see. October eleventh, Bulstrode arrives at my office, seeking some intellectual property advice…” And he told the whole story, except the dirty parts, ending with his conversation with Osip Shvanov, and his denial of involvement with any rough stuff.

“And you believed him?” asked Mary Peg.

“Not at all. He actually asked me about the ciphered letters. The people who just tried to kidnap you tried it because they want something you have, which can only be those letters, which you tell me you have not been able to decipher.”

The three Crosettis shared a quick look among them, and after a pregnant pause Crosetti said that they had not, and explained why, after which Mary Peg said, “Albert, you understand what this means?”

Crosetti said, “No, I don’t,” a temporary lie, this, to ward off dreadful knowledge.

“Well, it’s very clear to me,” said his mother. “There were only two people still alive who knew that the ruined books contained a set of ciphered letters, you and this Carolyn person, and the only people you’ve told are completely reliable-”

“Oh, right! What about Klim?”

“…completely reliable, which means that this Rolly woman has been behind all of it from day one.”

“Uh-uh.”

“No, really, Albert, face facts! Who got you to sell to Bulstrode? Rolly. Who disappeared to England right after you sold to Bulstrode? Rolly. Bulstrode must have found out something in England, and they were probably together when he found it. Then he comes back and he’s tortured to death to reveal whatever it was, and how could whoever did it know what he found out? Rolly!”

“Mother, that is so…so completely off the charts. You assume that Carolyn’s the perpetrator here on zero evidence. She could just as easily be another victim. She could’ve been tortured too, and that’s how whoever it is knows about the ciphers.”

“He’s right, Ma,” said Donna, as her natural defender’s personality emerged. “We just don’t know enough to speculate about the guilt of Carolyn Rolly, although unless the leak comes from Allie indirectly, the source of knowledge about the ciphers has to come from her. Meanwhile, this is clearly a criminal matter and-”

Bang.

The sound came from the street, and the three Crosettis knew immediately what it was, because they were not a family to ever say “I thought it was a firecracker or a car backfiring.” In the next seconds a fusillade sounded from the street. Everyone stood up and Mary Peg made for the cordless phone sitting on an end table. Now came breaking glass, the sound of heavy feet, and three big men charged into the room, all of them carrying large 9 mm semiautomatic pistols. One of them shouted at Mary Peg to drop the phone. She ignored him and continued to punch in 911. When the operator came on she gave her address twice and said, “Shots fired. Home invasion,” before the phone was torn from her hand and a big man grabbed her around the neck and held a gun to her temple.

THE FIFTH CIPHERED LETTER

My lord I have not had message from you these five moneths & what shal I doe? W.S. saith he will not give hys plaie of Mary to anie hand but my lord of Rochester’s owne or onne of hys house. Shal I steale it of hym & sende? Mr Wales is dead this weeke, found stabbed in Mincing Lane. From London 2^nd December 1611 Restyng y^r Lordships moste loyal & obd^t serv^t Richard Bracegirdle.