The Paper Mirror (6 page)

But I thought I’d better see what McGill had to say first. It might give me some clues on how to handle my meeting with Knight.

Once I’d gotten McGill and Knight out of the way, I’d contact the other board members, though I suspected that with the possible exceptions of Chester Burrows’ nephews, who’d been around it all their lives, none of them were all that familiar with the Collection or Taylor Cates’ world.

*

After lunch, I busied myself with what little outstanding work I had on my desk, to clear my slate for working on the Cates case.

I arrived at the Burrows at ten minutes till three, and parked in the almost-full side lot. I walked into the encompassing calm of the library and climbed the steps to the main floor, going directly to the circular desk. There were probably fifteen or so people seated at tables and in the smaller sitting-room areas, and another ten or twelve people visible in the stacks at either side of the room. A very handsome young redhead was pushing a cart with books from the desk toward the stacks, apparently to be put back on the shelves. He gave me a very nice smile, which my crotch and I returned. A middle-aged woman was behind the desk, putting cards into a Rolodex. She looked up and smiled as I approached.

“May I help you?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” I said. “I have a three o’clock appointment with Mr. McGill.”

“Ah, yes. Mr. Hardesty. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

She picked up a phone from somewhere beneath the counter and punched one of several colored buttons. She then said something I couldn’t hear and hung up.

“Mr. McGill asks that you go right up.” She pointed back toward the front entrance. “Take the stairs or the elevator to the second floor, and it’s the farthest door on your right.”

I thanked her and followed her directions. I noticed a young guy with a book watching me, but he quickly looked away when he saw I was aware of him.

Just as well
, a mind-voice said, though my crotch thought it would be a very nice idea for me to go over and say hello.

I took the stairs.

The farthest door on the right had a small but dignified sign beside it, saying: “Irving McGill, Director.” I knocked and heard a basso-voiced, “Come.”

I entered to find McGill just rising from the chair behind his desk. He was a little less gaunt than I remembered him as being, and his longish red hair was, I could see at this closer distance, flecked with grey. I walked over and took his extended hand. No smile. No sense of antagonism or displeasure, either. Just…businesslike.

“Please,” he said, gesturing me to a chair in front of his desk, the surface of which was almost invisible beneath neat piles of books and papers. “Sit.”

I did, as did he, and he got right to business.

“So how can I help you?” he asked. It struck me as unlikely that his name and the word “mischievous” would ever be used in the same sentence.

“I was wondering what you could tell me about Taylor Cates…anything you might know about his personal or professional life. Do you know if he had a partner, or any enemies? Had he been acting strangely lately? Glen O’Banyon gave me the impression that something about him was not quite right, and I hoped you might clarify that for me.”

McGill gave a quick head-raised nod after I’d finished. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I have only been with the Burrows less than six months. I arrived about two months before the transfer of the collection from the Burrows estate. It has been, as you can imagine, a very hectic time.” He pursed his lips slightly, as if in thought. “I admired Taylor’s devotion to the task and his sharp mind. He had, as I think you know, just completed his Master’s degree in Library Science. He was very ambitious—which almost verged on aggressiveness at times—and would have gone far in the field.

“I try to keep a professional distance from my employees and coworkers,” McGill continued, “so as to his personal life, I knew very little. He had a roommate, I know, and he never indicated they were anything more than that. He was something of a perfectionist, and he worked such long hours here I rather doubt he had much time for a personal life. As for enemies, well, I wouldn’t use so strong a word, but there was some bad feeling between Taylor and one of our other catalogers we subsequently had to let go.”

I assumed that clarified his earlier remark about being “two catalogers short.” “Oh? What was that all about?” I asked.

He gave a small sigh and leaned slightly forward in his chair. “Well, as I’ve said, Taylor was a perfectionist and he was rather intolerant of those around him who were not. Dave…Dave Witherspoon…was the first cataloger we hired, even before the collection was moved from the Burrows estate. I think he rather enjoyed holding that fact over Taylor’s head. Both were recent graduates of Mountjoy, but I got the distinct impression they really did not care for one another, though they were both sufficiently professional not to let it interfere with their work.”

“Have you any idea what their problem was?”

He shook his head. “Not really, other than the fact that I think Taylor, however irrationally, somehow resented the fact that Dave had been hired first. They were equally ambitious, so I suppose a certain degree of rivalry was only natural. But Dave was far more…‘laid back,’ I think they call it…and that bothered Taylor a great deal.

“And when Taylor came to me, telling me that Dave had been taking files home with him, which is strictly prohibited, and which Dave did not deny when questioned, I had no choice but to let him go. Rules are rules for a reason.”

“And how did Witherspoon react to being fired?” I could easily see why Witherspoon might be really pissed at Taylor, but I couldn’t easily stretch being pissed like that into a motive for murder.

McGill looked at me oddly. “How does anyone react to being fired? He was not happy, I’m sure. Nor was I, frankly. Dave is an excellent cataloger, and any library will be lucky to have him. I wrote him a letter of recommendation, and he was, in fact, at the opening.”

“How long before Taylor’s death was he fired?”

“Maybe a week and a half. Dave approached me at the opening to ask me to consider rehiring him. I was sorely tempted, given all the work to be done, and I do believe he learned his lesson, but considering the tensions between him and Taylor, putting the two of them back together just would have been too counterproductive. He left and I’ve heard nothing from him since—though I am giving strong consideration to rehiring him now that Taylor is…gone. And assuming he’s not already found another position.”

“And Taylor had no little flaws—his perfectionism aside—of his own?”

McGill paused a moment before saying, “Taylor’s only flaw, if it can be called that, was that he had the training and duties of a cataloger but the heart of a researcher. While he never would have admitted it, I noted that he had a tendency to become occasionally distracted from his cataloging by his desire to know more about the work being cataloged. He, of course, didn’t see the difference. He was constantly sending me notes on interesting bits of trivia he found in the works he was cataloging. It got to the point I simply didn’t have the time to read them all.”

“Did you get the impression that he was being…distracted…at the time of his death?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. He was cataloging the work of Jeremy Butler and his son, and seemed to have become fascinated by it.”

The name rang a bell. “Jeremy Butler?” I interrupted. “The ‘Fires of Hell’ evangelist of the twenties and thirties? What would his works be doing here?”

McGill allowed himself a small smile. “Well, of course his works would be here. Chester Burrows collected anything and everything, positive and negative, on the subject of homosexuality. And since for puritanical religious fundamentalists, the subject of homosexuality is high on the list of things to rail against…. If, to Oscar Wilde’s generation, homosexuality was ‘the love that dare not speak its name,’ to Jeremy Butler and his ilk, homosexuality was a sin so heinous the word itself was almost never directly used.

“Interestingly, it was the Butler papers that Taylor had wanted to work on from the moment he learned we had them. But I’d already assigned them to Dave Witherspoon. After Dave left I turned the Butlers over to him.”

“Any idea why his particular interest in Butler?”

He shook his head. “Not really, other, perhaps, than that Butler was a well-known public figure. Taylor seemed particularly fascinated by the fact that in addition to Butler’s vitriolic public writings—books, sermons, and religious tracts in which the subject of homosexuality comes up frequently if obliquely—there are apparently a rather large number of more personal papers…particularly letters to his son, Morgan, his only child and the apple of his eye. There are also a sizeable number of Morgan’s own papers included with those of his father, and it was Morgan who donated the papers to Chester Burrows shortly before his own death.

“In this case, Taylor’s distraction produced something of a coup which will have to be left to researchers to explore further…Morgan Butler married and had a son, but was apparently gay. He killed himself in 1953 at the age of 31.”

I just shook my head. “Interesting,” I said, and meant it.

McGill gave me another small smile. “I’m glad you think so. Contrary to popular belief, librarians do not lead lives of unremitting dullness.”

“Wasn’t Butler from here, originally?” I asked, mentally rummaging through the stacks of trivia scattered around the shadowy alcoves of my mind.

McGill nodded. “He was, yes. Morgan died here, and Morgan’s son still lives here, I understand. He has been threatening suit to have Butler’s papers removed from the Collection. He has a snowball’s chance in hell of doing so, of course, but he can try.”

“Well, I can understand him not wanting it made general knowledge that his father was gay…”

“If he even knew,” McGill interjected. “First of all, there is no concrete proof that he was, and he was very young when Morgan killed himself. It well may not have been the kind of thing that would even have been mentioned to him.”

I had to admit there was a lot more to his business than meets the eye. But interesting as it was to learn that the notorious preacher had skeletons in his closet, I couldn’t see much of anything in it that could possibly get Taylor Cates killed.

“How did you happen to find Taylor’s body?” I asked.

“I was just making a routine check of the building, making sure that everything that should be locked up was…with crowds of people around, I wanted to make doubly sure. And the door to the catalog room was unlocked. It shouldn’t have been. Taylor had been working at a desk near the door. There was an opened box of material on the desk—again, there shouldn’t have been. The door was to be kept locked to prevent just anyone from walking in, and while I knew he would be working to pass the time, he had instructions not to leave materials loose on the desk if he let someone in.”

He looked down at his desk as if in thought before continuing. “Those two facts alone set me immediately on edge. I called to him and there was no answer. I began looking for him and that’s when I found his body.”

“Is there any other reason to think it might not have been an accident?”

McGill leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on the desk. “I’m not really sure,” he said, “but Taylor had no reason to be in that part of the stacks, let alone on a set of steps that led to an unused door. The police apparently assumed that Taylor was going outside for a cigarette, or that someone had knocked on the door and he had gone to answer it. I told them that either assumption was highly unlikely, however logical.”

“How’s that?” Though Glen O’Banyon had already indicated the answer, I wanted to be sure he and McGill were on the same page.

“Because knowing Taylor, even as little as I did, I know that he would never have just left his post, cigarette or no, and that everyone knew that door was to be used as an emergency exit only. Even if someone had knocked—and again there is a sign on the outside of the door directing people to the front entrance—he would not have broken the rules by opening it.”

“Taylor never broke the rules?”

“Actually, no,” he replied. “And he was intolerant of anyone who did. That’s why he reported Dave for taking materials home with him. Some people may see it as being petty, but Taylor did not.”

“What were the papers he was working on at the time of the…accident, if I may ask?” I…uh…asked.

“Morgan Butler’s, I believe. I didn’t have time to look at them more closely than to make sure they were in chronological order and put them back in the box and return the box to the shelf. Looking back on it, I realize that was a rather strange thing for me to do under the circumstances, but I really wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.”

“Were any of the papers missing, could you tell? Is it possible someone might have been trying to steal them?”

He knit his brows and looked at me. “I really don’t know,” he said. “But I’d think it highly unlikely. Morgan Butler had no particular distinction of his own; I’d imagine if anyone were out to steal papers, it would be Jeremy Butler’s they’d be after.

“Jeremy Butler’s papers had already been cataloged, however, and we were just finishing up with Morgan’s. I’ll have both sets gone over again to be sure nothing’s missing. But as for anything of Morgan’s that had not yet been cataloged, I’m afraid we would have no way of knowing if anything were missing or not. Though again, I really can’t imagine that there would be.”