A Rare Murder In Princeton (6 page)

Odd, thought McLeod. Miss Congeniality had turned into pure Gorgon.

 

AND SHE WAS interested in Dorothy Westcott, who wasn’t on the paid staff, but was always around. Everyone called her Dodo. Dodo had beautifully coiffed pinkish blond hair and wore designer suits. She was president of the Friends of the Princeton University Library, the group of mostly rich townspeople who generously supported Rare Books and Special Collections, sponsored lectures and symposia, and financed publication of the
Princeton University Library Chronicle,
a scholarly journal that published articles about material in the collections.

Dodo invited McLeod to lunch one day and asked a few questions about her background and education. She was also interested in McLeod’s hair. “You never—well, touch it up?” she asked.

“Good heavens, no,” said McLeod. “I don’t have the patience. Besides I like to swim and the chlorine turns dyed hair green, doesn’t it? I find my white hair is kind of an asset when I’m interviewing people for the newspaper. They tend to tell me everything and I’ve always thought that was because I look so harmless.”

“I see,” said Dodo doubtfully.

“Yours looks lovely,” McLeod said, eyeing Dodo’s well-cared-for pink coiffure with awe. She moved into her interrogatory mode and learned that Dodo “just loved Princeton.” Her great regret was that she was not an undergraduate alumna.

“Alas, Princeton was not coed in my day, so I went off to Northampton and Smith, but I came here lots of weekends for dances and football games.” She did have a graduate degree from Princeton, “but that’s not the same,” she said.

“I think it’s wonderful myself,” said McLeod.

Dodo also regretted that her husband, Bob Westcott, was not an alumnus (“He went to Rutgers, poor soul”), but she had married him, it was clear, when she had learned for certain that he had made lots of money on Wall Street, was going to make even more, and was willing to commute to New York every day from Princeton. “So we live here—the children did very nicely at Princeton Day School until they went to Lawrenceville—and I try to help the university library all I can. Running the Friends is practically a full-time job, but Bob likes me to do it—although he wouldn’t stand for a regular job, say teaching, which I am fully qualified to do.”

“I’m sure you are,” said McLeod.

“And I guess this has a little more prestige than some things,” said Dodo. “You work with such lovely people . . .” And she recited a list of names that McLeod vaguely gathered belonged to the richest people in town.

The conversation languished, and McLeod could think of nothing to say except to compliment Dodo on the suit she wore. “Thanks,” said Dodo. “I do like good clothes. You have your own style, don’t you? I’ve noticed. At least, your clothes don’t come from Talbot’s.”

“I guess it is my own style, whatever it is,” said McLeod, who didn’t know whether not buying clothes at Talbot’s was a compliment or an insult and hoped it didn’t mean she looked like frumpy Fanny Mobley, who certainly had her own individual style. Then something occurred to her. “Did you know Jill Murray?” she asked Dodo.

“Everybody knew Jill Murray. She was quite the grande dame of Princeton,” said Dodo. “Of course she was ages older than I was, but she was involved with everything—the Present Day Club, Trinity Church, the Garden Club.”

“Who do you think murdered her?” asked McLeod.

Dodo looked around the restaurant, leaned closer to McLeod, and lowered her voice. “I’ve always thought it was Mary.”

“Mary?” McLeod asked.

“Her daughter-in-law,” said Dodo.

“Her daughter-in-law?” McLeod had known women who professed to hate their mothers-in-law, but never any woman that she thought would actually be driven to murder. “What was her name?”

“Mary Murray. Do you know her?”

“No, I don’t,” said McLeod.

“She’s married to that ridiculous Little Big Murray, and I think she was jealous of Jill. Of course, some people say it was Little Big that did it, but I never could see that. He’s too stupid, really. Jill had a brother, Arthur Lawrence, who was a foul-tempered old man, and some people thought he might have done it, just out of spite. She had another brother, Vincent, but he died before she was murdered. The police never found out who did it. The yard man was under suspicion a little while, but I’m sure it was Mary Murray. She’s so quiet and so good, and that’s the kind who always breaks out and does something awful like murder.”

McLeod shook her head in disbelief. It sounded like utter nonsense to her, and Dodo Westcott was probably projecting her own feelings onto Mary Murray, but she merely said, “Interesting.”

ONE DAY, CHESTER, Philip Sheridan’s assistant, came in the Reading Room and asked McLeod if she would stop by to see Mr. Sheridan before she left that day.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll come right now.”

“He didn’t want to disturb your work,” said Chester.

“I’d love to stop work,” said McLeod, and followed Chester to Sheridan’s hideaway.

“Ahhh, McLeod. May I call you McLeod?” Sheridan stood up and smiled at her.

“Certainly.”

“McLeod, thank you for stopping to see me. I have a little present for you, if you’ ll accept it.” He handed her a book. It was a fat hardcover book, heavy when McLeod took it into her hands. She looked at it and saw that it was
The Vicar of Bullhampton.
Puzzled, she opened it, and looked at the title page. “It says ‘1870,’” she said. “Is it a first edition?”

“It is,” said Sheridan. “Chester and I both spotted it in a London antiquarian bookseller’s catalog soon after you came in here, and we ordered it for you.”

“But shouldn’t it be in the Sheridan collection?”

“We already have two firsts of the
Vicar,
” said Sheridan.

“I’m overcome,” said McLeod. She sat down in the wing chair, and looked at her new book. “This was very sweet of you. Thank you so much.”

“I told you we’d make a collector out of you.”

“I’ll have to become a collector—out of gratitude.”

“For the joy of it,” corrected Sheridan.

“How do people become book collectors?” asked McLeod. “How did you get started?”

“I started early. I’ve been around fine books all my life, and I loved the children’s books my father bought for me. My favorite was
The Wind in the Willows,
I read it over and over. I loved Rat and Badger and dear old Toad. It was a quite ordinary copy bought in the thirties but it had illustrations by E. H. Shepard. When my father saw how I loved the book, he bought me the first edition from 1908—and I never looked back. I loved those two different editions of the same book. Over the years I bought other editions of
The Wind in the Willows
illustrated by other people—Arthur Rackham, Tasha Tudor, and Michael Hague.”

Sheridan said he had turned briefly to collecting Ernest Hemingway. “If you collect Hemingway, you get interested in books about Spain and bullfighting and in the other expatriate writers in Europe between the wars. Just like people who collect Shakespeare have to have Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s
Lives
because that’s where Shakespeare got his Roman plots, and Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
because that was the source of details for his history plays. I could talk forever.”

“Go ahead. How did you get from Hemingway back to the English?”

“Hemingway was the aberration. My heart wasn’t really in Americana. My father loved it, and I had a dear friend who was interested in American writers and we used to talk about them a lot. I’m an Anglophile at heart; I really like Dickens and Trollope and Thackeray and even Sir Walter Scott. And Galsworthy and then Evelyn Waugh—well, just all of them. It’s been very rewarding.”

McLeod took her expensive, heavy copy of
The Vicar of Bullhampton
and put it in her locker, thinking that she would never become a serious collector—it was so much easier to read a paperback than a heavy hardcover. Still, it was nice to own a Trollope first.

 

WHEN SHE SAW Miss Swallow in the Reading Room, she went over to her and whispered an invitation to lunch. Miss Swallow accepted, and at noon they went to their lockers to get their coats and purses. McLeod brought along her copy of
The Vicar of Bullhampton.

“I have something to celebrate. Lunch is my treat. Let’s go to Prospect.”

“That’s lovely,” Miss Swallow said. “I haven’t been there in years.” Prospect was an Italianate house, once the home for Princeton presidents, and now the faculty club.

“This is nice,” Miss Swallow commented when they were seated at a table by the window overlooking the formal garden that Woodrow Wilson’s wife had designed when her husband was president of Princeton.

They both ordered chicken salad. McLeod admired Miss Swallow’s pin, a silver angel.

“Thanks. And what are we celebrating?” asked Miss Swallow.

“This,” said McLeod, handing her
The Vicar.
“Philip Sheridan gave it to me. It’s a first edition. He found out how much I like Trollope.”

“That’s just like Philip,” said Miss Swallow.

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes, he’s lived in Princeton for years.”

“Have you always lived in Princeton?”

“For sixty years,” said Miss Swallow. “I’m almost a native.”

“Then you know about the murder house?” asked McLeod. “That’s where I’m staying.”

“I wish people wouldn’t call it that.” Miss Swallow paused. “I knew Jill Murray. She was older—believe it or not—than I, but I knew her. And her murder was so shocking. Nobody could believe it had happened. It was all anybody could talk about for weeks—no, months. And it’s equally shocking that it’s never been solved.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“As I recall, the police interviewed everybody remotely connected with her. Her husband was dead. She had one son and one brother but they were apparently cleared of suspicion. I really don’t have an idea.”

“Did she have any enemies?”

“Not that I know of,” said Miss Swallow.

They ate their chicken salad, spurned dessert, and went back to work.

ON THE NEXT Saturday morning, McLeod found herself cleaning out the garage with Dante Immordino.

On Friday, George had come home at a fairly decent hour and suggested they go out to dinner. After much discussion about where to eat—Friday night was a dreadful night to eat out in Princeton—they finally went to Lahiere’s. It was pretty full, but the maître d’ had offered to put them at a table in the bar.

“This is really awfully nice of you to take me out,” said McLeod.

“I’m trying to butter you up. I am going to ask the most godawful favor of you. Can you possibly oversee Dante when he comes tomorrow to clean out the garage? The president has asked me to be at an emergency meeting tomorrow. There’s no way I can refuse.”

“What on earth is going on?”

“A big donor is about to file a suit against the university because of the way his gift has been used,” said George. “And Tom wants me to meet with the lawyers and Les to decide on a strategy to deal with it. I’m flattered to be asked to be at the meeting.”

“I guess so,” said McLeod. Tom was Thomas Blackman, the president of Princeton, and Les was Lester Billings, the vice president for development. “Sure, Dante and I will clean out the garage. Just throw all that stuff away?”

“Just get rid of it, so we can get the cars in there.”

“We’ll do it,” said McLeod. “Never fear. Be of good cheer.”

“McLeod, you’re a dear,” said George, picking up the rhyme. “From gratitude I shed a tear.”

“It’s a trifle, mere.”

“I’m glad you’re near.”

In an excess of emotion, George had ordered a bottle of champagne, and they had continued rhyming until they were exhausted from laughing at their uses of fear, clear, beer, kir, seer, tear, spear, steer, queer, weir (a tough one that George managed to use), smear, sheer, hear, peer, and leer.