Final Notice (7 page)

I trudged up the sidewalk after Kate, as if I'd been thoroughly whipped into shape, and found her parking her butt on the circulation desk inside the door. She winked at me as I came in. And I said, "Damn." And wondered again which was the real Kate Davis. What they ought to do, I said to myself, is outlaw a sense of humor among women. And then I asked myself who "they" were and began to think that she was right that that combination of sass and high seriousness was going to do me in.

"All right, lady," I said. "Where to now?"

"Down, sir," she said and pointed to a stairwell behind the desk. She swiveled around on her butt, gave me another coy look, and hopped off the counter.

"Damn," I said again.

We walked down a spiral staircase to a huge basement storeroom, lined with half-filled bookshelves and lit from above by row upon row of naked bulbs.

"The stacks," she said with a flourish of her hand. "Or the tombs, as we call it around here."

The place smelled strongly of sere paper and of book rot. I ran a finger along one shelf of books and examined the contents. Stodgy, outsized folios, with marbled covers and leather spines. Books without covers, boxed like candy samplers in yellow cardboard containers. Old numbers of defunct magazines and foreign journals. Huge gazeteers and outdated Census reports. A graveyard of wood pulp and printer's ink and all those words, floating through the semi-dark like a faint babble.

"Why," I asked her, "are we here?"

Kate gave me a sexy look and said, "I can think of some interesting answers."

She took my hand and led me up to a dumbwaiter -the kind they used to ship books between floors. Five decrepit volumes were sitting inside. Worn quartos with cracked buckram covers and faint gilded print on the spines.

"Those are five of the books that Twyla Belton withdrew from the library before she was killed. They were brought down here for storage, along with a number of other outdated books. Most of them were given away to charities or sold at book fairs. But for some reason Ringold decided to keep these. Take a look."

I picked up one of the volumes. It was an illustrated edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Probably turn-of-the-century, judging by the cover. I opened it up and leafed through the Life. There were notes in the margins of the early pages. Little stars and exclamation points and score marks, as if someone had finally found a use for the symbols on the top keys of a typewriter. A few paragraphs had been underlined in faded red ink. And Twyla or somebody had written "Yes!" in big block letters beside several paragraphs. It was typical marginalia, that vehement dialogue we carry on with our books at the top of our voices, as if we were arguing with our grandparents about the new morality. I skipped to the middle of the text, to the glossy section of illustrations, and stopped cold.

She was standing beside me and when I glanced at her face, she nodded slowly, as if she'd come to that same page and had the same reaction. I looked back at the book. It was a photograph of a nude statue of Psyche. "Now in the Louvre in Paris," the citation beneath it read. And someone had taken a razor blade and a ruler to that photo and cut out the statue's breasts and genitals and the unfinished eyes and the mute stone lips.

"Sweet Jesus," I said under my breath. "We really do have a psychopath on our hands."
 
 

"Say he found the girl, Twyla, in the library," I said, thinking it out. "Took out the books he'd seen her reading and defaced the illustrations, as if he were practicing on the pictures what he planned to do to the girl herself."

"Maybe the photographs were like fetishes to him," Kate said. "Symbolic representations of Twyla, which he destroyed."

"I don't know about that," I said. "We'll have to talk with a psychiatrist to find out what the photographs may or may not have represented. What I do know is that two years ago, our Ripper tore up some books and then, maybe, tore up a girl. Now he's torn up some more books and I think we better get Ringold's list damn quickly and find out just how many young women have been taking books out of the art section."

"I can do that in the morning," Kate said pertly. "And follow up on it, too. And you can handle the men on the list."

She was dividing things up again, like the impetuous general's impetuous great granddaughter. Deploying the troop. Only this time I didn't mind. Kate Davis had earned her wings as far as I was concerned, and if she wanted to revel in it, that was all right, too.

"You did a good job today," I said to her.

And she grinned triumphantly.

"What would you say to having a drink with me. To celebrate?"

"I'd say yes, Harry." Kate Davis rolled her blue eyes heavenward and said, "It's in the stars."

We went -where else?- to the Bee. Sat in one of the dark cozy booths on the bar level, where we could look out through the glass louvers at the burghers in the. dining room or, when we felt like it, exclusively at each other. And as the night got older, we seemed to feel like it more and more often. Hers was not an easy face to dote on. It was, by turns, too ribald and too studiously intent. Like the girl herself it seemed to be split between sass and seriousness, between jokes and a schoolgirl's culture kit. But then she wasn't much more than a schoolgirl in years. And her sense of humor, her impolite refusal to take her own slogans seriously, made even her preachy side seem winning. And, I thought, a little sad, as if she were almost afraid to believe in anything too deeply. When I asked her, very late, with the cocktail piano playing weltschmerz and crystal tinkling below us like a metronome, why that should be so, she looked at me with one eye full of laughter and the other full of something like cautiousness.

"Do you think we know each other well enough to be so personal?" she said and only made it sound half a joke.

"You're the stargazer," I said. "You tell me."

"And what do I get in return? Do we share intimacies? Is it to that stage, yet? Sharing Intimacies Stage?"

I smiled at her and said, "You're a little drunk."

"I am," she admitted and rolled in her chair. "But that is
de rigueur
, is it not, for the Sharing Intimacies Scene? And what makes you so damn clear-headed, anyway? What makes you so sure I've got intimacies to share?"

"You really want to know?"

"I don't know?" she said. "Do I?"

"You have, Kate, a rare talent for making light of the things you like."

"And you are a pompous chauvinist," she said. "With an overdeveloped superego. And what I suspect is a tender and embarrassed heart. You also have, if I may say so, a very handsome face." She leaned forward tipsily and ran a finger down my cheek.

"I'm going to take you home," I said.

"Whose home?"

"Yours."

"Coward!" Kate cried. "Jessie will be distraught."

"And you will be relieved."

She dropped her finger from my cheek and said, "Why do you say that?" in a hurt voice.

"Because I have the feeling that, in spite of your prognostication, you need more than a day or two to fall in love."

"And what does love have to do with coming home with me?"

"For me?" I said. "Everything. I'm thirty-seven years old, Kate. Well past the one-night-stand period of my life."

She put her tortoiseshell glasses on her nose and peered at me as if I were out of moral focus. "You are terribly oldfashioned and sentimental. You, sir, are a snob."

I plucked her up by the arm and said, "Madam, so are you."
 
 

It was only a guess. But then Kate Davis was a dicey lady. And I was betting that under that brass and liberated patter was a young woman capable of hating herself in the morning. And of hating me, too. She certainly didn't act that way at her doorstep on Resor Avenue. Which is where I deposited her around midnight.

"Goodnight, Harry," she said coolly and held out a hand that might have been carved of ice.

I took it and pulled the rest of her to me and kissed her on her full bow of a mouth. It wasn't a passionate kiss. She was too drunk and self-absorbed for that. But it made me feel better. And I think it made her feel a little better, too. Reassured her that she wasn't losing her touch. When she stepped away from my arms, I ran a hand through that coarse mop of golden hair and she purred with content.

"Good night, Kate," I said.

"Harry?" she said as I turned to go. "Jessie was right." I turned back to where she was standing and she laughed and said, "Wasn't she?"
 

THE NEXT morning it was Kate Davis who showed up at the library with a big head and a chastened, painted grin on her face. It was nine A.M. and I was sitting at one of the big varnished oak tables with Miss Moselle, sipping coffee from a cardboard cup and listening to a far-fetched but highly entertaining astro-analysis of my character.

"Having been born on the cusp between Scorpio and Sagittarius," she told me, "makes you a difficult man, Harold. You see, Scorpio is a fire sign and Sagittarius is water. And when you combine fire and water..." Miss Moselle waved her fingers through the air, to indicate smoke rising from a doused flame. "Steam," she said conclusively..

"Is that bad?" I asked her.

"Oh, heavens, no. Nothing is good or bad in and of itself. A good deal depends upon the house in which you were born." She put a hand to her mouth and whispered, "Some of my colleagues believe that the moment of conception is more determinant of character than the moment of birth. But I don't hold with such salacious nonsense."

"Neither do I," I said.

"Good. Bring me your birth certificate or ascertain the hour and minute of your birth, and I shall make you a chart."

"Done," I said.

And at that moment, Kate Davis came dragging through the door. Jessie took one look and rushed to her aid.

"My dear," she said with concern. "What happened to you?"

"That man," Kate said, pointing a finger at me. "He got me drunk last night, Jess, and..."

"And?" Jessie Moselle said with appetite.

"And didn't take advantage of me."

Miss Moselle nodded her head judiciously, as if Kate had just confirmed her diagnosis. "Steam," she said, "Pure steam."

I wasn't sure I liked the way that sounded.

Miss Moselle hurried off on patent-leather pumps to fetch her bottle of stimulant. And Kate wound her way to the table and plopped down beside me. She was wearing denim and lace, Calvin Klein jeans and a frilly blouse that tied at the neck. And she looked, in spite of the hangover, absolutely lovable. All blonde and cream, with just a touch of color on her lips and in the blue of her eyes. I reached across the table and stroked her cheek.

"You have, if you don't mind me saying so, a beautiful face."

She snuggled against my hand with a sigh.

"Did I make a fool of myself last night?" she said woefully.

"Your honor is intact."

"That's hardly what I meant. Liquor frees the natural child in me. And it also loosens my tongue. If I said anything.. ."

I smiled at her and said, "All your secrets are still secret."

"I was afraid of that." She propped her chin on her right palm and eyed me glumly. "I think I ought to tell you something. Something I was afraid to say last night." She took a breath and confessed, "I'm not the person I appear to be."

"Oh?"

"No. It's all an act."

"All?" I said.

She grunted. "You're not making this any easier. You said last night that I laughed at the things I loved. There's a reason for that."

"Shall I make a guess?"

"If you insist," she said.

"You were married right out of high school. And after three or four years of growing up and growing apart, you left him. And since then, you've been afraid of hurting someone else the way you hurt him. So you don't get too deeply involved with anyone."

Kate crinkled her nose and blushed deep red. "Am I that transparent?" she said with astonishment.

"Your blue card," I said. "And a little help from Jessie Moselle."

"I see. I should have known I couldn't fool a trained snooper."

"Not when the snooper is scheduled to fall in love with you." I pointed up at the ceiling and said, "The stars. Remember?"

"I remember," she said in a small voice.

I ran a hand through her mop of curls. "You may not know this, yet, Kate. But I'm a grown-up. I can look out for myself."

But I didn't think she believed me. After three or four years of living with a child and then three or four more of feeling guilty for abandoning him, she wasn't going to believe that for awhile. But that was all right. Because I had plenty of time and a real fondness for the brassy girl who was half denim and half lace.

Miss Moselle came back, carrying a tin of aspirin and a cup of water in either hand. Kate smiled at her feebly.

"Take these," Jessie commanded and held out two white buttons.

"And, then, I think we'd better talk to Ringold," I said. "About Twyla Belton and the art books."

"Together?" Kate said, as she swallowed the aspirin.