Mistaken Identity (16 page)

Bennie crossed to the grand staircase, also of tan marble, running her fingers along a sleek banister of polished brass. She hustled past a bronze cast of the library’s founder and a bizarre Victorian candelabra of carved marble set on lion’s claws, which looked like a lamp with toes. She chugged to the top of the staircase and entered the first room. The Social Sciences room contained a bank of computers, but it was dark because the curtains were closed. She left the room, betting it failed the pretty test, and walked out to the staircase landing again, where she spotted a pebbled sign that read
LITERATURE.

Sounded pretentious enough.

Bennie strode down the marble corridor and slipped inside the room. It was a city block long, three stories high, and ringed by curly wrought iron balconies. The plaster ceiling was carved with elaborate Victorian curlicues, swirls, and figures. Indirect sunlight shone from the windows, falling softly on the vacant tables, and a row of computers sat off to one side. Standing by the bookshelves, Bennie ran a finger along the plastic-covered volumes. Milton. Pope. Tennyson. Thomas. She experienced a vague déjà vu of her father’s cottage in Delaware. Had Connolly written in this room? Could she be drawn to books for the same reasons Bennie’s father had been? Was it in their genes, and hers?

Bennie heard the sound of a chair being pulled out, and looked around. A librarian was returning to her desk. “Excuse me,” Bennie said, walking over. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Certainly.” The librarian was a slim, middle-aged woman with brushy silver hair, punctuated on either side by onyx dot earrings. She wore a loose, light-blue dress and red sailcloth espadrilles, and her smile was pleasant.

“Do you know a woman, a library patron, named Alice Connolly? She used to come here to write, every day until about a year ago.”

“I don’t recall that name.” The librarian turned and faced an old gray computer monitor, then hit a few keys. “There are twenty Alice Connollys listed here as members.”

“Her address would be on Trose Street.”

“Sorry. She’s not here. She didn’t have a card, not in the Philadelphia library system.”

Bennie frowned. “Maybe she didn’t take books on loan, but I believe she used this room to write in. She mentioned that she wrote on the computer. Do you know the people who use these computers, at least by sight?”

“Yes. I recognize the regular patrons. Most are students, because our collection is scholarly. We tend to be responsive to academic needs, and I see the same faces. What does Ms. Connolly look like?”

“Like me, only better.” Saying it out loud validated the connection. “Her hair is different. Red and short, styled in layers, and she’s thin.”

The woman looked Bennie up and down. Librarians were nothing if not forthright. “No. I’m sorry.”

Bennie thanked the librarian, confused. She’d have to double-check the other rooms. She left the room and was hurrying down the marble corridor when she felt something brush her shoulder.

“Alice,” said a soft voice from behind. “Is that you?”

Bennie turned. It was a slight young man wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, and Doc Martens. He carried a black knapsack on a bony shoulder. “You mean Alice Connolly?” Bennie asked, stepping forward.

“Wait, wait a minute.” The young man’s eyes were dark behind his tiny matte-framed glasses, and they searched Bennie’s face. He had to be twenty-five, but bewilderment reduced him to a small boy. And there was another emotion, one Bennie couldn’t quite place.

“You know Alice Connolly, don’t you? You thought I was her, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Have you seen Alice here, writing on the computers?”

“Who
are
you?” The young man edged backward, toward the staircase.

“Who are
you
?
If you’re a friend of Alice’s, talk to me. I’m her lawyer.”

“I can’t. I have to go. I have to get going.” He backed down toward the grand staircase and hurried down the stairs. Bennie hustled after him, her pace quicker. She could outrun an art student, for Christ’s sake. His Doc Martens clomped down the stairs, with Bennie at his crepe heels. Three feet away, then two.

“Stop,” Bennie called out, almost nabbing him in the middle of the staircase. “Just stop and we’ll talk.”

“I don’t know anything. Leave me alone!” The young man reached the landing and whirled around the corner to the next set of stairs, almost slipping on the marble. Bennie swung for him and missed, and he hit the lobby and raced across the floor toward the exit door. In front of it was the security desk, with a guard and a turnstile that gave Bennie an idea.

“Stop that kid!” she shouted to the guard. “He took my purse!”

“No! That’s not true!” the young man called, too late. The turnstile caught him in his slim waist and he doubled over.

“Wait right there, sir,” barked the guard, a heavyset black man in a blue shirt. A baseball bat with duct tape around its handle rested in the corner next to his perch. “Lady says you stole her bag.”

“I didn’t!”

Bennie feigned surprise. “My goodness, how silly of me. I just remembered. I didn’t bring my purse today. I’m so sorry.”

The guard scowled, looking from Bennie to the young man. “Sorry about that, sir. If you have no library materials to declare, you’re free to go.”

“Thanks,” he said, though Bennie clamped a hand on his shoulder.

“I have no library materials,” she told the disapproving guard and pressed through the exit into the sunlight. The streets were alive with businesspeople, summer tourists, and heavy traffic. Bennie tightened her grip on the kid and pressed him out of the foot traffic and toward Logan Circle. “I have to talk to you about Alice Connolly. I’m trying to help her. If you don’t talk to me now, I’ll subpoena you. Either way, we’re gonna have a chat.”

“You won’t hurt me, will you?”

“I’m a lawyer, not a thug.”

“Is there a difference?” the kid called back, and Bennie gave him points for humor. She led him by the elbow across the street and walked him to the benches under the shade trees around Swann Fountain.

“Now,” Bennie said, “how do you know Alice Connolly?” She plopped him onto a bench and stood over him, close as a lover.

“I don’t know Alice Connolly.”

“You want me to call the cops? Right now?”

“You gonna say I took your purse again?” He pouted up at Bennie in the hazy sun.

“I’m gonna say you’re obstructing justice in a capital murder case. How do you know Alice Connolly?”

The kid slumped into the bench, his back spiny in the thin T-shirt. His forehead looked damp to his George Clooney hairline. “Okay, I know Alice. Knew her.”

“Did she come to the library to write?”

“Yes, for a while.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Papers, for school. I’m at the Academy. PAFA.”

“Did you meet her in the library?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Fall semester, the year before last. She was new in town. So was I.”

“What was your relationship?”

“We were friends. We talked about things. Not much though. She was kind of hard to get to know. She would work on the computer, I would do research or sketch. We’d break for lunch. You know, friends.” His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and Bennie didn’t have to be a detective to come up with the next question.

“You didn’t date?”

“No.”

“But you wish you did.”

“Does it show?” He squinted at Bennie, and she sat beside him on the bench. It was too hot to be shaking down the heartbroken.

“Don’t run away now. I’ll chase you and make you wear plaid.”

“I believe it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sebastian Blair.”

“Bennie Rosato.” She shook his hand and it buckled in her grasp. “You talk to the cops about Alice?”

“I never talked to the police about anything. I’ve never been in trouble in my life. I don’t want to get in trouble now.”

“Relax. Just talk to me and you can go on your way. You thought I was Alice.”

“Yeah. Are you related?”

Bennie wiped her brow. “So let’s talk. I want to help Alice and I need to know what you know about her. What was the story between you and Alice?”

“I was in love. She wasn’t. We stayed friends. I never even told her.”

“This was when?”

“September.”

“Alice was living with someone at the time, a cop. Did you know that?”

He nodded regretfully. “They weren’t solid.”

“No?”

“Her boyfriend was at the gym all the time, I think he worked out, or boxed or something. She used to go with him to the gym, when she wasn’t working on the computer at the library.”

“She told you this?”

“Yeah. Then, in October she met someone else, another guy. Then she stopped coming to the library.”

“Where’d she meet this other guy?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t hang at the library. He looked like a lawyer.”

Bennie frowned. “A lawyer? What was his name?”

“I don’t know. She never said.”

“You didn’t press it?”

“No.”

Bennie sighed. “Sebastian. You lose the woman to another man and you don’t bother to find out who he is?”

The artist smiled weakly. “I tried, but she didn’t want to talk about him. She didn’t want to talk much after she met the lawyer. After a while, she stopped coming to the library. She kind of ditched me.”

“Her boyfriend was murdered in May of last year. I need to know her whereabouts that day. When she came and left the library, even what she was wearing.”

“Can’t help you there. She stopped coming to the library a long time before that.” He looked away, at the Swann Fountain, and Bennie followed his gaze. For the first time she noticed three kids playing in the fountain, drenched to their shorts and T-shirts, oblivious to the workday crowd. They kicked and splashed in the circular pool, and Bennie was distracted by the slick nudes at the fountain’s center.

“You think she was sleeping with this lawyer?” Bennie asked.

“Duh.”

“So who was he?”

“Some rich guy. He drove a Mercedes. He came by once or twice to pick her up.”

“What kind of Mercedes?”

“Sedan. New.”

“What color?”

“Shit brown.”

Bennie tried to puzzle it out. Connolly hadn’t told her any of this. “What did the lawyer look like?”

“Rich. Preppy.” The young man’s chin sunk onto his hand, like a lovesick version of
The Thinker,
which sat in front of the Rodin Museum down the Parkway. “Mainly he looked richer and preppier than me.”

“Was he white or black? Light hair, dark hair? Sebastian, you’re an artist, with an alleged eye for detail. Give me a description.”

“I can’t. The subject depresses me, and I’m no good with words.”

“Can you draw him, then?”

Sebastian raised his chin from his hand. “You gotta pencil?”

A
lice stood behind the inmates at the computers. Their blue shirts bent over the keyboards and they poked at the keys. Her cellie hunted-and-pecked in the middle, and two seats from her was Valencia, reeking like a funeral home. Leonia anchored the end of the row, a mountain of muscle next to Shetrell and the rest of her crew.

Alice kept her eye on them, wondering about last night. There had to be a contract out on her. It would have come to Shetrell, who was connected inside and out. But why? And from who? It didn’t make sense, but Alice wasn’t taking any chances, not with freedom this close. She knew how to deal with it. Leonia, not Shetrell, would do the dirty work. Alice strolled down the row of do-rags and Muslims and stopped when she got to Leonia’s chair. “How’s it going, girl?”

“S’all right,” Leonia said, without turning around.

“You should save that document. You typed a page already. You don’t want to lose it.”