Styx & Stone (20 page)

“There she is,” he said. “I don’t even gotta look.”

She was. I wanted to contradict him, just to watch him swallow his smug grin and cigar, but I thought he might not let us have the package: twelve-by-nine and about three inches deep, wrapped in brown kraft paper.

“Princeton University Press,” said McKeever, reading from the address. “Any idea what it is?”

“Let’s open it,” said Fenster, as if pawing through people’s mail really licked his stamps. “What is it?”

“It’s my father’s manuscript,” I said. They both looked at me. “And I guarantee page 154 is missing.”

McKeever nodded, and Fenster pinched my behind.

Outside, McKeever opened the squad car door for me, and I climbed in.

“That Joe Fenster’s a character,” he chuckled as the car pulled away from the curb. “I’ve known him since PS 62 in Queens. What’d you think of him?”

“His sister should have put him down when she gave birth to him.”

McKeever gaped at me.

“He’s a pervert, Jim,” I said by way of explanation. “Pinched me good and hard. I’ll have a bruise on my bottom tomorrow to prove it.”

The squad car took us uptown to the Columbia campus. McKeever stepped out and circled to my side to open my door. For a few seconds I was alone in the car with the patrolman driver. He looked at me through the rearview mirror and smiled.

“Frankly, miss,” he began, “if I wasn’t on duty, I’d pinch you too. And believe me, you’d know you was pinched.” He winked in the mirror just as McKeever opened my door.

McKeever and I trudged through the sunny cold, toting the manuscript box, until we arrived at Hamilton Hall.

“Is Professor Chalmers in?” McKeever asked Miss Little, producing his badge.

“Dr. Chalmers just went into a meeting with Professor Bruchner,” she said, waving a hand nervously in front of her face.

“Can you please announce us?”

Joan Little excused herself, with a polite smile for my benefit, and crossed the room to knock on a door marked
Conference
, opposite the lounge where I had met Hildy Jaspers and Gigi Lucchesi three days before. She slipped inside, only to emerge a few moments later.

“You may go in,” she said.

Victor Chalmers and Gualtieri Bruchner were seated opposite each other in the conference room. Chalmers seemed unnerved by the interruption, while Bruchner just looked past us, as if the disturbance were an unavoidable delay.

“Sergeant McKeever, is it?” asked Chalmers, jumping to his feet to shake the policeman’s hand, then mine. “Hello, Ellie. How’s Abe today?”

I shrugged. “Someone cut off his oxygen yesterday. He suffered heart failure and nearly died.”

After a sufficient display of outrage over the renewed attack, Chalmers got into the spirit of the detective’s visit. Bruchner remained impassive.

“How may I help you, Sergeant?” asked Chalmers.

“I wonder if you could take a look at this,” he said, holding out the brown-papered parcel.

“Of course. What is it?” he asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” I said.

He flipped open the top and shuffled some pages. His eyes darkened.

“Do you recognize it, Professor?” asked McKeever.

Chalmers nodded, turned a few more pages, then looked at me. “This is Abe’s manuscript,” he said. “This is
Daughters of Eve
.”

The title page in the box bore a different name:
Saints and Whores: Dante’s Women
, by Ruggero Ercolano.

“Plagiarist!” whispered Chalmers, closing the lid on the box.

I found it telling that an academic would see the intellectual transgression before the physical.

“My God!” he said, suddenly. “This means that Ruggero . . .”

“Are you prepared, sir, to swear a deposition that the manuscript in your hand is indeed the work of Abraham Stone?” asked McKeever in his most official tone. “Will you swear to it under oath?”

“Without hesitation,” declared Chalmers, chin jutting high in righteous indignation. “Abraham Stone consulted me often on this manuscript. We shared ideas and discussed alternative approaches and conclusions. This is his work, all right. I never would have believed Ruggero capable of such treachery.”

“What was Ercolano’s field of study?” I asked, interrupting Chalmers’s censure of his late colleague.

“Why, nineteenth century, of course.”

“And, for the benefit of Sergeant McKeever, who was absent from class that day, when did Dante write the
Divine Comedy
?”

Chalmers frowned. “He completed it around 1321, shortly before his death.”

“Would you say it’s common for nineteenth-century scholars to publish seminal works on medieval poets?” I asked, feeling like a DA on cross-examination.

He gulped. “Why, no, not at all. In fact, I’d say it’s fairly rare.”

“And is it standard practice for scholars of Italian birth to write their books in English? Flawless English?”

“No,” he shook his head violently. “Now I’m confused.”

McKeever’s head dropped, and he asked me: “Why must you spoil every solution I come up with?”

“What’s this about, Ellie?” asked Chalmers. “Did Ruggero steal Abe’s book or didn’t he?”

I laughed. “He’d have to have been an idiot to think he could get away with it.”

“But you found the manuscript in his apartment.”

“No, it was returned by the post office. Take a look at the address.”

Chalmers glanced down at the parcel in his hands. He gave a start.

“Princeton University Press? Your father has a contract with Princeton for this very book!”

“It seems unlikely that Ercolano was so naive. It’s like stealing the Mona Lisa and trying to fence it at the Louvre two days later.”

“Then what does it mean, Ellie?” asked Chalmers, desperate for answers to this horrible breach of academic code. “How did the manuscript come to be in Ruggero’s possession? Who would have done such a thing?”

I looked to McKeever, who just shook his head in dismay for what I was about to say.

“I would guess it was the same person who tossed the radio into Ercolano’s tub.”

McKeever and I went through Ercolano’s office again, looking for something we might have missed. I scoured his notebooks and lesson planner, finding nothing unusual. Victor Chalmers watched from the doorway, wringing his hands. Behind him stood Gualtieri Bruchner.

The drawers yielded the same articles as the night before:
niente.
The detective and I chatted for a moment, ignoring the curious chairman a few feet away. Then Bruchner intruded meekly, begging to ask a question.

“What is it?” asked McKeever.

“I was wondering,” he began with his
Mitteleurope
accent, “if you had noticed that key, Sergeant.”

McKeever and I looked to where Bruchner was pointing, the floorboards beside the wall that separated Ercolano’s office from my father’s. We were quite startled to see a brass key and cardboard tab lying in plain view.

“Was that here last night?” McKeever asked, holding the key carefully by the cardboard clip. He handed it to me.

I shook my head as I examined it. “I’m sure it wasn’t. And isn’t there a cleaning lady who comes through here at night?”

Chalmers nodded.

“What do you think it opens?” asked McKeever.

“That’s one of our key clips,” said Chalmers. “It has a number, 33; Joan will be able to tell you which door it opens.”

McKeever took the key to the secretary, who was surprised to find it missing. She rose from her desk, crossed the room to a bookcase, and reached up to retrieve a key from the top shelf. She then used that key to open a box mounted on the wall next to the bookcase.

“Well, I’ll be . . .” she said, holding key 33 up to an empty slot in the box.

“What does that open?” asked McKeever, looking over her shoulder.

Miss Little wheeled around, flushed, and threw a glance to Chalmers. “It’s the key to Professor Stone’s apartment.”

“What?”

“Yes, he kept a key here,” she said, blinking furiously. “You know how he sometimes forgets his keys. Well, he thought it would be a good idea to keep one here in case he needed it.”

“That’s outrageous!” said Chalmers. “Anyone could have taken that key.”

“No, Dr. Chalmers,” said Joan. “I’m the only person who knew he kept his key there, and no one has a key to this box but myself.”

“We all just watched you take the key down from the top shelf,” said Chalmers. “Surely others have seen you do the same.”

“But I’m the only person allowed access to this key box,” she protested. “No one should have opened it.”

McKeever and I exchanged wry smiles. “This is New York, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, this makes it look pretty bad for Ruggero, doesn’t it?” said Chalmers. “He must have seen where Joan hides the key. That’s how he got into your father’s place to steal the manuscript.”

“Or anyone else in this place,” said the cop. “Can you account for your whereabouts on the nights of January twentieth and twenty-second?”

Chalmers was floored. “You suspect me of desecrating Elijah Stone’s grave? And assaulting my colleague in his home?” Chalmers glared at the detective, then me, his face hot, eyes bulging. “I was in Boston on the twentieth,” he said, “and in Bronxville on the twenty-second. There are witnesses to attest to that. Instead of casting doubt on me, you should investigate what Ruggero Ercolano was doing with Abe Stone’s manuscript.”

Chalmers excused himself and left in a huff.

“What do you think?” I asked McKeever.

“Let’s just say that if I put the blame on Ercolano, no one will question it. Case closed.”

“Could you do that with a clear conscience?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I’ve got a docket full of pendings down on Tenth Street. There’s a little old lady who was knocked off in her apartment on Bleecker. The captain dumped that on me yesterday. I got a homo rape/murder for a month now in Sheridan Square; I can’t tell you where my day starts and where it ends. My wife and kid don’t know me anymore.”

I nodded. “OK, don’t worry about it. An old man gets clubbed in the head, and a corpse takes the blame. It’ll look good in the report; might even get you a promotion.”

“It isn’t like that.”

I knew I was being unfair to him, but I was angry.

“I’ll do what I can to help you,” he said, awkward and ashamed. “I’ll have someone look into the tie clip at Tiffany’s this afternoon. And we’ll check the prints on the key against Ercolano’s.”

“Sure,” I said, not looking at him.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Roger Purdy in the lounge. “Ercolano was a mediocre scholar, after all. I’m sure he saw glory in that manuscript.” He chuckled with contempt. “Only an intellectual destitute would sink so low as to plagiarize.”

“You seem to be an expert,” I said.

Purdy twitched. “What do you mean by that?”

“You talk as if you know plagiarism when you see it. That’s all.”

Purdy glared at me, not sure how to take my explanation. Then he decamped, almost stepping on his tail as he shoved past Bernie Sanger at the door with a straight-arm reminiscent of the Heisman Trophy.

“What’s he so steamed about?” Bernie asked, joining me in the lounge.

“He doesn’t like me very much.”