A Rare Murder In Princeton (24 page)

Natty, looking gray as usual, in spite of his black tuxedo, golden cummerbund, and glistening white shirt, greeted them—“dear boy” and “dear lady”—but without his usual effusion. He seemed, to McLeod, to be rather subdued. “Do have a martini,” he said almost absently, waving toward the bar.

McLeod had never seen so many stout, gray-headed men in tuxedos. But then there were even more white-haired ladies in long dresses. She decided there was an undeniable overlap between the membership of the Friends of the Library and the geriatric citizens of Princeton. Dodo Westcott, who looked positively juvenile in this company, came over to greet them.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” she said. “Such a good turnout. But I do miss poor Philip. Natty said this would be a kind of memorial to him. Actually, I hope he doesn’t make it too gloomy. Gloom turns donors off, you know.”

“I’m sure he won’t be too gloomy,” George said, “but surely it’s appropriate to remember Philip Sheridan at the Friends’ dinner.”

Dodo, as usual, hadn’t really listened to this. “Oh, there’s our featured speaker. I must go see if he needs anything,” she said, and rushed off to intercept a dapper little man who had just arrived.

“So that’s August Martin,” McLeod said to George. “I thought he’d be bigger.”

“He’s big enough. He’s a world figure,” said George.

McLeod wished that sometime, just once, George would not be so defensive about everything concerning Princeton University. Of course, August Martin was a world figure: A professor in the Near Eastern Studies Department, his every word on the touchiest part of the world was listened to with respect by governments, journalists, and academics; his books, scholarly to the core yet accessible to the lay reader, sold in the millions. He was a jewel in the crown of the Princeton faculty. Still, he was physically an awfully small man. McLeod wondered if it was Dodo or Natty who had secured him to speak at the Friends’ dinner. Whoever did it, it was a coup, she thought.

George then startled her by introducing her to Polly Griffin. McLeod, prepared to dislike any girlfriend of George’s, stared at her. She was sorry to see that Polly was very nice looking—and not white haired. In fact, her hair was glorious, long, shiny, straight, and parted in the middle and shaped into a French twist at the back of her head. “I’m so glad to know you,” Polly said. “George has said wonderful things about you.”

“Oh, good,” said McLeod inanely, admiring Polly’s straight black sheath that fell gracefully to the floor.

“Polly is at the art museum,” said George.

“Yes, I just came to spy out the competition,” said Polly.

“Competition?” said McLeod, feeling stupid.

“I work with the Friends of the Art Museum, and I suppose in a sense we’re competitors.”

“Oh,” said McLeod. Was she ever going to think of anything remotely interesting to say? She didn’t have to—Polly and George were in animated conversation together. She wandered off and, to her surprise, ran into Bigelow Murray, looking as huge as he had when she met him at Dodo’s.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” she said. George had warned her to be careful with Bigelow, but he couldn’t kill her in front of all these rich, elderly Friends, and she was dying to ask him some questions.

“Oh?” he said.

She didn’t want to bring up the treasure, but maybe she could work the conversation around to it. “You know Dante Immordino, don’t you? Isn’t he wonderful? He worked for your mother and now he works for George sometimes. He uses a snow shovel that was in the garage. Dante said it belonged to your mother and he says it’s better than George’s. Did you mean to leave it in the garage?”

“I don’t know what I meant to do,” said Bigelow. “I have to tell you that I hated that house after my mother died.” He paused and then began to talk rapidly. “It was a crime scene for a long time. I’m sure you know my mother was murdered there and they never found out who did it. They even suspected me for a while. And then when I finally decided to sell the house—Mary didn’t want to live there and neither did I—it was hard enough to clean out the house. I just gave up before I got to the garage. The real estate agent gave me hell about it, but I don’t know—I just let it go. And the house finally sold.”

“Oh, I ran across some letters,” said McLeod. “Written during World War II from a Lieutenant Vincent Lawrence to his mother. Is he your uncle?”

“He was. Can I get you another drink?” He was not interested in the letters, and appeared to want to turn away from her.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I wondered if you wanted the letters?”

He looked faintly puzzled. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “Toss ’em out.”

He left, a pained expression on his face.

She noticed that Dodo and Natty were urging people to find their places at the long tables. They had already swept the big shots to the head table—August Martin, the president of the Friends and his wife, the director of university libraries and his wife, the president of the university and his wife.

“Here you are,” said George, who came up with Polly Griffin. “Let’s find seats. Polly’s going to sit with us.”

“Good,” said McLeod, gritting her teeth. George sat between her and Polly, and although Polly kept leaning over to try to engage McLeod in conversation, it was hard. McLeod talked to the man on her other side—an editor at the Princeton University Press—but for once did not ask him any questions. Her mind wandered during Natty’s graceful remarks about Philip Sheridan, “who cannot be with us tonight,” but she tried valiantly to listen to August Martin as he spoke with what she was sure was great learning and wit about the situation in the Middle East. She remembered nothing of what he said.

When she and George came out of Procter Hall after the dinner, it was snowing hard and the short drive home took a long time.

 

IT SNOWED ALL night and all of Sunday morning. When the snow finally stopped Sunday afternoon, there was a thirteen-inch “accumulation,” as the weatherman on the Philadelphia television station put it.

“No newspapers today,” mourned McLeod. “I miss the Sunday papers.”

“Too much snow,” said George. “But I do believe it’s stopped.”

George had already started trying to shovel—and wasn’t getting very far—when Dante appeared. The two of them worked together until the driveway and the sidewalk were cleared.

“I’m going to buy a snow blower,” George announced when he and Dante came in, stomping their feet on the mat in the hall and peeling off their gloves.

“That’s a good idea,” said Dante.

“Have some hot chocolate,” said McLeod.

Dante and George looked pleased and took off their coats and followed her into the kitchen. They held the mugs in both hands for warmth. McLeod wondered how to begin asking Dante questions—she wished George would leave—but they were all three standing uncomfortably in the kitchen. “Let’s sit down,” she said, leading the way to the dining room table. “I’ll get some cookies.”

“I’m glad you two cleaned out that garage,” George said when she came back with the cookies. “At least, we didn’t have to dig out the cars. I saw the people across the street hard at it—it’s awful when you have this much snow. When I lived in that apartment, I always had to dig out my car when it snowed. They plowed the parking lot, but the plow would throw up big drifts behind the cars that we had to shovel out of the way. Homeownership has a lot to offer. But then if you hadn’t cleaned out the garage, we would have had to shovel out the cars here.”

“Dante, I wanted to ask you something about that,” McLeod said. “I mean when we cleaned out the garage.”

“I’ll just go upstairs and get my checkbook,” said George and left.

“Dante, after we cleaned out the garage, did you happen to tell anybody about the box of dresses I brought in the house?”

A shadow flickered over Dante’s face. “No, I didn’t tell anybody about it. Why would I do that?”

“Did the police ask you about it?”

“No. Why would the police ask me about it?” Dante sounded panicky.

“Lieutenant Perry said he was going to get somebody to talk to you. Don’t worry. There was something in the box besides dresses, and—”

“I don’t know anything about what was in that box,” said Dante. “You just said it was old clothes and you were going to give them to a student. I just carried the box inside for you.”

“That’s right. I remember that. Nobody’s accusing you of anything, Dante. I just wondered if perhaps you told Mr. Murray—Little Big, as everybody calls him—about it.”

“No, ma’am, I didn’t tell Little Big anything.”

George came back with his checkbook, wrote a check for the amount Dante named (it seemed rather large to McLeod, but what did she know about snow-shoveling prices?), gave it to him, and showed him to the door.

McLeod reflected while this was going on. Dante had looked distinctly odd when she asked him if he had told anybody about the box of dresses, but then he had forcefully and, she thought, convincingly, said that he had not told Little Big. If not Little Big, then who?

 

THE CHICKEN STEW for dinner was a huge success.

“It was really smart of you to cook this ahead of time,” George said. “Even if you did it just so you could go see Chester.”

“He told me something very interesting. I forgot to tell you. Everybody knew about Fanny and her drinking. Chester says they didn’t think it interfered with her work.” She ate more chicken, and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever been so frustrated. Nobody’s getting anywhere on the murder. And we don’t know who was after the treasure. I don’t think it was Little Big Murray. He doesn’t seem interested in anything about the house. I was going to tell him about the treasure, and I did tell him about the letters, but he was totally uninterested. Totally.”

“I don’t believe he’s interested in much of anything,” said George.

“Of course, it could all be a front, but it was good enough to fool me,” said McLeod.

ON MONDAY MORNING, the world—at least the Princeton part of it—was bright and clear, with a blue sky arching over the snow-covered houses on Edgehill Street, the snow seeming to enhance their gingerbread trim. As she walked to work on the neatly shoveled sidewalks that lay between banks of snow, McLeod admired the two fat snowmen in front of one house on Mercer Street, and she liked the way snow lay on the trees. It made a white stripe on the black branches of the bare trees and dusted the needles of the evergreens. Since she was admiring the winter scene, she decided she must be getting used to cold and snow.

She stopped by Joseph Henry House to check her snail mail (nothing of interest), e-mail (two students wanted extensions for the assignment to write about a person in the arts, and Clark Powell protested that three students in McLeod’s writing class wanted to interview him and he didn’t have time for them all), and her voice mail (nothing). She e-mailed the two students her refusal to extend the deadline and told Clark Powell to suggest some other student workers in Theatre Intime to the people who wanted to interview him.

She decided to go to Rare Books and see if she could do some work on van Dyke. Surely by now she could resume her work on the box where the murder weapon had been found. If not, she could always start on another box. And she could find out what was going on, if anything, with the murder investigation.

In the exhibition gallery, she noticed the curtains were at last drawn open on the replica of Governor Belcher’s office. So the crime scene was clear, she thought, as she looked through the glass at the desk and globe. It was almost two weeks since the murder.

In Rare Books she greeted Molly Freeman and signed in, hung up her wraps—winter was a lot of trouble, she thought for the thousandth time—and noticed that Derek the proctor was no longer seated in the reception area. She went to the Reading Room, where she gave Diane a call slip for the “Other Wise Man” box. She nodded at Miss Swallow, who looked up briefly from the big book she was examining, and noticed a new researcher seated at an empty back table, apparently expecting something to be brought to him. She decided that while she was waiting for her box to come up, she would go see Natty.

He wasn’t in his office, but McLeod loitered, knowing it would take a while for her box to appear in the Reading Room, and eventually Natty appeared.

“Dear lady,” he said, walking with her into his office. “Forgive me. I’ve been downstairs, looking for something.” He stood by his desk.

“Sit down, sit down,” she said as she hastily sat down herself, as usual. Getting Natty to sit down was like a ballet, she thought. Someone should choreograph it. “I just wanted to congratulate you on finding those prints for Miss Swallow, the orchid prints. Where were they?”

“Round and about,” said Natty. “Round and about.”

“Come on, Natty, you know how curious I am.”

“Dear lady,” he said again but without his usual animation. He rubbed a pencil between his two hands and looked at her. “You know we have many, many storage facilities. And I remembered one particular large cabinet with those wide shallow drawers. It isn’t in the vault; it’s in our storage area outside the vault, and I said, ‘I just bet those prints are in one of those drawers.’ And they were. I’m so glad they were there. Dear Miss Swallow. Such an interesting project that she has undertaken.”