Murder at the Library of Congress (11 page)

Entering, he stood alone in the room, surrounded by easels on which large canvases in various stages awaited the next step. A lengthy table lined a wall with windows that overlooked the bustling plaza.

The sound of a door from a second room opening caused the visitor to turn. Through it came a wizened old man barely five feet tall who walked with a pronounced limp. His white hair was thin and unruly, his glasses thick and in need of cleaning. He wore a dirty white shirt covered by an equally shapeless sleeveless black sweater. His pants were baggy. His shoes were of the molded variety and looked as if badly drawn.

“Ah hah, Mr. Conrad,” he said, smiling. “I see you brought me something.”

Conrad laid the rolled-up Reyes painting on the table. “He called ahead, right? You knew I was bringing this.”

“Of course, of course. Sit down. Tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“Let me see what we have here.”

Widlitz carefully removed the brown wrapping paper from the painting, then unfurled the painting itself. Its being rolled had caused hundreds of cracks to appear.

“It should never be rolled like this,” he said.

“That’s the way it was given to me.”

“What do people know? This will take time, Mr. Conrad. It won’t be easy.”

“Well, you tell him that. All I do is deliver it.”

“Of course.”

“I need to call him, tell him it’s here.”

“By all means,” Widlitz said, pointing to a phone in the corner.

“It’s Conrad,” he said after being connected. “It’s here at Widlitz’s place.”

“Good,” the man said. “Were there any problems?”

“No. The guy was nervous, though. Real nervous. Where did you find him?”

“It doesn’t matter. Did he indicate whether he was staying in California?”

“A day or two,” Conrad replied, running fingers through his mane of greasy, sun-bleached hair.

“I need you to pick someone up this evening at the airport.”

“All right.” He wrote down the information on the back of an envelope. Conrad Syms was often called upon by his employer to chauffeur people from the airport to the house.

“That’s all for the moment, Conrad.”

Conrad said, “Any chance of getting some money for meeting the guy last night? I’m a little short.”

“I’ll pay you tonight when you deliver my guest.” He hung up.

Conrad waved at Widlitz and left. He hung around the plaza for a while before driving home, where he lounged at the pool that was part of his apartment complex. He met the plane at nine, took his passenger to the house in the tony Brentwood section, received his pay in cash from a Filipino houseboy, and drove to Sunset Boulevard, where he handed over the BMW to a parking lot attendant at Carlos ’n Charlie’s. Maybe today he’d get lucky and meet a producer or director looking for his type. When he’d come to Hollywood from Minnesota after acting in some community theater productions, he was told he was a natural for motion pictures. So far, three years later, his only starring roles were in three pornographic movies and walk-ons in industrial films. Maybe it was time to change agents, he thought as he checked his appearance in the window, readjusted his straw hat to a more rakish angle, and made his entrance.

12

Usually, it was Mac who was up first, often before the sun. But this morning, he awoke to find his wife missing from their bed.

He found her in the kitchen.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

“No,” she said, looking up from where she sat at the table, a steaming cup of black coffee before her. “The impact of what happened last night has hit home.”

He poured himself a cup and joined her.

“I’ve only been at LC for two days. I was given a desk next to his, and interviewed him for the article. I saw him at the cocktail party. And now he’s dead. Something inside me says it didn’t happen, but I know it did because I was the one who found him. I touched him.” She wrapped her arms about herself and shuddered.

Mac took one of her hands in his. “Only natural, Annie, that there would be this delayed reaction. We get caught up in the swirl of the event, being questioned by the police, hearing more about it on television. Then we go to bed and it hits us like a bad dream.”

“And so real when you wake up.”

“Yes, so real. What’s this business about others having died while searching for the diaries?” Annabel had paraphrased Lucianne Huston’s broadcast for him.

“Nothing contemporary, Mac. There was a team of
researchers trying to find the diaries in the Canary Islands a hundred years ago. They were killed, presumably by a competing team. And the same thing happened to another group in the Dominican Republic. Natives were blamed, as I recall.”

He frowned, cocked his head. “I was thinking of something more recent, Annie.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t there a scandal involving the library eight or ten years back? Some researcher there—I think he, or maybe it was a she—disappeared or was killed.”

“It rings a bell, but only vaguely.”

“As I remember it, the individual worked in the Hispanic division.”

Her shrug was a statement: “It just doesn’t register with me.”

“I’ll pull it up from the
Post
’s Web site.”

“What did we ever do before Web sites?”

“Haunted the newspaper’s morgue and got ink on our fingers, or went blind looking at microfilm.”

“I’d better get showered.”

“Why don’t you stay home?” he suggested. “No need to go there today. You probably won’t get much done. The office space Consuela assigned you will be off limits while the police continue their investigation.”

“I’m scheduled to spend another day in Manuscripts looking at the Book of Privileges. Las Casas helped Columbus write it. I’m trying to link similarities between language he used in that document and in his other writings that he’s been given public credit for. Finding a needle in a haystack isn’t easy, but it doesn’t mean a needle isn’t in that hay. I don’t want to lose a minute of my time at LC, Mac. It’s such precious time.”

“Your call, of course. More coffee?”

“A little fresh, please.”

She took her cup into the bathroom, leaving him at the kitchen table with his own thoughts. He eventually got up and went to the terrace overlooking the Potomac. The first rays of sun sent its ripples dancing. The city was waking up to another day of politics and pressure, its primary occupations. Like the river, it would surge ahead of its own weight and volition, influencing the nation and world and being influenced by them, preaching lofty goals but falling short of them too much of the time, the most wonderful form of government ever put into practice—and the most difficult to make work.

While this was happening, he, Mackensie Smith, would go through his planned day, meeting with faculty colleagues at the university, walking the dog, buying the ingredients for dinner that night, and worrying about the wife he loved spending her day at a murder scene.

Whoever killed Michele Paul, Mac thought, presumably was someone from within the Library of Congress, a colleague or at least a person who’d had enough contact with Paul to want him dead. Of course, there was the possibility that the murderer was an outsider, perhaps someone who’d gained access to the library for the express purpose of killing him. But that was less likely.

Annabel had said Paul was disliked by many, with an intensity bordering on hatred by some. If he had to bet, Mac would assume it was a murder fueled by passion, a killer with a personal motivation. Passion of one sort or the other, not reason or greed or ideology, was behind most murders. At least that had been his experience when practicing criminal law, and the statistics bore it out.

But that was simply intellectual speculation. What really bothered him was that if Michele Paul’s killer was someone from within the library, that person could still be there. And Annabel would be there, too.

He dropped her at the Jefferson Building before heading for his meetings at GW.

“Sure I can’t convince you to stay home for a few days?” he asked as she was about to get out of the car.

“I really want to be here, Mac. I have so much to do in researching the article. Please understand.”

“Of course I understand,” he said, not adding that no magazine article, nothing in the world, for that matter, was as important as her well-being.

They kissed, and he watched her enter the elegant Italian Renaissance–style building named for the third and rather elegant president of the United States.

Mac had refreshed his knowledge of the Library of Congress by basic reading materials Annabel brought home with her. Quite a man was Tom Jefferson. After LC’s original collection of books, three thousand volumes purchased from England, was destroyed by British troops when they burned the Capitol building in 1814, Jefferson, by then retired to Monticello, offered his personal library of more than six thousand books, and Congress appropriated $23,950 for the purchase. Unfortunately, subsequent fires destroyed two thirds of the original Jefferson library; fewer than 2,500 remain in the library’s present collection.

Great books and murder.

Somehow they didn’t go together.

As she approached, Annabel was surprised at the lack of police presence in front of the building. Inside, people passed through the metal detectors, and their bags were searched as on any other day. That a murder had taken place wasn’t evident until she reached the Hispanic and Portuguese reading room on the second floor. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung across every entrance to the area. A distraught Consuela Martinez stood behind one strand of tape. When she saw Annabel approaching,
she went to a uniformed officer and informed him that Annabel was a researcher working in that section. Annabel lifted her badges for his inspection, and he allowed her to pass.

They went directly to Consuela’s office, where the division chief closed the door behind them. She sat heavily in her chair, directed a stream of air at her bangs, and shook her head. “Can you believe it?” she said.

“I’m afraid so. I was telling Mac it seemed unreal until this morning. The harsh light of day and all that.”

“Incredible. I mean, I detested the man, truly detested him—and respected his work, of course—but to think of him dying like that. Who could do such a thing?”

“I’m sure the police are working hard at coming up with that answer. What happens in a situation like this, Consuela? What law enforcement agency has jurisdiction?”

“The Washington MPD. The Capitol police get involved to make sure there’s no threat to anyone on the Hill. I think they offer some forensic help, too. But MPD’s in charge of the investigation. They’ve set up an interview room in the original Librarian of Congress’s office.”

“Where’s that?”

“In this building, first floor. It’s only used these days for ceremonial occasions and small gatherings. A beautiful room. Shame it has to be the setting for a murder investigation.”

“Who are they interviewing?”

“Everybody who knew Michele, I suppose. That takes in almost the entire professional staff. The press are being corralled in the theater. There’s lots of them.”

“The TV report last night said he’d been killed by a blow to the head. Do they have the weapon?”

“This is only rumor, but I was told it was a weight of a kind used by our conservation and preservation people.”

“A weight?”

“Yes, pieces of Linotype lead that are melted into bricks and covered with cloth. They’ve used them for ages to hold down curled pages, maps, that sort of thing.”

“I saw one of those on Paul’s desk. He had a bunch of papers under it.”

“Makes a great paperweight.” She picked up such an object from her own desk and handed it to Annabel, who weighed it in her hand.

“But not a perfect weapon. You’d have to really be struck by this for it to kill you. An impetuous act,” Annabel said.

“What?”

“If a lead brick like this
was
the murder weapon, the murderer picked it up from Michele’s desk because it was handy. Not premeditated.”

“An argument that got out of hand?”

“Possibly. Mac was telling me this morning about another scandal in this division. Someone … a researcher eight or ten years ago? A disappearance or a murder?”

“John Bitteman. He wasn’t murdered, but he was a link, possibly, to what’s been going on.”

“No. How?”

“John was probably the first one here really to start digging into the Las Casas story. It was before my time; I’ve only been here six years. He was obsessed with Las Casas and the idea of his diaries.”

“But you say he wasn’t murdered. I thought—”

“They don’t know what happened to him. He disappeared. The police labeled it suspicious, but he was never found. As I recall, there was some evidence of foul play. His apartment had been ransacked, and there was blood, I believe. But without a body, I suppose they couldn’t officially label it murder.”

“And he’s never been found.”

“As far as I know. Some of the old-timers joke that the
Hispanic stacks are haunted by Bitteman.” She laughed. “There isn’t an official building in Washington that isn’t haunted by one ghost or another, including this one. Bitteman isn’t the only supposed ghost around here. You’ve heard about the miserly librarian who hid all his life’s savings in various books in the collection when LC was housed in the Capitol?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

They were interrupted by Dolores Marwede.

“Hi,” Annabel said as the librarian stepped into the office.

“Hello.” Dolores closed the door and leaned against a bookcase. “This is unreal,” she said. “You discovered the body, Annabel?”

“I’m afraid so. Have the police spoken with you yet?”

“No, but I was told to be available this morning. You?”

“Last night. Briefly. They’ll want more. I’m on my way now to Manuscripts to look at the Book of Privileges again.”

“The show must go on.”

“I was telling Annabel about our ghosts, Dolores.”

“Oh?”

“Our miserly poltergeist who hid his life savings in the stacks.” To Annabel: “Dolores is our resident expert on library ghosts.”