“Only what I’ve said, that it was autobiographical and possibly threatening to Harper’s reputation,” I replied.
“That’s what she was working on down there in Key West?”
“I would assume so. I can’t be certain,” I said.
He hesitated. “Well, I hate to tell you, but we didn’t find nothing like that inside her house.”
Even Wesley looked surprised. “The manuscript in her bedroom?”
“Oh, yeah.” Marino reached for his cigarettes. “I’ve glanced at it. Another novel with all this Civil War romance shit in it. Sure don’t sound like this other thing the doc’s describing.”
“Does it have a title or a date on it?” I asked.
“Nope. Don’t even look like it’s all there, for that matter. About this thick.”
Marino measured off about an inch with his fingers. “Got a lot of notes written in the margins, about ten more pages written in longhand.”
“We’d better take a second look through all of her papers, her computer disks, make sure this autobiographical manuscript isn’t there,” Wesley said. “We also need to find out who her literary agent or editor is. Maybe she mailed the manuscript to someone before she left Key West. What we’d better make sure of is that she didn’t return to Richmond with the thing. If she did and now it’s gone, that’s significant, to say the least.”
Glancing at his watch, Wesley pushed back his chair as he announced apologetically, “I’ve got another appointment in five minutes.”
He escorted us out to the lobby.
I couldn’t get rid of Marino. He insisted on walking me to my car.
“You got to keep your eyes open.”
He was at it again, giving me one of the “street smart” lectures he had given me numerous times in the past. “A lot of women, they never think about that. I see ’em all the time walking along and not having the foggiest idea who’s looking at ’em, maybe following ’em. And when you get to your car, have your damn keys out and look under it, okay? Be surprised how many women don’t think about that either. If you’re driving along and realize someone’s following you, what do you do?”
I ignored him.
“You head to the nearest fire station, okay? Why? Because there’s always somebody there. Even at two in the morning on Christmas. That’s the first place you head.”
Waiting for a break in traffic, I began digging for my keys. Glancing across the street, I noticed an ominous white rectangle under the wiper blade of my state car. Hadn’t I put in enough change?
Damn.
“They’re all over the place,” Marino went on. “Just start looking for ’em on your way home or when you’re running around doing your shopping.”
I shot him one of my looks, then hurried across the street.
“Hey,” he said when we got to my car, “don’t get hot at me, all right? Maybe you should feel lucky I hover over you like a guardian angel.”
The meter had run out fifteen minutes ago. Snatching the ticket off the windshield, I folded it and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
“When you hover back to headquarters,” I said, “take care of this, please.”
He was scowling at me as I drove off.
3
Ten blocks away I pulled into another metered space and dropped in my last two quarters. I kept a red MEDICAL EXAMINER plate in plain view on the dash of my state car. Traffic cops never seemed to look. Several months ago, one of them had the nerve to write me up while I was downtown working a homicide scene the police had called me to in the middle of the day.
Hurrying up cement steps, I pushed through a glass door and went inside the main branch of the public library, where people moved about noiselessly and wooden tables were stacked with books.
The hushed ambiance inspired the same reverence in me as it had when I was a child. Locating a row of microfiche machines halfway across the room, I began pulling up an index of books written under Beryl Madison’s various pen names and jotting down the titles. The most recent work, a historical novel set during the Civil War and published under the pen name Edith Montague, had come out a year and a half ago. Probably irrelevant, and Mark was right, I thought. Over the past ten years, Beryl had published six novels. I had never heard of a single one of them.