Classified as Murder Page 8

  TEN

  “Why not?” I asked, surprised. “I don’t know much about him, I’ll admit. I have to say, though, he’s treated me with respect and courtesy.”

  “He got good manners.” Azalea nodded. “I’ll give him that. But you don’t reckon a man makes that much money being nice to people, do you? They say he was mean as ole Satan himself when it come to business. Don’t nobody get in his way.”

  I hadn’t really thought about Mr. Delacorte as a businessman since I knew him only through our interactions at the public library. Though he was always pleasant, I had sensed a core of steel beneath the politeness.

  “He’s not still in business, is he?” Sean put his fork down on his empty plate.

  “No, he retired about ten years ago,” Azalea said. “When he turned seventy-five, I think it was.”

  “How does he treat his family? Like he did his business rivals?” Sean surprised me by taking such an interest in this gossip. Maybe he was coming out of his funk.

  Azalea’s response was tart. “He give ’em all a home, didn’t he? Miss Daphne, Mister Hubert, and Miss Eloise be done living in the poorhouse, Mr. James ain’t take ’em in.” She snorted. “Miss Daphne’s husband was some sorry excuse for a man. Couldn’t keep a job and took to drinking real bad. Drowned hisself in a swimming pool. And Mister Hubert ain’t much better than his daddy, ’cepting he ain’t bad to drink.”

  Sean regarded me quizzically. “Sounds like really nice folks you’re going to be associating with, Dad.”

  “You better heed my words, Mr. Charlie. Whatever time you spend in that house, you don’t turn your back on them people.”

  I tried to make light of the situation, though Azalea’s pronouncements about the family made me increasingly uneasy. “Diesel will be with me, and he’s as good as a watchdog.”

  Hearing his name, Diesel sat up and meowed.

  Azalea eyed my cat askance, clearly unimpressed by my claim. “He’s big, the good Lord knows.” She glanced at the clock. “I can’t be standing around here talking no more. I got to get the washing going. You mind what I told you now.” She headed for the laundry room.

  “Seriously, Dad,” Sean said the moment Azalea was out of earshot. “Are you really sure you want to get mixed up with this bunch? The more I hear about them, the more I think you were right in the first place. Why don’t you call Mr. Delacorte and tell him you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I’ll admit I’ve had some qualms.” I folded my linen napkin and laid it beside my plate. “But I decided that, as long as I can keep away from the rest of the family, I’ll make it through fine.”

  “What happens if Mr. Delacorte wants you to take tea with him and his family again? I know you, Dad. You’re too polite for your own good. You won’t be able to say no.”

  Did I imagine a slight edge of scorn in my son’s tone? My reply was a bit heated. “There’s nothing wrong with good manners. Mr. Delacorte is a gentleman. If I decline an invitation politely, he won’t press me to change my mind.”

  Sean rolled his eyes at that. “It’s all too Miss Manners for me. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I decided there was no point in delaying any longer as I stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I want to freshen up before I leave for the Delacorte house. Come on, Diesel.”

  “See you later,” Sean called out as Diesel and I left the kitchen.

  A few minutes before nine I parked in the shade of one of the massive live oaks that lined the Delacorte driveway. The tree had to be hundreds of years old, and there were others of similar size and age on the grounds, all of them festooned with Spanish moss. For a moment I fancied I had stepped backward in time a couple of centuries to around the time the house was first built.

  The sound of traffic on the nearby street and the mewing of my cat brought me back to reality. I released Diesel from his safety harness, grabbed my satchel, and got out of the car with my cat.

  I stood for a moment and stared at the facade of the house. After a couple of deep breaths, I headed up the walk. Diesel strode along beside me.

  Truesdale opened the door as I raised my hand to knock.

  “Good morning, Mr. Harris.” He stood back to allow me and Diesel to enter, then carefully shut the door behind us. “Mr. Delacorte awaits you in the library.”

  “Thank you, Truesdale,” I said. Before I could say that I knew the way and would announce myself, the butler headed toward the library.

  After all the English mysteries I’ve read, I should have realized there were no shortcuts with a butler. Diesel and I trailed in the man’s wake.

  Truesdale opened the door and advanced inside. “Mr. Harris is here, sir. With his companion.”

  James Delacorte rose from behind his desk as Diesel and I moved forward. “Good morning, Charlie. And Diesel.” He beamed as he gazed down at the cat. I was pleased to note that he seemed more chipper than he had on Saturday afternoon.

  “Good morning, Mr. Delacorte,” I said. Diesel warbled, and our host laughed.

  “What a charming sound.” Mr. Delacorte came around the desk to rub Diesel’s head.

  Truesdale coughed discreetly, and I turned to him.

  “Would you care for any refreshment, Mr. Harris?” The butler waited for my response, his face a polite mask.

  “Not at the moment, thank you,” I said. “Perhaps some water later, if it’s no trouble.”

  “Not at all, sir.” Truesdale gave a small bow before he turned to his employer. “Sir?”

  “That will be all for now, Nigel, thank you.” Mr. Delacorte waved his butler away. “I’ll ring if I need you.”

  “Of course, sir.” Truesdale bowed again and then left the room.

  “You’re certainly punctual,” Mr. Delacorte said. “A virtue, to my mind.” He returned to his chair behind the desk. “Please, sit.”

  I sat in the chair I’d occupied two days ago and set my satchel on the floor beside me. Diesel began to prowl around the room. I watched him for a moment, but he was not a destructive cat. I didn’t think he would be leaping onto shelves and knocking things off. He simply wanted to sniff out the room and see what it had to offer.

  Mr. Delacorte coughed gently, and I turned my attention to him.

  “Sorry, sir,” I said.

  I was about to assure him that Diesel wouldn’t damage anything when Mr. Delacorte spoke. “Not to worry. When I had a cat in the house, I always allowed it in this room. I never had a problem, other than the odd hairball.

  “Now, about the inventory,” he continued. “Over the years I have kept my own sort of catalog of the collection in these volumes, adding each acquisition as I made it.” He patted a stack of four leather-bound books, each about an inch thick, on the desk in front of him. “I suppose I should have computerized it at some point, but I am not fond of the things. I would much rather rely on my own way of doing things, old-fashioned as it may be.”

  “Are those volumes the only copy of your inventory?”

  My concern must have shown in my face. Mr. Delacorte chuckled. “No, there is a backup copy. My lawyer keeps it in his office, along with other important papers of mine. I bring the second copy up-to-date every couple of months. That’s one of the tasks for this week, as I have made several acquisitions in the past month that need to be included.”

  “Having a backup is always a good idea,” I said. “Whether it’s an electronic copy or a print one. At some point, if you like, I can work on creating a database for your collection so you can have an electronic version.” I didn’t add that the electronic version would have considerable more flexibility than his print one. How did he ever find anything in those volumes, unless he remembered exactly when he purchased each item in his collection, and in which order?

  The magnitude of the job hit me then. How did he expect to match the items on the shelves with the entries in his catalog? Unless his collection was arranged in accession order. That is, the first book he bought was the first
book on the first shelf, followed by the second book he bought, and so on through all his purchases and arranged in that order on all the shelves in the room.

  Or perhaps he had another system—some system, at least. Trying to inventory the collection would be chaos otherwise.

  I was never very good at playing poker, and Mr. Delacorte was watching me intently. He smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, Charlie. ‘How does he ever find anything?’ I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m afraid it’s the kind of thing that can give a librarian a headache.”

  “There is method in my record keeping, rest assured on that. Perhaps not the conventional way of doing things, but it has worked for me for over fifty years now.” He tapped the volumes in front of him. “Each of these books corresponds to a set of shelves in the room. The books are placed in accession order—isn’t that what librarians call it?—on the shelves to correspond with the entries in the book.”

  “That’s the right term,” I said, feeling much relieved. But Mr. Delacorte’s next words made my spirits sink all over again.

  “At least, they used to correspond,” he said, almost as if I hadn’t spoken. “I discovered last week that a number of the shelves have been rearranged, and now everything is quite mixed up.”

  ELEVEN

  This was bad news. It might take days—if not weeks—to get the books sorted out in accession order again.

  Rearranging the collection was malicious. The person who did this obviously understood the arrangement of the collection. A family member? That seemed the most likely answer.

  “Whole shelves?”

  “Not quite,” Mr. Delacorte replied. “What I should have said was that books were moved to shelves where they don’t belong. I noticed it because I spotted my copy of a later printing of The Bay Psalm Book, one of my earliest acquisitions, on a shelf containing items I purchased, oh, perhaps eight years ago.”

  How exciting, I thought. The Bay Psalm Book, metrical translations of the Psalms into English, was the first book still in existence printed in the American colonies. From what I could remember, there were only eleven known copies that have survived from that first edition printed in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was impressed that Mr. Delacorte owned a copy of even a later printing.

  I was so caught up in thinking about this one book that I had to force my attention back to the conversation at hand. “Do you have any sense of how extensive the rearrangement is?”

  “No,” he said. “But the shelf on which I found my Bay Psalm Book contained several other items from different periods of acquisition. My guess is that the rearrangement is fairly extensive.” His expression turned grim with that last statement.

  I certainly couldn’t blame him for that. His assumption made my stomach sink even further.

  “What day did you make your discovery?”

  “Wednesday,” Mr. Delacorte said promptly. “I returned home from a brief business trip to New York late Tuesday night. When I came into the library the following morning, I realized a mischievous hand had been at work in my absence.”

  “Did you confront your family about the prank?” That was a mild word for it, in my opinion.

  “Naturally, because they were all here while I was away,” Mr. Delacorte responded. “They all professed ignorance. I observed them as carefully as I could, and the only one whose reaction I found patently insincere was Stewart’s. He was quite a jokester as a child and adolescent. I thought he had grown out of it, but this is in line with the kind of joke he used to pull.”

  “Except in this case, it’s a costly joke—at least in terms of time,” I said.

  Diesel had finished his first tour of the library and came back to settle down on the floor beside me. As was my habit, I bent to stroke his head, and he warbled softly.

  “Indeed.” Mr. Delacorte’s face reddened—not much, but enough to make me fear a repeat of Saturday’s episode.

  “I’m sure we can soon make headway with returning the collection to its proper arrangement.” I put as much conviction in my voice as I could muster.

  “I devoutly hope so,” Mr. Delacorte said as the red faded away. “Perhaps now you understand my fears about thefts from the collection. At first glance, it might seem simply a thoughtless prank.”

  When he paused, I finished the thought. “But it could have been done to conceal a theft and make it harder to uncover.”

  Mr. Delacorte nodded.

  A thought struck me, and I felt sheepish. “There’s one important question I forgot to ask. Do you keep the library locked when you are not in here?”

  “I do,” he said. “The only other key to the room is in Nigel’s safekeeping.” He held up a hand. “And before you ask, no, I do not believe he is responsible. It was another member of the family.”

  There was no use arguing with him on that point, I could tell by his tone. “Was there any sign of forced entry?”

  Mr. Delacorte shook his head. “No. I have no idea how the miscreant obtained it, but he—or she—must have a key.”

  I agreed. “The first thing is to determine whether anything has actually been stolen. If a theft has occurred, you can call in the police.”

  “I would prefer not to involve the police,” Mr. Delacorte said, his expression pained. “I have little affection for my family, I will admit, but I would like to avoid the unpleasantness of a police investigation.”

  That was his call, and I wasn’t about to argue with him. I figured he could be preparing himself for the worst by saying that items had been stolen. Then when we discovered everything was still here, only jumbled around, he would be relieved.

  “I think we should start on the inventory, then,” I said. “But one more thing—the items in the cabinets. Are they in the inventory, too?”

  “No,” Mr. Delacorte said. “They are mostly maps and letters, things like that. I have a separate inventory for them. At the moment I’m not concerned about that part of my collection. It’s the books that are the most important overall.”

  “Then the books take priority.” I regarded my employer for a moment. “Let me start with the first volume of the inventory and do some searching, see what I can find. It might not be as extensive as you fear.”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Mr. Delacorte said with a slight smile. “I am pleased to have your help with this. I confess I considered it a daunting task to undertake on my own, and I didn’t want to involve Nigel. He has many other duties, and I knew he would fret about them while he was helping me in here.”

  “I’m more than happy to help,” I said as I stood. I didn’t remind him that he was paying me quite well for the work. “Now, the shelf—the one that signaled someone mixed up the books. Did you replace any of them in their proper positions?”

  “I started to,” Mr. Delacorte said. “I was so angry, however, that I found myself unable to think, and I decided to leave them alone until I found a capable assistant.” He paused a moment. “The Bay Psalm Book is in its proper place, however. That was as far as I got.”

  He extracted the inventory volume on the bottom of the pile on his desk and handed it to me.

  “The hard part for me with such a marvelous collection,” I said, “is going to be focusing on the task at hand, rather than sitting down with each and every item and poring through it.”

  Mr. Delacorte nodded. “I understand. And I promise, once we are done, you have an open invitation to come here and look over anything you like, for as long as you like.”

  “Thank you.” I hefted the inventory ledger in my right hand. It weighed four or five pounds. “Oh, and I suppose an explanation of how the ledgers correspond to the shelves would help. I should have asked that already.”

  Mr. Delacorte said, “Of course.” He rose from behind the desk and headed for the wall to the right of the door as one exited the library.

  The first ledger started with the first book on the top shelf and proceeded in order through five ranges of shelves. That
took us down the wall and on to the next, almost to the end, where the second ledger started. That was enough for now, I decided. One ledger at a time.

  This was going to be tedious. I rather relished the challenge, I had to admit. To bring order out of chaos—well, librarians have lived for that for thousands of years.

  I stood in front of the first shelf and opened the ledger while Mr. Delacorte returned to his desk. He said he was going to work on his correspondence while I started the inventory.

  The first page of the ledger was a title page that read simply “Collection of James S. Delacorte,” followed by his address. The handwriting was clearly and precisely formed, the letters neat and orderly. I turned the page to the first entry and found that it took up the entire page. I skimmed through the information on the copy of The Bay Psalm Book and whistled softly when I saw what Mr. Delacorte paid for it. A bargain. Then I realized he bought it fifty years ago. Adjusting for inflation, he had paid a hefty sum, even for a later edition.

  I verified that the book was indeed on the shelf. I was tempted to pull it off the shelf and delve inside, but I resisted. I turned the page to get to the second item, and I almost dropped the ledger because the title listed was a three-volume first edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , published in London in 1813. This was one of my all-time favorite novels, and the thought of holding a first edition thrilled me.

  That particular thrill would have to wait, I realized, when I examined the second book on the shelf. It was not part of a three-volume set, and it was also too tall—probably about thirty-seven centimeters, or fourteen-and-a-half inches, according to my trained eye. The binding was ravaged by time, and no title was visible. Before I handled it, I needed to be prepared.

  I retrieved my satchel from the chair where I’d been sitting, opened it, and extracted a box of cotton gloves and set them on the work table. I smiled to see Diesel now occupying my former place. He was curled up and twisted partway onto his back, sleeping. I set the satchel down and put on the gloves.