Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Daniel held his finger to his lips, playfully mocking his own profession. “We don’t like to talk about such things here. Libraries are in denial about the theft problem, in part because they can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s a great attitude.”

“A truly fail-safe security system is cost-prohibitive for a public library. And there are philosophical problems, too. It is a public library, after all, supported by tax dollars. How far do you want us to go, protecting our precious wares from the public who underwrites us? And even if you could keep the public from ripping you off, there are always going to be librarians who steal. No one likes to talk about it, but it happens.”

“Makes sense,” Tess said, although she had never thought about the issue before. Every profession harbored its miscreants: doctors, journalists, lawyers. Why should librarians be exempt from sin?

“Do you know about Stephen Carrie Blumberg?” Daniel asked as she continued to wander the room, wondering what she was doing there.

“No. Should I?”

“Not by name. But he’s the most infamous library thief of contemporary times. A bibliokleptomaniac.”

“A librarian?”

“No, yet he was better at taking care of things than some of the libraries from which he stole them. But he was sick, clinically. He actually entered a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea in his trial.”

“Did it work?”

“He was sent to federal prison. He got out a few years ago, and they wanted to make it a condition of his release that he announce himself to the staff whenever he visited a library or archive. I think someone figured out it was unconstitutional. Unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

“You sound almost as if you admired him,” Tess said.

“Me? No, not particularly. In fact, I know about him only because one of our librarians here was obsessed with the subject, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my former colleague, for obvious reasons. He rattled on about Blumberg all the time. Eventually, I became so curious I read A Gentle Madness, the Nicholas Basbanes book about bibliomania.” Daniel shrugged.

“I like books, but not that much. Sometimes I wondered if my former colleague was similarly inclined. Now I guess we’ll never know.”

“Excuse me?” Tess had only been half listening as she studied the books and artifacts, trying to think why her Visitor had sent her here. But she sensed the conversation had taken a turn she needed to follow.

“I’m sorry. I just assumed, when you said you were a private detective, that you knew…” Daniel looked embarrassed. “After all, the police have already been here, although no one could tell them much. They wanted a crash course in Poe, but Jeff Jerome at the Poe museum is better suited to that task. The thing is, no one here remembers Bobby ever speaking about Poe. H. L. Mencken was his passion-and his downfall.”

“Bobby Hilliard worked here? The paper never mentioned that.”

“His employment was kept quiet, for obvious reasons.”

“Obvious reasons?” Tess was beginning to feel like a parrot.

Daniel Clary looked around uneasily, although they were alone in the Poe room. “There was a confidentiality agreement, binding to both parties. I’m not supposed to talk about it, and I definitely shouldn’t be talking about it here. For obvious reasons.”

“Daniel, nothing about this is obvious to me, but I’d like to change that.”

Tell me everything you know about Bobby Hilliard,“ Tess demanded of Daniel Clary that evening, sitting next to him at the granite bar in Sotto Sopra.

He looked around uneasily, a fish out of water at the glamorous-for-Baltimore restaurant, although he had been momentarily poised enough to order a Moretti, an Italian beer. Tess also found Sotto Sopra intimidating, with its steady supply of beautiful people who appeared to have been bused from some other city. There was no one on the streets of Baltimore who looked like the diners at Sotto Sopra. But the restaurant had the twin advantages of proximity to the library and great risotto, so she had asked Daniel to meet her here.

“We weren’t particularly close,” he began slowly, pushing his glasses up his nose with his thumb. Tess couldn’t help noticing he had used a too-large screw to mend them on one side, which was why they kept sliding down. “He wasn’t at the Pratt very long. Not even a year, and that was four years ago. Four years. Which means I’ve been there for ten.”

“Ten? You look like you’re twenty-five.”

“I’m thirty-three. People always think I’m younger, though. Once it was irritating, but I find it less and less so.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Anyway, I guess I hadn’t thought about him for years. Our paths crossed only once, about six months ago. Would you believe he made more money working part-time as a waiter than I make working full-time? He loved telling me that.”

“Why did he leave in the first place?”

Daniel Clary’s face was so clear and guileless that Tess could watch the prospect of a lie pass over it, like a small wispy cloud drifting by the sun.

“The thing about library theft,” Daniel said, almost as if he were working this out for himself, “is that missing items come to light only when someone wants them, and years can go by before someone makes a request for a particular book. Just like the old song: We don’t know what we have until it’s gone. Bobby was suspected of taking dozens of things, but only one incident was ever proven.”

“Which was?”

He looked guilty, a little boy who remembers the admonishment not to tattle.

“We were working in the Mencken Room one day toward summer’s end, preparing for Mencken Day. That’s the one day the room is open to nonscholars, and we sometimes put out items that aren’t normally on display. Bobby and I were going through boxes of stuff. He was totally hipped on Mencken, knew quite a lot about him. He was telling me how he ended up in a feud with Dreiser, whose work Mencken loved-”

“He wrote an introduction to An American Tragedy,” Tess put in. “I found a copy at Kelmscott.”

Daniel nodded. Every Baltimore bibliophile knew Kelmscott, a used-book store.

“We came across a pillbox. It wasn’t a particularly interesting item in and of itself. It was said to have belonged to him, but it was china, with painted flowers, so who knows? He was sick for a long time before he died, and his wife had died before him. A pillbox would have raised allusions at odds with what we were trying to do, which was to put together a kind of visual display that would make visitors feel as if they had been inside Mencken’s head. An exhibit about his intellectual life, his writing life. People might get excited about looking at the typewriter on which he worked, or his desk. But a pillbox? It had no context.”

“It didn’t fit the myth,” Tess said. “You didn’t want people to think about the stroke and how he was incapacitated during those last years of his life.”

“Well, I’m not saying we were trying to propagandize-I don’t care that much for Mencken; the revelations about all that racist crap in his diaries kind of killed it for me-but we were trying to find a way to create a display that would work for the people who are passionate about his work.”

Tess was familiar with these esoteric debates about context and historic accuracy in museum displays. They bored her cross-eyed.

“Bobby agreed with me, although he went into this long soliloquy about how Mencken was something of a hypochondriac. Apparently, when Al Capone was hospitalized here, Mencken would badger Capone’s doctors for confidential information about his condition. He was fascinated with the case.”