DEAD GIVEAWAY

​

By Roman Sympos

 

1.

​

“Yes, this is one of ours,” said the clerk at Beauport Books, a neurasthenic young man with blonde-streaked hair and patches of beard. He peered more closely at the credit slip, then turned to his laptop.

 

Hart feared the clerk might recognize the name on the slip and know what Bob Seeburg looked like, so he’d prepared an explanation.

 

He’d start with the truth: he was impersonating Bob Seeburg because he was too embarrassed to confess he was cashing in a dead man’s credit slip, like some kind of book buzzard.

 

He’d acquired the slip honestly enough, thanks to an old high school friend, Monica Spinoza. Monica was a friend of Bob Seeburg’s husband, Larry Conant, who’d asked her to make a first pass through the dead man’s effects. He was too shaken to do it himself. “You know what a pack rat he was,” Larry told her. “If you could just cull out the receipts, the recipes, the jars of bent paper clips. . . the junk. I’ll get to the rest when I can bear it.” Larry knew Monica and Bob had been close, so he told her to keep anything that struck her fancy. The bookstore credit slip put her in mind of the only bibliophile she knew.

 

The clerk put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and looked at Hart as if for the first time, all six feet-five, three hundred pounds of him, blocking the aisle.

 

“We’ve been trying to reach you, Mr. Seeburg,” said the clerk, “but your phone keeps going to voice mail. Says here that you’d call and tell us what you want us to do with the books we didn’t buy. Do you want them, or should we put them on the giveaway rack?”

 

Hart wasn’t surprised to hear that Seeburg’s phone was as dead as its owner. It’d been submerged for hours in the salt-water estuary where his car was discovered a couple of weeks ago.

 

“Could I take another look?”

 

The rejects, he was told, had marginalia and underlining—automatic disqualifications at Beauport Books. Not for Hart, though. He’d always found that kind of thing interesting, and sometimes useful in his line of work.

 

Unfortunately, the titles were all hard-boiled detective and crime stories. Not his drawer. Being a detective himself, he found pulp fiction unrealistic, despite prevailing opinion to the contrary. He’d never met a client he didn’t like and he’d only encountered a gun—well, several of them—once in his career.  Tough? He was anything but. He preferred Dickens to Dashiell Hammett. Add to that, tropical fish and chess puzzles.

 

“Philip Marlowe plays chess,” Monica told him.

 

Soft-boiled, if anything. Egg-shaped. An egghead.

 

Not long ago he was entirely raw, a Junior Operative in Continental Investigations’ Boston office, where Monica was working the front desk. She’d gotten him hired and he’d done her proud, rising to Senior Operative in just two years on the strength of a complicated embezzlement and murder case. The Great Pandemic Resignation put an end to Continental’s Boston branch and left the young man adrift. Eventually he washed up here in Gloucester on Cape Ann, at the tip of Boston’s North Shore. Monica and her husband, Sam Tull, another old friend, along with their two-year-old daughter, Portia, ended up in Manchester-By-The-Sea, just over the line.

 

Pawing through the rejects, Hart’s eye landed on James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Monica, a hard-boiled fan, had been urging him to read. “Yeah, it’s violent, but so’s Oliver Twist. Bill Sykes?” Monica hugged herself and shivered, shaking her blonde curls. “And this has real merits. Layers, you know? And it’s short.”

 

He picked the slim paperback out of the box.

 

The clerk finished ringing up Hart’s stack of books. There were only two: a glossy illustrated volume on rare aquarium fish (“the Galaxy Rasbora is native to Myanmar . . .”) and a book about the Gloucester poet, Charles Olson.

 

“You still have $15 in credit,” said the clerk.

 

“I guess I need another credit slip,” said Hart.

 

As the clerk made the slip out to “Robert Seeburg,” Hart reflected on the fact that even if it read “Theodore P. Hart” it would be inaccurate, since that wasn’t his real name either. It had been made up on the spur of the moment by someone who didn’t know his real name, and Hart had just recently decided to make it legal. He’d found out at the conclusion of the embezzlement case that his life could be in danger, and a month ago something happened to make the danger palpable. Monica and Sam had already started calling him “The Op”—short for “The Operative”—playing on his new first name and middle initial: “TheO P.”  They thought it was cute.

 

#

 

Hart was a new Gloucester resident, but Gloucester wasn’t new to him. He’d visited on summer vacations when he was a boy, long before there was a Beauport Books. This had been his first visit to the bookstore and he’d found the place hard to maneuver in. Next time he’d come when it was less crowded.  It had interesting stuff on local history and the city’s writers and poets, like Olson.

 

And it was close by, a few blocks down Main Street from his newly renovated apartment. This was on the second floor of what used to be the local branch of the Elks Club. Hart’s office was also on Main Street, which made life easier for someone who couldn’t afford a car, or even fit in most of them.

 

Gloucester was much as he remembered it. The major sights were still there—the fisherman’s statue on Stacy Boulevard, the Stage Fort monument at Half Moon Beach, and the “summer cottages” (mansions, more like) across the harbor, in East Gloucester.

 

Fort Point, though, once home to immigrant families working the docks and decks of the city’s fishing industry, was rapidly gentrifying in the shadow of a new hotel. Commercial fishing was barely a memory. Main Street and Rogers Street, on the waterfront, were brimming with brew pubs and pasta stores and vinegar-and-oil boutiques and chocolatiers. Whale watch boats had replaced the trawlers in the Inner Harbor. Tourism was Gloucester’s main industry now. The city was quickly becoming a blue-collar version of quaint, picture-postcard-perfect Rockport, just to the north.

 

Some remnants of the glory days hung on. The Italian bakery below Hart’s office, for instance, and The Crow’s Nest, a bar and overnight bed-sit for sailors and fishermen, now a tourist destination thanks to Sebastian Junger’s best-seller, The Perfect Storm. The shuttered Elks Club was a mute testament to the passing of a way of life: parochial, calloused, civic-minded, devout, and, for better or worse, run by men.

 

After feeding his fish (he had a 30-gallon tank in the dining room) and then himself (he had a dozen Hungry Man trays stacked in the freezer), Hart sat back in his La-Z-Boy to read Postman.

 

The style was simple and straightforward and colloquial, but that was ok. He wasn’t wedded to any particular style, Dickens notwithstanding. Hemingway was simple, too, but, as Monica would say, he had layers. Hart wasn’t sure Cain did.  Still, he found himself intrigued despite his aversion to the protagonist, Frank Chambers, who’d just rolled off a hay-truck after a week-long bender in Tiajuana before introducing himself to the reader on page one. On the next page Chambers was conning a free meal at a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere, and on the page after that he was hitting on the owner’s nubile wife, Cora.

 

Despite his distaste, Hart couldn’t put the book down. The young drifter and the pouty sex-kitten represented an American type that had always fascinated him because it was so foreign to his own personality, a mystery more challenging than any Whodunit.

 

This was the type that mistook violence for power and impulse for freedom. What Frank and Cora didn’t realize, thought Hart, was that giving way to impulse is the worst kind of bondage, impeding your ability to think rationally and anticipate your next move. It didn’t expand your autonomy. It restricted it. And sure enough, when Frank persuades Cora to help him murder her husband so they can shack up together, the plan goes haywire, almost landing them both in the slammer.

 

Hart was also intrigued by Bob Seeburg’s hand-written marginalia. Small, neat, and precise, it seemed to anticipate the detective’s own line of thought. For example, “Right. Didn’t think of this, did you?” appeared next to the paragraph where Frank’s scheme begins to go off the rails. Later, after Frank has hatched an even more elaborate, supposedly fool-proof plan to murder Cora’s husband, Seeburg had written, “Another idea too complicated for its own good.” And so it turned out to be. A few pages further on, just as Frank’s second plan starts to unravel, the comment read, “If he weren’t an idiot, this could work.”

 

What made the marginalia doubly intriguing was the resemblance between Frank’s second scheme—to push the husband’s car off a cliff with the man lying dead inside it—and Bob Seeburg’s own manner of death.

 

Seeburg’s 1960 MG A had been discovered in the predawn hours of a Monday in June, up to its hubcaps in mud at the bottom of the Stoney Cove estuary. The dead man was slumped over in the driver’s seat with the windows cranked down. He’d apparently drowned, but the tide was low, so police assumed the car had gone in at some point at or near high tide, in the middle of the night and presumably off the left side of Presson Point, just a few feet away. Fresh skid marks in the dirt pointing in that direction supported the idea. A deep bruise on his forehead suggested that Seeburg had been knocked unconscious by the steering wheel when the car hit the water. The MG predated airbags but had been equipped with seat belts at some point. The victim hadn’t fastened his.

 

“He never did,” said Larry, when the police came to deliver the news. They’d had to look at the car’s registration to find the victim’s home address, because Bob had forgotten his wallet. “He always did,” said Larry.

 

A canvass of the area, including the few waterfront homes on the other side of the cove, yielded no leads. No one had seen or heard anything.

 

For lack of any positive evidence indicating otherwise, the coroner ruled the death a suicide. There was brackish water in Bob’s lungs and nothing to suggest that the blow to his head had been delivered by anything besides the steering wheel. The entrance to Presson Point was little more than a gap in the guard rail along the Route 128 causeway heading into Gloucester, just before you reached Rust Island and the A. Piatt Andrew Bridge.  You had to slow way down, move over to the breakdown lane, and make a sharp right turn to get there. Bob couldn’t have veered off the road by accident. He’d turned in deliberately. The skid marks in the dirt were left by a vehicle that had accelerated rapidly from a standing stop, pedal to the floor, heading straight for the water.

 

Blood samples showed high levels of hydroxyzine, a prescription drug Bob was taking for insomnia, according to his doctor. “He’d been depressed and anxious for weeks, and was eating it like candy,” said Larry, who awakened that morning to find Bob missing from the other side of the bed and the police at his door. Bob usually slept in while Larry fixed breakfast. “I wasn’t surprised that he was up, though,” Larry told Monica. “He was doing that a lot, lately, getting up in the middle of the night. Said the drug wasn’t helping, no matter how much he took.”

​

The remains of the deceased were cremated, as he’d wished, the day after the coroner issued his report. There would be a memorial service at a later date.

 

#

 

Lawrence Conant and Robert Seeburg had met as faculty members at Horton College, in nearby Wenham. Conant, in his 50s and the younger of the two by twelve years, taught piano in the Music Department and was a virtuoso performer well-known on the North Shore and throughout greater Boston. He appeared regularly at the Rockport Summer Music Festival and still cut a dashing figure on stage, with his shoulder-length hair, now streaked with gray, flying in every direction and his powerful, agile hands leaping high as they rushed up and down the keyboard. He was famous for his daring improvisations ad libitum.

 

Bob, who’d retired a year ago, was a distinguished historian and prize-winning author of half a dozen books on the heretical sects of Medieval Europe. In sharp contrast to Larry’s charismatic, Bohemian personality and imposing physique, Bob was diminutive, quiet, bespectacled, and self-contained. He dressed conservatively and was known for his acerbic wit. “The little man’s weapon of choice,” as he put it once in a discussion of Napoleon’s bon mots, then paused before adding, “when your army is busy elsewhere.”  Fastidious to a fault, he never threw anything away. His taste for lurid crime and detective fiction baffled all who knew him.

 

The two had been married for seven years the night Bob died.

 

“They were Cape Ann’s version of The Odd Couple,” said Monica. This was at The Squawking Gull the morning after Hart’s visit to the bookstore.

 

The two of them were sitting near the window, Hart still in his overcoat. He never took it off in restaurants or cafés, especially sitting at a table. Without it he looked like a beach ball perched on a spool of thread.

 

He stared blankly.

 

“You know,” prompted Monica. “Oscar and Felix?”

 

Nothing.

 

“Neil Simon?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Neil fuckin’ Simon, Theo.”

 

Monica sighed and took a sip of coffee. She could never tell where Hart’s indifference to popular culture began or ended. Often it seemed limitless.

 

At the Berklee School of Music she’d been exposed to every genre and medium of performance, at every talent level. She’d never made it as a pop singer (although she still appeared now and then at local venues), but her switch to a business track had kept her steadily employed and her broad musical education had helped her master the arts of life by opening her up to whatever it had to offer. In particular, Berklee gave her something to talk about with Larry, whom she met at a birthday party for a mutual acquaintance. They bonded over Chopin. In two years, she’d gotten to know The Odd Couple well, and found herself, for some reason, the special target of Bob’s affection.

 

“He said I reminded him of a portrait of the Virgin Mary by some medieval painter, Roger somebody.”

 

“Van Der Weyden,” said Hart.

 

He understood. Monica was beautiful in a way that went beyond mere sex appeal, which she had in abundance. Blonde, statuesque, and ideally proportioned, she looked, to Hart, more like Botticelli’s Venus than the Virgin Mary. Hart got the Virgin Mary part, though. That air of total innocence. Gay men as well as straight, women as well as men, L, G, B, Q or any other letter of the alphabet—people were drawn to Monica the way you’d be drawn to the first daffodil of spring.

 

But there was a bee in the blossom: Monica didn’t suffer fools gladly. And when she spoke her mind, it was often in expletives.

 

Innocent? Yes. But not naïve.

 

Sam was one of the only two men Hart knew who understood her, Hart being the other. But Hart never wanted to marry her.

 

“So, was I right about Postman?” she asked.

 

Hart nodded. He'd finished it in one night. “But not for the reason you think.”

 

He explained about the marginalia.

 

“You think that’s where Bob got the idea?”

 

“It’s a pretty amazing coincidence otherwise.”

 

He asked about Bob’s state of mind. “You said Larry thought he was worried and anxious. Did he seem that way to you?”

 

“No, but it was hard to tell with Bob,” Monica replied. “He kept so much of himself buttoned up inside that Harris tweed sport coat. If anyone could unbutton it, though, it’d be Larry. I’ll bet he often did.” She raised her eyebrows, Groucho-like. “And other things.”

 

“The Harris tweed, the British sports car—sounds like an Anglophile. I’m surprised he wouldn’t go for Marple over Marlowe or Cain.”

 

“He devoted his professional career to studying heretics and outcasts—hanging with the bad boys.”

 

“But if he was so finicky, how could he bring himself to deface his precious book collection with marginalia?”

 

“I think that was the combative academic coming out, knocking heads together. He called his scribbles ‘conversations with the dead.’  More like brawls. He liked to pick a fight, intellectually. Couldn’t help himself.” 

 

She paused to sip her coffee before continuing.

 

“His collection is vast. It takes up two big rooms in that house of theirs at the top of Rust Island. Do you know the place?”

 

“Haven’t done the Rust Island tour yet.”

 

“Fifteen rooms, cantilevered, glass and I-beams and cables, with floor to ceiling views in every direction. Scandal of the neighborhood.”

 

“I didn’t know Gordon College paid their faculty so well.”

 

“Bob’s from wealth. Was. Old wealth. Brahmins.”

 

“Doesn’t sound like Bob’s style. The house, I mean.”

 

“It’s not. It’s all Larry Conant.” She took a bite of her croissant and gulped it down with another sip of coffee.

 

“Anyway, Larry’s been trying to get him to whittle down the collection. Ever since Bob retired, Larry’s been pestering him to move to New York. He only stayed at Gordon because Bob enjoyed the life—the teaching, the writing. Larry feels held back, he told me once. Here in the boonies. A big frog in a little pond. Once they were free of Gordon, he wanted one last chance to see how far he could get on a bigger stage than the Shaylin Liu.”  She was referring to the stunning, but small, auditorium that Rockport Music had recently built for its events. “He thought they should start jettisoning the stuff they don’t really need or use, in preparation," said Monica. "Bob’s money wouldn’t buy them more than a walk-in closet in Manhattan.”

 

“Was Bob on board with the idea?”

 

“Not according to Larry. His family came over on the first boat after the Mayflower. His ancestors are lying in Sleepy Hollow.” This was the cemetery in Concord where Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne were buried.

 

“But he did start getting rid of his books,” observed Hart.

 

“Apparently.”

 

Hart was silent for a moment. Then he said, “So maybe he gave in after all.”

 

He’d taken only two bites of his blueberry muffin. He wasn’t hungry, and he should have been. They both knew what that meant. There was a problem here that needed solving.

 

“Could that have been why he was anxious and depressed?” he asked. “Because they were leaving Gloucester?”

 

“Could be. Not enough to kill himself, though. He did have something on his mind, last time we talked, but I didn’t want to pry. Guess I should have.”

 

As they were leaving, Hart asked, “What did Larry say when you showed him the credit slip?”

 

“He was off doing errands when I found it. There was a grad student there who was helping him pack up Bob’s library. They didn’t know how long Larry would be gone and I had to leave before he got back. But he did tell me I could keep whatever I wanted.” Monica shrugged. “So.”

 

“I’d feel better if he knew you gave it to me.  Could you tell him, next time you see him?”

 

#

 

The next morning Hart and Sam were standing next to each other just inside the entrance to Presson Point, arms crossed, looking out at the estuary. Low clouds scudded overhead and a vicious wind rustled the tops of the trees in the Stoney Cove Reservation, whose entrance was just to their right. The scene was bleak and littered with junk. A rusted hibachi. A broken milk crate. A piece of battered plywood lay across the trail leading into the woods, about thirty yards in. A plastic bag caught on a sapling nearby was flapping like a tattered banner. The place had seen better days.

 

Hart asked Sam to join him because Sam knew something about cars. Expensive cars and collectibles, like Bob’s MG. He’d once owned a BMW, the only one in Boston with a “Black Lives Matter” bumper sticker. He’d also owned a ‘58 Corvette and one of the original Teslas. That was when he was working at Parker and Houk, a corporate law firm in the Financial District. He gave it all up, and a lot more that no longer mattered to him, when he married Monica. She had only one condition: that he sell his cars and use the money, along with what remained of his earnings at P & H, to help her start a legal aid non-profit.

 

“Where dat be goin’?” asked Sam, pointing to the path. He still affected AAVE on occasion, despite his middle-class Evangelical upbringing and Harvard degrees. He and his older brother had grown up in Roxbury, where fluency in the patois was helpful to avoid trouble.  These days he used it only with his White friends, as if to say, “I ain’t your Oreo.” Hart heard it less frequently now that Sam and Monica had a two-year-old at home learning to speak.

 

“It leads to some houses along the estuary. Over there.” Hart pointed across the marshy foreshore. Monica had told him that Larry and Bob sometimes took their afternoon walks in the Reservation. Rust Island was just a few hundred yards away, along the 128 causeway. Maybe this spot meant something to Bob. Maybe that’s how he’d ended up here.

 

Hart and Sam walked out along the eroding earthworks of the abandoned jetty, which now, at high tide, was submerged at its far end. Sam was looking closely at the huge granite blocks lining the left side, the mooring side.

 

“Some big gaps here between the granite and the dirt,” he said, pointing. “You’d have to accelerate quickly and aim carefully to clear them without getting stuck. Or flipping over.” He looked over the edge. “And in the dark, too. I’m surprised that old roadster had the pep.”

 

“Looks like it must have,” said Hart.

 

Sam studied the scene for another minute or two. Rain had washed out the skid marks since the accident.

 

“Yeah, I can see it,” said Sam, looking around him. “Not a sure thing, but not impossible.”

 

“He wouldn’t have been thinking ‘possible’ or ‘impossible.’ I doubt he came here meaning to kill himself, but once he got here, the thought . . . .”

 

Sam nodded. “It must have occurred to him before, if what you say about his state of mind is true.”

 

Before they left, Hart walked up the trail and looked under the plywood. “It’s dry under there now,” he told Sam when he got back to the car.

 

He left Presson Point the same way he’d arrived: lying flat on his back in the cargo area of Sam’s Prius, like a corpse in a hearse. He couldn’t fit in the passenger seat.

 

On their way to Hart’s office, Sam asked why he was so interested in the death of Bob Seeburg.

 

“Something’s not right,” said Hart.

 

“I thought so.”

 

“You see it, too?”

 

“Nope. I see that you’re looking peaked.”

 

Sam waited for Hart to continue. When he didn’t, he asked, “So what’s not right?”

 

Hart explained about Larry’s desire to move to New York, and Bob’s reluctance.

 

“As for the anxiety and depression, we only have Larry’s word for it. Monica saw no sign of it. Just that Bob seemed to have something on his mind.”

 

“I see where you’re going with this.”

 

“You do?”

 

“But it doesn’t sound like a strong enough motive. Kill your spouse because he doesn’t want to move to New York? And do it . . . .”

 

“I think Bob was resigned to . . . .”

 

“. . . by getting him to kill himself? And what about the notes in the book?  It’s pretty clear where Bob got the idea.”

 

“But the notes tell us he thought it was a bad idea.”

 

“Yeah, if you’re an ‘idiot’ trying to get away with murder, maybe. But as a way to kill yourself, it could work. Did work.  He probably remembered it while he was sitting there, with the engine idling.”

 

“But I think he’d given in, to the idea of New York. I think he was getting ready to go with Larry. Otherwise, why bring books to Beauport Books?”

 

“If that’s so, then Larry killing Bob, or somehow getting him to kill himself, makes no sense at all.”

 

#

 

Hart was briefing a client in his office later that morning—a surveillance case involving a wonky disability scam—when his phone rang. The client, an attractive claims adjuster, reached for hers, but stopped midway.

 

“That’s your ringtone, too?” he asked, after glancing at his phone and letting it go to voicemail. He didn’t recognize the number.

 

The client shrugged. “I like Mendelssohn.”

 

“But the Hebrides Overture? What are the chances?”

 

“I like to sail. You?”

 

“I get seasick. But I do like the ocean. I mean, looking at it.”

 

The client consulted her watch.  He’d never been good at small talk—especially with women—except on subjects of shared interest. Sometimes not even then. One of the things that didn’t interest him much, truth to tell, was sex, and he suspected they knew it. Still, he liked women, liked being around them.

 

He had two more appointments before lunch. When the last one left, he checked his voicemail. The call was from Larry Conant.  Monica had just told him about the credit slip, and he wanted to know if Hart remembered any of the titles of the books Bob had tried to sell.

 

“I’m combing through his bookshelves,” said Conant, “making a selection of his favorites, to remember him by. I’m wondering if there were any rejects that Bob was supposed to pick up. If you happen to know, could you call me back when you have a chance? Thanks!”

 

Hart still wasn’t very hungry, but he called Monica anyway to see if she was in town that morning, still helping Larry with Bob’s stuff. She was, so he asked her out to lunch.

 

“So soon?” she asked. “We just did lunch yesterday.”

 

“My treat,” he said.

 

“In that case, let’s make it Branzino.”

 

Branzino was an upscale Italian seafood place too expensive for either of them. But Hart wasn’t planning to have more than a bowl of soup, and he had some questions that only Monica could answer.

 

He'd just found himself a perch on a stool at the only table available—he was too big to fit in a booth—when Monica came striding in with a big smile on her face. Her long curls were bouncing behind her, trying to keep up.

 

“Guess what?” she said.

 

“What?”

 

“No, guess.”

 

“Portia is reading the New York Times.”

 

She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a check. She held it up with a dramatic flourish.

 

Hart turned his massive torso to look and came close to falling off his stool. Regaining his balance, he peered closely, then blew through his pursed lips–the nearest thing he could manage to a whistle.

 

“Five figures.”

 

“I finished going through Bob’s belongings and I was about to leave when Larry asked me to wait. His checkbook was open by the time I caught on. I told him, no, absolutely not. I did it as a favor, you know?”

 

Hart nodded. “Out of respect for Bob, and as a friend.”

 

“So he asked if he could make a contribution to NOSLA instead.”  This was “’North Shore Legal Aid,” Sam and Monica’s non-profit.  “But never . . . .” She turned the check around to read it again, as if she still couldn’t believe it.  “Fuckin’ A,” she said. Then she stuck it deep in her bag and sat down across from Hart.

 

“He said it was time to put Bob’s money to better use than buying ‘tepid pornography.’  Those were his words.”

 

“I take it he’s not a fan.”

 

“He’s like you. Hates it. Hates the violence, the sex. Says it’s boring. He knows I’m in Bob’s camp so he likes to tease me about it.”

 

“What doesn’t he like?”

 

“He says there’s nothing interesting about physical pain. It’s not an emotion, like love or envy or fear. There’s nothing complicated about it. It just comes in different shapes and sizes. He felt the same way about the sex scenes. They’re all the same, he’d tell me—no dialogue, just panting and clichés.”

 

“Sounds like he knew a lot about it, for someone who hated reading it.”

 

“He’s like you. And Bob was like me—always urging him to give it a chance.”

 

“Could you let me see that check again?”

 

She took it out and held it up.

 

Hart shook his head. “Wow,” he said in a monotone. He went on to tell her that Larry had been in touch, about the credit slip.

 

“I told him as soon as I showed up this morning,” Monica said. “He didn’t mind at all and asked what I’d bought. I told him I gave it to you because old books weren’t my thing. I can’t even keep up with the new books.”

 

Once the server had taken their orders, Hart asked Monica if the grad student was there again this morning, still packing up the “tepid pornography.”

 

“His name is Hal. Not sure why he was still there. The shelves were empty by the time I arrived.”

 

“Which volumes did Larry decide to keep?”

 

“From what I could tell, I don’t think he kept any. Like I said, he hated that stuff.”

​

#

 

Early the next morning, before leaving for work, Hart returned Larry Conant’s call.

 

“Anything in particular you’re interested in?” he asked, after apologizing for the delay.  

 

“The Postman Always Rings Twice, as I recall, was one of Bob’s all-time favorites,” replied Conant.

 

“I just finished reading it,” said Hart. “Can’t say it’s one of mine. Sorry.”

 

“A man after my own taste,” said Conant.

 

In the background, Hart could hear a piano hesitantly repeating the same phrase. Something of Bartók’s, an etude from Mikrokosmos, thought Hart. One of the difficult ones.

 

They arranged to meet later that morning at Beauport Books.

 

“I’ll be at the giveaway shelves out front. I can show you which books I left there. I’ll bring the Cain with me.”

 

“How will I recognize you?” asked Larry.

 

“You can’t miss me,” replied Hart.

 

#

​

Hart was glad the giveaway shelves were outside, and not just because it was a warm, sunny day. Maneuvering in the narrow aisles of the bookshop would have been difficult, not to mention keeping their conversation sotto voce. There was only one other customer in the vicinity, a middle-aged, nondescript man in a Bruins windbreaker, but he was sitting about twenty feet away in a sagging upholstered armchair, examining one of the giveaways. Hart couldn’t see the title.

 

“You were right,” said a booming voice. “You’re hard to miss.”

 

Hart looked up and saw a tall, handsome, powerfully built man. He had long, black wavy hair that was graying at the temples, and he wore a dark gray quarter-zip pulled over a white, open-necked shirt. His eyes were an electric blue.

 

“Larry Conant,” he said, extending one big hand. Hart took it and introduced himself. Conant’s fingers wrapped around his as smoothly and snugly as butcher paper around a pound of frankfurters. His whole body seemed to vibrate with restrained power. Hart understood now what Monica meant when she spoke of the pianist’s stage presence.

 

“Is that it?” said Conant, letting go and nodding at the book in Hart’s other hand. The detective had his index finger tucked inside.

 

“Yes, and these are the other rejects.” He gestured to four more volumes stacked at the end of a shelf.

 

“Thank you for going to all this trouble,” said Conant, reaching out for the book. Hart kept it at his side.

 

“You know,” he said, “it would be nice to get a little remuneration, in addition to the thanks. For going to all this trouble.”

 

Conant seemed taken aback, but he recovered quickly.  He smiled, revealing a gleaming row of straight white teeth. “Of course, how inconsiderate of me,” he said. Still smiling, he pulled out his wallet. “Would ten dollars cover it?”

 

“Let’s make it ten thousand.”

 

The smile disappeared.

 

“No?” asked Hart.  “How about twenty?”

 

Conant’s face began to turn red. He gave a little laugh.

 

“I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny,” he said, “but it strikes me as in very poor taste to joke about . . . .”

 

“I’m not joking,” said Hart. He pointed again to the little stack of giveaways at the end of the shelf. “Pick one up.”

 

Conant picked up The Killer Inside Me, which was lying on top.

 

“Open it,” said Hart.

 

“Where should . . . “

 

“Anywhere.”

 

Conant opened the book.

 

“Read what it says in the margin, on the left-hand page.”

 

Conant stared at the page, but didn’t say a word.

 

“You can’t, can you? Because it’s practically illegible.”

 

Conant looked up.

 

“They’re all like that,” said Hart.  “Except this one.” He held up the book in his hand and opened it at the place where he’d stuck his index finger.  “The notes in the others are unreadable,” he added, “because the man who wrote them—the only man who could read them—is dead.”

 

Conant closed The Killer Inside Me and placed it back on the little pile at the end of the shelf.

 

 “OK,” he muttered.

 

“Sorry. I can’t hear you.” Hart leaned forward, peering at him.

 

“Yes,” said Conant. “Twenty thousand.”

 

“For this rare, annotated copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

 

“Yes.” said Conant, keeping his voice low. “I don’t have it with me, of course. And I can’t get an amount like that from an ATM. I’ll have to get my checkbook and meet you somewhere.”

 

“Before we make the arrangements, I have one more request.” Hart paused. “I guess it’s more of a demand.”

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“Why? Why did you kill him?”

 

Conant was silent but turning redder by the second. Was it shame? Or rage?

 

“You won’t get this if you don’t tell me,” said Hart, holding up the book. “I’m a detective, as Monica may have told you—not the nice kind, as you can see.  Still, I have an inquiring mind, and it wants to know.”

 

More silence.

 

“Or I can just walk away.” Hart placed the slim volume in his coat pocket and lumbered toward the sidewalk. “I know people who’ll be interested in reading it.”

 

“For love,” Conant said, raising his voice. “I did it for love.”

 

Hart turned around and walked back.

 

“For Hal?”

 

Conant’s eyes widened in astonishment.

 

“You killed your husband of seven years so you could run off with . . . .”

 

“Keep your voice down,” Conant hissed, moving closer and opening his huge hands as if to clutch the lapels of Hart’s overcoat. The detective looked down at them and saw they could span an octave with ease, maybe even his own twenty-inch neck. Too bad he’d never hear them playing Rachmaninoff. The thought almost made him regret what was about to happen.

 

Conant lowered his hands. “I did it because he wouldn’t let me go.”

 

“You mean, with any money to your name?”

 

“Speaking of money . . . ”

 

They turned and saw the man in the Bruins windbreaker standing next to them.

 

“That’s worth a lot more than twenty thousand dollars,” he said, nodding at the book in Hart’s pudgy hand.  “I’d say it’s priceless.”

 

Then he held up his badge and introduced himself.

 

 

2.

 

“I guess it was when Monica told me Bob didn’t want to go to New York.”

 

Hart was sitting, coatless, in a spacious wicker armchair on the veranda behind the Alcott Inn, in Rockport, with Sam and Monica and Detective Lieutenant Peter Fallon. They’d finished dinner and were taking their time, lingering over drinks in the shadow of the hotel. It had lengthened as they ate and now engulfed the back lawn and the pool area. Soon it would encroach on the stone wall beyond, where the land fell away to the blue waters of Sandy Bay. 

 

Hart had polished off two appetizers, a cobb salad, a bowl of chowder, and a chocolate mousse, along with his entrée. He was off his fast and had a lot of skipped meals to make up for.

 

At Hart’s request, they’d agreed to save their questions until postprandial drinks were served, so he could eat and not talk. Until then it would be the latest news, polite inquiries, comments on the lovely evening.

 

“How so?” asked Fallon, tapping his cigarette on the edge of his plate.  “Can’t people change their minds?”

 

He was middling in appearance in every way: not tall and not short, neither fat nor thin. Middle-aged with gray eyes and gray hair cut close to his scalp. He had crow’s feet but his brow was smooth. His mouth, at rest, turned up at one end and down at the other, as though he were listening to a joke inside his head. He’d left his Bruins windbreaker at home and was wearing an off-the-rack blue suit. It didn’t hide his paunch, just made him look more like the veteran police detective he was. He had the raspy voice of a chain smoker. That was why he’d suggested they sit outside, on the veranda, where the chairs were also wide and cushioned, saving Hart the embarrassment of having to ask. As the four of them talked and the shadows grew, Fallon lit each of his cigarettes from the one before.

 

“It didn’t make sense that Bob would be getting rid of his books if he planned on staying here,” Hart continued. “But Larry said he was losing sleep, taking hydroxyzine. And then he killed himself.  So which was it? Had he agreed to go to New York? Getting rid of his books says he had. If so, what was keeping him up at night? Something really serious if the cure was prescription drugs.”

 

“Conant told us what, after pleading guilty,” Fallon chimed in. “Harold Babcock, his grad student. And lover.”

 

“And not the first, either,” said Hart. “Bob was used to them, these infatuations. They didn’t last. But this was different. Larry asked for a divorce. He’d be moving to New York with Hal, not Bob. Or his library.”

 

“Was Hal in on it?” asked Sam.

 

“Nothing so far connects him to the murder,” said Fallon, “and Conant didn’t implicate him.”

 

“But if Bob wasn’t moving to New York, why would he be selling his library?” asked Monica.

 

“He started before Larry told him the truth,” said Fallon. “He’d agreed to the move and gotten as far as taking the first box to Beauport Books before Larry demanded they end the marriage.”

 

“And split their assets,” said Hart.

 

“Which included half of everything Bob owned,” said Sam, finishing the thought. “Minus the books, of course. I take it there was no prenup?”

 

Fallon shook his head. “When Conant started clearing the bookshelves, after Seeburg’s death, that’s when it occurred to him that the book might be incriminating. He told me he’d read it long before he decided that Seeburg had to be killed.”

 

“I bet Bob pestered him without mercy before he agreed,” said Monica, who knew how much patience it took to succeed.

 

“Signing his own death warrant,” said Hart.

 

“Even bought Conant a brand-new copy,” said Fallon. “He knew his wouldn’t do.”

 

“That’s why nothing in Bob’s handwriting appeared in it,” said Hart. “And what did appear—Larry’s notes—seemed to match what Monica told me about Bob’s personality.”

 

“That’s what made them a really Odd Couple,” said Monica, putting down her wine glass. “In the play, Oscar is a slob and Felix is a neatnik. That’s odd enough. But with Larry and Bob, what you saw was the opposite of what you got. Bob looked and behaved like the up-tight college professor he was, but he liked pulp fiction and sports cars and heretics and daring world-beaters like Napoleon. And he was a compulsive hoarder. And his handwriting showed all that. It was rushed, and grandiose, and”—she spread her arms—”overflowing, sprawling. Larry was a flamboyant, histrionic show-off, at least on stage, but in his private life he was organized and methodical and neat as a pin. And obsessive about preparation. You should see his piano scores—every measure annotated in that careful, precise hand.”

 

“Which I recognized when you showed me his check,” said Hart.

 

“Conant confirmed that he read Postman months ago,” said Fallon. “But Frank Chambers’s second murder scheme came back to him as he tried to come up with a plan. After the murder, he became obsessed with the copy he’d annotated and started combing through the library, looking for it.” Fallon paused to light another cigarette. “He asked Hal to look for it, too. He’d decided it had to be destroyed, just to be safe.”

 

“But what danger was there, really?” asked Monica. “Even if somebody found it and recognized Larry’s handwriting, how would that be incriminating?”

 

“It wouldn’t,” Fallon replied. “But he didn’t know that.”

 

“The book wasn’t important as evidence,” said Hart.

 

“No,” Fallon agreed.

 

“How was it important, then?” asked Monica.

 

“As bait,” said Fallon. “We had our eye on Conant from the beginning.” He held up three fingers in succession. “One: a spouse that stood to inherit a lot of money. Two: a suicide victim whose sole motive for taking his own life was supplied by said spouse. Three: a list of suspicious facts and circumstances that didn’t count as positive evidence or could all be explained away.”

 

“Like the level of hydroxyzine in the victim’s blood,” added Hart.

 

“We don’t know when the drug was taken, or administered,” continued Fallon, “but Seeburg had ingested enough before he died to see him through open heart surgery, if he’d needed it. But hey, maybe he was desperate, and sleep deprivation makes you so you can’t think straight. And different people react differently to dosages. Could we prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there was enough to prevent him from driving himself to Presson Point? No.”

 

“You just mentioned stuff not counting as positive evidence?” asked Sam.

 

“Yeah, like Conant having no alibi. But so what?  Why would he need one, if we had no way to tie him to the scene?”

 

“How about the blow to Bob’s forehead?” asked Monica. “Why would Larry have to brain him if the hydroxyzine—I assume it was slipped into his food or something—had already done the job for him?”

 

“He needed there to be some reason, some ostensible reason, to explain why Bob hadn’t been able to open the door and get out of the car after it plunged in the water,” said Hart. “Why he just sat there and let himself drown without a struggle.”

 

“It’s not an easy thing to do,” Fallon interjected, “let yourself be drowned.”

 

“If the hydroxyzine didn’t prevent him from driving to Presson Point,” Hart continued, “why would it keep him from crawling out the window? Air was just inches away. Also, getting knocked out by the steering wheel would make it look like the suicide was unpremeditated, something Bob did on impulse. That would be more believable than making it look like he’d driven there meaning to kill himself, when there are so many more dependable and painless ways to get the job done.”

 

“Do we know what Larry used to hit him with?” asked Monica.

 

Fallon shrugged. “He says a wine bottle. They have a cellar full of them. But it doesn’t matter. We have his confession, thanks to the wire Mr. Hart agreed to wear, and the other evidence that he brought to our attention—I mean besides the writing in the book. But I’ll let him tell you the rest of the story.”

 

“But wait a second,” said Sam, leaping in. “Can’t the medical examiner tell post-mortem how long before death the victim was bruised or wounded?”

 

“Ordinarily, yes,” said Fallon. “And I asked Conant about that. He said he’d read somewhere that you can delay discoloration and swelling with an ice pack. (It's true, by the way.) So after he walloped Seeburg in his sleep, he got one out of the freezer—you know, those flexible, reuseable ones—and tied it to his forehead with an elastic bandage. Then he carried Seeburg to the car and drove to the Point, making sure to remove the ice pack before driving into the estuary.”

 

“But how . . . .”

 

“I’ll let Mr. Hart take it from here,” said Fallon, pointing his cigarette at him.

 

“So, as I said,” Hart began, “I couldn’t make sense of Bob selling off his books unless he’d agreed to go with Larry to New York. But if he’d agreed to go to New York, why would he still be anxious and depressed? And why kill himself? What could account for it?

 

“Monica’s description of how Larry was handling his grief also didn’t add up. Imagine you’ve just lost a loved one. Wouldn’t you want to go through their personal effects first, before letting other people pick over them?  If I couldn’t even look at them without falling to pieces, I’d put them aside, or have them put aside, until I could. I wouldn’t invite others to take whatever they wanted while I was getting my act together. And then there was Monica telling me Larry didn’t keep any of Bob’s books, when he’d just told me, in his voicemail, that he wanted to keep the books that were Bob’s favorites.”

 

“Babcock confirmed that Cain’s book was the only one they were looking for,” said Fallon.

 

“Truth is,” said Hart, “I had second thoughts about using Bob’s credit slip. Anything I bought with it rightfully belonged to Larry, his surviving spouse.” He turned to Monica. “That’s why I told you I’d feel better if Larry knew you gave it to me. Initially, at least. But by the time you told him, I was hoping he’d call me to ask about it. I wanted to know how he’d react.”

 

“Were you expecting him to ask for money? Or were you going to make him a present of your tropical fish book?”

 

“No, I’d visited the crash site by then, with Sam, and I was expecting Larry to ask about The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

 

“You never told me why we were there at all,” said Sam.

 

“I was curious to know how closely Bob’s suicide matched the death of Cora’s husband, Nick Papadakis, in the book.  I was still working on the premise that Bob got the idea from reading about it. His notes were so focused and precise. But there was one thing wrong: they were also skeptical, even contemptuous. They were critical of Frank’s planning—over-planning, actually, his inability to foresee every possible contingency because he was certain he’d covered all of them. Frank's lust for Cora was fogging his brain, but he thought he was thinking clearly. And whoever was writing in the margins was on to that.

 

“Then I came to the place where Frank’s second attempt succeeds, but not in the way he expected. He’s killed Papdakis by crushing his skull with a wrench. The body is lying in the victim’s own car. Now all Frank needs to do is push the car over a cliff so it will look like Papadakis died that way.”

 

Hart paused to think. He was looking at the ocean. “It’s more complicated, way more complicated, of course.” He turned to Monica. “I’ll give Cain credit for that. There’s no mystery to solve, no itch to figure out ‘Whodunit?’  You know who, from the start. You’re watching them do it. But the consequences, the ‘Butterfly Effect’—you know, the butterfly in China that causes a hurricane in Florida?—they’re as intricately worked out as an endgame by . . .”

 

It was dusk by now and the others’ faces were getting hard to see, but Hart could sense he’d wandered off point.

 

“So. All Frank needs to do is get Nick’s car over the cliff. And he does. But he’s inside it when it goes over. The ultimate fuck-up. And in the margin, right next to this paragraph, right next to the ultimate fuck-up, it says, ‘If he weren’t an idiot, this could work.”

 

He looked at Sam. “I wanted to see how.”

 

“And what did you see?” asked Sam. “Because all I could see was that Bob managed to kill himself the way Frank killed Papadakis, according to your account. And we knew that already.”

 

“It’s not what I saw that mattered, but what you saw.”

 

“And that was?”

 

“Those gaps between the granite blocks and the driveway along the top of the jetty. You said you didn’t think Bob’s MG had enough, what was it? ‘pep’ to get over them.”

 

“But apparently it did, whoever was driving it.”

 

“With a little help.”

 

Everyone waited for Hart to finish his sentence. Sam did it for him.

 

“That piece of plywood. To bridge the gap.”

 

“It didn’t have to be very big,” said Hart. “Just big enough to get the first tire over.”

 

“So you picked up the plywood and looked underneath.”

 

“And found a tire track on the underside,” said Fallon, shaking his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Mr. Hart and I spent an interesting few hours together after he stopped by the station. I admit, I was annoyed at first. A PI who thinks he has the answer? Straight out of some bullshit TV show. I wasn’t going to waste my time.” Fallon looked at Hart.  “But the desk sergeant told me you might have something, and then I recalled your work on that St. Valentine's Day Massacre case, so . . . .”  

 

"You mean the negligence suit," said Hart.

 

Fallon nodded and took a drag on his cigarette, then tapped the ashes over the railing. “Sorry,” he croaked. “The plywood. Please continue.”

 

“It was dark when Larry dragged it over there,” Hart resumed, “so he wouldn’t have noticed the tire track. It matched the treads on Bob’s tires, which meant Bob must have been murdered—he couldn’t have dragged anything anywhere if he was dead.”

 

“It’s what convinced Judge Prentice to let us wiretap Conant,” said Fallon.

 

“And that’s why you picked it up?” asked Sam, turning to Hart. “To look for a tire track?”

 

“I didn’t expect to be so lucky,” said Hart. “I just wondered what it was doing there. It only made sense if it helped people get across a muddy spot, a spot that’s always wet. But when I picked it up, I saw the ground was bone dry. That’s when I noticed the track.

 

“But Larry wasn’t in the car when it was discovered,” said Sam

 

Fallon took over. “What stuck with him was the idea of going over with the victim.” He went on to summarize the course of events as Conant had confessed to them—how he’d examined the murder scene two weeks before and saw the gaps, how he’d scrounged the plywood at a salvage shop so it would look like just another piece of junk, how he waited for the right tide and left the plywood on the trail the night before. “From there it was easy to drug Bob’s wine at dinner, smack him with the bottle while he slept, attach the freezer pack, and drive him to Presson Point.”

 

“But how could he count on the weather being right?” asked Monica.  “I’ve been there. The jetty turns to mud in the rain—the car would get no traction. Or what if the moon was shining and someone saw him, from across the way? Even if it was dark enough, he could miss the plywood.”

 

“He couldn’t count on any of it,” said Hart. “I think that was one of the things that made it so attractive, the challenge. That he could pull it off when Chambers couldn’t. His contempt for ‘tepid pornography,’ for the ‘idiots’ who appeared in it and wrote it . . .”

 

“And read it,” said Monica.

 

“And read it—his contempt was that deep. He’d show them all how it was done.”

 

“That was Larry’s signature style in front of an audience, too,” said Monica. “Taking risks, almost out of control—too fast, too reckless, going just over the edge, but never enough to destroy himself.  And it was all an act, carefully prepared and practiced.  ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,’ he told me once.”

 

“’Or what’s a heaven for?’” said Hart, completing the sentence. He was impressed that Larry was a fan of Robert Browning, and wished more than ever that they could have been friends. He turned to Fallon. “You say the police had him in their sights from the beginning. There’s a place in Cain’s book where Frank says something like the same thing. He knows the police will suspect him right from the start, but there’s nothing they can do because they can’t prove he was behind the wheel.”

 

“Speaking of which,” said Sam, “how did Bob end up behind the wheel?”

 

“The car went in with the windows up,” said Fallon. “While it was sitting there, Conant had plenty of time to get himself out of the driver’s seat and pull Seeburg’s body into it. Not difficult for someone with shoulders and arms that powerful. And it didn’t have to be placed just so because once the car filled up with water, the body would be floating around anyway. Then he rolled Bob’s window down to let the water in. When the level was almost to the roof, he took a deep breath from what was left, rolled down the window on his side, and eased himself out. He was less than a foot from the surface.”

 

“And then,” said Sam, “he climbs onto the jetty, drags the plywood over to the trail—taking care to stay on the granite blocks so he’d leave no tracks—and walks home along the causeway.”

 

“The chance of a passing car at that time of night was pretty low,” said Hart, “and all he’d have to do was duck behind the guard rail if one came along.”

 

It was dark, now, and the crickets were singing. The young man assigned to their table had just come out to remind them, gently, that the restaurant was closing. As they rose to leave, Fallon took a last sip of coffee and brought his last cigarette to his lips. Hart leaned forward and blew out the candle in the glass snifter.  In the darkness, he saw the ember on the end of Fallon’s cigarette glow brighter for a moment, then plunge down and disappear with a hiss.

 

 

                                                                               THE END