Newberry on Walton Street?'
The Newberry Library was an imposing, burly, five-storey brick building with a triple-arched entrance that occupied an entire block of West Walton. It had just celebrated its one hundredth anniversary and there was about the formidable old sentinel of a structure a sense of antiquity and conservatism. It had been endowed by businessman William Loomis Newberry to be an uncommon collection of uncommon collections', and so it was. A pleasant woman who identified herself as Miss Prichard, the assistant librarian, chatted amiably as she led St Claire down hallways through arroyos of books, maps, and documents.
'Did you know this was the first electrified building in the city?' she asked, pointing towards the ceiling of the lobby. 'That's why the bulbs in that chandelier are pointed downwards, so people would know. Gas lamps won't work upside down, of course.'
'Is it always this cool in here?'
'We have climate control for twenty-one miles of books and manuscripts, Mr St Claire,' she said proudly. 'We haven't lost a book in one hundred years.'
'Quite a feat these days. Some people will steal anything.'
'I should hope that our clientele is a bit more singular than that,' she said in a very matter-of-fact tone.
The Rushman collection was in one of the rear chambers. It was a small room without windows and, except for the door, lined on all four sides with Bishop Rushman's books. An oak table contained three equally spaced brass table lamps with green shades. It occupied the centre of the room, surrounded by heavy, unpadded chairs. The place was as quiet as a mausoleum.
It was a surprisingly diverse collection. Novels by Dostoyevsky and Dante sat beside the works of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Darwin. Leather-bound codes of canon law shared space with Faulkner, Hammett, and Chandler.
St Claire eagerly pulled out a book and checked its spine. And his shoulders slumped. Rushman's peculiar method of indexing had been replaced by the Dewey decimal system. He looked around the room at the hundreds of books and realized that there was no way to identify C13 among all the volumes. He stared at the library for several minutes, trying to figure out if there was any correlation between the Dewey numbers and Rushman's old index numbers. He turned abruptly and went back to the office.
'Ms Prichard, I notice the indexing system has been changed on the books in the Rushman collection.'
'Oh yes, we had to go to the Dewey decimal system. All the books must conform, you know. What a mess it would be if we made an exception! But it was done without damage. We have never damaged a book.'
'No, you don't understand. Did the Newberry, by any chance, keep a record of the bishop's indexing system?'
'My, my, you are a purist, aren't you, Mr St Claire? Well, now, let's just go to the records.'
She opened a narrow oak drawer and her nimble fingers danced along the index cards. She pulled one out, looked at if for a moment, and then handed it to him with a smile. It was labelled 'Huckleberry Finn'. In the corner of the Dewey card was noted: 'Rushman index: J03
'Bless you,' St Claire said with a wide grin. 'Now all I have to do is go through all these cards, find C13, turn to page 489, and hope to hell I know what I'm looking for.'
'I remember you,' Edith Stoddard said to Jane Venable. 'You handled the Robertson injury case. That was in 1990, as I recall.' She had recovered from the booking ordeal and seemed almost relaxed. She was seated at a tattered bridge table in a small holding cell adjacent to the processing station. The room was bare except for the table and a cot in the corner. She had been fingerprinted, strip-searched, and issued a pair of orange county-issue coveralls with the word PRISONER stencilled across the back. The sleeves were rolled back several times. Stoddard would be held there until court convened in the morning. Venable had a momentary flashback, remembering these same surroundings ten years earlier. Nothing seemed to have changed. The same blue-grey paint on the walls, the small barred window in one corner. 'That's right,' Jane Venable answered. 'You were a very nice person, but you were a ferocious negotiator,' Stoddard said bluntly but unassumingly.
'That's what I get paid for - being a ferocious negotiator, I mean — not for being a nice person. Thank you for that.'
'I don't need a lawyer, Miss Venable,' the prisoner said firmly.
'Yes, you do. You never needed one more than you do right now,' Venable answered.
'I'm guilty, Miss Venable.'
'Please call me Jane.'
'Jane. I just want to plead guilty and get it over with.'
'There's more to it than that,' Venable said.
