auction, hoping he could sell it and still keep the secret.”
Suddenly the room felt hot. “Now I’ve got to ask you some-thing,” I said. “I want to be very careful here but I can’t. There’s no way I can do this with any tact.”
I felt Erin’s eyes burning into my face but I stared at Lee. He looked away, ostensibly to refill his glass, but I knew that look, I had seen it on too many people too many times. It pushed me to the bottom line, to give voice at last to the unthinkable and cut through all the bullshit.
“You tell me, Lee. Did you kill Denise?”
I heard Erin cry out in protest but my eyes never left Lee’s face, and he couldn’t look at me, and suddenly there was no need to answer the question.
“Oh, Lee,” I said, and my voice broke.
He tried to recover. “I didn’t kill anyone, Cliff. How could you even think that?”
“It’s a question I’ve got to ask. I’d sooner cut out my tongue.”
Lee made a great effort and forced himself to look in my eyes. “Then tell me why in God’s name you’d even think such a thing.”
“Somewhere along the way I began to believe Archer’s story. It’s as simple as that. His story and yours can’t exist side by side. They just can’t work.”
“What is his story, exactly? Help me understand it.”
“Nothing very complicated. He says Burton’s journal is his. He told that to a bookseller he’s known almost forty years. A guy who may be his only friend.”
“You show me the thief who doesn’t believe he owns what he steals. There’s got to be more than that.”
“There is now. Now there’s you. There’s the look on your face and the way you can’t look me in the eye and deny it.”
He did look at me at last. It took a vast effort, but his eyes met mine and he said, “I don’t need to justify myself to you. Goddamn it, do you know who you’re talking to?”
He looked at Erin and said, “For God’s sake, you don’t believe this?”
“Of course not.” But her voice lacked the certainty that should have been there. She was rattled: for the first time that calm, professional demeanor had deserted her.
“Just tell him what he wants to know,” she said. “Tell him and let’s all go to bed and be done with this.” She looked at me coldly and her look said,
Instead Lee said, “I’d like to ask you something, Cliff, then I’d like you to please get out of my house. Do you really think I would kill someone over a book? Do you think I’m that stupid, that desperate to own any book, when I could just buy the damned thing anyway? Or is it the money that drove me crazy? You tell me, then we’ll both know.”
“I’ll give you my guess. Long ago you and Archer should have been joint heirs to this marvelous library of Burton material. You got it all, but you shared it with Hal on the q.t. You made that unholy alliance with Archer that you would give him a couple of the books, including Richard’s journal, which you knew even then was worth more money than most of the others combined. You and Archer made a pact that they could never be sold until the last real heir was dead, because you both knew where they had come from, and the fraud your family had worked to get them away from the Warren family for nothing.
“The easy thing to do, the right thing, would have been to seek out Mrs. Gallant and pay her. Just a good wholesale price might have made all the difference in her life. But you didn’t do that; you were afraid to admit you had those books because that would put them all at risk. For once in your life you went against your own sense of decency and what’s right. You and Archer decided not to tell anyone. The books were legally yours, you didn’t have to pay the old woman or anyone else. But if you had, if you’d just been as fair to the old woman as you were with Archer, maybe none of this would’ve happened. Instead you decided to keep quiet, take no chances. Just keep quiet and she’d go away, fade into the woodwork, die or whatever.
“You should’ve paid that old woman, Lee. I know that’s what your instinct would have been, pay her and get this blot out of your life. But then time passed and that window of opportunity closed. You became a judge, then a prominent judge. The real point of no return was your interview with Reagan. By then you’d have been glad to get rid of all the books, just give them away. They were like a millstone around your neck when the president began considering you for the Supreme Court. That’s your motive, Lee. You’d do anything for a chance at that appointment, and even a small scandal, even something like this where you were legally right, would be enough to kill that possibility dead in the water.”
I finished off my drink.
“Lee?” It was Erin, and her tone begged him to deny it. “Tell him he’s crazy.”
“He can’t,” I said.
“I didn’t kill her,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill her.”
Then he said, “She just…died.”
“Oh my God.” Erin sank to the sofa. “Oh my God.”
“Erin, Cliff, listen to me,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I went over to see her. I shouldn’t have, I know that. But I was so certain I could get the book away from her. I knew they were poor, you told me that, and people will
