He didn’t allow himself to be frightened by that; instead he again stared out at the hauntingly beautiful lake.
For the first time, I heard a genuine melancholy in the mogul’s voice. “She’s…she’s already dead.”
I nodded. “It just hasn’t made the obits yet… Coffee?”
Six
The Homewood Library seemed modern to me, but only because of my age-it dated to the ’70s and you walked into a big high-ceilinged area with wide steps leading up to a surrounding second floor that was like a landing that got out of hand.
The place was all cheerful oranges and greens and yellows, dotted with oppressively cheerful posters encouraging reading and featuring lots of Asian and black faces, though everybody I saw in there was white. What had once been open and spacious was now a little cluttered, with an area obviously intended for seating given over to portable bookcases of NEW RELEASES and AUDIOS, and various computer stations.
It didn’t remind me much of the austere churchlike libraries of my youth-hardwood floors and institutional green walls and endless shelves of anonymous dustjacket-less books overseen by cold-eyed old-maid librarians with their hair in gray buns and their bodies in gray dresses that a nun would’ve considered needlessly unflattering.
And Janet Wright didn’t remind me of those old-maid librarians, either, though her white blouse and black skirt were a little stark, at that. Her dark blonde hair was pinned up (though not in a bun), attractive stray curls of it struggling free to give her heart-shaped face unbidden decorative touches. Her reading glasses were wireframe and merely serviceable, like the touches of lipstick and eyeliner that appeared to be her only makeup. She seemed to have a nice shape, too, though her wardrobe played it down.
But there was no getting away from that nice, creamy complexion and eyes so brown they almost looked black from a distance, and she had a very nice smile that she flashed generously at the grade-school kids-third- graders? — who were sitting on the floor in the Children’s Section staring up adoringly at her, lost in the story she was reading…a book called The Glass Doorknob, something or other about a sock monkey.
I was impressed-not one of these kids was fidgeting or squirming or looking to need their Ritalin dosage, even if their laughter did seem unnecessarily shrill. Of course, eight kids who were spending their Friday after- school time at the library probably weren’t the type to be fussy; plus, the six girls probably wanted to be Janet Wright when they grew up, and the two boys probably wanted to marry her when they did (although right now they had no idea why).
As she sat in the chair, her audience gathered around like little Indians, it was obvious she related well to the tykes, stopping to ask them questions, involving them, really looking at them and even listening to their answers.
Already I understood what Jonah Green had meant about this woman not deserving what I was here to do to her. Nobody looking at her would have guessed a contract kill would be her fate. On the other hand, nobody looking at me would have guessed I was stalking my prey-in jeans, running shoes, brown sweater, lighter brown shirt- with-collar, I might have been a teacher or writer, the kind of rumpled jerk who browses endlessly at Borders and never buys a goddamn thing, then complains that book sales are down because the world has gone illiterate.
Right now I was fucking around in the War Section, flipping through books on Vietnam written by idiots who hadn’t been there. And, by the way, if you ever have a question about where any specific subjects can be found in the stacks of the Homewood Library, from gardening to the Holocaust, I’m your guy.
She’d been easy enough to spot-from the handful of pictures Green had given me, plus when I came in she was sitting at the HELP DESK with her name on a nameplate in front of her. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple to make her.
She also worked the front desk, during lunch hour, checking out books, pleasant, friendly, helpful to various library patrons, clearly good at what she did and happy doing it.
I kept browsing, “reading” magazines and books while I kept up my surveillance, lately keeping track of Janet Wright interacting with these laughing children. It was the kind of thing that would give you a warm feeling if you weren’t here to kill her.
After the kids scampered off to their suppers, Janet returned to the help desk where she was doing paperwork when a narrow-faced, conventionally handsome guy approached her, a thirty-something would-be Yuppie with a tan, perfect hair, a pale yellow shirt with an alligator on it and jeans that were too new-looking.
I was nearby, pretty much directly behind my subject, going through old bound volumes of Life magazine from the ’40s and ’50s, stopping at the surprisingly frequent shots of starlets in bathing suits.
A conversation started up between my librarian and the Yuppie, for which lip-reading would not have been a necessary step-in fact, the obnoxious Yuppie made it hard not to overhear. Apparently this whole quiet-it’s-a-library concept was foreign to him.
He flicked the HELP DESK sign and said, with a grin that told me he appreciated his own wit, “ I could use some help.”
The librarian I could barely make out, and her back was to me.
But I think she said, “Rick-please. Not here.”
He leaned a palm against the edge of the desk and his smile was a white slash in the too-tanned face.
“Come on-you’re not still mad…”
She said nothing, her head down. She was doing paperwork, or pretending to.
The smile disappeared and he leaned in, his expression approximating humility. “Baby. Come on. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
On her response, I heard her just fine: she wasn’t talking any louder, but the words were crisp and clear.
“Next time,” she said, looking right up at him, “I’ll call nine-one-one. I swear I will.”
He drew back; shrugged. “Hey. You pissed me off. Deal with it.”
She slammed a book shut.
“I am dealing with it,” she said.
“Baby…”
“You had no right-no right.”
And now she looked back down at her work.
“It’s over, Rick,” she said. “Don’t make me call security.”
He leaned in again, got another smile going, though it bordered on a sneer. “Why-you want another scene?” He laughed and it sounded forced. “Sometimes I think you like scenes.”
She said nothing. Did not look up at him.
He turned to go, but had only moved a step when he looked back and said, “Hey-pick you up. Usual time.”
“No. No!”
“Meet you, then.”
He shot her a goodbye with a gun of thumb-and-forefinger, and sauntered off, cocky as hell. She didn’t bother to reply.
Pity-seems like nobody ever hires you to kill a prick like that.
Another librarian, a busty, almost plump woman also in her early thirties, moved in and pulled up a chair- on-wheels from somewhere and sat behind the desk with Janet. The second librarian had on a bright pink blouse and darker pink slacks; her hair was very blonde and big and sprayed, and her makeup was loud. Fuckable, though.
“Janet,” she was saying, making no attempt to keep her voice down, “you have got to do something about that creep! ”
Janet shrugged. “I told him it’s over, Connie. I told him just now.”
“Do you think he heard you? You think he ever really listens to anything you say? Listen to me, sweetie. He is going to really hurt you, next time.”
Janet, who had swiveled on her own wheeled chair, to face her colleague, sighed and shook her head.
