In A Strange City

Chapter 11

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.”

“I had forgotten Capone was treated for his syphilis here. He gave Union Memorial the cherry trees out front, right?”

“They called it porphyria in the newspaper accounts-delusions of grandeur. Although in his case it might better have been called delusions of squalor. At one point, he thought he was the head of a large factory, which is a fu

“Interesting euphemism.”

“No, truly. His patron had gone to Chicago, and Capone moved down from New York, waiting to be called up, almost like a ballplayer in the minor leagues. He was totally legit while he was here, working for a construction company and living in Highlandtown.”

Tess tried to envision what the world might be like today if Capone had fallen in love with his life here and decided to go straight. But the one thing she knew about history is that there is no shortage of men-or women-willing to step forward and play the role of villain. It’s not unlike the NCAA tournament: The top seed may not win, but someone has to. That’s why she could never warm up to science-fiction plots where people traveled back in time, intent on assassinating Hitler or Stalin, John Wilkes Booth or Timothy McVeigh. There would have been another Capone or McVeigh, another St. Valentine’s Day massacre or Oklahoma City bombing. Evil isn’t particular about its perso

She didn’t think it worked the same way for the good guys. Only one Lincoln, one Gandhi. Them she would save, if she ever happened on a time-travel device.

“Bobby could talk,” Daniel continued. “I mean, he could cast a spell with words, as surely as a snake charmer does with his little pipe. He was pouring it on, impressing me with his knowledge of Baltimore trivia, keeping up this stream of gossip about our colleagues. He was trying to distract me-because the minute he thought my back was turned, I saw him slip the pillbox in his pocket.”

“What did you do?”

Daniel looked miserable. “Nothing. Not then, at any rate. I-I was scared to confront him.”

“Scared? Based on the description of Bobby in the newspaper, and what I saw of him at the grave site, you’ve got a good thirty pounds on him.”

“You were there? You saw the shooting?” Tess nodded brusquely, not wanting him to get off track. “Is that why you came to the library?”

“Sort of. So Bobby intimidated you. Why?”

“You know how there are these people who, even into adulthood, make you feel like the biggest nerd in the world? Bobby had that effect on people. He was… cool, for want of a better word. If I had said anything to him, he would have laughed at me-and ended up persuading me it was okay, somehow, to take the pillbox. So I kept quiet. Until the next day, when I told our supervisor what I had seen.”

“You got him fired.”

Daniel nodded, eyes fixed on his glass of beer. “He was allowed to resign, as long as he returned the pillbox and agreed not to use the Pratt for a reference for future library work. They tried to get him to confess that he had taken other things as well-mainly rare books and maps from the Maryland Room-but he swore up and down it was a one-time lapse.”

“But if he was a thief, why not call the police?”

“Because they couldn’t be sure. If the Pratt had called the police, nothing would have been gained, and the Beacon-Light would have gotten wind of it and run a story, which could have scared off people who were pla

“I can’t believe people would be so unforgiving.”