“What!” said the family lawyer. “You shot someone? Did you call the-”
“No, and I’m not going to. A couple of guys tried to kidnap me-”
“What! Who?”
“Donna, calm down,” he said, “you’re sounding like an Abbott and Costello act. You want the story or not?”
Donna took a breath or two and seemed to snap her professional persona into place. It took nearly the whole hour to spin out the tale, what with her questions and the backtracking and prevarications by the little brother, so typical and so maddening, and the elaborate explanations of the ciphers and Klim’s role in the household, and the peculiar case of Carolyn Rolly. By the time Donna was satisfied, the little kitchen was uncomfortably warm and the level in the gallon jug of red wine had descended two inches or more.
Donna riffled through her pages of notes and checked her watch. “Okay, let’s review a little before this guy gets here. First of all, you have no claim whatever on the Bulstrode estate for any purported swindle, because you had no right to sell that manuscript. Nor had your pal, Rolly. Both of you conspired to steal property rightly belonging to your employer. So the main thing I’m going to have to do is convince this Mishkin to forget the damn thing and go home. You really should’ve talked to me earlier.”
“Nobody stole anything, Donna,” said her brother. “I explained this to you. Sidney told us to break the books and we broke the books. He got full value for the maps and plates and the rest was fully insured. It was just like a junked car. The junk man pays ten bucks for it and if he finds a CD under the front seat, he doesn’t have to give it back.”
“Thank you, counselor. I see you went to a different law school than I did. Finders, keepers is only on the playground. If your junk man found a diamond ring in the wrecked car, do you think he could give it to his girlfriend?”
“Why not?” asked Crosetti.
“Because he had no reasonable expectation that the car would contain a diamond ring. If the legal owner happened to see the ring on the girlfriend he could sue for replevin and he’d win. When Glaser gave you those books he had no idea that they contained a manuscript worth serious money. When you found it your duty was to inform him of the increased value of his property, not convert it to your own use.”
“So if I find a painting in a yard sale and I know it’s a Rembrandt and the seller doesn’t, I have to tell her? I can’t just give her ten bucks and sell it for ten million?”
“A completely different situation. You’d be profiting from your superior knowledge, which is legit, and you would own the painting before you sold it. That, by the way, is what Bulstrode did to you. It’s sneaky, but perfectly legal. On the other hand, you never owned the books from which the manuscript emerged. Glaser did and does. In fact, I would suggest you contact him right now and tell him what’s going on.”
“Oh, get out of here!”
“Idiot child, focus on this! You stole an object worth between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. In a few minutes, a guy is going to show up who thinks that value is part of an estate he holds in trust. What do you think he’s going to do, as an officer of the court, when we have to tell him that this valuable object actually belongs to someone else, and did when you sold it to his client?”
“Listen to her, Albert,” said Mary Peg in a stern voice.
Crosetti rose from the table and stalked out of the room, seething. At some rationalizing level of his mind he had convinced himself that the whole manuscript transaction was something of a prank, on the level of swiping a stop sign from a pole, for which he had been duly punished by Andrew Bulstrode’s scam. Morally, he had argued to himself, the thing was a wash. But now he was sitting with two of the three women in the world he most wished to impress (Rolly being AWOL), and they were agreed that he was a colossal jerk and a felon, and here all the family weight bore down: the disappointment, however veiled by kindness, that he was not the hero his father had been, that he was not an achiever like his sisters, that he especially was not a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School like Donna. He was woozy with wine besides and thought that he might as well go upstairs with his gun and shoot himself, that would save everyone a lot of trouble.
But what he did instead, since he was in fact a decent young man from a loving family and not the tortured neurotic artist he sometimes imagined himself to be (as, briefly, now) was to pull out his cell phone and call Sidney Glaser in Los Angeles. He had Glaser’s cell phone number inscribed in his own device, of course, and Glaser answered on the third ring. An old-fashioned fellow, Sidney, but he made an exception for cell phones.
“Albert! Is there anything wrong?”
“No, the shop’s fine, Mr. G. Something’s come up and I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need an answer right away.”
“Yes?”
“Well, um, it’s sort of a long story. Can you talk?”
“Oh, yes. I was about to go down to dinner but I can talk for a little while. What is it?”
“Okay, this is in reference to the Churchill. The one that got ruined in the fire and you asked Carolyn to break it?”
“Oh, yes? What of it?”
“I was just wondering about the, ah, remainder. I mean the stripped books…”
A pause here. “Have you had a call from GNY?”
“No, it’s not really an insurance issue…”
“Because, ah, what they paid out wasn’t nearly what we could have got at auction and so, ah…look, Albert, if they call, if they ever call, please refer them to me, understood? Don’t discuss the breaking of those books, or what Carolyn did, or anything with them. I mean the prints and maps, the decorator backs, these are really quite trivial matters and you know how these insurance people are…”
“I’m sorry…decorator backs?”
“Yes, Carolyn said she had a customer for the backs and could she burnish them up and deodorize and so forth and sell them and I conveyed them over to her. There should be a paper bill in the files. But the main thing is-”
“Excuse me, Mr. G. When was this?”
“Oh, that day, the day after the fire. She came upstairs and asked me if she could play with the carcasses, the leather and so on. Did you know she was an amateur bookbinder?”
Mary Peg called out, “Albert? Come back here and talk!” Crosetti stuck his thumb over the microphone slits and yelled, “In a minute, Ma. I’m on the phone with Mr. Glaser.”
Resuming his conversation, he said, “Uh-huh, yes, sir, I did know that. And so you actually sold her the books?”
“Oh, yes, just the carcasses, net of the prints and so on. I think she paid thirty dollars a volume. I really don’t like to bother with that aspect of the trade and Carolyn made a little business of it for some years, sprucing up fine bindings off worthless books and selling them to decorators, who would then sell them, I imagine to illiterates for concealing their liquor cabinets. Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”
Crosetti made something up, a question about how he should handle the fire loss in their inventory accounting system, got a brief answer, and closed the conversation. He was both relieved and stunned by what he had just learned: relieved because this cleared up the legal ownership of the manuscript, stunned because Carolyn had allowed him to think there was something shady about the deal when there wasn’t. So why had she allowed him to take the manuscript for his own? Why had she pretended to be semi-blackmailed into letting him have it? Why had she used this supposed crime as an emotional lever to get him to sell it to Bulstrode? None of it made sense. And how was he supposed to get all that past his sister?
He went back into the kitchen and related the gist of the conversation he had just had, and, as expected, Donna was full of the objections that he just passed through his own mind. He cut her off, however, feeling rather more aggressive, now that he had right on his side. “Donna, for crying out loud, none of that matters. For all practical purposes I own the Bracegirdle manuscript. Carolyn isn’t here, and Glaser is not going to make a fuss because I got the impression he’s scamming the insurance company on the ruined volumes. He probably put in for the whole value and forgot to mention to them what he’d realized on the maps and prints, five grand or so. So that part’s fixed.”