Not Wisely But Too Well
Not Wisely But Too Well
by
MELISSA DEMEO
I had just opened a fresh box of Mike and Ike candies when she walked into my office. She was
one of those dames who’d look better without glasses, but her tweed skirt clung to her like a
drowning man on a life raft. I offered her a Mike and Ike.
She said, “I prefer Hot Tamales.”
I turned the fan up to high. My gaze dropped to the soft folds of her silk blouse. I tried to
pretend I was staring at her name tag.
“You work at the library … uh …?”
“It’s Bebe,” she said.
“As in ‘gun’?”
“It’s short for Beatrice,” she said. “And yes, I’m the head librarian at the Ridgefield
Library.”
“What can I do for you, Bebe?”
“Someone is writing in the books,” she said.
I stood up. I’ve met a lot of killers in my line of work, but the one I hate the most is a
time killer.
She said, “Wait,” and laid a hand on my arm. It would have been a nice hand if the
fingernails weren’t bitten raw. I sat back down.
“Look.” She produced a stubby paperback and plowed it through the piles of paper on my
desk. The cover had a grainy picture of an old-timey type, with a ZZ Top beard and an unnerving
stare. I shrugged. The only book I’ve ever read is the Ridgefield Town Charter. I read it once a
year, on New Year’s Eve. Don’t let the pretty petunias in the hanging baskets fool you. Every
town has a seedy underbelly.
“The Great Short Works of Herman Melville,” she said.
“Oh, yeah. The guy with the fish,” I said. I remembered something from Mrs.
Wroblewski’s class.
The corner of her mouth turned down a little. She said, “Open the back cover.”
I popped a yellow Mike and Ike in my mouth. The yellow ones are supposed to taste like
lemon, but twenty years of stale joe has killed my taste buds.
“Please,” she said.
I opened the back cover and saw a note, in faint pencil, in handwriting like you’d see on a
wedding invitation or an antique document where the s’s all look like f’s.
“‘I wish a death all stinky with guilt’?” I read. “I know quite a few guys who are stinky
with guilt.”
“Sticky,” she said, and leaned forward across my desk until a wisp of brown hair
decamped from her bun. “It’s ‘sticky with guilt.’”
Her perfume crossed the small space between us. “What is that? Gardenias? Lilies of the
valley?”
“Hot Tamales.”
I swallowed down a bolus of Mike and Ike. “I don’t do rinky-dink jobs,” I said, pushing
back Melville. “Big deal—someone wrote in a book.”
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“A library book,” she said, sitting firmly back in the chair.
“It’s hardly a capital crime.”
She handed me a bunch of dead presidents. “I didn’t know librarians made so much,” I
said.
“Meet me at the library tomorrow,” she said as she left my office. “We open at ten.”
•••
I don’t like libraries. Like all gumshoes, I get nerved up in quiet places. There’s always a feeling
of something barely submerged, something about to happen. My ex used to say that feeling was
called possibility. And that’s exactly what worries me.
Bebe met me in the foyer. The doors slid open and shut like a sally port in the hoosegow.
It was one of those newfangled additions: all angles and lines. I remembered seeing a model of it
in the local rag before it was built.
“I thought there was supposed to be a glass staircase here,” I said.
“It turned out to be cost-prohibitive,” she said. “Moreover, the board decided it would be
too tempting for young men to look up patrons’ skirts.”
We took the back staircase, made of solid, voyeur-thwarting cement. The sound of our
shoes bounced off the high ceiling and came back to us like a jackhammer in a subway tunnel. I
followed the backs of Bebe’s pumps, which had a strap across the instep and might have been
worn by Ginger Rogers. Their click-clacking abruptly stopped when they hit the carpet on the
second floor. A few people looked up from books and screens to glance at us, then back down. I
reflexively examined my tie, which, I noticed, still bore the mark of the coffee I’d called
breakfast.
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Bebe led me to a row of shelves labeled “A–BRO/Fiction” and pulled down a book:
Sense and Sensibility.
“Kind of a redundant title,” I said.
She ignored me and opened the back cover. And there it was: the same spindly
handwriting from the Melville tome. I wish a death all sticky with guilt.
She moved to another shelf, pulled out another book—Fahrenheit 451—and opened the
back cover. Same thing.
I reached over her, to the book leaning into the gap left by Fahrenheit 451. It was by the
same author, Ray Bradbury. This one was called Something Wicked This Way Comes. Where do
they come up with these titles? Inside the back cover, the same inscription, the same
penmanship, the same everything. I checked the next book, and the next, and the next. It was as
predictable and yet startling as a blinking neon sign outside a flophouse.
“Every book?” I asked.
“Up to and including W. B. Yeats,” she said.
“Yeats?”
“Authors with last names beginning with the letter y,” she clarified.
I looked down the rows and rows of books and was once again reminded of a prison: a
big one, with multiple galleys, cell over cell over cell, each containing a desperate life.
“Can’t you just take a look in the card catalog, see what name keeps showing up?”
“Our circulation department is computerized now,” Bebe said.
“Even easier.”
“There was no patron’s name in common.”
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“Surveillance footage, since the library’s so up-to-date?” I scanned the ceiling for
cameras.
“Nothing.”
I took a handful of Mike and Ikes from my pocket and popped them in my mouth. “Food
is not permitted in the library,” she said.
“Candy isn’t food,” I said.
A matronly type approached Bebe, told her she was looking for the last in the Fifty
Shades of Grey trilogy, and Bebe led her around the corner.
I wandered to Row SCO–TIL, fingered the spines of the books, and selected the bulkiest
one: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It was heavy and leather-bound and looked
like you could kill a man with it. Starting from the back—the familiar, penciled inscription was
there—I flipped through the pages. I never did get Shakespeare—all those thous and doths.
These days kids take language arts. Years ago, it was plain old English. The only class I ever
flunked. You would have, too, if your teacher had been Mrs. Wroblewski. My eyes landed on a
bit by Lady Macbeth complaining about those damn spots. I decided to check out the comedies.
A real laugh riot, that Will Shakespeare, but one line caught my attention: The fool doth think he
is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. Ain’t that the truth. Maybe I should have
given Shakespeare half a chance.
I looked for more from this Touchstone galoot. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my
humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach.
Making sure Bebe wasn’t nearby, I reached into my pocket for another handful of Mike
and Ikes. The gold-edged pages of the Shakespeare book turned over to the inside back cover. I
wish a death all sticky with guilt. And there was something else . . . a stain, a smudge of the
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faintest pink. Blood? I sniffed it. Licorice. I racked my brainpan for the name of the poison that
smelled like licorice. Arsenic? No, that was almonds . . .
Back when I was a flatfoot patrolling a popsicle-stand beat, the precinct chief was this old
guy—so close to retirement, you could have tipped him over with a puff of air—whose
catchphrase was “Shave off the mustache.” Someone, somewhere, had told him about Occam’s
razor—the idea that the best answer is the one right under your nose—but he could never
remember the name, so he’d just say, “Shave off the mustache.”
And here was the mustache, under the nose of Shakespeare, of all people. . . . there is no
more plenty in it . . .
I nearly barreled into Bebe as I raced out of the aisle of shelves. I dumped Shakespeare’s
complete works into her arms and took the stairs down, two at a time.
•••
At the other end of Main Street is a candy store. Gerty nodded at me as I approached the counter,
but I saw a slight movement of her gloved hand behind the glass.
“Heya,” I said.
“What’s up?”
She crossed her arms, exposing a tattoo of a heart that said “OH YOU KID.”
“I thought maybe you’d seen someone,” I said. “A G&P juicer.”
“Nope,” she said and started folding little boxes.
“Gerty,” I said. “I saw those caramel creams.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m no stool pigeon,” she said.
I waited. Finally, she sighed, looked around her, and said, “There’s a lady comes in,
every Thursday.”
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A kid, blotto on Swedish Fish, careened around the corner and nearly took me down. The
distraction gave Gerty time to sweep the caramel creams under the counter.
“That’s all I got,” she said. “Mike and Ikes?”
I took the box from her and left the shop.
•••
It was a long stakeout. Packs of rowdy middle schoolers flashing dazzling orthodontia went in
and out all day. I waited. A springer spaniel nearly used me like a tree.
Finally, I saw an old lady carrying a canvas bag printed with a picture of that bug-eyed
Betty who dressed in nothing but white and wrote poems about death. What was her name …
Angie Dickinson? The name was similar, if not the gams.
The old lady disappeared into the shop and came out a few minutes later, still carrying
the bag. She was surprisingly spry—and a jaywalker, to boot—and I had to jog to keep up with
her as she passed the hardware store, made a hair-raising crisscrossing to Town Hall and the
bookstore, and hoofed it past the gift shops and snack bars and dance schools. She paused only to
exchange pleasantries with the hot dog vendor at the corner of Prospect.
Instead of going toward the new, main entrance of the library, she took a sharp right,
down a flagstone path, through the original part of the building. It’s a tight space—I guess there
were fewer books in 1903—but it somehow feels bigger, like an old English clubroom. No one’s
likely to shush you in there. You wouldn’t dare make a peep.
The old lady walked through the archway separating the old library from the addition and
straight to WAT–Z/Fiction. She made a beeline for the last book on the far end, wrenched it out
with the focus of a hawk snatching a chipmunk, and opened the back cover. The pencil in her
right hand glinted under the fluorescent lights.
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“Don’t do it, lady,” I said.
“Do what?” She looked up, all innocence, her lips creaking up into an attempt at a kindly
smile. She shifted a sensibly clad foot and accidentally upset the canvas bag she’d set on the
floor. A fleet of little pink and white submarines spread out on the floor. Good & Plenty.
I seemed to hear the old jingle: Don’t know any other candy that I love so well.
“All right, it was me,” she said, menacing now. “Stay back.” She lifted the pencil to the
page.
I took a step forward.
“It’s sharpened,” she said.
My hands shot up.
Bebe came around the corner and gasped. “Mrs. Clennam!”
“I’m warning you,” Mrs. Clennam said. “Stay back or Émile gets it.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “put the Zola down and no one gets hurt.”
A murmuring crowd started to gather. Mrs. Clennam narrowed her eyes and brought the
pencil down. There were gasps. The point broke, and it made a sound in the high-ceilinged
library like the report of a rifle.
“Why, Mrs. Clennam, why?” cried Bebe.
“I never could finish,” the old lady said.
“What do you mean?” Bebe asked.
“Twenty years of book discussion groups. All those crudités and glasses of merlot, and I
never could finish the book in time.” She brandished the copy of Claude’s Confession with a
bony hand.
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“Oh, I know everyone else could,” she went on. “All those other women, with their four
children under the age of five. The men who came straight from a long day at work. They all
managed to read the whole book. Even the acknowledgments.”
She swiped a tear from her tired face. “I never got through the whaling chapters of MobyDick.”
Several of the onlookers averted their eyes.
“I was a comp lit major at Barnard!” she wailed and fell to her knees. A woman in the
back of the crowd fainted.
Mrs. Clennam dropped her pencil, and it rolled to a stop at the toe of Bebe’s black pump.
Bebe picked it up and stuck it through her bun.
I put an arm on Mrs. Clennam’s shoulder. I had a soft spot for this old bird, perp though
she was. “Come on, Mrs. C.,” I said. “I know a place where you’ll have all the time in the world
to read.”
Someone had alerted the precinct, and suddenly Baynes was there with the handcuffs. “I
hate to see a nice old lady go down like that,” he said. “Reminds me of my own grandma. Why
couldn’t she have stayed home and watched Wolf Hall? But no, they always think they can take
on the Western canon.”
“Treat her good, Baynes,” I said and watched him lead her through the crowd and out of
the oaken doors.
•••
I stood under the white vaulted ceiling of the old library and looked up at the circles and
semicircles and triangles. I don’t usually go in for all those architectural gewgaws, but it wasn’t
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half bad in there. Kind of cool, in a good way, like wading into a clear stream on a hot day.
Maybe I’d take a look around sometime.
I heard the click of shoes on the marble floor and smelled cinnamon. I turned around.
“I was just going to take my lunch break in the park,” Bebe said. She pulled Mrs.
Clennam’s pencil out of her bun, and her hair came down in long brown waves. “Care to join
me?”
I patted my pocket and heard the familiar jangle. “I’ll bring the Mike and Ike,” I said.
“And I’ll bring the Rilke,” she said.
(© 2016 Melissa DeMeo)
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