“Not directly,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the death of Professor Quill.”
“Oh...” She had been willing to attack, he thought, in her robin-like way, but now she deflated. “You better come in. The campus police asked me about the maps, and I had nothing to do with all of that. I don’t work at the Andersen anymore, and I didn’t steal a key. I turned them all in when I transferred to the Wilson. Every last one of them. The very idea!”
“Do you know how many maps they’re missing?”
“According to rumors from friends, at this point, sixteen. But they never keep a good inventory over there—it could be sixteen maps over ten years, even twenty. And some might be misfiled. So, who knows?”
Virgil stepped inside the house and was hit by the smell of death. His nose wrinkled involuntarily, and O’Hara spotted it.
“My mother’s dying in the back bedroom,” she said. “Pancreatic cancer finally got her... It’s been four years, and she has no more than a few days left, if that. God bless her, I hope she goes sooner. Now she’s still with us, I roll her and wash her, I give her morphine under the tongue once every two hours, she no longer has control of her bowels. I have to buy diapers for her. She hates being alive.”
“Do you have help?”
She snorted. “Barely. You know how much that costs? Mother had no home care insurance. I pay a service when I’m working; a nurse comes every two hours to check on her. Sticks her nose in the door and that’s about it. A neighbor keeps an eye out her window in case the house catches fire while I’m gone. It’s a disaster.”
She pointed Virgil to a chair in the living room, and said, “Now, about Dr. Quill...”
She had seen Quill in the library from time to time, she said, usually working on his laptop in the carrel or reading. “He brought in his own chair, an expensive one, leather and all that.”
He was not there often. “A lot of people want those carrels, and I don’t think he was using his even once a week. It was a shame. But I never said anything to him about it.”
She’d never witnessed any arguments, any conflicts, involving Quill. “He came and he went. By himself. I can’t remember seeing him talk to anybody.”
O’Hara’s living room was tiny, perhaps twelve by twelve, smelled lightly of pasta, and had two walls taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The shelves were packed. When O’Hara’s cell phone chirped, she said, “Time for the morphine, back in a minute,” pushed herself out of her chair, and disappeared into the back of the house. Virgil stood to take a look at the books. Mostly novels, and mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British.
O’Hara came back, and Virgil reached to the highest shelf and took down a thick, battered copy ofThe New Shorter Oxford English Dictionaryand handed it to her. “Lift this over your head and swing it at my face.”
She tried and failed. She got the book up above her hair, but that was it, and then fumbled it. Virgil grabbed the dictionary, said, “Thanks,” and put it back on the shelf.
“That was a test,” she said. “Of what?”
“We think Professor Quill was killed when somebody lifted his laptop overhead and hit the back of his skull, then his neck, and hard. Anyway, the laptop was high-tech, expensive, and heavy—more than twelve pounds. That dictionary probably didn’t weight more than seven or eight.”
“Then you know—”
“Yes. You didn’t kill Quill.”
“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “The very thought is absurd.”
Virgil smiled. “How about the maps?”
She looked at him, her face grave, and said, “I had nothing to do with the maps. I work and I take care of mother, and that’s all I do. If I stole those maps, they’d fire me and I’d lose my pension. Thirty-five years and I’d lose my pension. The medical care in this country... Mother couldn’t afford extended care, she just couldn’t...”
Tears poked out at the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with the backs of her hands. Virgil said, “I believe you. I’d bet those maps are lost somewhere in the library.”
“Exactly,” she said with a hint of defiance.
—
Virgil gave her his card, said good-bye, and left. As he was walking away, he knew for certain that O’Hara, by her telltale eyes and body language giveaways, had stolen the maps and that she’d done it to finance her mother’s health care.
Basically, he thought, fuck a bunch of maps.
—
He called Trane. After the phone rang five times, she finally answered, and said, “You got me out of a conference. Thank you.”
“O’Hara didn’t kill Quill. She couldn’t lift a seven-pound dictionary more than a couple inches over her head, and then it almost pulled her over backwards. She’s about five-two.”
