Tuesday morning found the three of us, Poole, Scanlon, and myself, in Parker Foxcroft’s office. Scanlon set to work searching the room, with what I considered remarkable speed and efficiency. He removed every drawer from Parker’s desk, looked at their undersides and backs, and searched under and at the back of the desk itself. He did the same thing with each individual drawer in the file cabinets. Taking down all the paintings and photographs in the room, he turned them around as well, “for anything Foxcroft may have taped on the backs.” Where one corner of the wall-to-wall carpet had come suspiciously loose, he pulled it back and looked underneath it.
After giving the room a thorough going-over, he turned to the bookcase. With the help of Poole and me, he swung the bookcase around so that he could run his hand over the back of it; he applied the same procedure to the underside of the shelves.
“Now we have only the books to go through,” he said. “But it’s a hell of a job if we have to look at every one of them; there must be several hundred. It would save time if—” He paused to wipe off his hands, which were black with dust.
“If what, Joe?” 1 said.
“If we could read Parker’s mind—so to speak. He’d probably pick a book that neither he nor anyone else would be likely to read.”
“The Holy Bible.” suggested Poole. I couldn’t help smiling at that.
“My choice,” I said, “would be Finnegans Wake. Joyce said, you may recall, that he expected anyone who wanted to understand the book to spend his entire life reading and rereading it.”
“Is there one here?” asked Scanlon. I pointed the book out; he removed it from the shelf and opened it.
“Eureka,” he said, and held it open for me and Poole to see. There, taped to the inside of the front cover, was a floppy disk. A second floppy was taped to the inside of the back cover.
“Now,” I said, “all we have to do is run these through a computer. But again, it’s a hell of a long job.”
“I’ll be glad to tackle it,” said Poole.
I was about to hand him the disks when it occurred to me that, after our abortive attempt in Connecticut to find the murderer, I had seen Tim’s spirits decline quite precipitously.
“Thank you, Herbert,” I said, “but my brother, Tim, has been looking a bit out of sorts lately, and working on these disks may cheer him up.”
“As you think best,” said Poole. “But if you change your mind, just let me know.”
“Congratulations, Joe,” I said to Scanlon. “You’ve both earned an expense-account lunch.”
And I took them to the Colombe d’Or, where the words “prix fixe” are not in the maître d’s vocabulary, not even in the deepest recession.
I was much too impatient to wait until the weekend to get Parker’s disks to Tim, so I had them sent to him by overnight mail, after first asking Hannah to copy them, just in case. When I called Tim to tell him to be on the lookout for them, I said: “If you find something, just give me a call, and I’ll drop everything and come right out to Weston.”
He called me the next day. All the energy and high spirits I found so inspiring in Tim were back in his voice again, stronger than ever.
“But you just got the bloody things,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly have had time to go through them.”
“Didn’t need to, buddy,” he fairly chirped.
“So what did you find?”
“I think in order to save time that you’d better come out here pronto, Nick.”
“If you say so.” I really didn’t need the invitation; I was already primed to bolt for Grand Central Station.
“I think you’ll be happy,” said Tim, as we were about to hang up, “with what I’ve found.”
Hallelujah. Could the game at last be afoot?
“What I did,” Tim told me when I got to Connecticut, “was print out the menus of the two disks you sent me.” He pulled out a single sheet from a sheaf of computer printouts.
“This is the one you’ll find interesting.”
I picked up the sheet and looked at it. This is what I saw:
“I’m not sure what I’m looking for, Tim,” I said, after quickly glancing at the printout.
“You must look more closely, Nick,” he said, and put his finger on the entry IRVING.
“Irving,” I said. “What d’you know? The mysterious Irving that Parker mentioned to Susan Markham.”
“Precisely,” said Tim. “And what this file contains is the rejection letter Parker wrote to Judith Michaelson’s husband, the letter she claims drove him to suicide.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “It did mean something after all—Irving.”
“Here you are.” Tim handed me several more sheets. “The letter itself, which I printed out. I suggest you read it.”
The letter opened with “Dear Mr. Michaelson” and then this opening paragraph:
You have apparently sent this manuscript to me to read because I have a reputation as a literary editor, as distinguished from one of the commercial hacks who ply our editorial waters. At least one of your assumptions is far off the mark. Literary I may well be; literary your book is most assuredly not; nor do I believe it ever can be, with the most assiduous rewriting. I strongly advise you to consign this abortive piece of rubbish to the flames, or the trash can, whichever may be most convenient.
“Ordinarily,” Parker’s letter continued, “I would not waste my valuable time criticizing your work in any detail, but because you mentioned the name of a good friend of mine in your submission letter, I have decided to take a few pains at least and point out to you where your manuscript is lacking both coherence and literary merit.”
And there followed, as far as I could tell from a hasty reading, a page and a half of comments on the plot of Michaelson’s novel, and what Parker found to be “its manifest weaknesses of style and structure.”
Shaking my head, I handed the transcript of the letter back to Tim. “Leaving aside the brutality of Parker’s rejection,” I said, “and we already know what he is capable of in that department, what am I to make of this?”
“Patience, and all will become clear,” said Tim. “First, I want you to call Judith Michaelson and ask her one question.”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
He told me the question I was to ask. I called Judith Michaelson and asked the question. She answered me without hesitation.
And shortly after that, Tim came through, as I had instinctively known he would.
All became brilliantly clear.