“The thing is, my boss is a sensitive man.”
“About what?”
“Pardon?”
“A guy’s not usually sensitive in the abstract,” I said. “His sensitivity is likely to be generated by a specific source in his everyday life.”
“Well, all right, in Fletcher’s case right now, it’s money more than anything else.”
“Quite a lot of it?”
“You do get right down to business, Mr. Crang.”
“Saves time.”
“In money, I’d say the total value of the store.”
“Is this your way of saying Fletcher’s business is on the rocks?”
“Totally, unless he stops doing stupid things.”
“How stupid are the things he’s doing?”
“Fletcher would kill me if he knew what I’m telling you.”
“You haven’t told me much yet.”
Charlie wriggled a little in her chair. It was a movement not without its charm. “I get the impression he’s in hock up to his eyeballs,” she said.
“To whom?”
“That’s the trouble. I haven’t a clue what he owes or who he owes it to, but from his attitude around the store, all the worrying and penny-pinching he does, moaning and groaning, complaining about getting a decent night’s sleep, the man is a wreck.”
I shook my head a little. “You know I’ve seen Fletcher a little bit lately, Charlie?”
“That’s partly why I chose to come here.”
“Fletcher strikes me as just the same unyielding guy as ever.”
“I was pretty sure you’d say that,” Charlie said. “But if you were in my shoes, working alongside Fletcher practically every day, you’d know the man is definitely in some kind of trouble. Almost for sure financial.”
“In the store the other day,” I said, “the place looked kind of swell. Fresh paint job, for starters. New digital safe. Pretty spiffy item.”
Charlie shook her head, “That stuff’s all the tip of the iceberg.”
“We’re not talking big bucks?”
“Something like fifteen thousand all told, paint job and everything, that’d be my guess.”
“Too few dollars to qualify as a major worry?”
“Just enough to spruce up the building. That’s how Fletcher phrased what it cost. The new look, the painting, plus replacing the old counters in the front room. And the most expensive thing, that stupid damn safe.”
“You don’t see a need for the safe?”
“It used to be that we’d put anything we had of a unique value, which was never much you’d call pricey anyway, in a locked cabinet under the main counter. Nothing went wrong with that system. Then Fletcher switched from the cabinet to the idiotic safe, and look what happened.”
“A break-in.”
“The first one since I’ve worked there, which is almost four years, I’ve never heard Fletcher speak of a previous one.” Charlie’s voice rose a couple of decibels, and her face flushed pink with what I took to be anger at the uselessness of it all.
“On the other hand,” I said, “I don’t imagine the store has ever before been minding anything as valuable as the Walter Hickey letters and the forged poems.”
“That’s true,” Charlie said. “But we’ve never had a robbery before. I’m just saying.”
“Let’s get back to Fletcher’s supposed heavy new debt,” I said. “You got a theory about that? Is he a gambler? Made some bad business deals? What?”
“Not cards or dice or any of that. Fletcher’s got a kind of puritan streak in that particular area.”
“But?”
“But he seems to have been shaky businesswise the last couple of years. It’s just a feeling I have. The whole antiquarian book industry has gone through tough times for a whole decade. Businesses closed like mad. Fletcher had to let two full-time employees go. He kept me, and we weathered the whole downturn thing.”
“So here you are, still in business. What’s your worry?”
“I think it might’ve come at a cost I didn’t really appreciate until now. Maybe Fletcher’s overextended. That’s not a business term I really understand. All I sense for sure is that Fletcher’s worried crazy.”
“On the other hand, the forged poems and the Hickey letters, he must have been pumped about getting his hands on them?”
“Especially Meg Grantham’s item,” Charlie said. “He got excited over it like I’ve hardly ever seen him over anything else. The way he acted, those poems were his salvation.”
“And now they’ve vanished.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, sitting up in her chair, looking indignant. “But you’re the man who’s going to get them back.”
“It’s what I’m good at.”
Charlie smiled in a manner that some might call seraphic.
“Let’s just sum up here,” I said. “Fletcher’s been hit with a double whammy. He’s deep in hock to somebody, according to you, and he’s lost the two sets of valuable documents put in his trust by clients, the clients being Meg and the Hickey woman. Now I enter the picture.”
Charlie nodded, agreeing with my simple statement. She said, “Fletcher’s more frantic than you probably imagined from your meeting with him.”
“That’s why you’re slipping me these bits of inside information about his probable debt to a person you can’t name? It’s all about his delicate emotional state? You want me to go easy on Fletcher, the guy who hired me?”
“Not exactly that.” Charlie put her coffee mug on the desk and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “It’s more that I want to encourage you to locate the missing documents as soon as you can, for Fletcher’s sake.”
“Your wish is that I see about fingering the thief?”
“Exactly.”
“In that category,” I said, lingering over what I was about to say, “what about yourself, for instance?”
“Me?”
“I imagine you have access to the safe.”
“So
