It may have been the first time ever in the history of New York City that a plumbing contractor got whisked through Manhattan in a police motorcade. But Alvin Speyer, the “pipe fitter,” as the stud had been nicknamed in the squad room, interrupted an extramarital tryst to get picked up by Captain Heat in the carriage turnaround of his Times Square hotel and Code Three’d behind a pair of motorcycles to the curb between Patience and Fortitude, the famous marble lions of the NYPL’s main branch.
The first thing Heat noticed when they met Carolyn Jay in her office on the second floor was that she was wearing the same clothes as the day before. “Not my first all-nighter,” said the librarian with a mock-salacious wink. “Thank goodness I’m on good terms with security and the coffee pot in the break room got fixed.”
“But you did make progress, right?” asked Nikki, trying to get to it without appearing disrespectful to the woman who had burned midnight oil to help her.
“It’s a process, right? Catalog interpretation isn’t like the Map Room, where the answer to every question is a map. But enough headway to ask you to bring…Mr. Speyer, is it? Come in, let me show you why I needed to borrow you.”
It was early enough that Mrs. Jay had the bull pen to herself, so she rolled two chairs from other work stations beside hers. “Let me walk you through my journey. Succinctly, I promise. Time is critical, I can see it that, Nikki. That’s why I bore down. Not so easy with the digital system down, I don’t need to tell you.”
“And I thank you so much for your efforts, Mrs. Jay.”
“Well, hold your applause until we see if it paid off.” She swapped her glasses for the readers on the chain around her neck and picked up a yellow lined tablet full of abbreviations, acronyms, and code numbers in her Palmer Method script. “The key to the whole thing, thanks to Mr. Speyer’s good citizenship, was to focus on the provenance of that boat. From the description, a wooden eighteen-footer, isn’t that right? Please say that’s right.”
“Yes,” said Alvin Speyer.
“Thank God.” She went back to her notes. “A search needs a premise. Mine was that wooden boats are so retro, so high-maintenance that, much like a hot rod enthusiast, any owner would be proud of his craft and consort with like-minded devotees. That led me across the hall to room 217 to explore the Directory of Associations and appropriate newsletter catalogues shelved there. Here’s where I’ll skim for you. I spent hours thumbing through the Oxbridge Directory, Benn’s Media, and others, searching for association newsletters, filtered for this region, of clubs catering to the small-wooden-boat owner. I made my short list and moved downstairs to Microforms, where I pulled the annual newsletters of each organization from the last five years—an arbitrary limit, but it seemed a reasonable time frame given the circumstances. Going on and on, that led me to learn of the Great Upstate Boat Show, held annually up in Queensbury, New York.”
Nikki opened her own notebook. “And you found a contact we can talk to?”