“Could he have left it in his car, by any chance? The night he went to the strip club, for example? It’s not in the car now. I know that already, but I’m just wondering if he might have left it in the car at some point and left the car unlocked…”
“I highly doubt it. First of all, I don’t think he would have taken it with him to a place like that. And secondly, I last talked to him on Friday. If he had somehow lost his work, he would have been…beside himself. Absolutely devastated.”
“You’re sure a manuscript exists?”
Briessen said, “I’m sure the novel in progress exists.”
DeMarco cocked his head, thought for a second. “I say manuscript, you say novel in progress. Is there a difference?”
“I guess it all depends on how you’re conceiving of a manuscript.”
“Well, you said he does his first draft in longhand. So I’m thinking a tablet of some kind? A legal pad? A notebook?”
“He used a bound journal. A lot easier to carry around.”
“Like a diary, you mean?”
“Bigger,” said Briessen. “Maybe nine by twelve. It would look just like a hardcover book. Like a smallish coffee table book, you know? It has a dark maroon cloth binding.”
“Like a book without a jacket,” DeMarco said. “I don’t recall seeing anything like that. And he’s written four books so far.”
“You wouldn’t find any of the older journals. Once he’s put the second draft on his hard drive, he stores that journal in a safe-deposit box at the bank.”
“Could the novel in progress be there too?”
“It’s probably right under your nose. And I just now realized why.”
“I do wish you would share that information with me.”
“You get to be famous,” Briessen said, “and people start stealing little pieces of you. I once stole a shot glass out of the Hemingway house in Key West.”
“If the journal’s been stolen, how could it be right under my nose?”
“That’s not what I meant. Tom was wary of the possibility that somebody might try to steal it. Now that he’d become a kind of celebrity. I mean if you’re nineteen or twenty years old and all you want is to be a writer, and one day you happen to be in a famous writer’s house or office and you see his journal lying there on his desk or sticking out of his briefcase—”
“And students came to his house?”
“Frequently. Three or four times a semester he’d have gumbo night for a small group of students. He makes a mean pot of gumbo.”
“Always the same students? During any particular semester?”
“There was some overlap, but he tried to include everybody at least once. Everybody from his advanced fiction workshop.”
DeMarco made a mental note to get the class roster from the department secretary. “So if one of those students happens to see his idol’s journal, he just might grab it if the opportunity presents itself?”
“That’s how I got my favorite shot glass.”
“So then, to prevent that possibility, the thing to do would be to conceal the journal somehow. So that it doesn’t look like a journal.”
“Right. It looks just like a big book, so you put a book jacket on it.”
DeMarco stepped up close to the metal bookshelf. With his free hand, he pulled the first book of appropriate size off the top shelf, laid it open on the desk, and unfolded the jacket. “I don’t suppose you would know what the jacket looks like.”
“Civilization,” Briessen said.
“Excuse me?”
“Last time I saw it, he was using the book jacket from Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Tom figured that most people would be intimidated or bored by such a book. Especially students. Therefore, not tempted to steal it.”
Quickly DeMarco ran a hand across the titles. “Not on the top shelf. Not on the second…not the third…and not the bottom. Might he have changed the jacket?”
“Might have but I doubt it. I mean, why bother if it was doing what he wanted it to do?”
“So if it’s not here, it must be at the house.”
“I’d bet money on it.”
After satisfying himself that none of the books in the office was the journal in disguise, DeMarco drove to Huston’s house. From his trunk, he took a pair of gloves and booties and put these on just inside the foyer. Then he went to Huston’s spacious den.
And there it was, square in the middle of the second shelf from the top in the wall-length mahogany bookshelf. “Son of a gun,” DeMarco said. His hands shook as he used a pen to lay the book open, then to lift away the jacket. A journal with a plain cloth cover the color of burgundy wine. From the looks of it, not many pages held Huston’s tight but neat handwriting. Maybe twenty in all. “Not much,” DeMarco said aloud. But maybe it would be enough.
He replaced the cover, then wrapped the book in a dish towel from the kitchen drawer. At the barracks, he logged both items in at the evidence room, then immediately logged out the journal, minus the jacket. Before returning to his office, he washed his hands with plenty of hot water, but they were still shaking when he pulled on a pair of thin white gloves.
Twenty-Nine