The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry(7)

“All right, Mr. Fikry,” Lambiase says, “tell me what happened.”

“Someone stole Tamerlane,” A.J. says.

“What’s Tamerlane?”

“It’s a book. It’s a very valuable book.”

“To clarify. You mean someone shoplifted a book from the store.”

“No. It was my book from my personal collection. It is an extremely rare collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“So, it’s, like, your favorite book?” Lambiase asks.

“No. I don’t even like it. It’s crap, it’s jejune crap. It’s . . .” A.J. is hyperventilating. “Fuck.”

“Calm down, Mr. Fikry. I’m trying to understand. You don’t like the book, but it has sentimental value?”

“No! Fuck sentimental value. It has great financial value. Tamerlane is like the Honus Wagner of rare books! You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, my pops was a baseball card collector.” Lambiase nods. “That valuable?”

A.J. can’t get the words out fast enough. “It was the first thing Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, back when he was eighteen. Copies are extremely rare because the print run was fifty copies, and it was published anonymously. Instead of ‘by Edgar Allan Poe,’ it says ‘by a Bostonian’ on the cover. Copies sell for upward of four hundred thousand dollars depending on condition and the mood of the rare books market. I was planning to auction it off in a couple of years when the economy had had a little time to improve. I was planning to close the shop and retire on the proceeds.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Lambiase says, “why would you keep something like that in your house and not in a bank vault?”

A.J. shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was stupid. I liked keeping it close by, I suppose. I liked being able to look at it and be reminded that I could quit anytime I wanted to. I kept it in a combination-locked glass case. I thought it was safe enough.” In his defense, there is very little theft in Alice Island except during tourist season. It is October.

“So, did someone break the case or did someone know the combination?” Lambiase asks.

“Neither. I wanted to get wasted last night. Fucking stupid, but I took out the book so I could look at it. A poor excuse for company, I know.”

“Mr. Fikry, was Tamerlane insured?”

A.J. puts his head in his hands. Lambiase takes that to mean that the book wasn’t. “I only found the book about a year ago, a couple of months after my wife died. I didn’t want to spend the extra money. I never got around to it. I don’t know. A million retrospectively idiotic reasons, the main one being that I am an idiot, Officer Lambiase.”

Lambiase doesn’t bother telling him that it is Chief Lambiase. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. First, you and me are gonna file a police report. Then, when my detective comes in—she’s only on half days during the off-season—I’m gonna send her down to your place to look for fingerprints and other evidence. Maybe something’ll come up. The other thing we can do is call the auction houses and other people who deal in these sorts of items. If it’s as rare a book as you say, people will notice if an unaccounted-for copy comes on the market. Don’t things like that need to have a record of who owned them, a whatchamacallit?”

“A provenance,” A.J. says.

“Yeah, exactly! My wife used to watch Antiques Roadshow. You ever seen that show?”

A.J. doesn’t reply.

“One last thing, I’m wondering who knew about the book?”

A.J. snorts. “Everyone. My wife’s sister, Ismay, teaches at the high school. She worries about me since Nic . . . She’s always bugging me to get out of the store, get off the island. About a year ago, she dragged me to this dreary estate sale in Milton. It was sitting in a box with about fifty other books, all worthless except Tamerlane. I paid five dollars. The people had no idea what they had. I felt kind of shitty about taking it, if you want to know the truth. Not that it matters now. Anyway, Ismay thought it would be good for business and educational or some crap if I put it on display in the store. So I kept the case in the shop all last summer. You never come to the store, I guess.”

Lambiase looks at his shoes, the familiar shame of a thousand high school English classes where he’d failed to do the minimum required reading rushing back to him. “Not much of a reader.”

“You read some crime, though, right?”

“Good memory,” Lambiase says. In fact, A.J. has a perfect memory for people’s reading tastes.

“Deaver, was it? If you like that, there’s this new writer from—”

“Sure, I’ll stop by some time. Is there someone I can call for you? Your wife’s sister is Ismay Evans-Parish, right?”

“Ismay’s at—” At that moment, A.J. freezes as if someone has pressed the pause button on him. His eyes are blank and his mouth drops open.

“Mr. Fikry?”

For nearly thirty seconds, A.J. is frozen and then he resumes speaking as if nothing has happened. “Ismay’s at work, and I’m fine. There’s no need to call her.”

“You were gone for a minute there,” Lambiase says.

“What?”

“You blacked out.”