“I have a series of names and photos here,” she replied. “I'd like to know if you recognize any of them.”
“You mean did I know them personally, or as customers? Cops have already asked me the same-”
“Regardless, we're not the cops, and we'd like to know.”
“Sure, any way I can help. This is about those murdered kids, right? The ones the Poet Killer poisoned, right? Parry, reading the man's name tag, said, “Don't concern yourself with that, just look at the photos and names and answer the questions, Marc.” Parry's officious-sounding tone appeared to hit the young man like a blow, if Jessica read his reaction correctly; he seemed to lean back exaggeratedly, straighten, and take a deep breath, as if assessing the agents anew.
“Tamburino,” he said to Parry, “my name's Tamburino to you.”
As Jessica laid out the photos and names, she asked, “You always on the day shift, Mr. Tamburino?”
“Day, night, all the time. It's mine,” he said throwing his hands skyward. “Bought out the owner, Nelson DeWitt. Took every penny I had plus a major-assed loan I'll die paying back, but it's a living, sorta.”
“Do you recognize any of these young people?” she asked again.
“This one looks familiar,” he said, pointing to Maurice Deneau's picture, “and I remember this guy,” he added, pointing to Pierre Anton's image. “I like guys.” He eye-balled Parry hard now. “Hell, they all look familiar. One time or another, I do believe they've all been in my store… These two for absolute certain.” He again fingered the pictures of the two male victims. “And this babe, always in here-browsing and sitting on the floor and reading in-house mostly. Seldom to never purchased. Had the need but not the bread.” He indicated Micellina Petryna with a jab of his left index finger.
“What about the others?”
“Not so regular, but yeah, I'd almost swear all of 'em's been in at one time or another, sure. Why? I mean anyone living around here? They're going to be a full-or part-time student somewhere, and students read, and therefore they wind up at my store. I order books for the classes at the community college and at University of Philly, undercut their on-campus stores, you see. Everybody knows it, so they come to me for textbooks and they browse and buy other kinds of books while they're here. Doesn't mean 1 had anything to do with their getting themselves killed.”
“No one is accusing you of anything, Mr. Tamburino,” Jessica soothed.
“That'd be a switch,” he replied, and winked. “You can call me Marc.”
“The victims didn't have too far to come for reading material,” said Parry in her ear.
“Only decent independent bookseller in the area,” said Tamburino. “Nearest Barnes and Noble is out at the merchant mall at the Trump Casino Hotel. If somebody collects books, or just has a love affair with the printed word, and he or she lives on Second Street… well, eventually, they come to me. That's the store motto.”
“What is?” asked Parry. “Expect Darkest Expectations to book your darkest needs,” he said with a self-deprecating smile and shrug. “Made up the motto for DeWitt couple of years ago. Put it in the window. Told him he needed to get wired to the Web, that I'd put it on a Web site for him. But he's… he was resistant to change.”
“I don't see that you've got any computers here,” remarked Parry.
'Took all my cash to buy the store. Computers'll have to wait.”
“How long have you owned it?”
“DeWitt's just putting the finishing touches onto the sale. He's retiring to a farm he bought in Ontario.”
“Canada?” asked Parry.
“No Arizona or Florida for DeWitt. DeWitt's… well… different.”
“How long did you work for him?” questioned Parry Bout several years now.”
“You think he's strange?”
“Different. I didn't say strange.”
“How do you mean different?” Parry pressed.
Tamburino shook his head. “Contrary is all. Contrary as hell and with everything. You tell him Florida's warm year-round, and he counters with the body needs cold, not hot, to live a long life. Nonsense like that. You tell him that the moon's in the sky, he tells you it's a fake, created by the U.S. government to delude us into believing it's the moon. Different like that is all.”
“What can you tell us about these people?” Jessica pointed to the photos on the counter.
“Not a whole lot; some were heavily into the Romantics-the poets-while others liked Love craft, Poe, Kafka, even Chekhov, early Koontz, vampire novels, you name it. How should I know?”
“Do you have receipts that might tell us about their purchases?”
“Does this place look like I own the latest in merchandising software? Look around. I use an adding machine.”
“Did any of them, to your recollection, purchase any poems by Garrison Burrwith?”
“Who's that?”
“Donatella Leare, then?”
“Oh, sure, they were into Leare's stuff.”
“And the poet Lucian Locke?”
“Yeah, pretty heavily there, too. How'd you know?”
“Wouldn't Scully on X-Files know?” Yeah, you're good.” He smiled. “But you know I've had both Locke and Leare in the store to sign copies of their latest works, so a lotta people came in just for the wine, cheese, and signature, among them your victims maybe. Kinda undercuts your cool score, heh, Scully?”
“Then these two authors are big in Philly? Around this area, they're the biggest. Best thing since Byron, Shelley, and Keats in my humble opinion.”
“Do you have any copies of their books?”
“Right behind you, follow the poetry section to the Ls.”
As she and Parry searched for the slim volumes of poetry, Tamburino shouted, “You gotta love their dark sincerity, man. The dark sincerity of their profound words. It's like Poe and Byron all rolled into one.”
Jessica returned with the books. “Highly recommended, then? Are these signed copies?”
“Yes, they are.”
“I'll take them both.” To Parry she whispered, “A handwriting expert like Eriq might be able to do something with the signatures. Might even find match points between the signature of one of the poets and the killer.”
“Both of these authors have cult followings,” said Tamburino. “Lot of word of mouth about both. The kids around here love 'em like they love Ginsberg; really can't get enough, like what Burroughs these days is to kids who read novels.”
“Thanks, Mr. Tamburino, and how much?” she asked, reaching for her purse.
“I've got it, Jess,” said Parry, placing a twenty on the counter.
“For the two signed copies, it's forty-nine ninety-nine,” Tamburino informed them. “Signatures make the books more valuable, along with the fact they're first editions.”
“Forty-nine ninety-nine for two little books of poetry? That's like a dollar a page,” Parry complained. “Awfully expensive paper and ink.”
“Locke and Leare keep my doors open.”
Jessica snatched out thirty more dollars while Parry, digging for more bills, muttered, “We'll put it on the company tab.”
While Tamburino rang up the order, Jessica started to collect the photos of the dead young men and women when she noticed the walls. They had been done up with a gray, wrinkled wallpaper that created the appearance of leather or even stone. A sponge-painted finish picked up the light and reflected it back. Jessica looked about at the self consciously creepy, sooty store and realized that even the soot was painted on. So real looking, she thought. The place evoked the interior of a medieval castle down to the fixtures and the frames around the artwork. Wherever one found a break in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a photograph was displayed, each depicting some dense forest or idealized landscape populated with mythological creatures, winged nymphs and fawns and angels. Stepping closer to one of these, she did a double take, realizing that they were not photographs at all, but paintings, meticulously rendered to resemble photographs, and displaying an ethereal use of light that bordered on uncanny. The term magical realism immediately sprang to her mind to describe the paradoxical mixture of “realistic” and fantastic in the pictures.