“Wouldn’t do ‘em much good. They’re not gonna find this in any archive.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’ve got possession of the tapes and transcripts. And there are no other copies.”
“But if you can’t make your sources public, what good is it?”
“It’ll all come out in due time.”
“Way too late for me, it sounds like. How do you know this is real?”
“Good Lord, hon, that’s what we’re chasing all over creation trying to do.”
“How close are you to verifying it?”
“Pretty close,” I said. “Close and yet so far.”
“Well, at some point we’ll have to trust each other,” Libby said. “We are honorable people, you know. If we give you our word, we’ll live up to it.”
“At least that’s what my uncle Dick Nixon always said,” said Luke.
“But I’ll have to know it all,” Libby said. “Everything you’ve got.”
This was met by silence as we considered what she was saying.
“I can’t write anything unless I know everything,” she said.
We ate quietly for a few minutes. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.
“Surely you understand that,” she said.
“Of course,” Erin said unexpectedly. “For your paper to be valid, it’s got to be based on source material that’s open to public examination. Or at least available long enough for somebody with impeccable credentials to verify that it’s real.”
“I don’t know any other way. They’d certainly demand to see what it comes from.”
“There might be another source—a more conclusive one—at some point.”
Libby just looked and waited. Cautiously, Erin said, “There’s a journal.”
“As in a journal kept by Richard Burton? In the master’s own hand, do I dare hope?”
Erin said yes with her eyes.
Libby took a deep breath. “What might the master have said in such a thing?”
“We hope it would confirm what Koko has on tape. We don’t have possession yet.”
“Sounds like you intend to get it, though.”
Erin shrugged. “Even if we do, it belongs to another party. It would be up to him what and if anything gets released. It’s totally his call.”
“This gets better and better, doesn’t it?”
“He’s a decent guy, I can vouch for that. My guess is…”
“Yes?”
She shook her head. “That’s crazy. I can’t go there, not till I speak with him. I’ve already said more than I should.”
“Well then,” Libby said. “How about some ice cream?”
We ate our ice cream and thought some more. Finally Erin said, “Look, if anything’s going to get done here tonight, you’ll have to trust each other at least this far. Agree that nothing coming from the other party, either directly or as follow-up, gets used without that party’s permission. And go from there.”
“You talk like a lawyer.”
“Oh, please, don’t hold that against me.”
“What do we do, sign our names in blood?”
“I’d suggest shaking hands and taking each other at our word.”
“That’s not very lawyerly advice.” Libby paused, then said, “I’m okay with it.”
“Koko?”
“Sure,” she said in an unsure voice.
I said, “As a demonstration of good faith, we’ll go first,” and I launched into the tale before anyone could have second thoughts. I told them how Josephine had come into my bookstore, how I had met Erin at the home of a Denver judge, and how Koko had been involved in Baltimore long before any of us. I told her how the old lady had died and of the deathbed promise I had given her. I left out the death of Denise, the Baltimore mob connection, and the facts of Archer’s beating.
“Oh wow,” Libby said again. “You’ve done a lot more on it than I have.”
I shrugged, and the moment stretched.
Suddenly she said what I hoped she’d say. “I’ll give you my part, for whatever it’s worth. Use it if you can. If you can find a way to share it, that would be lovely.”
She poured coffee. “I told you how I heard about the Burton club when I first came here, and about Rulon Whaley, the old man I met who thought Burton was a spy. Rulon was a true Charleston eccentric, but he had a forceful way of making me believe him. He told me about a photographer on East Bay Street who had taken a picture of two men in May 1860.”
“Burton and Charlie,” Koko said excitedly. “How’d he know it was them?”
“Long ago—forty years at least—he bought a bunch of papers at an estate liquidation. Ledgers, records, mostly junk. There was also some personal correspondence, but no one had ever attached any importance to it. Just old letters between obscure, forgotten people, that’s what anyone would think, looking at it. Rulon was then in his late twenties, just starting his law practice, but he had already read everything on Burton, and there was one letter that haunted him all his life. It had been written at the beginning of the Civil War by a young man to a former classmate. Apparently they had been best pals in school, and the fellow who wrote the letter was trying desperately to be a photographer.
“He was having a hard time of it. He was poor and the equipment was expensive. He was young, no one took him seriously, and photography itself was suspicious to a lot of people then. He had borrowed money from his friend to buy a camera and he was trying his best to get established, making portraits when he could get people to sit for him, shooting street scenes, whatever he could do to improve himself.
“One day the two men appeared. One was dapper-looking, the other…well, you could tell he had been around in the world. They had their picture made on East Bay Street. He remembered it because the worldly one had terrible scars on his cheeks. I’ve done a little photography, enough to know that’s the kind of thing you look for, something that sets off a face and makes it unforgettable. I don’t remember the exact date but I’ve got it written down, even to the time of day when the picture was made.”
“It was noon,” I said. “The sun was too bright and the photographer fussed over it. And Burton got impatient and almost walked away.”
“Yes! How did you know that?”
“It’s on my tapes,” Koko said. “Jo’s family had a copy of that picture but it got lost. We tried but we couldn’t find any evidence of a photographer on that stretch of street.”
“That’s because he never had a real place of business. He was living with his sister and her husband, people named Kelleher, and even that was just for a short time. I think he was only there for a month. I doubt if he ever had more than a hand-printed sign stuck in the window. By June, Kelleher had thrown him out.”
“Kelleher was the dentist,” Koko said.
“He was a dentist, and his wife was named Stuyvessant,” Libby said. “The photographer was nicknamed Barney—Barney Stuyves-sant. He was just a kid on fire with the artistic possibilities of the camera. Rulon gave me the letter when he knew he was dying.”
Erin said, “And just from that your friend was convinced Burton had been here.”
“Sure. How many men have scars like that? Rulon had already read everything about Burton, so yes, that’s the first thing he thought when he read Barney’s letter. He knew Burton was in the country then. He knew about the blank period that Burton’s biographers had never been able to pin down. He knew Burton had come through the South. And over time his belief grew stronger, even when there was nothing to back it up. That’s how he was.”
“So this is where we are,” I said. “Koko has a lot of anecdotal material on tape, which no academic or publisher would accept on its face value. You have a photographer’s letter, which seems to back us up, but it’s still not enough. And Erin has a lead on a journal that might solve everybody’s problem.”