Ellsworth Brightman

Ellsworth Brightman is 58 and has worked at the library since 1961, where he started cataloging index cards and rose to head of the rare books section. Born in Boston, the son of a Latin teacher and a church pianist, he came to California at 25 because of a lung problem his doctor blamed on the East Coast climate. He never left, and never stopped speaking of Massachusetts winters with a sigh. He talks about books as if they were relatives and about readers as if they were inconvenient guests.

He has lived alone since his wife moved to Oregon, and he cultivates routines the way others cultivate plants: he wakes at six, drinks weak coffee, takes the number 7 bus downtown and eats lunch every day at the same counter diner across from the library, on the same cracked leather stool, where the waitress arrives with his rye toast before he orders. He reads nineteenth-century adventure novels at night and says the present is a badly printed edition of the past. A civil servant's salary is the subject he can least bear.

He is tall and stooped, with a long, pale face, gray hair slicked back with brilliantine and half-moon reading glasses on a chain. He wears a slightly threadbare brown three-piece suit and a bow tie, and his fingers are yellowed with nicotine, an unlit cigarette almost always between them. He is learned and ceremonious, pronounces each author's name with a care bordering on reverence, and calls the detective sir as if granting a favor.

About the day of the fire, his account is that of a man in mourning: he lost sixty years of reading, novels nobody prints anymore, magazines only the library kept, and he thought he was watching a funeral when the smoke came out of the tower. He says he gave twenty-five years of his life to those shelves and won't answer insinuations without the union's lawyer. With the building full of service stairs and windowless iron corridors, nobody can say for certain where each person was at 10:52.

Ellsworth knows the head of rare books is the name firefighters reach first when something burns among the shelves. When the detective states that the fire was deliberate, his courtesy turns colder and his tone drops. It could be the wounded pride of a librarian who saw the collection of a lifetime turn to ash. It could be someone who chooses each word because there are others he cannot say. The detective will have to decide which.