Peter

Peter is John Keller’s professional contact and the person who hired him to investigate Richard Flynn’s manuscript. He receives Keller’s reports as the inquiry unfolds, then hears Keller’s possible explanation of the events surrounding Joseph Wieder’s death. Peter’s role is defined less by investigative action than by the questions he brings to Keller’s conclusions: whether they can be substantiated, and whether they can safely be published.

Role in the Investigation

During the investigation, Peter is often out of town or occupied with business, so Keller keeps him informed by telephone. In one update, Keller reports that Danna Olsen has found no trace of the manuscript’s other chapters. Peter’s limited availability makes their exchanges intermittent, but he remains the person to whom Keller is accountable for the assignment.

When they meet at Abraçeo in the East Village, Keller tells Peter that he has finished the job and hands over a written summary. He also gives Peter a copy of Laura Baines’s book. Peter puts the summary in his briefcase without paying it much attention, and appears preoccupied. As Keller begins describing a possible reconstruction of the fall and winter of 1987, Peter listens absently, fidgeting with a sugar sachet and sipping his tea.

Response to Keller’s Theory

Peter does not dismiss Keller’s account outright, but he stresses the gap between a plausible explanation and evidence strong enough to support publication. He warns that a project of this kind would be difficult to publish without solid proof. His caution matters because Keller’s investigation has produced a theory, not the missing manuscript that might substantiate it.

Peter also struggles to reconcile Flynn, the man who sent Keller the manuscript, with the possibility that he was a killer. He allows that Flynn could have committed the murder, then asks whether the manuscript might have been a confession. Keller’s hypothesis is that Laura Baines manipulated Flynn into killing Wieder, left him to bear the consequences, and later built a career on what the murder made possible. In this account, Flynn understood the deception only after receiving Baines’s book. Peter listens to the theory, but its explanatory force does not resolve the evidentiary problem.

Publication and Legal Limits

When Keller concedes that the manuscript has disappeared and that he is not prepared to write a book, Peter returns the conversation to the practical limits of the assignment. Keller feels he may have wasted Peter’s time; Peter says that is not the issue. He doubts that a publisher would accept the legal complications, anticipating that Baines’s lawyers would make mincemeat of the publisher.

Peter’s function in the investigation is therefore not to settle what happened, but to mark the boundary between an interpretation and a publishable claim. Keller has accumulated a possible narrative of the 1987 events, yet the absent manuscript and lack of solid evidence leave Peter unwilling to treat that narrative as a finished case.