Bookman's wake

Also by John Dunning

FICTION

The Holland Suggestions

Looking for Ginger North

Denver

Deadline

Booked to Die

The Bookman’s Wake

Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

NONFICTION

Tune in Yesterday

On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio

THE

BOOKMAN’S WAKE

JOHN DUNNING

POCKET STAR BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PA Pocket Star Book, published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 1995 by John Dunning

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-56782-9

First Pocket Books printing March 1996

10 9 8

POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cover design by Jae Song

Manufactured in the United States of America

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

To Jack Kisling of Hairline Press, who navigates

with a steady hand the eddies and shoals

of the printshop.

Again, prices on actual books discussed by characters in the story may be a year or two out-of-date. In a time of madness, when a new novel can bring ten times its cover price a year after publication, prices become obsolete almost as they’re published. Janeway remains a cynic when people pay too much too soon and glorify the trendy. But he is an equal-opportunity cynic who saves his deepest skepticism for me, when he and I are alone at four-thirty in the morning.

Another tip of the hat to Warwick Downing, who bullied me for three years. To George Fowler for turning me left and right in the Seattle rain. To Pat McGuire for long friendship and a kick in the duff when I needed it. And a kind word for the small-press publishers of today. Some still struggle valiantly in the great lost cause.

THE

BOOKMAN’S WAKE

The man in St. Louis died sometime during the afternoon, as near as the coroner could figure it. It happened long ago, and today it is only half-remembered even by old-timers who follow crime news. The victim was eccentric and rich: that, combined with the inability of the police to identify either a motive or a suspect, kept it on front pages for a week. Then the press lost interest. Reporters had been charmed by the puzzle, and by the colorful background of the deceased, but they could only sell that for a few days and then something new had to happen. It didn’t—the case slipped off the front pages and became history, perhaps to be resurrected periodically in anniversary pieces or in magazine accounts of unsolved mysteries. On the news desk at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , an editor ripped and read an AP squib about a triple murder in Phoenix, fifteen hundred miles to the southwest and thought—not for the first time—that the world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people. He considered using it as a two-graph filler on page eight: then he thought, Christ, we’ve got enough crazy people of our own, and the Phoenix murders got bumped by a UPI account of a squabble along the Chinese-Russian border. In Phoenix, that day and for the rest of the week, the case was front-page news. The cops didn’t have a clue. If murder had to happen, said the cop in charge of the

Phoenix case, it should at least be logical. It’s not the garden-variety passion killer we find scary, the cop said, it’s the guy who kills for no good reason and then disappears into the night. The police hardly ever catch him because he strikes without reason and has no motive. The trouble with random murder is that all the common denominators are superficial. The killer may break in the same way, he may use the same weapon, but there is never anything that hints of a motive because there isn’t any. Give me a motive, other than craziness, said the cop, and I’ll clear this case. That cop didn’t know, because it didn’t make the papers in Phoenix and was one among many brutal homicides on the national teletype as the long weekend began, that a Baltimore man had just been killed in much the same way. This time there was a survivor—his wife, blind from birth and left babbling madly in the killer’s wake. She was useless as a witness and was soon committed to a state institution, but perhaps even then she might have had something to tell an investigator with knowledge of Phoenix and St. Louis and the perspective to see them all as a single case. But computers weren’t yet in broad general use: communities separated by vast distances weren’t linked as they are today; murders weren’t grouped electronically by such factors as weaponry, forensic matching, and killer profiles. There was the teletype, with its all-points bulletins advising that murders had been committed, but what else was new? The term serial killer had not yet entered the common lexicon, and to most people it was inconceivable that a killer might strike in St. Louis on Monday, Phoenix on Wednesday, and in a Baltimore suburb on Friday night. On Sunday there was a double murder in Idaho—a rancher and his wife killed just as they were sitting down to dinner. This was big news in Boise, but it made hardly a ripple in St. Louis, Phoenix, or Baltimore. On the ninth day the killer struck for the last time—an elderly woman living alone in New Orleans. This time he set fire to the house, hoping, police theorized, to cover up his crime. In each of the five cities teams of detectives worked their local angles and found nothing. They sifted false clues, chased down rumors, and slowly over the weeks watched their final leads disappear into the big blank wall. The one common denominator remained hidden by the vast expanse of geography and by the often cryptic methods of police teletyping.

No one knew it then, but in each of the death houses lived a book collector.

That’s how I got into it, more than twenty years later.

BOOK I

ELEANOR

Slater wasn’t my kind of cop. Even in the old days, when we were both working the right side of the good-and-evil beat, I had been well able to take Mr. Slater or leave him alone. He had played such a small part in my life that, for a moment, I didn’t know who he was. I was working in my office, a small room in the rear of the used-and-rare bookstore I owned in Denver, writing up books for my first catalog, when Millie buzzed me from the front. “There’s a Mr. Slater here to see you,” she said, and the last person I would’ve thought about—did think about—was Clydell. This was annoying. My work was going slowly: I was an absolute novice at bibliography, and even with modern books there are pitfalls everywhere. Open on the table before me was a copy of Nickel Mountain , by John Gardner, as fresh and crisp as the day it was born in 1973. Gardner had signed it on the half title, a nice little touch, since he won’t be signing any more, that almost doubled its value. It’s not yet an expensive book—about $25-40 unsigned, in fine first edition—the kind of book that should be a snap to describe and price. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, who not only puts out fine books but also gives you the straight bibliographical poop. He’s not like Lippincott, who states first edition most of the time, or McGraw-Hill, who states it when the guy in the back shop feels like putting it on: if Knopf says it’s a first edition, you can take it to the bank and cash it…although I do remember one or two Willa Cathers that might or might not follow tradition. Let’s face it, all these houses are dotted with land mines. William Morrow was a model of consistency, but on one pricey little Harry Crews title, instead of noting second printing as always before, he put two tiny dots at the bottom of the copyright page. Cute, Morrow. That little piece of camouflage cost me $40 for a spectacular nonfirst last year. Doubleday always, and I mean always , puts the words first edition on his copyright page and takes it off for later printings. But on one John Barth he didn’t: he put no designation whatever, instead hiding a code in the gutter of the last two pages. The code must say H-18—not H-38 or H-Is-for-Homicide or H-anything-else—or it’s not a first. Harper and Row was as reliable as Knopf over the years, except in one five-year period, circa 1968— 73, when for reasons known only to Messrs. Harper and Row in that great bookstore in the sky, they started putting a chain of numbers on the last page, for Christ’s sake, in addition to saying first edition up front. Figure that out. The only way I can figure it out is that people who publish books must hate and plot against people who cherish them, make collectibles of them, and sell them. I can just see old Harper and Row, rubbing their translucent hands together and cackling wildly as some poor slob shells out his rent money, $700, for a One Hundred Years of Solitude , only to discover that he’s got a later state, worth $40 tops. Harper really outdid himself on this title: in addition to hiding the chain of numbers (the first printing of which begins with “1”), he also published a state that has no numbers at all. This is widely believed to be the true first, though there can still be found a few keen and knowledgeable dealers who would beg to differ. The one certainty is that on any Harper title for that era, the back pages must be checked. Thus concealed are points on early Tony Hillermans in the $750-and-up range, some Dick Francis American firsts (the numbers on one of which seems to begin with “2,” as no “1” has ever been seen), a good Gardner title, and, of course, Solitude , a fall-on-your-sword blunder if you make it, the rent’s due, and the guy who sold it to you has gone south for the winter.

So I was stuck on Nickel Mountain , with a guy I didn’t want to see storming my gates up front. I was stuck because I seemed to remember that there were two states to this particular book, A. A. Knopf notwithstanding. I had read somewhere that they had stopped the presses in the middle of the first printing and changed the color on the title page. God or the old man or someone high in the scheme of things didn’t like the hue, so they changed it from a deep orange to a paler one. Technically they are both first editions, but the orange one is a first-first, thus more desirable. It’s no big deal, but this was my first catalog and I wanted it to be right. The title page looked pretty damn orange to me, but hot is hot only when you have cold to compare it with. Go away, Slater, I thought.

I took an index card out of my desk, wrote check the color , and stuck it in the book. I told Millie to send the bastard back, and I got ready to blow him off fast if he turned out to be a dealer in snake oil or a pitchman for a lightbulb company. Even when he came in, for a moment I didn’t know him. He was wearing a toupee and he’d had his front teeth pulled. The dentures were perfect: you couldn’t tell the hairpiece from the real thing, unless you’d known him in the days when the tide was going out. His clothes were casual but expensive. He wore alligator shoes and the briefcase he carried looked like the hide of some equally endangered animal. His shirt was open and of course he wore a neckchain. The only missing effect was the diamond in the pierced ear, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d get to that too.

“You fuckhead,” he said. “Lookitcha, sittin‘ there on your damn dead ass with no time to talk to an old comrade-in-arms.”

“Hello, Clydell,” I said without warmth. “I almost didn’t know you.”

He put his thumbs in his lapels and did the strut. On him it was no joke. “Not bad, huh? My gal Tina says I look twenty years younger.”

Tina, yet. An instant picture formed in my mind— young, achingly beautiful, and so totally without brains that she just missed being classified as a new species in the animal kingdom.

“You’re the last guy I’d ever expect to see in a bookstore, Clydell,” I said, trying to keep it friendly.

“I am a doer, not a reader. It’s good of you to remember.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said, sidestepping the gentle dig.

“My deeds of daring have become legends among the boys in blue. I’m still one of their favorite topics of conversation, I hear. So are you, Janeway.”

“I guess I can die now, then. Everything from now on will just be downhill.”

He pretended to browse my shelves. “So how’s the book biz?”

I really didn’t want to talk books with a guy who— you could bet the farm on it—couldn’t care less. “Have a seat,” I said reluctantly, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Listen to ‘im,” he said to some attendant god. “Same old fuckin’ Janeway. No time for bullshit, eh, Cliffie? One of these days they’ll make a movie about your life, old buddy, and that’s what they’ll call it: No Time for Bullshit .”

It was all coming back now, all the stuff I’d always found tedious about Slater. His habit of calling people old buddy. The swagger, the arrogance, the tough-guy front. The false hair on the chest, as some critic— probably Max Eastman—had once said about Hemingway. The glitz, the shoes, the bad taste of wearing animal hides and buying them for his wife. Then bragging about it, as if going deep in hock on a cop’s salary for a $4,000 mink was right up there on a scale with winning the Medal of Honor for bravery. Some of us thought it was poetic justice when the Missus took the mink and a fair piece of Slater’s hide and dumped him for a doctor. But there was still light in the world: now there was Tina.

“It’s just that I’m pretty sure you didn’t come in here for a book,” I said. “We sold our last issue of Whips and Chains an hour ago.”

“You kill me, Janeway. Jesus, a guy can’t even stop by for old times’ sake without getting the sarcasm jacked up his ass.”

“To be brutally honest, you and I never ran with the same crowd.”

“I always admired you, though. I really did, Janeway. You were the toughest damn cop I ever knew.”

“I still am,” I said, keeping him at bay.

He made dead-on eye contact. “Present company excepted.”

I just looked at him and let it pass for the moment.

“Hey, you know what we should do?—go a coupla rounds sometime. Go over to my gym, I’ll give you a few pointers and kick your ass around the ring a little.”

“You wouldn’t last thirty seconds,” I said, finally unable to resist the truth.

“You prick,” Slater said in that universal tone of male camaraderie that allows insults up to a point. “Keep talking and one day you’ll really believe that shit.” He decided to take my offer of a chair. “Hey, just between us old warriors, don’tcha ever get a hankering to get back to it?”

“You must be out of your mind. No way on this earth, Clydell.”

He looked unconvinced. “Tell the truth. You’d still be there if it wasn’t for that Jackie Newton mess. You’d go back in a heartbeat if you could.”

“The truth?…Well, what I really miss are the Saturday nights. I hardly ever got through a whole shift without having to wade through guts and pick up the pieces of dead children. It’s pretty hard for something like this”—I made the big gesture with my arms, taking in the whole infinite and unfathomable range of my present world—“to take the place of something like that.”

We looked at each other with no trace of humor or affection. Here, I thought: this’s the first honest moment in this whole bullshit conversation—we’ve got nothing to say to each other. But the fact remained: Slater hadn’t come waltzing in here to show off his togs and tell me about Tina.

He lit a cigarette and looked at the bookshelves critically, the way a scientist might look at a bug under a microscope.

“Is there any money in this racket?”

I shook my head. “But it’s so much fun we don’t care.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he said dryly.

I felt my temperature rising. Slater had about twenty seconds left on his ticket and he must’ve known it. Abruptly, he switched directions.

“Y’know, there are some jobs where you can have fun and still make a buck or two. Maybe you’ve heard.”

I think I knew what he was going to say in that half second before he said it. It was crazy, but I was almost ready for him when he said, “I could use a good man if you’re ever inclined to get back in the real world.”

I let the full impact of what he was saying settle between us. He raised his eyebrows and turned up his palms, pushing the sincere look. It probably worked like a charm on children and widows and one-celled organisms like Tina.

“Let me get this straight, Clydell…you’re offering me a job?”

“More than a job, Clime…a lot more than that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t jump too fast, old buddy, till you hear me out.” He took a long drag and blew smoke into the air. “Last year I paid tax on a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Somebody’s gotta pay for those two-hundred-dollar toilet seats the Pentagon keeps buying.”

“Listen, you asshole, just shut up and listen. The best thing I ever did was take early retirement and go out on my own. Right now I’m the hottest thing Denver’s ever seen. I may branch out into radio. I was on two shows last week and the program director at KOA says I took to it like nobody she ever saw. Are you listening to me, Janeway? I could make a second career out of this if I wanted to. It’s so easy it oughta be against the law. None of those guys work more than two or three hours a day, and I’m just gettin‘ warmed up then. It’s all bullshit. I can bullshit my way out of anything, and that’s all you need in radio. I found that out after the first five minutes. It ain’t what you know, it’s what you got between your legs. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Clydell, what’s this got to do with me?”

“Keep your pants on, I’m getting to it. This is all by way of saying that your old buddy is leading a very full life. They invite me on to talk about the detective business and find out I can hold my own on anything. I’m filling in for the morning drive-time host next week. Denver Magazine is doing a piece on me, a fullblown profile. They’re picking me as one of Denver’s ten sexiest men over fifty. Can you dig that?”

I could dig it. Any magazine that would come up with a horse’s-ass idea like that deserved Slater and would leave no stone unturned in the big effort to find him. I hoped they’d shoot their pictures in the morning, before the town’s sexiest man got his hair off the hat rack and his teeth out of the water glass.

Slater said, “On radio they’re thinking of billing me as the talking dick.”

“This also figures.”

“I can talk about any damn thing. Politics?…Hell, I’m a walking statistical abstract. Ask me something. Go ahead, ask me a question…about anything, I don’t care.”

“Oh, hell,” I said wearily.

“ I’ve got an answer for everything and you can’t even come up with a fuckin‘ question.”

I looked at him numbly.

“Here’s something you didn’t know. They skew those microphones in my favor. If I get any shit from a caller, all I’ve gotta do is lean a little closer and raise my voice and he just goes away.” He gave me a grin and a palms-up gesture, like a magician who’d just made the rabbit disappear. “I’ll tell you, Cliff, I’m really hot as a pistol right now. I’m at the top of my game. There’s even talk about them doing one of my cases on the network, on Unsolved Mysteries .”

“If you’re such a ball of fire, how come you didn’t solve it?”

“I did solve the goddamn thing, that’s why they want to do it, you goddamn moron, as a follow-up to a story they did last year about all the meatheads who couldn’t solve the damn thing. Get this straight, Janeway—there is no case I can’t solve. That’s why I’m cutting Denver a new rear end, because I guarantee everything. I get results or I don’t cash the check. You got a missing person?…I’ll find the son of a bitch. If he owes you money, I’ll drag his ass back here, and before we’re through with him, he’ll wish he’d never laid eyes on you, this town, and most of all me. I can find anybody in a day or two—it’s just a matter of knowing your guy and using the old noggin. We’ve got a computer database with access to seventy million names in every state in the union. If the bastard’s got a MasterCard, works for a living, or has ever subscribed to a magazine, I’ve got his ass in my computer. I can tell you his home address, phone number, the size of his jockstrap, and how many X-rated videos he watched last week. I can tell you stuff about yourself that you didn’t even know.”

“Clydell…”

“Okay, the point is, I can’t keep up with it. I’ve got three legmen and three tracers on my payroll full-time, and I still can’t keep up with all the work. I could put on three more people right now and we’d still be a month behind in our billings. I turn down more jobs now than I take on: I take on any more, I won’t be able to do the sexy ones myself. I’ll just be a Paper man, shoveling shit and passing out assignments. Not the life for your old buddy, if you know what I mean. This is where you come in.”

“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head.

“You’d be second-in-command. Write your own ticket. I guarantee you’d make fifty grand, rock bottom, your first year. You’d have your pick of all the interesting cases, you’d be the go-between between me and the staff. You’d get a staff car and all expenses paid. I’m telling you, old buddy, my people go first-cabin all the way. My liquor cabinet opens at four and the staff has all the privileges. And if you’re lonely at night, we’ve got three secretaries with world-class’t-and-a, and they do a helluva lot more for a guy than take his dictation. I know you’re not crazy about me, Janeway, I got eyes in my head. But you ask anybody who works for me, they’ll all tell you what a pussycat I am. A guy does it my way, he’s got no problems. You’re gonna love this, and you’ll love me too before it’s over. Even if you don’t, nobody says we’ve gotta sleep together.”

With that sorry premise, I excused myself and went to the bathroom.

He was still there, though, when I came back.

“Think about it,” he said.

“I already have.”

“ Think about it, you dumb schmuck.” He looked around critically. “You’re like me, Janeway, a man of action. What the hell are you doing here?”

I’ll give it one try, I thought, see if I can make him understand the tiniest truth about the world he’s blundered into. But I couldn’t find the words even for that. You’ll never convince a doorknob that there’s anything more to life than getting pushed, pulled, and turned.

“I appreciate the thought,” I said, “but I’ve got to pass.”

“This job’s tailor-made for you, it’s got your name stamped all over it. You want proof?…I’ll toss you a plum. Two days’ work, you pick up five grand. There’s even a book angle, if you’re interested.”

I stared at him.

“Do I finally have your attention?” he said, grinning. “Did I just say a magic word or something?”

“You might’ve started with that, saved yourself a lot of time.”

“Shut up and listen. I need somebody to go pick up a skip. My staffs booked solid for the next two weeks; I’m so tight right now I can’t even send the janitor out there. This lady needs to be delivered back to the district court in Taos, New Mexico, ten days from tomorrow, absolute latest. The bondsman’s out fifty grand and he’s willing to grease our cut to fifteen percent for dragging her back. I’ve already done the arithmetic: that’s seventy-five big ones, just for taking a couple of plane rides. I pay your freight out there, you go first-class all the way, plus I give you the big cut.”

“Where’s out there?”

“She’s in Seattle.”

“How do you know that?”

“I went to Madame Houdini and looked in a crystal ball, you fuckin‘ schlemiel. I play the odds, that’s how. This gal comes from there, she’s still got people there, where else is she gonna go? I called a guy I know and put him on her case. Just sit and watch, you know the routine. Yesterday, around four o’clock, there she comes, bingo, we got her. My guy just gives her plenty of rope, and after a while she leads him to the Y, where she’s staying.”

“Where’s your guy now?”

“Still on her tail. He called me from a phone booth an hour ago, while she was getting her breakfast at the bus station lunch counter.”

“Why not just have him pick her up? Seems to me that’d be the easy way.”

“It’s not him I’m trying to impress, meatball. Let me level with you, Janeway: I don’t give a rat’s ass about this case, it’s just a way for you to make some quick and easy dough and see how much fun workin‘ for your old buddy really is. I swear to God, when I thought of you last night, it was like the answer to some prayer. I’ve been needing somebody like you as a ramrod in my office for at least a year now, but nobody I talked to seemed right for the job. Then this Eleanor Rigby thing popped and it came to me in one fell swoop. Cliff Janeway! What a natural.”

“What Eleanor Rigby thing?”

“That’s the skip’s name.”

I blinked. “Eleanor Rigby ?”

“Just like the song,” Slater said in the same tone of voice. But his eyes had suddenly narrowed and I sensed him watching me keenly, as if, perhaps, I might know Eleanor Rigby as something other than a song of my youth.

“Eleanor Rigby,” I said, staring back at him.

“Yeah, but this little baby’s not wasting away to a fast old age.”

I blinked again, this time at the picture he showed me.

“Not bad, huh? You make five big ones and you get to ride all the way home handcuffed to that . I’d do this one myself, old buddy, if it wasn’t for a radio date and Denver Magazine .”

Then, very much against all my better judgment, I said, “Tell me about it.”

2

Eleanor Rigby had gone to Taos to steal a book: that, at least, was how the betting line was running. On the night of September 14, four weeks ago, she had by her own account arrived in New Mexico. Five nights later she had burglarized the country home of Charles and Jonelle Jeffords. While tossing the house, she was surprised by the Jeffordses sudden return; a struggle ensued and shots were fired. According to a statement by Mrs. Jeffords, the Rigby woman had shot up the place in a panic and escaped the house. The law came quickly and Rigby was flushed out of the surrounding woods. She had initially been charged with aggravated burglary, a violation of New Mexico statute 30-16-4: then, after further interviews with the victims, the DA had added the more serious business—aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder. I didn’t know what the penalties were in New Mexico, but it probably wasn’t much different from Colorado. The whole package could get her ten years in the state penitentiary. The judge had set a standard bail: the DA had probably argued that Rigby had no ties to the community and was not a good risk, but judges, even in the punitive era we seem to be heading into, are reluctant to throw away the key before a defendant has had her day in court. Bail was $50,000: Rigby had put up as collateral a property she owned, a wooded tract near Atlanta that had been left her by her grandfather. The bondsman had posted the cash bond and had taken title to the property as a guarantee that she’d appear for her court date.

But Rigby did not appear. She returned to the Jeffordses’ house, broke in again, stole some papers and a book, and this time got away.

“That’s where we come in,” Slater said. “The Jeffords woman wants her book back; it’s one of those things, you know how people get over their stuff. A few days later she heard from the cops that Rigby had been seen in Denver; Jeffords got pipelined to me. It didn’t take us long to figure out that Rigby had been here for one night only, just passing through on her way to Seattle. The rest is history. My guy’s got a bead on her and she’s sittin‘ in the bus station, waiting for one of us to come pick her up. That’s when I thought of you, old buddy. I’m sittin’ at my desk thinking about this crazy dame and her book, and all of a sudden it hits me like a bolt of lightning right in the ass. Janeway ! And I wonder where the hell my head’s been the last two years. I didn’t give a damn about the case anymore, I’ve got bigger problems than that on my mind, and you, my good old buddy, are the answer to all of ‘em.”

I looked at him, wondering how much of this bullshit I was expected to swallow at one time.

“Think of it this way, Clime. You got nothing to lose, and you can buy a helluva lot of books for five grand.”

It was almost uncanny: that’s exactly what I was thinking, almost to the word. It was as if Slater had drilled a hole in my head and it had come spilling out.

“And while you’re up there, you can double your money if you happen to stumble over that little book that Jeffords wants back so bad. Best deal you’ve had in a month of Sundays. You get five grand guaranteed, just for getting on the airplane. Get lucky and make yourself another five.”

“What’s the name of this book you’re looking for?”

He got out his wallet and unfolded a paper. “You familiar with a thing called The Raven ?”

“Seems like I’ve heard of it once or twice. It’s a poem. Written by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“This one was by some guy named Grayson. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Not so far.”

“All I can tell you is what the client told me. I wrote it down real careful, went back over it half a dozen times, and it’s still Greek.”

“Can I see the paper?”

He gave it up reluctantly, like a father giving away a daughter at a wedding. The paper was fragile: it was already beginning to wear thin at the creases. I didn’t say anything about that, just unfolded it gingerly and looked at what he had written. “Actually, I do know the book,” I said. “It’s a special edition of The Raven , published by the Grayson Press.”

I sensed a sudden tension in the room, as if I had caught him stealing something. Our eyes met, but he looked away. “I don’t understand this stuff,” he said.

“What about it don’t you understand?”

“What makes these things valuable…why one’s worth more than the others. You’re the expert, you tell me.”

“Supply and demand,” I said in a masterpiece of simplicity.

Slater was probably a lifelong Republican who was born knowing the law of supply and demand. It’s the American way. If you want something I’ve got, the price will be everything the traffic will bear. If I’ve got the only known copy, you’d better get ready to mortgage the homestead, especially if a lot of other people want it too. What he didn’t understand was the quirk of modern life that has inflated ordinary objects and hack talents into a class with Shakespeare, Don Quixote , and the Bible. But that was okay, because I didn’t understand it either.

But I told him what I did know, what almost any good bookman would know. And felt, strangely, even as I was telling it, that Slater knew it too.

“The Grayson Press was a small publishing house that dealt in limited editions. I’ve heard they made some fabulous books, though I’ve never had one myself. Grayson was a master book designer who hand made everything, including his own type. He’d take a classic, something in the public domain like

The Raven , and commission a great artist to illustrate it. Then he’d publish it in a limited run, usually just a few hundred copies, numbered and signed by himself and the artist. In the trade these books are called instant rarities. They can be pretty nice collector’s items, though purists have mixed feelings about them.“

“Mixed feelings how?”

“Well, it’s obvious they’ll never take the place of the first edition. Poe’s work becomes incidental to this whole modern process. The books become entities of their own: they’re bought mainly by people who collect that publisher, or by people who just love owning elegant things.”

He gave me a nod, as if waiting for elaboration.

“It’s not an impossible book to find, Clydell, that’s what I’m telling you. I think I could find your client one fairly easily. It might take a month or two, but I could find it, assuming the client’s willing to spend the money.”

“The client’s willing to spend ten grand…which I’d be inclined to split with you fifty-fifty.”

“The client’s crazy. I could find her half a dozen copies for that and still give her half her money back.” “Don’t bullshit me, Janeway. How do you find half a dozen copies of a rare book like that?”

“People call them instant rarities: that doesn’t mean they’re truly rare. My guess is that this Grayson Raven is becoming a fairly scarce piece, but I still think it can be smoked out.”

“You guys talk in riddles. Rare, scarce…what the hell’s the difference?”

“A scarce book is one that a dealer might see across his counter once every five or ten years. A rare book— well, you might spend your life in books and never see it. None of the Grayson books are really rare in that sense. They’re scarce just by the fact that they were all limited to begin with. But they’re all recent books, all done within the last forty years, so it’s probably safe to say that most of them are still out there. We haven’t lost them to fire, flood, war, and pestilence. As a matter of fact, I can tell you exactly how many copies there were—I’ve got a Grayson bibliography in my reference section.”

I got the book and opened it, thumbing until I found what I wanted.

“ ‘The Raven and Other Poems , by Edgar Allen Poe,’” I read: “‘published by Darryl Grayson in North Bend, Washington, October 1949. Four hundred copies printed.’ It was one of Grayson’s first books. The last time I saw one in a catalog…I’m trying to think…it seems like the dealer was asking around five hundred dollars. That’s pretty steep, actually, for a book like that, but I guess this Grayson was a pretty special bookman.”

“And you really think you could get your mitts on half a dozen of these?”

“Well,” I hedged, “I could find her one, I’m sure enough of that.”

“How do you go about it? I mean, you just said you’d only get to see one of these every five or ten years.”

“Across my counter. But I won’t wait for that, I’ll run an ad in the AB . That’s a booksellers’ magazine that goes to bookstores all over the country. Somebody’s bound to have the damn thing: if they do, they’ll drop me a postcard with a quote. I might get one quote or half a dozen: the quotes might range from two hundred up. I take the best deal, figure in a fair profit for myself, your client pays me, she’s got her book.”

“What if I decide to run this ad myself and cut you out of the action? Not that I would, you know, I’m just wondering what’s to prevent it.”

“Not a damn thing, except that AB doesn’t take ads from individuals, just book dealers. So you’re stuck with me. Old buddy ,” I added, a fairly nice jab.

It was lost on him: his head was in another world somewhere and he was plodding toward some distant goal line that he could only half see and I couldn’t imagine.

“My client wants the book, only the one she wants ain’t the one you’re talking about.”

“I’m not following you.”

“This Grayson dude was supposed to’ve done another one in 1969.”

“Another what?”

“Raven.”

“Another edition of the same book? That doesn’t sound right to me.”

I thumbed through the bibliography, searching it out.

“There’s no such book,” I said after a while.

“How do you know that?”

“It would be in the bibliography.”

“Maybe they missed it.”

“They don’t miss things like that. The guy who put this together was probably the top expert in the world on the Grayson Press. He spent years studying it: he collected everything they published. There’s no way Grayson could’ve published a second Raven without this guy knowing about it.”

“My client says he did.”

“Your client’s wrong, Clydell, what else can I tell you? This kind of stuff happens in the book world…somebody transposes a digit taking notes, 1949 becomes 1969, and suddenly people think they’ve got something that never existed in the first place.”

“Maybe,” he said, lighting another smoke.

A long moment passed. “So go get Rigby,” he said at the end of it. “Pick her up and cash your chips. At least we know that’s real.”

“Jesus. I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”

“Easiest money you ever made.”

“You better understand one thing, Slater, and I’m tempted to put it in writing so there won’t be any pissing and moaning later on. I’m gonna take your money and run. You remember I said that. I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I wouldn’t go back to DPD for the chiefs job and ten times the dough, and listen, don’t take this personally, but I’d rather be a sex slave for Saddam Hussein than come to work for you. Can I make it any clearer than that?”

“Janeway, we’re gonna love each other. This could be the start of something great.”

3

For an hour after Slater left I browsed through the Grayson bibliography, trying to get the lay of the land. I had owned the book for about a year and had never had a reason to look at it. This is not unusual in the book business—probably 90 percent of the books you buy for your reference section are like that. Years pass and you never need it: then one day a big-money book comes your way and you really need it. There’s a point involved and you can’t guess, you’ve got to be sure, and the only way to be really sure is to have a bibliography on the book in question. In that shining moment the bibliography pays for itself five times over. Bibliographies are not for casual browsing or for bathroom reading. They are filled with all the technical jargon, symbols, and shorthand of the trade. The good ones are written by people with demons on their backs. Accuracy and detail are the twin gods, and the bibliographer is the slave. A bibliography will tell you if a book is supposed to contain maps or illustrations, and on what pages these may be found. It will describe the binding, will often contain photographs of the book and its title page, will even on occasion— when this is a telling point—give a page count in each gathering as the book was sewn together. If a printer makes an infinitesimal mistake—say the type is battered on a d on page 212, say the stem is fractured ever so slightly, like a hairline crack in a skier’s fibula—it becomes the bibliographer’s duty to point this out. It matters little unless the printer stopped the run and fixed it: then you have what is called in the trade a point. The bibliographer researches relentlessly: he gets into the printer’s records if possible, trying to determine how many of these flawed copies were published and shipped before the flaw was discovered. Those copies then become true firsts, hotly sought (in the case of hot books) by collectors everywhere.

Bibliographies are among the most expensive books in the business. A struggling book dealer on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, Colorado, can’t possibly buy them all when the asking price is often in three figures, so you pick and choose. I remembered when the Grayson book was published: it was announced with a half-page spread in the AB , an ad that promised everything you ever wanted to know about the Grayson Press. I had torn out the ad and stuck it in the book when it arrived. The title was The Grayson Press, 1947-1969: A Comprehensive Bibliography , by Allan Huggins. The blurb on Huggins identified him as the world’s top Grayson scholar and a collector of Grayson material for more than twenty years. The book looked substantial, one for the ages. It was thick, almost eight hundred pages, and it contained descriptions of every known book, paper, pamphlet, or poem ever issued by the Graysons. It had come in a signed limited edition at $195 and a trade edition at $85. To me it was a working book. I took the trade edition, and now, as was so often the case, I was damn glad I had it.

It was divided into four main sections. First there was a narrative biography of Darryl and Richard Grayson. This, combined with a history of their Grayson Press, took sixty pages. The second section was by far the biggest. It attempted the impossible, the author conceded, to catalog and annotate every scrap of Grayson ephemera, all the broadsides that the brothers had printed over a twenty-two-year career. This consumed more than four hundred pages of incredibly dense copy. The third section was called “Grayson Miscellany”: this contained the oddball stuff—personal scraps, Christmas cards (the Gray-sons had for years printed their own cards, charming pieces that, today, are eagerly sought), special announcements, trivia. Even the commercial jobs they had taken on—posters, menus for restaurants, brochures for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department —all the unexciting ventures done purely for cash flow, are now avidly collected by Grayson people. There would never be a complete accounting: a fire had destroyed the printshop and all its records in 1969, and it’s probably safe to say that previously unknown Grayson fragments will be turning up for a hundred years.

It was the final section, “Grayson Press Books.” that was the highlight of the bibliography. Grayson had made his reputation as a publisher of fine books, producing twenty-three titles in his twenty-two years. The books were what made collecting the scraps worthwhile and fun: without the books, the Grayson Press might have been just another obscure printshop. But Darryl Grayson was a genius, early in life choosing the limited edition as his most effective means of self-expression. When Grayson began, a limited edition usually meant something. It meant that the writer had done a work to be proud of, or that a printing wizard like Darryl Grayson had produced something aesthetically exquisite. Scribners gave Ernest Hemingway a limited of A Farewell to Arms , 510 copies, signed by Hemingway in 1929 and issued in a slipcase. But in those days publishers were prudent, and it was Hemingway’s only limited. Covici-Friede published The Red Pony in a small, signed edition in 1937, with the tiny Steinbeck signature on the back page. Perhaps the nearest thing to what Grayson would be doing two decades later was published by a noted printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers, in 1932: a limited edition of Homer’s Odyssey , the translation by T. E. Lawrence. People can never get enough of a good thing, and around that time the Limited Editions Club was getting into high gear, producing some classy books and a few that would become masterpieces. The Henri Matisse Ulysses , published in the midthirties, would sell for eight or ten grand today, signed by Matisse and Joyce. Slater would find that interesting, but I didn’t tell him. It would be too painful to watch him scratch his head and say, Joyce who?…What did she do ?

Like almost everything else that was once fine and elegant, the limited edition has fallen on hard times. Too often now it’s a tool, like a burglar’s jimmy, used by commercial writers who are already zillionaires to pry another $200 out of the wallets of their faithful. There are usually five hundred or so numbered copies and a tiny lettered series that costs half again to twice as much. The books are slapped together as if on an assembly line, with synthetic leather the key ingredient. As often as not, the author signs loose sheets, which are later bound into the book: you can sometimes catch these literary icons sitting in airports between flights, filling the dead time signing their sheets. Two hundred, four hundred, six hundred…the rich get richer and God knows what the poor get. The whole process has a dank and ugly smell that would’ve horrified the likes of Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and Darryl Grayson. According to Huggins, Grayson was the last of the old-time print men, the printer who was also an artist, designer, and personal baby-sitter for everything that came off his press. Look for him no more, for his art has finally been snuffed by the goddamned computer. Grayson was the last giant: each of his books was a unique effort, a burst of creativity and tender loving care that real book people have always found so precious. The Thomas Hart Benton Christmas Carol had been Grayson’s turning point: he had worked for a year on a new typeface that combined the most intriguing Gothic and modern touches and had engaged Benton to illustrate it. The book was sensational: old Charles Dickens was covered with new glory, said a New York Times critic (quoted in Huggins), the day the first copy was inspected by the master and found fit to ship. The Times piece was a moot point: the book was sold-out, even at $700, before the article appeared, and it mainly served to make the growing Grayson mystique known to a wider audience. People now scrambled to get on Grayson’s subscription list, but few dropped off and Grayson refused to increase the size of his printings. The Christmas Carol was limited to five hundred, each signed in pencil by Benton and in that pale ink that would later become his trademark by Grayson. There were no lettered copies and the plates were destroyed after the run.

I skimmed through the history and learned that Darryl and Richard Grayson were brothers who had come to Seattle from Atlanta in 1936. Their first trip had been on vacation with their father. The old man had their lives well planned, but even then Darryl Grayson knew that someday he would live there. He had fallen in love with it—the mountains, the sea, the lush rain forests—for him the Northwest had everything. After the war they came again. They were the last of their family, two boys then in their twenties, full of hell and ready for life. From the beginning Darryl Grayson had dabbled in art: he was a prodigy who could paint, by the age of eight, realistic, anatomically correct portraits of his friends. It was in Atlanta, in high school, that he began dabbling in print as well. He drew sketches and set type for the school newspaper, and for an off-campus magazine that later failed. He came to believe that what he did was ultimately the most important part of the process. A simple alphabet, in her infinite variety, could be the loveliest thing, and the deadliest. Set a newspaper in a classic typeface and no one would read it: use a common newspaper type for a fine book and even its author would not take it seriously. The printer, he discovered, had the final say on how a piece of writing would be perceived. Those cold letters, forged in heat, sway the reading public in ways that even the most astute among them will never understand. Grayson understood, and he knew something else: that a printer need not be bound to the types offered by a foundry. A letter Q could be drawn a million ways, and he could create his own. The possibilities in those twenty-six letters were unlimited, as long as there were men of talent and vision coming along to draw them.

Personally, the Grayson brothers were the stuff of a Tennessee Williams play. They had left a multitude of broken hearts (and some said not a few bastard offspring) scattered across the Southern landscape. Both were eager and energetic womanizers: even today Atlanta remembers them as in a misty dream, their exploits prized as local myth. Darryl was rugged and sometimes fierce: Richard was fair and good-looking, giving the opposite sex (to its everlasting regret) a sense of fragile vulnerability. In the North the personal carnage would continue: each would marry twice, but the marriages were little more than the love affairs—short, sweet, sad, stormy. The early days in Seattle were something of a career shakedown. Darryl got a job in a local printshop and considered the possibilities; Richard was hired by a suburban newspaper to write sports and cover social events— the latter an ideal assignment for a young man bent on proving that ladies of blue blood had the same hot passions as the wide-eyed cotton-pickers he had left in Atlanta. Having proved it, he lost the job. Huggins covered this thinly: an academic will always find new ways to make the sex act seem dull, but I could read between the lines, enough to know that Richard Grayson had been a rake and a damned interesting fellow.

A year of this was enough. They moved out of town and settled in North Bend, a hamlet in the mountains twenty-five miles east of Seattle. With family money they bought twenty acres of land, a lovely site a few miles from town with woods and a brook and a long sloping meadow that butted a spectacular mountain. Thus was the Grayson Press founded in the wilderness: they built a house and a printshop, and Darryl Grayson opened for business on June 6, 1947.

From the beginning the Grayson Press was Darryl Grayson’s baby. Richard was there because he was Darryl’s brother and he had to do something. But it was clear that Huggins considered Darryl the major figure: his frequent references to “Grayson,” without the qualifying first name, invariably meant Darryl, while Richard was always cited by both names. Richard’s talent lay in writing. His first book was published by Grayson in late 1947. It was called Gone to Glory , an epic poem of the Civil War in Georgia. Energetic, lovely, and intensely Southern, it told in nine hundred fewer pages and without the romantic balderdash the same tragedy that Margaret Mitchell had spun out a dozen years earlier. Richard’s work was said to have some of the qualities of a young Stephen Crane. Grayson had bound it in a frail teakwoodlike leather and published it in a severely limited edition, sixty-five copies. It had taken the book four years to sell out its run at $25. Today it is Grayson’s toughest piece: it is seldom seen and the price is high (I thumbed through the auction records until I found one—it had sold, in 1983, for $1,500, and another copy that same year, hand-numbered as the first book out of the Grayson Press, had gone for $3,500). Huggins described it as a pretty book, crude by Grayson’s later standards, but intriguing. Grayson was clearly a designer with a future, and Richard might go places in his own right. Richard’s problems were obvious—he boozed and chased skirts and had sporadic, lazy work habits. He produced two more poems, published by Grayson in a single volume in 1949, then lapsed into a long silence. During the years 1950-54, he did what amounted to the donkey work at the Grayson Press: he shipped and helped with binding, he ran errands, took what his brother paid him, and rilled his spare time in the hunt for new women. He freelanced an occasional article or short story, writing for the male pulp market under the pseudonyms Louis Ricketts, Paul Jacks, Phil Ricks, and half a dozen others. In 1954 he settled down long enough to write a novel, Salt of the Earth , which he decided to market in New York. E. P. Dutton brought it out in 1956. It failed to sell out its modest run but was praised to the rafters by such august journals as Time magazine and The New Yorker . Amazing they could find it in the sea of books when the publisher had done what they usually did then with first novels—nothing at all. The New York Times did a belated piece, two columns on page fifteen of the book review, just about the time the remainders were turning up on sale tables for forty-nine cents. But that was a good year, 1956: Grayson’s Christmas Carol rolled off the press and Richard had found something to do. He wrote a second novel, On a Day Like This , published by Dutton in 1957 to rave reviews and continued apathy from the public. One critic was beside himself. A major literary career was under way and America was out to lunch. For shame, America! Both novels together had sold fewer than four thousand copies.

His next novel, though, was something else. Richard had taken a page from Harold Robbins and had produced a thing called Warriors of Love . He had abandoned Dutton and signed with Doubleday, the sprawling giant of the publishing world. The book was a lurid mix of sex and violence, a roaring success in the marketplace with eighty thousand copies sold in the first three weeks. The critics who had loved him were dismayed: the man at the Times drew the inevitable comparison with Robbins, recalling how in his first two books Robbins had seemed like a writer of some worth and how later he had callously sold out his talent for money. The only critic in Richard’s eyes was his brother, though he’d never admit it or ask for Grayson’s judgment. It was clear, from a few surviving pieces of correspondence, that Grayson had had nothing to say beyond a general observation that whoring—a noble and worthy calling in itself—ought to be confined to the bed and never practiced at the typewriter.

Richard never wrote another book. His big book continued making money throughout his life. It was filmed in 1960, and a new paperback release again sold in vast numbers, making an encore visit up the bestseller charts. Huggins viewed Richard as a tragic literary figure, lonely and sensitive and often mean, ever seeking and never finding some distant personal El Dorado. He continued to live in North Bend: had a house built on the property for his wife, who soon left him for another man. But there were long periods when he disappeared, absorbed into the decadent life of Seattle and Los Angeles and New York. In North Bend he filled his nights with classical music, so loud it rocked the timbers. Often he would drift down to the printshop, where he sat up all night composing poems and bits of odd prose for nothing more than his own amusement. Sometimes he would set these pieces in type, striking off one or two or half a dozen copies before dismantling the layout and staggering to bed at dawn. Old acquaintances might receive these in the mail, lyrical reminders of a time long past. One poem, containing four stanzas and lovingly printed on separate folio sheets in Grayson’s newest typeface, was fished out of the garbage by a neighbor. It remains, today, the only known copy. An occasional piece might be sent to a childhood friend in Atlanta, a girl he once knew in Hollywood, an old enemy in Reno who, inexplicably, kept it, only to learn later that it was worth real money. These would arrive out of the blue, the North Bend postmark the only hint of a return address. In an apologia, Huggins described the bibliographer’s nightmare of trying to include it all—there was simply no telling how many had been done and completely destroyed, and new scraps were turning up all the time. At least one Grayson collector had assembled more than two hundred unpublished poems and bits of prose, set in type by Richard in his odd moments. There had been talk of getting these writings published, if rights could be determined and the heirs could ever agree. A dual biography had been published three years ago: titled Crossfire with the subtitle The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard Grayson , it had been written by a woman named Trish Aandahl and brought out by the Viking Press. The Graysons died together in a fire that destroyed the printshop on October 14, 1969. Both had been drinking and apparently never knew what happened to them. Aandahl was cited by Huggins as the chief source of information on Grayson’s final project, which had been destroyed in the fire. It had engaged him for years, off and on around other work. Reportedly he had designed two intricate, separate-though-compatible alphabets for the two parts, English and French. Based on a few surviving letters and the recollections of people who knew him, Huggins was able to pinpoint the French volume as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil .

I remembered that Baudelaire had been one of Poe’s biggest fans in his lifetime. In fact, Baudelaire had translated Poe’s works into French.

4

I flew to Seattle the same afternoon. The job was a piece of cake, Slater said at the airport. The kid had no priors and had offered no resistance to the deputy who arrested her in the woods. No weapon had been found, either in Rigby’s possession or in a search of the vicinity. The shooting was believed to be an act of panic, and Rigby had ditched the gun immediately afterward. At the bond hearing her lip had described her as a sweet kid committed to nonviolence. She was either Mother Teresa or Belle Starr, take your pick. I took my gun along for the ride. I wasn’t about to shoot the kid, but when you’ve been a cop as long as I was, you don’t leave home without it. I cleared it through the airline and tucked it in my bag, which I checked through luggage. I was also carrying a certified copy of the bench warrant and an affidavit describing in detail the Rigby woman’s crime. I read it all through again on a bumpy two-hour flight.

Slater had arranged everything. I had a car waiting and a room at the Hilton downtown. My plan was short and sweet: I would bust the Rigby woman, park her for safekeeping in the Seattle jail, cut a swath through the Seattle bookstores tomorrow, and deliver her to New Mexico tomorrow night. The ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire were my companions, but I shook them off. I was not going to get into that, I promised myself. Poe sat beside me as the plane circled Seattle: the gaunt little son of a bitch just wouldn’t go away. The hell with you, I thought: I’m taking this woman back to New Mexico. Poe gave a crooked little smile and fastened his seat belt, and the plane dropped into the dense cloud cover and rumbled its way downward.

My contact was a guy named Ruel Pruitt. Slater had used him on several cases with Seattle angles and found him to be “a good guy at what he does. He hates the world,” Slater said, “but he’s like the damn invisible man, and there’s nobody better at this cloak-and-dagger shit.” I was to check into my hotel and wait in my room until Pruitt called, then go pick up the girl. After that I was on my own. I had never done any bounty-hunter work, but I knew the routine because I had cooperated with enough of them when I was a Denver cop. Some were okay, highly professional: then there were the goofballs right out of a Chuck Norris movie. All I needed for this job, Slater assured me, was a sturdy pair of handcuffs, and he had given me a set of good ones from the trunk of his car.

I got into Seattle at three-thirty Pacific time. Of course it was raining. Perry Como might think the bluest skies you ever saw were in Seattle, but all I’ve ever seen there is rain. I almost missed the hotel—the Seattle Hilton has its check-in lobby on the ninth floor, and only a garage entrance and elevator at street level. By four-thirty I was settled in my room, on the seventeenth floor with a window into rain-swept Sixth Avenue. At 5:05 the telephone rang. A velvety voice said, “Janeway?” and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I’m in a bar near the Kingdome.” He gave me an address and said he’d be outside in a blue Pontiac. He read off his plate number and I got it down the first time. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” he said. “I got no idea how long this little dyke’s gonna sit still.”

Wonderful, I thought, listening to the dead connection—just the kind of charmer I’d expect to find working for Slater. I slipped the cuffs into my jacket pocket and ten minutes later I pulled up behind the Pontiac on First Avenue. The plate matched the number he’d given me, and I could see two people sitting inside. One of them, I thought, was a woman. The bar nestled at the foot of an elevated double-decker viaduct, looking like a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde. It was triangular, squeezed in where the street slashed through on a kitty-corner layout. The rain was heavy now. I sat waiting for a break, but the rain in Seattle isn’t like the rain in Denver: a guy could grow a long white beard waiting for it to slack off here. At 5:45 by the digital in my car, I decided to run for it. I flicked up my parking lights, got his attention, hopped out, and ran to his car. The doors were locked. Pruitt and his ladyfriend sat smoking, chatting as if I weren’t there. I rapped on the backseat doorglass and Pruitt looked around, annoyed, and pointed to his custom seatcovers. I stood with water running down my nose and looked at them through the glass, said, “Son of a bitch,” and hoped they could read my lips. Eventually he got the message: he leaned over the seat, found an old blanket, and spread it over his seatcovers. By the time he was ready to open the door, I was drenched.

I pushed the blanket roughly out of the way and flopped down on the backseat.

“Hey, cowboy,” Pruitt said, “are you trying to piss me off?”

The woman giggled and we all looked at each other. Pruitt was an ugly pockmarked man. His face had been badly pitted long ago, the way you used to see on smallpox victims, and it gave him a look of rank decay. He smelled of cedarwood aftershave and peppermint, which on him had a faintly sickening effect.

He was in his late forties: his girlfriend was younger, a brassy-looking blonde. But it was Pruitt who commanded the attention. His coat was open so I could see the gun he wore. He was an intimidator, I knew the type well, it had crossed my path often enough when I was a cop in Denver. Give him an inch and he’ll walk all over you. He’ll bully and embarrass you and make life miserable. I never give guys like him an inch, not even when I could see, like now, the eyes of a killer.

“Where the hell did Slater dig you up?” he said.

“He used to date my mother. I hear he found you the same way.”

The blonde gave a small gasp: one didn’t, I was supposed to believe, talk to the man in that tone of voice. Pruitt’s eyes burned holes in my head. “We’ve got a real smart-ass here, Olga. Ten thousand guys in Denver and Slater sends me a smart-ass.”

“Tell you what,” I said evenly. “Let’s start over. I’ll go back to my hotel and dry out, -have a drink, get a good dinner, maybe find myself a friend of the opposite sex to help me pass the time. You sit here in the rain, follow Slater’s girl, and call me when you want to pass the torch. How does two weeks from tomorrow sound?”

“A real smart-ass. You’re getting water all over my car, for Christ’s sake, didn’t your fucking mother teach you anything? Where were you raised, in a back alley behind some Denver whorehouse?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. I seem to’ve missed all the advantages Mrs. Hitler gave you.”

He burned me with his killer eyes. The blonde seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to crawl over the seat and kill me.

“Just for the record,” I said pleasantly, “I’m about this close to pushing what’s left of your face right through that windshield. Do we understand each other yet, Gertrude?…or do I have to take that gun away from you and empty it up your ass?”

We sat and stared. I was ready for him if he came, and I thought he might. The rage simmered in the car and fogged up the windshield. In the end, he had a higher priority than teaching a cowboy from Denver who was boss.

“You want to tell me about this woman?” I said.

“You’ve got her picture. She’s in there, it’s your job now.”

“I’ll tell you when it’s my job. If I have any more trouble with you, I’m out of here, and you and Slater can figure it out by yourselves.”

“Shit.”

I couldn’t improve on that, so I let it ride. We sat in the car for a few minutes without talking. “Go inside,” he said to Olga as if I weren’t there. “See if our pigeon’s getting lonely.” She got out and ran through the rain, disappearing into the bar. Pruitt sat in silence, his collar turned up to his ears, his eyes riveted on the neon lights in the window. He lit a cigarette but put it out without comment when I cracked the window and the rain came in on his seats.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said. He got out in the rain and walked to the bar. I trailed along behind him. He tapped the hood of an old roadster parked at the front door—Rigby’s, I was left to conclude. It was a true jalopy, with current Washington plates and bad tires. We went inside. Pruitt didn’t want to go past the dark aisle that led into the barroom. We stood there a moment in the pitch, trying to adjust our eyes. It was still early, but already the bar was crowded with happy-hour zombies and refugees from various wars. Music was playing loudly on the jukebox: “Sea of Love.” Maybe thirty people were at the bar and at tables scattered around it. The bartender was a fat man who looked like Jackie Gleason. Olga sat on a stool at the far end. Two stools away was Eleanor Rigby.

“There she is,” Pruitt said.

We stood for another moment.

“Is it your job yet, or am I supposed to stand here all night?”

“Go on, blow.”

He motioned to Olga, who left an untouched beer and came toward us. “I’ll probably meet you again sometime,” he said to me. “The circumstances will be different.”

“I’m in the Denver phone book, if you ever get out that way.”

“Maybe I’ll make a point of it.”

Asshole , I said, not entirely under my breath.

I ambled to the bar and sat on the only empty stool, directly across from Rigby. The bartender came; I ordered a beer and sucked the foam off. Ten yards away, Eleanor Rigby had another of whatever she was drinking. I watched her without looking. I looked at two guys having a Seahawks argument and I watched her with peripheral vision. I watched the bartender polishing glasses and I looked at her. She looked bone weary, as if she might fall asleep at the bar. I stole a frontal look. There wasn’t much danger in it, she was just another good-looking girl in a bar and I was a lonely, horny guy. She’d be used to gawkers, she must get them all the time. She was twenty-one, I guessed, with thick hair pinned back and up. “Eleanor Rigby.” I shook my head and tried to clear away the Victorian spinster the song conjured up. I wondered what it does to people, being named after something like that and having to carry that baggage all your life.

I was in it now, committed to the deed. I told myself she was nothing more than a cool five grand, waiting to be picked up. I wasn’t sure yet how to take her—probably later, on the street. I didn’t like the smell of the crowd in the bar. It was a blue-collar crowd, a sports crowd, and there’s always some ditz ready to rise up out of a crowd like that and defend a pretty woman’s honor no matter what. Never mind my court papers, never mind the cheap-looking ID Slater had given me as I left. The ID identified me as an operative of CS Investigations of Denver, but there was no picture of me on it and it gave me no authority beyond what Slater had, what anybody has. What I could use right now was a state-issued license with my kisser plastered all over it. But the state of Colorado doesn’t require its private detectives or its psychotherapists to have special licenses: all a bozo needs is an eight-by-twelve office, the gift of gab, and the power of positive thinking. I was making what amounted to a citizen’s arrest, and I had the law on my side because she had jumped bail and was now a fugitive. But if you have to explain that to a crowd in a bar, you’re already in trouble.

I nursed my beer and waited. She sat across the waterhole, a gazelle unaware of the lion’s approach. The stool had opened to her immediate left. I was tempted, but a shark moved in and filled it. Story of my damn life: the studs make the moves while I sit still and consider the universe, and I go home to a cold and lonely bed. I thought about Rita McKinley and wondered where she was and what she was doing with herself. In a way that was difficult to explain, Eleanor Rigby looked a little like Rita, like a younger model. Actually, she looked nothing like Rita at all. The stud to her left was already hitting on her. In happier times she might’ve been thrilled, but now she just looked tired and bored. The bartender drifted down and asked if I wanted another brew. I said I was okay, I’d send up a flare when the need became great. At the front table the Seahawks flap was still raging, a real-life commercial for Miller Lite. Across the way, Mr. America said something and gestured to her drink. She shook her head and tried to go on with her life, but he remained doggedly in her face. She swished her ice and sipped the watery remains while her hero worked his way through the first twelve chapters of his life story. He was one of those loud farts, the kind you can’t insult: he probably couldn’t be killed, except with a silver bullet. He was halfway to his first million and nobody to share it with. I couldn’t imagine any interesting woman falling for that line, but interesting probably wasn’t what he was after. The guy was a moron, either that or I was. I didn’t have time to dwell on it because just then Eleanor Rigby got up and left him flat, halfway between the big deal he had just pulled off and all the bigger ones coming down the pike.

I liked her for that. In a way it was a shame I was going to have to bust her. I left two bills on the bar and followed her down the hall to the Johns. She disappeared into the ladies‘. I checked to make sure there was no other way out, then I drifted back into the bar and took up a position where I couldn’t miss her. I was standing near the only window, which looked out into the street. Heavy black drapes were closed over it, but I parted them slightly so I could see out. I was staring at her car, my hand suspended between the curtains. Someone was sitting behind the wheel. I saw a light, very faint: he was looking for something, rummaging through the glove compartment. He put on his hat and got out in the rain. Pruitt. He stood for a moment, oblivious to the rain that had bothered him so much before. He gave her door a vicious kick, leaving a dent six inches across. I saw the snap of a blade, a wicked stiletto, and he bent over and poked a hole in her tire. Then he walked away and I watched the car go flat.

Just then she came out of the hallway. She walked past, so close I could’ve touched her. I let her go, following her out through the narrow foyer. By the time I got to the door she had run to her car. I stood watching her through the tiny pane of glass. Yes, she had seen the flat tire: she was sitting in her car doing nothing. I could imagine her disgust. Time for Loch-invar to appear, as if by magic: a knight with a bouquet in one hand and a set of shackles in the other. Bust her now, I thought, walking out into the rain: bust her, Janeway, don’t be an idiot. But there was Poe, grim and pasty-faced, lurking in the dark places under the viaduct.

I stopped at the curb and pointed to her tire. She cracked the window ever so slightly.

“You got a flat.”

“No kidding.”

“Hey,” I said in my kindest, gentlest voice. “I can’t get any wetter than this. Gimme your keys, I’ll get out your jack and change it for you.”

5

She sat in the car while I changed her tire. I jiggled her up, took off her lugs, and hummed a few bars of “Singin‘ in the Rain.” Her spare tire was like the others: it had been badly used in at least three wars, the alleged tread frequently disappearing into snarls of frayed steel. I hauled it out of the trunk and put it gently on the curb. The street was as deserted as a scene from some midfifties end-of-the-world flick, but it fooled me not. Pruitt, I thought, was still out there somewhere, I just couldn’t see him. If this were Singiri in the Rain , he’d come on down and we’d do a little soft-shoe routine. I’d be Gene Kelly and we’d get Eleanor Rigby out of the car to play Debbie Reynolds. Pruitt would be Donald O’Connor, tap-dancing his way up the side of the viaduct and out onto the highway, where he’d get flattened by a semi. Suddenly I knew, and I didn’t know how, that there was a joker in the deck: Slater hadn’t hired me for my good looks after all. A far greater purpose was hidden under the surface: what had been presented as an interesting side dish was in fact the main course, and the big question was why the camouflage ? I was told to play lead in Singin’ in the Rain , and now, well into the opening number, I learned it was really West Side Story we were doing. In a minute Pruitt would come down and we’d do one of those crazy numbers where the good guys sing and dance with the hoods, just before they all yank out their zip guns and start zipping each other into hoodlum heaven. I scanned the street again, searching for some sign of life, but even Poe had disappeared into the murky shadows from whence he’d come.

I tossed Rigby’s flat tire into her trunk and contemplated the spare. I resisted the inclination to laugh, but it was a close call: she must’ve searched the world to’ve found five tires that bad. I’ll take your four worst tires and save the best of my old ones for a spare . You gotta be kidding, lady, there ain’t no best one. Oh. Then throw away the three worst and give me whatever’s left . You know the routine, Jack Nicholson did it in a restaurant in Five Easy Pieces : four over well, cooked to a frazzle, and hold the tread. Pruitt didn’t need a knife, a hairpin would’ve done it for him. I hummed “I Feel Pretty” in a grotesque falsetto as I fitted the tire onto the wheel, but it didn’t seem to brighten the moment. Crunch time was coming, and I still didn’t know what I was going to do. It was that goddamned Poe, the wily little bastard: he had cast his lot with Slater and was waxing me good. That one line about Baudelaire in the Huggins bibliography had been the hook, and I was too much the bookman to shake it free.

Was it possible that Darryl Grayson had been working on a two-book set, Poe and Baudelaire, English and French, at the time of his death, and that one copy of the Poe had been completed and had survived? If you read “Dear Abby” faithfully, as I do, you know that anything is possible. What would such a book be worth, quote-unquote, in today’s marketplace?…A unique piece with a direct link to the deaths of two famous bookmen, snatched from the blaze just as the burning roof caved in. Was it truly the best and the brightest that Darryl Grayson could make? If so, it was worth a fair piece of change. Ten thousand, I thought, Slater even had that right: it was worth just about ten grand on the high end. But with one-of-a-kind pieces, you never know. I could envision an auction with all the half-mad Grayson freaks in attendance. If two or three of them had deep pockets, there was no telling how high such a book might go.

I tightened the last of the lugs with my fingers. Not much time left now, and it wasn’t going to end with the whole company out in the street singing “Maria.” I needed some quick inspiration and got it—the thin point of my filing-cabinet key shoved into her air valve brought the spare hissing down flat. She didn’t hear a thing: the rain was drumming on her roof and her window was up. I got up and walked around the car, looking at her through the glass. She cracked the window and gave me a hopeful smile.

“The news is not good. Your spare’s flat too.

”She didn’t say anything: just took a deep breath and stared at her knuckles as she gripped the wheel. I fished for a legitimate opening, any bit of business that might make her trust a half-drowned stranger on a dark and rainy night. “I could call you a cab,” I said, and my luck was holding—she shook her head and said, “I don’t have enough money left for a cab.” That was a cue, but I didn’t leap at it like a sex-starved schoolboy, I let it play out in a long moment of silence. “I could loan you the money,” I said cheerfully, and I thought I saw her doubts begin to vanish in the rain. “Hey, you can mail it back to me when you’re flush again.” She gave a dry little laugh and said, “That’ll probably be never.” I shrugged and said, “You’re on a bad roll, that’s all Look, I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas, but I’ve got a car right across the street. I could drive you home…as long as you don’t live in Portland or someplace.”

She seemed to be considering it. I knew I didn’t look like anything out of the Seattle social register, so sincerity was probably the best I could hope for. I leaned in close, crossed my arms against her window, and talked to her through the crack. “Look, miss, you can’t stay out here all night. If you’re broke, I’ll loan you the money for a place…a cheap place, okay?…no strings attached. Call it my good deed for the year, chalk it up to my Eagle Scout days. If you’re worried about me, I can understand that, I’ll slip you the money through the window and give you an address where you can send it back to me when your ship comes in. What do you say?”

“I thought Good Samaritans were extinct.”

“Actually, I’m your guardian angel,” I said, trying for a kidding tone to put her at ease.

“Well, you’ve sure been a long time coming.”

“We never show up until the darkest possible moment.”

“Then you’re right on time.”

“I could spare thirty dollars. You won’t get much of a room for that, but it’s better than sitting in your car all night.”

She leaned close to the crack and studied my face.

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Because you look like you’ve just lost your last friend. Because I know you’ll pay me back. Because once or twice in my life, I’ve been so far down it looked like up to me.”

“Richard Farina.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was surprised she had made that connection.

“That’s the title of a book by Richard Farina. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me .”

I said, “Oh,” and pretended not to know it. I’d have to watch that, keep the literary metaphors out of my talk until I saw where we were heading.

“So what do you say?” I asked.

“I won’t take your money…but, yeah, maybe a ride…I could use a ride if you’re going my way.”

“I’m sure I am.”

I told her to stay put and I’d drive up close so she wouldn’t get wet. Then I had her, snuggled in the seat beside me. No wonder monsters like Ted Bundy had it so easy. That thought crossed her mind too and she said, “I guess I’m a sitting duck if you’re some wacko from a funny farm.” She shrugged as if even that wouldn’t matter much. I gave her the big effort, a smile I hoped was reassuring. “Ma’am, I don’t blame you at all for thinking that, I’d be thinking it myself if I were in your shoes. All I can tell you is, you’re as safe with me as you’d be in a police station.”

I hoped this wasn’t laying it on too thick, but it didn’t seem to bother her. “My name’s Janeway.”

Her hand was warm and dry as it disappeared into mine. “Eleanor Rigby.”

I was surprised that she’d use her real name: she probably hadn’t had time yet to get used to being a fugitive.

“Eleanor Rigby,” I repeated. “You mean like…” and I hummed the staccato counterpoint.

She tensed visibly at the melody. For a moment I was sure she was going to get out and walk away in the rain. “You’ve probably heard that a million times,” I said, trying to make light of it. “I imagine you’re sick of it by now.” Still she said nothing: she seemed to be trying to decide about me all over again. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by that. I grew up on Beatles music, it was just a natural connection I made. I sure wasn’t relating you to the woman in the song.”

Her eyes never left my face. Again I was certain I was going to lose her, she seemed that ready to break and run. “We can start all over if you want. My name’s Janeway, and I’ll still loan you the thirty if you’d rather do it that way.”

She let out a long breath and said, “No, I’m fine.”

“And your name is Eleanor Rigby, I understand. It’s a great name, by the way. Really. How’d you come to get it?”

“The same way you got yours, I imagine. I come from a family of Rigbys and my father liked the name Eleanor.”

“That’s as good a way as any.”

Now she looked away, into the rainy night. “This is going to be a lot of trouble for you.”

“Trouble’s my middle name. Which way do you want to go?”

“Get on the freeway and go south. Stay in the left lane. When you see 1-90, branch off to the east, take that.”

I turned the corner and saw Interstate 5, the cars swirling past in the mist. I banked into the freeway, glancing in my mirror. No one was there…only Poe, interred in the backseat.

“You’d better turn that heater on,” she said. “God, you’re so wet.”

“I will, soon’s the car warms up.”

She gave me a look across the vast expanse of my front seat. “I guess you’re wondering what I was doing in a bar if I was so broke.”

“I try not to wonder about stuff like that.”

“This is the end of a long day, in a very long week, in a year from hell. I was down to my last five dollars. The only thing I could think of that I could buy with that was a margarita. I had two and killed the five. Sometimes I do crazy things like that.”

“So now what do you do? Do you have a job?”

She shook her head.

“At least you’re not stranded here. I couldn’t help noticing the Washington plates on your car.”

“No, I’m not stranded. Just lost on planet Earth.”

“Aren’t we all. I’m not so old that I don’t remember what that feels like.”

“You’re not so old,” she said, looking me over.

“You must be all of thirty.”

I laughed. “I’m not doing you that big a favor. I’ll be forty years old before you know it.”

“Almost ready for the nursing home.”

“You got it. Where’re we going, by the way?”

“Little town called North Bend.”

Ah, I thought: Grayson country.

She sensed something and said, “Do you know North Bend?”

“Never been there.”

“I’m not surprised. It’s just a wide place in the road, but it happens to be where my family lives. You know what they say about families. When you come home broken and defeated, they’ve got to take you in.”

She was still tense and I didn’t know how to breach that. Food might do it: I’d seen that happen more than once.

“Have you had dinner?”

She looked at me. “Now you’re going to buy me dinner? Jeez, you must really be my guardian angel.”

“So what do you say?”

“I feel like the last survivor of the Donner party. That means yes, I’m starving.”

I saw an intersection coming up, filled with neon promise.

“That’s Issaquah,” she said. “There’s a Denny’s there. It was one of my hangouts when I was in high school. Can you stand it?”

I banked into the ramp.

“You look terrible,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes. Maybe they’ll let you in if you comb your hair.”

“If I get thrown out of a Denny’s, it’ll be a bad day at Black Rock.”

Inside, we settled into a window booth. I ordered steaks for both of us, getting her blessing with a rapturous look. I got my first look at her in good light. She was not beautiful, merely a sensational young woman with world-class hair. Her hair sloped up in a solid wall, rising like Vesuvius from the front of her head. It was the color of burnt auburn, thick and lush: if she took it down, I thought, it would reach far down her back. Her nose was slightly crooked, which had the strange effect of adding to her appeal. She could stand out in a crowd without ever being a pinup. Her looks and ready wit probably made job-hunting easy, if she ever got around to such things.

“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.

“Little of this, little of that. Mostly I’ve been a professional student. I’ll probably still be going to college when I’m thirty. I graduated from high school at sixteen and I’ve been in and out of one college or another ever since. I go for a while, drop out, drift around, go somewhere else, drop out again. I transfer across state lines and lose half my credits, then I have to start up again, learning the whole boring curriculum that I learned last year and already knew anyway, just to get even again. Schools shouldn’t be allowed to do that—you know, arbitrarily dismiss half your credits just so they can pick your pocket for more tuition. But that’s life, isn’t it, and I’m sure it’s nobody’s fault but my own. It drives my family nuts, the way I live, but we are what we are. My trouble is, I’ve never quite figured out what I am. This is a mighty lonely planet, way off in space.”

It was the second time she had said something like that. I was beginning to wonder if she had been star-crossed by her name, doomed to play out the destiny of a lonely woman whose entire life could be told in two short stanzas.

“I do what I can, but then I get restless,” she said. “My mom and dad help out when they can, but they don’t have any money either. For the most part it’s on my shoulders.”

“So what do you do?” I asked again.

“I’m versatile as hell. I know a lot of things, some of them quite well—just survival skills, but enough to buy something to eat and a room at the Y. I can work in a printshop. I wait a dynamite table. I mix a good drink—once I got fired for making ‘em too good. I type like a tornado and I don’t make mistakes. I’m a great temporary. I’ve probably worked in more offices as a Kelly girl than all the other Kellys put together. I could get in the Guinness Book of World Records . Do they pay for that?“

“I don’t think so.”

“Probably not. They make a fortune off us freaks and pay us nothing.”

“You could probably get on full-time in one of those offices if you wanted. Law office maybe. Become a paralegal. Then go to law school.”

“I’d rather lie down in a pit of snakes. I find the nine-to-five routine like slow poison. It poisons the spirit, if you know what I mean. About three days of that’s about all I can stand. But that’s most likely what I’ll do tomorrow—get my dad to take me into town, go on a temporary, fill in somewhere till I’ve got enough money for a few tires and some gas, then drift away and do it all over again.”

There was a pause, not long, while she seemed to consider something. “If I feel lucky, I might look for books tomorrow.”

I tried not to react too quickly, but I didn’t want to let it get past me. “What do books have to do with working in an office?”

“Nothing: that’s the point. The books keep me out of the office.”

I stared at her.

“I’m a bookscout.” She said this the way a woman in Georgia might say I’m a Baptist , daring you to do something about it. Then she said, “I look for books that are underpriced. If they’re drastically under-priced, I buy them. Then I sell them to a book dealer I know in Seattle.”

I milked the dumb role. “And you make money at this?”

“Sometimes I make a lot of money. Like I said, it depends on how my luck’s running.”

“Where do you find these books?”

“God, everywhere! Books turn up in the craziest places…junk stores, flea markets…I’ve even found them in Dumpsters. Mostly I look in bookstores themselves.”

“You look for books in bookstores…then sell ‘em to other bookstores. I wouldn’t imagine you could do that.”

“Why not? At least sixty percent of the used-book dealers in this world are too lazy, ignorant, and cheap to know what they’ve got on their own shelves. They wouldn’t invest in a reference book if their lives depended on it. They might as well be selling spare parts for lawn mowers, that’s all books mean to them. Don’t get me wrong: I love these people, they have saved my life more times than you would believe. I take their books from them and sell them to one of the other book dealers—”

“One of the forty percent.”

“One of the ten percent; one of the guys who wants the best of the best and isn’t afraid to pay for it. You bet. Take from the dumb and sell to the smart.”

“That’s gonna be hard to do tomorrow, though, if you’ve got no money.”

She opened her purse. “Actually, I’ve got a little over three dollars in change. Pennies, nickels, and dimes.”

“I don’t think you could buy much of a book with that.”

She finished her soup and thought it over. “I’ll tell you a story, and you see what you think about it. I was down and out in L. A. I was broke, just about like this, down to my last bit of pocket change. So I hit the bookstores. The first one I went to had a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . You ever hear of that book?”

I shook my head, lying outrageously.

“A guy named James Agee wrote it and another guy named Walker Evans illustrated it with photographs. This was a beautiful first edition, worth maybe three or four hundred dollars. The dealer was one of those borderline cases—he knows just enough to be dangerous, and he had marked it ninety-five. He knew he had something , he just wasn’t sure what. I figured my friend in Seattle might pay me one-fifty for it, but of course I didn’t have the wherewithal to break it out of there. I also knew it wouldn’t last another day at that price—the first real bookman who came through the door would pick it off. I drifted around the store and looked at his other stuff.” She sipped her water. “You ever hear of Wendell Berry?”

The poet, I wanted to say. But I shook my head.

“The poet,” she said. “His early books are worth some money, and there was one in this same store, tucked in with the belles lettres and marked three dollars. I counted out my last pennies and took it: went around the corner and sold it to another dealer for twenty dollars. Went back to the first store and asked the guy if he’d hold the Agee for me till the end of the day. The guy was a hardass: he said he’d hold it if I put down a deposit, nonreturnable if I didn’t show up by closing time. I gave him the twenty and hit the streets. My problem was time. It was already late afternoon, I had only about an hour left. What I usually do in a case like that is sell some blood, but they’ll only take a pint at a time and I was still seventy dollars short. So I worked up a poor-little-girl-far-from-home hustle. It was the first time I’d ever done that, but you know what?…it’s easy. You guys are the easiest touches; I guess if you’re a young woman and not particularly hideous, you really can make men do anything. I just walked in cold off the street and asked twenty shopkeepers in a row if they could let me have two dollars for something to eat. One or two of them snarled and said, ‘Get out of my life, you effing little deadbeat,’ but you get a thick skin after the first two or three and then it all rolls off. One guy gave me a ten. In a cafe on the corner I got money not only from the owner but from half the guys at the counter. I could probably make a living doing that, but it has a kind of self-demeaning effect, except in emergencies. You don’t learn anything, and one day you wake up and you’ve lost your looks and can’t do it anymore. So I made a pact with myself, I would never do it again unless I had to. I got back to the store right on the button and bought my book. And my luck was running like a charm, I didn’t even have to call Seattle, I found a guy in east L.A. who gave me more than I’d counted on—one seventy-five. He specialized in photo books and I thought he might be good for this one.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the end of the story. Even while he was paying me, I noticed a box of books on his counter, new stuff he’d just gotten in. On top of the stack was a first edition that damn near stopped my heart. I finally worked up my courage and asked him, ‘Hey, mister, whatcha gonna want for this?’ He got a stern, fatherly look on his face and said, ‘I think that’s a pretty nice book, sweetie, I’m gonna want twenty to thirty bucks for it.’ And I almost died trying to pay him with a straight face. The next day I called my friend in Seattle and he sent me a good wholesale price, four hundred dollars. And there I was, back in the chips.”

“Incredible,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t know many bookscouts who could pull off something like that.

“Oh, yeah!…yeah! And so much more fun than working in some accountant’s office or typing dictation for a lawyer. I mean, how can you compare typing all day with bookscouting. The only trouble with it is, it’s not reliable. You can go weeks without making a real score, and the rest of the time you’re picking up small change. So it all depends on how I’m feeling. If I think I’m gonna be lucky, I’ll hit the stores: if not, I’ll go to work for Ms. Kelly again.”

I knew I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t be that interested in the specifics. But I had to.

“What was that book, that was worth so much?”

She grinned, still delighted at the memory and savoring each of the title’s four words. “ To…Kill…a … Mock-ing-bird !”

I tried for a look that said, It means nothing to me , but what I wanted to do was close my eyes and suffer. Jesus, I thought… oh, man ! That book is simply not to be found. Stories like that are what make up the business. A dealer in photography hands a pretty ragamuffin a thousand-dollar book, so desirable it’s almost like cash, and all because he hasn’t taken the time to learn the high spots of modern fiction.

The waitress brought our food. Eleanor reached for the salt and I saw the scar on her wrist. It was a straight slash, too even to have been done by accident.

At some time in her past, Eleanor Rigby had tried to kill herself, with a razor blade.

“So,” she said, in that tone people use when they’re changing the subject, “where were you heading when I shanghaied you in the rain?”

“Wherever the wind blows.”

“Hey, that’s where I’m going! Are you married?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ever been?”

“Not that I can remember. Who’d put up with me?”

“Probably one or two girls I know. D’you have any bad habits?”

“Well, I don’t smoke.”

“Beat your women?”

“Not if they do what I tell them.”

She laughed. “God, a nonsmoker with a boss complex. I may marry you myself. Don’t laugh, Mr. Janeway, I’ve lived my whole life on one whim after another. Have you ever been at loose ends?”

“Once, I think, about twenty years ago.”

“Well, I live that way. My whole life’s a big loose end. I go where the wind blows. If the natives are friendly, I stay awhile and warm myself in the sun. So where’s the wind blowing you?”

“Phoenix,” I said—the first place that popped into my mind.

“Oh, lovely. Lots of sun there—not many books, though, from what I’ve heard. I’d probably have to work for a living, which doesn’t thrill me, but nothing’s perfect. How would you like some company?”

“You’ve decided to go to Phoenix?”

“Why not, I’ve never been there. Why couldn’t I go if I wanted to?”

She was looking right down my throat. She really is like Rita, I thought: she had that same hard nut in her heart that made it so difficult to lie to her.

“What do you suppose would happen,” she said, “if we just turned around and headed south. Strangers in the night, never laid eyes on each other till an hour ago. Just go, roll the dice, see how long we could put up with each other.”

“Would you do that?”

“I might.” She thought about it, then shook her head. “But I can’t.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been known to do crazier things. I’ve just got something else on my agenda right now.”

“What’s that?”

“Can’t talk about it. Besides, it’s too long a story. My whole life gets messed up in it and I don’t think you’ve got time for that.”

“I’ve got nothing but time.”

“None of us has that much time.”

She was feeling better now, I could see it in her face. Food, one of the most intimate things after the one most intimate thing, had worked its spell again. “Oh, I needed that,” she said. “Yeah, I was hungry.”

“I’m glad you decided to stick around.”

“Sorry about that. I just have a bad reaction to that song.”

“I think it’s a great song.”

“I’m sure it is. But it gives me the willies.”

“Why would it do that?”

“Who’s to say? Some things you can’t explain.”

Then, as if she hadn’t been listening to her own words, she said, “I’ve got a stalker in my life.”

She shook her head. “Forget I said that. I’m tired…at the end of my rope. Sometimes I say things…”

I stared at her, waiting.

“Sometimes he calls me and plays that song.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I know him by sight, I don’t know his name. Obviously he knows mine.” She shivered deeply. “I don’t talk about this. But you’ve been such a dear…I can’t have you thinking I’m crazy.”

“Have you called the cops?”

She shook her head. “Cops don’t seem to be able to do much with people like that.”

“If he’s harassing you on the phone, they can catch him. The time it takes to trace a call these days is pretty short; damn near no time at all.”

“So they’d catch him. They’d bring him in and charge him with something minor, some nothing charge that would only stir him up.”

“How long has he been doing this?”

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “Not long, a few weeks. But it seems like years.”

“You can’t put up with that. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

“Like…get a gun, you mean?”

I let that thought speak for itself.

She sighed. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

The strange thing was, I believed her.

“Do you have any idea what he wants?”

“I think I know what he wants. But just now I would like to please change the subject. Let’s get back to happy talk.” She cocked her head as if to say, Enough, already . “Those wet clothes must feel awful.”

“I’ve been wet so long it feels like dry to me. What was that guy’s name?”

“That’s more like it. His name was Richard Farina.”

“Is his book worth anything?”

“Mmmm, yeah,” she said in a singsong voice. “Hundred dollars maybe. I wouldn’t kick it out in the rain.”

The waitress came and left the check.

Eleanor looked at me hard. “So tell me who you really are and what you’re doing. I mean, you appear out of the night, kindness personified, you walk into my life when I’ve never been lonelier, you’re going where the wind blows but you don’t have a change of clothes. What are you running away from?”

“Who said I’m running away?”

“We’re all running away. Some of us just don’t get very far. Yours must be some tragic love affair for you to run with only the clothes on your back. What was her name?”

“Rita,” I said, suddenly inspired. “It’s funny, she was a book person, a lot like you.”

“No kidding!”

“The same only different.” I fiddled with the check. “She’d love that story you told me.”

“The book world is full of stories like that. Books are everywhere, and some of them are valuable for the craziest reasons. A man gets put on an Iranian hit list. His books go up in value. A guy writes a good book, a guy writes a bad book. Both are worth the same money on the collector’s market. A third guy writes a great book and nobody cares at all. The president of the United States mentions in passing that he’s a Tom Clancy fan and suddenly this guy’s book shoots into the Hemingway class as a collectible. And that president is Ronald Reagan , for God’s sake. Does that make any sense?”

“Not to me it doesn’t.”

“It defies logic, but that’s the way it is today. People latch onto some new thing and gorge themselves on it, and the first guy out of the gate becomes a millionaire. Maybe Clancy is a master of techno-babble. Do you care? To me he couldn’t create a character if his damn life depended on it. You watch what I say, though, people will be paying a thousand dollars for that book before you know it. Then the techno-babble rage will pass. It’ll fade faster than yesterday’s sunset and the focus will move on to something else, probably the female private detective. And that’ll last a few years, till people begin to gag on it. Meanwhile, it takes a real writer like Anne Tyler half a career to catch on, and James Lee Burke can’t even find a publisher for ten years.”

“How do you learn so much so young?”

“I was born in it. I’ve been around books all my life. When I was fourteen, I’d ditch class and thumb my way into Seattle and just lose myself in the bookstores. So I’ve had six or seven years of good hard experience. It’s like anything else—eventually you meet someone who’s willing to show you the ropes. Then one day you realize you know more about it than your teacher does—you started out a pupil, like Hemingway with Gertrude Stein, and now you’ve taken it past anything the teacher can do with it. And it comes easier if you’ve had a head start.”

“Starting young, you mean.”

She nodded. “At sixteen I had read more than a thousand books. I knew all the big names in American lit, so it was just a matter of putting them together with prices and keeping up with the new hotshots. But it’s also in my blood. I got it from my father: it was in his blood. It took off in a different direction with him, but it’s the same stuff when you get to the heart of it. Books…the wonder and magic of the printed word. It grabbed my dad when he was sixteen, so he knows where I’m coming from.”

“Does your father deal in books?”

“He wouldn’t be caught dead. No, I told you his interest went in another direction. My dad is a printer.”

She finished her coffee and said, “I’d give a million dollars if I had it for his experience. My father was present at the creation.”

I looked at her, lost.

“He was an apprentice at the Grayson Press, in this same little town we’re going to. I’m sure you’ve never heard of the Grayson Press, not many people have. But you can take it from me, Mr. Janeway, Grayson was the most incredible book genius of our time.”

6

There wasn’t much to see of North Bend, especially on a dark and rainy night. I got off at Exit 31 and Eleanor directed me through the town, which had long since rolled up its awnings for the night. The so-called business district was confined to a single block, the cafe, bar, and gas station the only places still open. But it was deceptive: beyond the town were narrow roads where the people lived, where the Graysons had once lived, where Eleanor Rigby had grown from a little girl into a young woman. We went out on a road called Ballarat and soon began picking up numbered streets and avenues, most of them in the high hundreds. It was rural by nature, but the streets seemed linked to Seattle, as if some long-ago urban planner had plotted inevitable annexations well into the next century. We came to the intersection of Southeast 106th Place and 428th Avenue Southeast: I still couldn’t see much, but I knew we were in the country. There was a fenced pasture, and occasionally I could see the lights of houses far back from the road. “Here we are,” Eleanor said abruptly. “Just pull over here and stop.” I pulled off the road across from a gate, which was open. My headlights shone on a mailbox with the name rigby painted boldly across it, and under that—in smaller letters—the north bend press. We sat idling. I could hear her breathing heavily in the dark beside me. The air in the car was tense.

“What’s happening?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not the kind of problem you’d imagine. I just hate to face them.”

“Why would you feel like that?”

“I’ve disappointed them badly. I’ve done some things…stuff I can’t talk about…I’ve let them down and suddenly it’s almost impossible for me to walk in there and face them. I can’t explain it. The two people I love best in the world are in there and I don’t know what to say to them.”

“How about ‘hi’?”

She gave a sad little laugh.

“Seriously. If people love each other, the words don’t matter much.”

“You’re very wise, Janeway. And you’re right. I know they’re not going to judge me. They’ll just offer me comfort and shelter and love.”

“And you shudder at the thought.”

“I sure do.”

We sat for another minute. I let the car idle and the heater run and I didn’t push her either way. At last she said, “Let’s go see if Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home again.”

I turned into the driveway. It was a long dirt road that wound through the trees. The rain was beating down steadily, a ruthless drumbeat. In a moment I saw lights appear through the trees. A house rose up out of the mist, an old frame building with a wide front porch. It looked homey and warm, like home is supposed to look to a tired and heartsick traveler. But Eleanor had begun to shiver as we approached. “Th-there,” she said through chattering teeth. “Just pull around the house and park in front.” But as I did this, she gripped my arm: my headlights had fallen on a car. “Somebody’s here! Turn around, don’t stop, for God’s sake keep going!” Then we saw the lettering on the car door—the vista printing company—and I could almost feel the relief flooding over her. “It’s okay, it’s just Uncle Archie,” she said breathlessly. “It’s Mamma’s uncle,” she said, as if I had been the worried one. A light came on, illuminating the porch and casting a beam down the stairs into the yard: someone inside had heard us coming. I pulled up in front of the other car at the foot of the porch steps. A face peered through cupped hands at the door. “Mamma,” Eleanor said, “oh, God, Mamma.” She wrenched open the door and leaped out into the rain. The woman met her on the porch with a shriek and they fell into each other’s arms, hugging as if they hadn’t seen each other for a lifetime and probably wouldn’t again, after tonight. I heard the woman yell, “Gaston!…Get out here!” and then a man appeared and engulfed them both with bearlike arms. I had a sinking feeling as I watched them, like Brutus might’ve felt just before he stabbed Caesar.

Now Eleanor was waving to me. I got out and walked through the rain and climbed the steps to the porch. “This is the man who saved my life,” Eleanor said dramatically, and I was hooked by the woman and pulled in among them. The man gripped my arm and the woman herded us all inside. “This place is a shambles,” she said, picking up a magazine and shooing us on. I was swept through a hallway to a well-lit kitchen where a tall, thin man sat at the table. He got to his feet as we came in, and we all got our first real look at each other. The woman was young: she might easily have passed for Eleanor’s older sister, though I knew she had to be at least my age. But there wasn’t a wrinkle on her face nor a strand of gray: her only concession to age was a pair of small-framed granny glasses. The man was burly: my height and heavier, about the size of an NFL lineman. His hair was curly and amber and he had a beard to match. The man at the table was in his sixties, with slate-gray hair and leathery skin. Eleanor introduced them. “This is my father, Gaston Rigby…my mother, Crystal…my uncle, Archie Moon. Guys, this is Mr. Janeway.” We all shook hands. Rigby’s hand was tentative but his eyes were steady. Archie Moon gripped my hand firmly and said he was glad to meet me. Crystal said that, whatever I had done for their daughter, they were in my debt—doubly so for bringing her home to them.

There was more fussing, those first awkward moments among strangers. Rigby seemed shy and reserved: he hung back and observed while Crystal and Eleanor did the talking. Hospitality was the order of the moment: Crystal wanted us to eat, but Eleanor told her we had stopped on the road. “Well, damn your eyes, you oughta be spanked,” Crystal said. She asked if we’d like coffee at least: I said that sounded wonderful. Eleanor said, “I think what Mr. Janeway would like better than anything is some dry clothes,” and Crystal took my measure with her eyes. “I think some of your old things would fit him close enough, Gaston,” she said. “Get him a pair of those old jeans and a flannel shirt and I’ll get the coffee on.”

Rigby disappeared and Crystal bustled about. “Get down that good china for me, will you, Archie?” she said, and Moon reached high over her head and began to take down the cups. Eleanor and I sat at the kitchen table, lulled by the sudden warmth. Impulsively she reached across and took my hand, squeezing it and smiling into my eyes. I thought she was probably on the verge of tears. Then the moment passed and she drew back into herself as Moon came with the cups and saucers and began setting them around the table.

“None for me, honey,” he said. “I been coffeed-out since noon, won’t sleep a wink if I drink another drop.”

“I got some decaf,” Crystal said.

“Nah; I gotta get goin‘.”

“What’ve you gotta do?” Crystal said mockingly. “You ain’t goin‘ a damn place but back to that old shack.”

“Never mind what I’m gonna do. You don’t know everything that’s goin‘ on in my life, even if you think you do.”

They laughed at this with good humor. They spoke a rich Southern dialect, which Crystal was able to modify when she talked to us. “This old man is impossible,” she said. “Would you please talk to him while I get the coffee on?—otherwise he’ll run off and get in trouble.”

Moon allowed himself to be bullied for the moment. He sat beside Eleanor and said, “Well, Mr. Janeway, what do people call you in casual conversation?”

“Cliff sometimes brings my head up.”

“What line of work are you in?”

“Why is that always the first thing men ask?” Crystal said.

“It defines them,” Eleanor said.

“So, Mr. Janeway,” Moon said loudly. “What line of work are you in?”

“Right now I’m between things.”

“An old and honorable calling. I’ve been in that line once or twice myself. Sometimes it can be pretty good.”

“As long as you come up smiling.”

“Just for the record,” Crystal said in her Southern voice, “we don’t care what you do for a living. I’m just glad you were in the right place at the right time, and I’m grateful to you and we’re so glad you’re here with us.”

“That was gonna be my next comment,” Moon said, “in more or less that same choice of words.”

“Where’re you staying, Mr. Janeway?” Crystal asked.

“He’s going where the wind blows, Mamma,” Eleanor said, as if that explained everything.

“Tonight the wind dies here,” Crystal said. “I won’t hear any argument about it, we’ve got a fine room in the loft over the shop. It’s warm and dry and there’s a good hard bed. Best of all, it’s private.”

“You’ll love it,” Eleanor said.

“In fact,” Crystal said as Rigby came in carrying some clothes, “why don’t we get that done right now?—get you into some dry duds and checked into your room. We’re putting Mr. Janeway in the loft,” she said to Rigby, who nodded. To me she said, “The only thing I need to ask is that you not smoke over there. Gaston doesn’t allow any smoking in the shop. I hope that’s not a problem.”

“Not for me.”

“Good. I’ll whip us up some cinnamon rolls to go along with the coffee. You get yourself thawed out and come back over in half an hour so we can all get acquainted.”

“Me, I gotta go,” Moon said.

“You ornery old cuss,” Crystal said. “Damn if you’re not the unsociablest one man I ever met.”

“I’ll take Mr. Janeway over to the loft while I’m goin‘ out,” Moon said to Rigby. “No sense you gettin’ wet too.”

I followed him back through the house. We popped open two umbrellas and went down into the yard. Moon pointed out the path with a flashlight he carried, leading the way to an outbuilding about twenty yards behind the house. The first thing I noticed, even before he turned on the light, was the smell…the heavy odor of ink mixed with some-thing else. The light revealed a long room, cluttered with machinery and steel cabinets. Two large ancient-looking presses stood against the far wall, a smaller handpress on a table near the door, and, nearer the door, was a vast, complicated machine from another century, which I thought was probably a Linotype. It was. “That smell shouldn’t bother you any,” Moon said. “It’s just the smell of hot type. Gaston must’ve been working out here till just before you showed up. You shouldn’t even notice it upstairs.”

He flipped on the lights. Our eyes touched for less than a second, then he looked away. “I’ll leave you a slicker here by the door, and the flashlight and the umbrella too. If you need anything else, there’s a phone upstairs, you can just call over to the house.”

The first thing I saw was a no smoking sign. Moon moved me past it, onto the circular staircase in the corner opposite the presses, then up to the loft, a spacious gabled room with a skylight and a window facing the house. In the middle of the room was a potbellied stove, which looked to be at least a hundred years old. Moon stoked it and soon had a fire going: “This old bastard’ll really dry out your duds. And it’s safe, Gaston has it checked every so often. It’ll run you right out of here if you let it get too hot on you.” He walked around the room looking in corners. Opened a door, peeped into an adjacent room. “Bathroom. There’s no tub, but you’ve got a shower if you want it.”

He made the full circle and stood before me. He radiated power, though his was wiry, a leaner brand than Rigby’s. His voice was the prime ingredient in the picture of hard male strength that he presented to the world. It was a deep, resonant baritone, bristling with Southern intelligence. He’d be great on talk radio, I thought, and I was just as sure that he’d have nothing to do with it. “The phone’s here beside the bed,” he said. “It’s on a separate line, so you just call over to the house just like any other phone call.” He bent over the end table and wrote a number on a pad. Then he stood up tall and looked at me. “I can’t think of anything else.”

“Everything’s great.”

He turned to leave and stopped at the door. “Crystal kids around a lot, but I really do have to go. There’s a waitress in Issaquah who’s got dibs on my time. You look like a man who understands that.”

“I do have a faint recollection of such a situation, yes.”

He gave a little half-laugh and asked if I’d be around tomorrow. “If you are, come see me. I run the newspaper, my shop’s over in Snoqualmie, just a few minutes from here. Anybody in either town can tell you where I’m at. If the sun comes out tomorrow, I’ll show you some of the best country in the world. I’ve got a cabin up in the hills about an hour’s drive from here. Built it forty years ago and it’s been swallowed up by national-forest lands, about a million acres of it. That’ll keep the Holiday Inn bastards at bay, at least for the rest of my life. It’s yours if you’d like to unwind in solitude for a few days.”

Again he paused. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, Janeway. I’ve got the feeling we owe you more than we know. Does that make any sense?”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“I don’t know either, it’s just a feeling I’ve got. Like maybe you came along in the nick of time, not just to keep our little girl from getting herself wet.”

“If I did, I don’t know about it. But I’m glad I could help her.”

He looked at me hard. “The kid doesn’t tell us much anymore. She’s all grown-up, got a life of her own. She never had a lick of sense when it came to strangers. Hitchhiked home from L.A. when she was eighteen, damn near drove her mamma crazy when she told us about it that night at dinner. Today she got lucky and found you. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know we’re in your debt.”

I made a little motion of dismissal.

“All of us. Me too. Hell, I’ve known that kid since she was born, she used to hang around my printshop for hours after school, asking questions, pestering. ‘What’s this for, what’s that do?’ She’s such a sweetheart, I couldn’t think any more of her if she was my own daughter. And I know that anybody who helped her out of a tough spot could walk in here and the Rigbys would give him damn near anything they owned. So rest easy, I guess that’s what I wanted to say, just rest easy. These people aren’t kidding when they say they’re glad to see you.”

Then he was gone, clumping down the stairs, leaving me with one of the strangest feelings of my life.

I sat at the stove in Gaston Rigby’s clothes, gold-bricking.

What the hell do I do now? I thought.

7

A few minutes later I climbed down the stairs to the printshop and stood there in the quiet, aware of that primal link between Gaston Rigby’s world and my own. It was there, huge and fun-damental—amazing that I could live a life among books and be so unaware of the craftsmen who made them. Darryl Grayson had worked in a shop much like this one, and not far from this spot. Here he had practiced his voodoo, making wonderful things on quaint-looking equipment, just like this. I felt a strange sense of loss, knowing that someday we would attain technological perfection at the expense of individualism. This magnificent bond between man and machine was passing into history. I was born a member of the use-it-and-throw-it-away generation, and all I knew of Grayson’s world was enough to figure out the basics. The big press was power driven. The plate identified it as chandler and price , and it was run by a thick leather strap that connected a large wheel to a smaller one near the power source. On a table was a stack of leaflets that Rigby had been printing for an east Seattle car wash. I looked at the handpress. It had been made long before the age of electricity, but it was still, I guessed, what Rigby would use for fine work. It had a handle that the printer pulled to bring the paper up against the inked plate. The table beside it contained a few artistic experiments—poems set in typefaces so exotic and disparate that they seemed to rise up on the paper and battle for attention. It’s like beer, I thought foolishly. I had once been asked to help judge a beer-tasting, and I had gone, thinking, this is so damn silly . Beer was beer, wasn’t it? No, it was not. I learned that day that there are more beers in heaven and earth than mankind ever dreamed of. And so it is with type.

Rigby seemed to have them all, yet instinctively I knew that this was far from true. Still, his collection was formidable. They were stacked in tiny compartments of those deep steel cabinets: there were at least fifty cabinets set around the perimeter of the room, and each had at least twenty drawers and each drawer held a complete and different face. I pulled open a drawer marked cooper black and saw a hundred tiny compartments, each containing twenty to fifty pieces of type. I looked in another drawer farther along: it was called caslon old style . I did know a few of the names: recognized them as pioneers of type development, but the names conjured nothing in my mind as to what their work would look like. I didn’t know Caslon from a Cadillac, and most of the names were as foreign to me as a typeface of old China. There were deepdene and bodoni, century and devinne, kennerley, futura, baskerville, and granjon . Each took up several drawers, with compartments for various point sizes. There were some that Rigby himself didn’t know—entire cabinets labeled unknown in all point sizes, unknown antique face, c. 1700, found near wheeling, west virginia, 1972. wheeling , Rigby called it, and it seemed to have come, or survived, in only one size. At the far end, nearest the presses, was a cabinet marked grayson types , each row subtitled with a name— Georgian, pacific, snoqualmie . On the other side were cabinets marked dingbats and woodcuts . I opened the first drawer and took out a dingbat. It was a small ornament, which, when I looked closely, became a fleur-de-lis that could perhaps be the distinguishing mark of a letterhead. In the far corner was a paper cutter: next to it, coming down the far wall, a long row of paper racks. Then the Linotype, an intricate but sturdy machine the size of a small truck. This was the world of Gaston Rigby. Enter it and step back to the nineteenth century, where—forgetting its sweatshops and cruelties and injustices—man’s spirit of true adventure, at least in this world, made its last stand.

And there was more. I came to a door halfway down the far wall and opened it to find a room almost as large as the first. I flipped on a light and saw what looked at first glance to be another workshop. But there was a difference—this had neither the clutter nor the workaday feel of the other. It looked like the workplace of a gunsmith I had once known, who also happened to be the world’s most vigorous neat-freak. There was a long workbench with rows of fine cutting tools—chisels, hammers, and files of all sizes. There were several large anvils, a row of powerful jewelerlike eyepieces, two strong and strategically placed lamps. This is where he does it, I thought: does it all by hand. I realized then that I was thinking of Grayson, not Rigby, as if I had indeed slipped back in time and somehow managed to saunter into Grayson’s shop. I saw the sketches on the wall—an entire alphabet, each letter a foot square and individually framed, upper and lower case. The drawings ringed the entire room. I looked closely and decided that they were probably originals. Each was signed Grayson , in pink ink, in the lower-right corner. At the end of the workbench I found a large steel plate. It was a die or matrix, a foot square, containing the letter G in upper case. It corresponded exactly to the G framed on the wall. Just beyond the matrix was a long device that looked like a draftsman’s instrument: it had a swinging arm that could trace the G and, I guessed after examining it, scale it down. Suddenly I could see the process. Grayson would first sketch his letters on paper. Then he would cast a die in metal. Then, using his one-armed machine, he could scale it down to any point size, down to the type on an agate typewriter if he so chose. He was the Compleat Printer, with no need of a type foundry because he was his own typemaking factory. Rigby had saved a set of his sketches and some of his equipment: he had main-tained the working environment of Darryl Grayson, almost like a museum.

When I looked around again the world had changed. My calling had shifted at the foundation, and I knew I would never again look at a book in quite the same way. I lingered, hoping for some blazing enlightenment. At the far end of the room, half-hidden in shadows, was a door I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps it was in there, the answer to everything. But the door was locked, so I had to forgo the pleasure.

I heard a bump up front: someone, I imagined, coming to fetch me. I turned out the light and went back through the shop to the front door. But when I opened it, whoever had been there was gone.

8

At the end of my universe is a door, which opens into Rigby’s universe. Either side must seem endless to a wayward traveler, who can only guess which is the spin-off of the other. We sat at the kitchen table, talking our way through their high country and along my riverbeds, and if much of what I told them was fiction, it was true in spirit and gave them little cause to ponder. I discovered that I could tell them who I was without giving up the bigger truth of why I was there. Occupation, in fact, is such a small part of a man that I was able to frame myself in old adven-tures and bring them as near as yesterday. Crystal served sweet rolls steaming with lethal goodness, the butter homemade, the sugar flakes bubbly and irresistible. Rigby sat across from me at the kitchen table, his face ruddy and mellow, cautiously friendly. Eleanor had excused herself and gone to the bathroom. Crystal pushed another roll toward me with the sage comment that nobody lives forever. That was one way of looking at it, so I took the roll while Rigby considered going for a third. “Ah, temptation,” he said in that soft, kind voice, and he and Crystal looked at each other and laughed gently as if sharing some deeply personal joke. I reached for the butter and said, “I’ll have to run for a week.” Crystal told me about a bumper sticker she had seen that said: don’t smoke…exercise…eat fiber…die anyway . And we laughed.

In twenty minutes my dilemma had been honed to a razor-thin edge. Something had to give, for deception is not my strong point. There was a time when I could lie to anyone: the world I went around in was black-and-white, I was on the side of truth and justice, and the other side was overflowing with scum-sucking assholes. Those days ended forever when I turned in my badge. I could like these people a lot: I could open a mail-order book business in a house up the road and be their neighbor. Every morning at eight I’d wander into Rigby’s shop and learn another secret about the universe beyond the door, and sometimes in the evenings Crystal would invite me for dinner, where I’d give them the true gen about my rivers and deserts. Shave about eight years off my age and you could almost see me married to their daughter, raising a new generation of little bookpeople in the shadows of the rain forest. They were the real stuff, the Rigbys, the salt of the earth. Suddenly I liked them infinitely better than the guys I was working for, and that included all the judges and cops of the great state of New Mexico.

They were not rich by any means. The microwave was the only touch of modern life in the house. The refrigerator was the oldest one I’d ever seen still working in a kitchen. The stove was gas, one step up from a wood burner. The radio on the shelf was an Admiral, circa 1946; the furniture was old and plain, giving the house that rustic, well-lived look. Whatever Darryl Grayson had taught Gaston Rigby all those years ago, the art of making money was not part of the mix. Grayson’s name had come up just once, in passing. Fishing, I had cast my line into that pond with the offhand remark that Eleanor had told me of a man named Grayson, who had taught Rigby the business. His hand trembled and his lip quivered, and I knew I had touched something so intrinsic to his existence that its loss was still, twenty years later, a raw and open wound. Crystal came around the table and leaned over him, hugging his head. “Darryl was a great man,” she said, “a great man.” And Rigby fought back the tears and tried to agree but could not find the words. Crystal winked at me, encouraging me to drop the subject, and I did.

“What’s all this?” Eleanor said, coming in from the hall. “What’re we talking about?”

“I was just asking about the Linotype,” I said, making as graceful a verbal leap as a working klutz can expect to achieve.

“There hangs a tale,” Eleanor said. “Tell him about it, Daddy.”

Rigby tried to smile and shook his head.

“You tell ‘im, honey,” Crystal said.

Eleanor looked at her father, then at me. “It’s just that we had a kind of an adventure getting it here.”

“It was a damned ordeal was what it was,” Crystal said. “What do you think, Mr. Janeway, how does ten days without heat in weather that got down to twenty below zero sound to you?”

“It sounds like kind of an adventure,” I said, and they laughed.

“It was our finest moment,” Eleanor said, ignoring her mother, who rolled her eyes. “Daddy heard from a friend in Minnesota that a newspaper there had gone broke and they had a Linotype in the basement.” “It had been sitting there for twenty years,” Crystal said, “ever since the paper converted to cold type. Hardly anyone there remembered what the silly thing had been used for, let alone how to use it.”

“It was ours for the taking,” Eleanor said.

“Craziest damn thing we ever did,” Crystal said. “

Who’s telling this, Mamma? Anyway, it was the middle of winter, they were gonna tear down the building and everything had to be out within two weeks.”

“It was one of those instant demolition jobs,” Crystal said. “You know, where they plant explosives and bring it all down in a minute.”

“So we drove to Minneapolis,” Eleanor said.

“Nonstop,” said Crystal.

“The heater in the truck went out in Spokane…”

“Didn’t even have time to stop and get it fixed. We took turns driving, sleeping when we could.”

“Hush, Mamma, you’re spoiling the story. So we get to Minnesota and it’s so cold my toenails are frozen. The snow was piled four feet deep, the streets were like white tunnels. You couldn’t even see in the shops at street level.”

“They had this thing stored in a basement room that was just a little bigger than it was,” Crystal said. “They must’ve taken it apart and rebuilt it in that room, because right away we could see that we’d never get it out unless we took it apart and carried it piece by piece.”

I looked at Rigby. “Had you ever done anything like that?”

He shook his head.

“He had to figure it out as he went along,” Eleanor said.

“Gaston can do anything, once he sets his mind to it,” said Crystal.

“Anybody can, with a little time and patience,” Rigby said.

“We spent two days in that basement,” Eleanor said, “tearing down this machine, packing the parts, and putting them on the truck. It was so cold your hands would stick to the steel when you touched it, and all around us the wreckers were stringing explosives.”

“But we got the damn thing,” Crystal said, “and sang Christmas carols all the way home…in February.”

“We thought of getting the heater fixed in Montana,” Eleanor said, “but by then, hey, it was up to ten degrees—a major heat wave.”

“And we could smell home,” Rigby said.

I could almost feel the satisfaction and joy of getting it set up here in working order, and I said something to the effect.

“Yeah,” Crystal said, “even I can’t deny that.”

“You can’t put a label on it,” Rigby said.

“Somehow you mean more to each other,” Eleanor said, “after you’ve done something like that.”

A sudden silence fell over the table. The evening was over, and I knew that, once again, I was not going to bust her. I didn’t know why—it certainly wasn’t Poe anymore—but I was ready to live with it, whatever happened.

“You’ll find a lot of books over there if you’d like to read,” Crystal said. “Sorry there’s no TV.”

I made a so-who-needs-it gesture with my hands.

“Breakfast at six-thirty,” she said. “That’s if you want to eat with us. I’ll rustle you up something whenever you come over.”

She walked me to the door, leaving Eleanor and her father alone at the kitchen table. On the porch she took my hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she hugged me tight and disappeared back into the house. I stood on the porch listening to the rain. The night was as dark as it ever gets, but I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my back. There would be no bust, no handcuffs, no force. I watched my five grand grow wings and fly away into the night. Half the puzzle was finished.

Now that I knew what I was not going to do, I thought I could sleep.

9

I opened my eyes to the ringing of the telephone. It was five after three by the luminous clock on the table beside me: I had been asleep almost five hours. Par for the course, I thought, staring into the dark where the phone was. I let it ring, knowing it couldn’t be for me, but it kept on until I had to do something about it. When I picked it up, Eleanor was there in my ear.

“I’m coming over. Is that okay?”

“I don’t know…what’ll your parents say?”

But she had hung up. I rolled over and sat on the bed. When five minutes had passed and she hadn’t arrived, I groped my way to the window and looked across at the house. It was dark except for a faint light on the side facing away from me. Soon that too went out—someone in a bathroom, I thought—but then another light came on in the opposite corner. Something moved in the yard: I couldn’t tell what as I tried to see through the rain-streaked glass, but it looked like some critter standing under the window had moved quickly back into the darkness. A deer maybe, or just a mirage thrown out by a brain still groggy from too little sleep. But I hadn’t forgotten about Eleanor’s stalker and I sat on the sill and watched the yard. The light went out and again I swam in an all-black world. I sat for a long time looking at nothing.

At ten to four I decided that she wasn’t coming and I went back to bed.

I heard a sharp click somewhere, then a bump. There she is , I thought. But nothing happened. The drumming of the rain was the only reminder that I could still think and I could still hear. The minutes stretched toward the dawn. There was not yet a hint of light, which, given the clouds covering the state, was at least ninety minutes away. Again a light flashed. This one brought me up with a start—it was here in my room, inches away. As my eyes focused, I saw that it was the extension button on the telephone— someone had picked up the phone downstairs in the printshop and was having a conversation at four o’clock in the morning. This went on for some time, at least two minutes, then the line went dark. I rolled out of bed and went to the door, opened it, and listened down the circular staircase. Nothing . No sound, no light, not a hint of movement anywhere.

I lay on the bed staring up into the dark. Eventually, though I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I began to doze off.

***

It was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream. I was drifting, somewhere between worlds, when my eyes flicked open and I knew she was there. “Hey,” I said, and I felt her sit beside me on the floor. I reached out and touched her head: she had laid it across her folded arms on the bed. “Thought you’d never get here.” She still didn’t speak: for several minutes she just lay there under my arm, her breathing barely audible above the rain. Then she said, “I didn’t come because I felt stupid. I am stupid, waking you up in the middle of the night.”

“It’s okay, I was awake anyway,” I lied.

“The truth of the matter is, I’ve just been through the loneliest night of my life. It got so desolate I thought I’d die from it.”

There was a long pause. She said, “I keep thinking that maybe my mom and dad can help me when I get like this, but they can’t. I know they love me, but somehow knowing it just makes the loneliness all the stronger. Does that make any sense?”

“You’re not their little girl anymore. You’ve lost something you can’t ever get back, but you haven’t yet found what’s gonna take the place of it in the next part of your life.”

“The next part of my life,” she said with a sigh.

I could hear the pain in her voice. “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you’ll let me.”

She seemed to consider it. “Just talk to me, help me get through the night. I know you want to sleep and I’m being a thundering pain in the ass. But you have no idea how much it would help, Mr. Man from Nowhere, if you’d just talk to me for a little while.”

“Listen and believe it. There’s nothing I’d rather do, right this minute, than talk to you.”

“Oh, Janeway.” Her voice got thick, and broke. “I hurt so bad. I hurt so bad and I can’t talk to anyone.”

“Talk to me.”

“I don’t know, maybe somebody like you, who’s just passing through and doesn’t know me. I can’t talk to Mamma and Daddy, there’s just too much in the way. I don’t know what it is, we can’t get past the facts of the matter and get down where the real trouble is.”

“What are the facts of the matter?”

“How completely and beyond redemption I’ve fucked up my life.”

“Maybe it just seems that way.”

“I’ve done a stupid thing. Don’t ask me why, it was just insane. I felt compelled, like I had no choice. Then they said I’d done something worse, and one thing led to another and I did do something worse…only it wasn’t what they said I’d done. But they locked me up for it, and now they want to lock me up again, maybe for years. If they do that, I will kill myself, I swear I will. I couldn’t live in a cage.”

“None of us can. That’s not really living.”

“But some people survive. I couldn’t even do that, not if we’re talking about years.” She shook her head: I felt the movement. “No way.”

Gently, I prodded her. “What did you do?”

She was a long time answering, and at first the answer was no answer at all. “I can’t tell you either.”

“I won’t judge you.”

“It’s not that. There are pieces of the story missing. Without them I just look like a fool.”

“Take the chance. Maybe I can help you find the pieces.”

“No one can. None of it makes sense. I’m like that guy in The Man Without a Country , I’ve got no roots, nothing solid to hold on to. I love my parents but I have an awful time talking to them.”

“Everybody does. It means you’re one hundred percent normal.”

She chuckled, a sad little noise. “And all the time I thought I was crazy. I have the worst time trying to talk to them. And I know I’ve got to, I don’t think I can let another day pass without doing that. But how can I?”

“Try it out on me first.”

She didn’t say anything. I let her alone for a few minutes, then I nudged her arm. “What happened to you?”

“I was in New Mexico,” she said at once, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask it one more time. “I got in trouble…I can’t tell you about that. But I’ve been carrying it around for weeks now. If I don’t tell somebody…”

I gave her a little squeeze: nothing sexual, just friendly encouragement,

“That’s where I picked up my stalker, in Taos.” Again she tried to lapse into silence. But then she said, “I had a room there. I’d come home and things would be moved.”

“Ransacked?”

“No…but yeah, maybe. I had the feeling he’d done that, been through all my stuff and then put it all back, just so. But he’d always leave one little thing out of place, something obvious like he’d wanted me to see it. Once he left a cigarette, still burning in a Styrofoam cup. He wanted me to know he’d just left. Then he started with the phone. It would ring late at night and I’d hear him breathing…or humming that song.”

“You told me before: you knew what he wanted.”

“He told me. But I can’t explain it now, so don’t ask me.”

“Explain what you can.”

“I felt like something evil had come into my life. I’d turn a corner and he’d be there, right in my path. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes were all sunken and he had holes in his face, deep pits across both cheeks. Scared me deaf and dumb. I can’t tell you what it was like. I’d walk down to the phone booth and call home and he’d come up behind me, rip open the door, and stand there staring. He said he could kill me, right there at the telephone— kill you and go up to North Bend and kill your mother too . God, I just freaked. Then one night he got into my room when I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning there was a dead…rat…on the bed beside me. And I really freaked.”

I was listening to her words, trying to figure how and when this had all happened. It had to be sometime after the first Jeffords break-in, but before the second. Whatever else her stalker had done, he’d pushed her onto that next level of desperation. She had failed to get what she’d gone after at the Jeffords place—what the stalker also wanted—and had gone back for another run at it. Then what?

Then she took it on the lam: jumped bail, struck out for home. “So how’d you get back here?” I asked. She had driven her car, she said in that flat tone of voice that people use when you ask a stupid question. But I was trying to get at something else, something she couldn’t yet know about. “What roads did you take?” I asked, and she laughed and wondered what possible difference it could make. “I came across the Sangres, up the Million-Dollar Highway to Grand Junction, then took the freeway home.”

Slater had lied about her coming through Denver. He had probably lied about other things as well. The pockmarked man sounded like someone I had met quite recently, and my whole involvement felt suddenly dirty.

I couldn’t get her to say any more. “I’ve already said too much,” she said. “If I keep on, I’ll feel worse than ever. Maybe I should just take poison and save us all the grief.”

“That, of course, would be the worst thing you could do.” I calculated my next line and said it anyway. “I hope you’re not one of those people who turn suicidal on me.”

“Have you known people like that?”

“One or two. It’s always tragic, especially when they’re young.”

“I saw you looking at the scar on my arm. Back in the restaurant.”

“No use lying about it. I couldn’t help noticing.”

“Well, you’re right. I did that to myself.”

“Why?”

“Loneliness,” she said without missing a heartbeat. “Desolation, the undertow, the barren landscape. I can’t explain it. The loneliest times come when I’m adrift in a big city, or here with people who love me. When I’m really alone, up on a mountaintop somewhere, I’m fine. I go up to Archie’s cabin and I can go for a week without seeing another living soul. The feeling of peace is just incredible. Too bad we can’t live our lives on mountaintops. I really like being with people until I actually am, then I can’t stand them. Maybe I should try to find Jesus; people say that works, though I can’t imagine it working for me. I’m just not spiritually oriented. So I drift. Sometimes I don’t even know where the road’s gonna take me.”

“Talk to me, Eleanor. You got in trouble in New Mexico, then you came back here. What happened then?”

“Nothing. That’s the stupid part of it. I came fifteen hundred miles and I couldn’t go the last mile home. Instead I drove out to see Amy. But she wasn’t home and I couldn’t find her.”

“Who’s Amy?”

“Amy Harper. She was my best friend till she married Coleman Willis. The cock that walks like a man. Our relationship got a bit strained after that. It’s hard to stay friends with someone when her husband hates you.”

“How could anyone hate you?”

“I wouldn’t go to bed with him. To a guy who wears his brain between his legs, that’s the last word in insults.”

In a while I said, “So you went to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there. You wouldn’t want to kill yourself over that. Amy’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“People always come back.”

“Maybe so, but I won’t be here.”

No, I thought: you probably won’t be.

“What did you do then?” I said.

“Drove out to my parents’ place. Stood in the rain watching the house, afraid to come up and talk to them. God, I’ve never been so alone in my life. Then I saw them come out and drive off—going to town, I figured, for the week’s groceries. I went over to the house and sat on the porch. I wanted to die but I didn’t know how. I thought if I could just lie down and close my eyes and not wake up, I’d do it. But it’s not that easy. It’s impossible, in fact; I don’t want to die , for God’s sake, I never wanted to die. I thought maybe I could find some peace in the printshop. I used to do that when I was a little girl. When I’d get blue, I’d go back in the shop and put my cheek against that cold press and I could feel the warmth come flooding into me, especially if there were books back there and if they were books I loved. I could take a book and hold it to my heart and the world was somehow less hostile, less lonely.”

“Did that work?”

“It always works, for a while. But it’s like anything else that has fantasy at its roots. Eventually you’ve got to come back to earth. Now I’m running out of time. Something will happen, today, tomorrow…some-thing’ll happen and I’ll be history.”

She pulled herself up on the bed. I heard her shoes hit the floor.

“Would you do something for me, Mr. Janeway?”

“If I can.”

“Hold me.”

“I don’t think that’ll be any great hardship.”

“That’s all I want…just…just…”

“Sure,” I said, taking her into the cradle of my arm.

She was shivering. I drew the blanket up under my chin and the body heat spread around us. Her hair smelled sweet, as if she had just washed it. I knew I had no business smelling her hair. She snuggled tight against me and I had no right to that either. Maybe she’d go to sleep now. Maybe I could forget she was there, just like the people at Lakehurst forgot the Hindenburg when it was blowing up in front of them. Somewhere in the night Helen Reddy was singing “I Am Woman” and I was thinking you sure are , to the same driving melody. I had been what seemed like a very long time without a woman, and this one was forbidden, for more reasons than I could count.

We lay still on the bed, and slowly the dark gave way to a pale and ghostly gray. Saved by the dawn. It was five-thirty: the Rigbys would be getting up for the new day. I patted her shoulder and rolled out of bed, moving to the window for a look at the house. It was peaceful and ordinary in the rainy morning, nothing like the den of tears I had blundered into last night. I turned and looked at Eleanor. Her face was a white blur in the half-light: her eyes, I thought, were open. We didn’t say anything. I hit the John, and when I came out, she had not moved from her spot on the bed. I looked out the window. Someone in the house had turned on a light, the same one I had seen earlier. I knew then what I was going to do.

“Listen,” I said, still looking out the window. “I’ve got to tell you something.” But I never got the words out. A car came out of the misty woods and up the road toward the house. I felt heartsick watching it come. Only when it had pulled in behind my rental and stopped did the cop behind the wheel turn on his flasher.

It filled the room and colored us a flickery red and blue. Eleanor lay still as death. Down in the yard, two county cops had stepped out in the rain. One walked up the steps, meeting the Rigbys as they came out on the porch. The other came up the path to the printshop.

“Judgment day,” Eleanor said. “I had a feeling it would be today.”

10

Next case.“

”The matter of Eleanor Jane Rigby, Your Honor. Filing number one three seven five nine six.“

“Is this the prisoner?…are you Eleanor Jane Rigby?” “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you understand the nature of this proceeding?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s be sure. This is an extradition hearing, to determine whether you will be returned to the state of New Mexico to face criminal charges outstanding there. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You may contest the extradition or waive that right. Do you have an attorney?”

“A public defender, in Taos.”

“But here, in Seattle?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Would you like to consult with an attorney here?”

“I don’t see any point in it.”

“You wish to waive that right?”

“Sure…might as well.”

“Do you understand, Miss Rigby, that commencing any legal proceeding without an attorney is a risky and unwise decision?”

“It won’t matter.”

“So you wish to go ahead.”

“Sure. I just want to get it over with.”

“Very well. Mr. Wallace?”

“Yes, Your Honor. All we want to do is get her out of here.”

“I can understand that. Do you have the extradition waiver form?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Thank you. For the record, I am now handing to the prisoner, Eleanor Jane Rigby, the consent form as required by Revised Code of Washington, title ten dash…uh, eighty-nine dash…”

“Uh, oh three oh, Your Honor.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wallace. Will the prisoner please sign where the bailiff indicates?”

“What happens if I don’t sign this?”

“We will hold you here for up to sixty days, New Mexico will make a formal filing of its demand, and there will be a full hearing.”

“And in the end I’ll go back anyway.”

“The court cannot advise you of that, Miss Rigby. That’s what an attorney would do.”

“Where do I sign?…Here?”

“Let the record show that the prisoner is signing the waiver consent form in the presence of the court.”

“And at this time I am tending the document to the court for your signature, Your Honor.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wallace. The prisoner will be remanded to the King County jail, until such time as the New Mexico authorities send someone to escort her back.”

“Your Honor?”

“Was there something else, Mr. Wallace?”

“We’d like to get her out of here tomorrow. We’ve been informed by New Mexico that they can’t send a deputy until at least Tuesday of next week.”

“Is that a particular problem?”

“It’s a potential problem. Today is what?…Thursday. That means she’ll be in our custody five days and nights. I know I don’t have to remind Your Honor about potential problems with young female prisoners. We don’t want another Bender case on our hands.”

“Is there a special reason to think we might have such an incident?”

“I understand this prisoner has a history of suicide attempts.”

“Is that true, Miss Rigby?”

“I wouldn’t call it a history…I cut my wrist once.”

“Your Honor—”

“I understand, Mr. Wallace. Nobody wants a replay of Bender. What do you suggest?”

“We have a man here to take her back.”

“It’s New Mexico’s responsibility. Will Washington be reimbursed for the costs of such a trip?”

“It won’t cost us anything.”

“Tell me about it…gently, please.”

“Shortly after the arrest of the prisoner and her transfer here from East King County, our office was contacted by a Mr. Cliff Janeway of Denver, Colorado, who was sent here to arrest the suspect and escort her back.”

“Sent by whom?”

“An agent of the bail bondsman.”

The judge closed her eyes. “Mr. Wallace, are you seriously asking me to release this young woman in the care of a bounty hunter?”

“He’s not a bounty hunter, Your Honor.”

“Please, then…what is he?”

“He’s a rare-book dealer in Denver. More to the point, he’s a former officer of the Denver Police Department with more than fifteen years experience.”

“Is Mr. Janeway in this court?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She motioned with her hand. “Come.”

I walked down into the arena.

“You are Mr. Cliff Janeway?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you were engaged, as Mr. Wallace said, to arrest the defendant and return her to New Mexico.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have papers?…Let me see them, please.”

“We’ve checked him out thoroughly, Your Honor. We’ve talked with a Detective Hennessey at the Denver Police, who was his partner for several years, and to a Mr. Steed, who is chief of detectives. Both gentlemen spoke uncompromisingly of his dedication and character.”

“All right, Mr. Wallace, I get the picture. Be quiet a minute and let me read this stuff, will you?”

Silence.

The judge cleared her throat. “Mr. Janeway?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You were hired by a Mr. Slater of Denver, who was representing the Martin Bailbondsmen of Taos, is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

She blinked and looked at me through her glasses. “I can’t help wondering, sir, how a police detective becomes a dealer in rare books.”

“He gets very lucky, Your Honor.”

She smiled. “Have you ever done any bounty-hunter work?”

“No, ma’am.”

“This is not something you do for a living?”

“Not at all.”

“How did you come to accept this case?”

“It was offered to me. Mr. Slater didn’t have time to come out of town, and he asked me to come in his place.”

“How did you propose to escort Miss Rigby back to New Mexico?”

“By air.”

She nodded her approval. Just to be sure, she said, “No three-day trips by automobile?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What does New Mexico have to say, Mr. Wallace?”

“Well, naturally they’d love to come get her—you know how those sheriff’s boys love to travel. But they understand our problem too.”

“They have no objection to Mr. Janeway?”

“They’re comfortable with him. One or two of them know him, as a matter of fact.”

“What about you, Miss Rigby? Do you have any objection to being escorted by Mr. Janeway?”

“I don’t care who takes me.”

“We sure don’t want to keep her any longer than we have to, Your Honor.”

“All right. The prisoner is remanded to the custody of the jailer, who will release her to Mr. Janeway upon presentation of the papers and the airline tickets. I hope I’m making myself clear, Mr. Janeway. I’m holding you personally responsible for this prisoner’s safe passage. I’m not interested in any deal you may have made with this…what’s his name?…Slater, in Denver. You baby-sit this one all the way into Taos. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Next case.”

11

The Rigbys sat in stony silence in the first row of Judge Maria McCoy’s court. Archie Moon sat beside Crystal, directly behind the defendant’s table. The room was nearly empty beyond the second row: there were a couple of legal eagles—people who drift from court to court, endlessly fascinated by the process—and across the aisle sat a young blond woman with a steno pad. I was surprised to find even that much Seattle interest in the plight of a defendant in a legal action thirteen hundred miles removed.

“I shouldn’t even talk to you, you son of a bitch,” Crystal said.

I had found them in the cafeteria, eating sand-wiches out of a vending machine, and I sat with them and tried to explain how the deceit had begun, how the lie kept growing until the appearance of the cops put an end to it. We got past it quickly. It was my intent they now embraced, and they gripped my hand with the desperation of shipwreck survivors who come upon a lifeboat in choppy, hostile waters. I told them what was going to happen and what I was going to try to do. I would ferry Eleanor into Taos, meet with her lawyer, and see if any mitigating circumstances might be uncovered that would sway the court toward leniency. There had been a time, not too long ago, when I had done such work for a living, and I had been good at it. But I hadn’t even heard Eleanor’s side of things yet, so I didn’t know what was possible.

“I’ve got to tell you,” Crystal said, “we don’t have any money to pay you. None at all.”

“Call it one I owe you. If I can help in any way, it’ll be my pleasure.”

Crystal asked if she should try to come to New Mexico. I told her not yet: let me get my feet on the ground and see how the wind was blowing. Gaston Rigby watched us talk, his sad and weary eyes moving from her face to mine. “If it does become a question of money,” he said, “you let us know, we’ll get it somehow.” Archie Moon said he had a little money put aside, enough to get him to Taos if I thought he could do any good. I told him to keep that thought on the back burner and I’d let him know.

Then there was nothing more for them to do but take the long ride home, face a house that would never again seem so empty, and wait out the days and weeks and months for the justice system to do what it would. For me the case had taken on a kind of inevitable flow. Everything about it felt orchestrated, as if my part in it had been preordained. A woman named Joy Bender had killed herself in the Seattle jailhouse and had named me her chief beneficiary. The Bender case was an ugly one, full of posthumous rape-and-abuse charges. A letter had been left with Bender’s mother, who had released it to the press with a raging broadside at the system. In time the Bender letter had been discredited as the work of a sick and angry mind. The mother had written it herself, but the headlines were a cop’s worst nightmare for a month. Even now there was widespread public belief that the true facts had been covered up and the mother was being framed to clear the real villains, the jailers and the cops. Things like that do happen, often enough that people retain their disbelief when a case against the cops collapses like a house of cards. So the DA was primed and ready when I walked in and made a case that sounded halfway legit. When I mentioned in passing my real concern that Rigby might harm herself, he was all ears. When I told him she had already tried it once, this hardened man who had seen everything shivered and drew in his wagons. And the overworked and bludgeoned system in Seattle had bent a rule or two and sent New Mexico’s problem packing with the fastest reliable messenger—me.

I was still sitting at the table in the cafeteria when a shadow passed over my left shoulder, too close to be moving on by. I looked up and into the face of the young blond woman I had seen taking notes in the courtroom earlier.

“Mr. Janeway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Trish Aandahl, Seattle Times .”

I gave her a long, wary look. “This must be a slow news day. I didn’t think major metropolitan dailies bothered with simple extradition hearings.”

“Nothing about this case is simple, and everything about it interests me. May I sit down?”

She did, without waiting for the invitation. The steno pad was still clutched tight in her left hand.

“Listen,” I said. “Before you draw that Bic out of the holster, I don’t want to be interviewed, I’ve got nothing to say.”

“May I just ask a couple of questions?”

“You can ask anything you want, but I’m not going to let you put me in print saying something dumb. The fact is, I don’t know anything about this case that could possibly be worth your time. And I learned a long time ago that when you don’t know anything, the last guy, or gal, you want to see is a reporter.”

“You’ve been burned.”

“Basted, baked, and broiled. There was a time when Blackened Janeway was the main lunch course at the Denver Press Club.”

She smiled, with just the right touch of regret. She was good, I thought, and that made her dangerous. She made you want to apologize for not being her sacrificial lamb.

“I’m not a hard-ass,” I said by way of apology. “I like the press. Most of the reporters I know are fine people, great drinking buddies. I even read newspapers once in a while. But I’ve lived long enough to know how your game works.”

“How does it work?”

“If you quote me accurately, your obligation ends right there, even if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. My viewpoint gets run through your filter system and I wind up holding the bag.”

She flashed a bitter little smile and I took a second, deeper look at her. She was one of those not-quite-rare but uncommon women, a brown-eyed blonde, like the wonderful Irene in Galsworthy’s sadly neglected Forsyte Saga . Her hair was the color of wheat in September. Her face was pleasantly round without being cherubic: her mouth was full. She was in her thirties, about Rita’s age, not beautiful but striking, a face carved by a craftsman who had his own ideas of what beauty was.

Belatedly I recognized her name. “You wrote the book: the Grayson biography.”

“I wrote the book,” she confessed.

“I should be asking you the questions. You probably know more than I do.”

“That may be. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“I keep telling you, I don’t know anything. I’m just a friend of the court, delivering a prisoner back to the bar.”

“Right,” she said with a tweak of sarcastic skepticism. She opened her purse and dropped the steno pad inside it. “Off the record.”

“Everything I’ve got to say I said on the record in open court.”

“You didn’t say why you’re really here and what you’re doing.”

“It’s irrelevant. I’m irrelevant, that’s what you need to understand.”

“Who is Slater?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“There’s someone else involved in this. Slater’s not just working for a Taos bonding company.”

I shrugged and looked at a crack in the ceiling.

“I made some calls after the hearing. You left deep footprints in Denver.”

“That’s what they said about King Kong. On him it was a compliment. As a gorilla he was hard to beat.”

I waited but she missed her cue.

“You were supposed to say, ‘That gives you a goal to shoot for.’ If we’re going to play Wits, the new Parker Brothers game, you’ve got to be sharp.”

She gave me a look of interested amusement.

“We’ll put it down to midafternoon sag,” I said.

“You are a handful, aren’t you? My sources in Denver didn’t exaggerate much.”

“So who are these people and what are they saying about me?”

“Who they are isn’t important. They told me what anybody could get with a few phone calls and a friend or two where it counts.”

“Read it back to me. Let’s see how good you are.”

“You were with DPD almost fifteen years. Exemplary record, actually outstanding until that caper a while back. You have a fine-tuned but romantic sense of justice. It should always work, the good guys should always win. Then the end would never have to justify the means, a cop could always work within the rules and evil would always take the big fall. How am I doing so far?”

“You must be on the right track, you’re starting to annoy me.”

“You asked for it. Shall I go on?”

“You mean there’s more?”

“You have an intense dislike of oppressive procedure. It galled you when the courts let creeps and thugs walk on technicalities. You nailed a guy one time on an end run that cops in Denver still talk about…probably illegal but they never stuck you with it. So the guy went up.”

“He was a serial rapist, for Christ’s sake. He got what he needed.”

“You’re getting annoyed all over again, aren’t you? They told me you would. That case still bothers you, it’s the one time you really stepped over the line and let the end justify the means. Your fellow cops remember it with a good deal of admiration, but it rankles you to this day, the way you had to get that guy.”

“I sleep just fine. My only regret is that I didn’t get the son of a bitch a year earlier, before he started using the knife.”

“You’re a guy out of time, Janeway. You were a good cop, but you’d‘ve been great fifty years ago, when there weren’t any rules.”

“There’s probably a lot I’d appreciate about life fifty years ago.”

“You don’t like telephones, television, or computers. I’ll bet Call Waiting drives you crazy.”

“People who load up their lives with crap like that have an inflated sense of their own importance. You might not believe this, but I’ve never missed an important phone call.”

“I do believe it. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

“If it’s that important, they always call back.” I looked at her hard. “You really are getting on my nerves.”

“Good. If I can’t get you to talk to me, at least I can ruin your day. If I tell you enough about yourself, maybe you’ll understand something.”

“And what is that?”

“If you don’t talk to me, somebody else will.”

“I can’t help what other people tell you.”

“They tell me you’ve got this code you live by and you’ve got it down pat. You see a lot of things in black and white: if you give your word, people can take it to the bank. The problem is, you expect the same thing out of others. You tend to be hard and unforgiving when someone breaks the code. When you come up against a brick wall, your tendency is to go right on through it. You had little finesse when it came to official policy and no patience with politics.”

“I can’t think of anything offhand that’s as evil as politics. It turns good men into bad all the time.”

“You spend a lot of your time alone. You trust no one in a pinch as much as you do your own self. You’ve got such self-confidence that sometimes it strikes others as arrogance. Your reputation as a smart-ass is as high as the Rockies. Richly deserved would be my guess.“

“I work on it every day. I hire four people to sit on a panel, test me once a week, and tell me how I’m doing. Lately I’ve been unable to afford the sex therapist, but you could probably tell that. I don’t feel that my day’s properly under way unless I’ve run three miles and verbally abused someone of far less mental dexterity than myself—preferably in public, where the scars of their humiliation will be shattering and damn near impossible to shake off.”

She gave a little smile. “Actually, you’re a champion of the underdog. The strong never abuse the weak in your presence.”

“Now I’m a regular Robin Hood. You’ll have to make up your mind.”

“You’ve got quite a name as a fighter. People don’t mess with you much.”

“Some have.”

“But they didn’t come back for seconds.”

“Not since I killed that blind crippled boy last summer.”

She laughed. “You’re an American original, aren’t you? Listen to me, Janeway. I mean you no harm. I come in friendship and peace.”

“That’s what Custer said to the Indians.”

“You and I are probably a lot alike.”

“That’s what Sitting Bull said back to Custer.”

“And like the Indians and the cavalry, we’d probably end up killing each other. But I’ll tell you this, it’ll all be up front. I never break my word.” She leaned forward and looked me straight in the eyes. Our faces were closer than strangers ought to be. “Who is Slater?”

I looked at her hard and gave her nothing.

“Maybe it would make a difference if I told you what else I know.”

“What’s that?”

“That Darryl and Richard Grayson were murdered.”

Her sense of timing couldn’t have been better: I felt the tingle of her words all the way to my toes. Without taking her eyes from mine, she reached into her bag and took out a card. “Both my numbers are here if you decide you’d like to talk. Anytime, all off the record. If not, have a nice flight to Taos.”

She got up and walked out.

12

Who was Slater? The question lingered through the night.

Why was I here?

In my mind I saw him working his scam, dancing his way into my life with that cock-and-bull story about him and me and our brilliant future together. I watched again as he spread open that paper, where someone had written the particulars of Grayson’s Raven so long ago that it was beginning to fall apart. It wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about a bounty fee on a skip, it might not even be about Eleanor except in an incidental way. The real stuff had happened long ago, probably before she was born.

But it didn’t matter now, did it? I was under a court order, and I had to play according to Hoyle.

I sat up late reading a bad novel. I watched some bad TV. At three o’clock in the morning I sat at my window and looked down into the rainy Seattle street.

But I couldn’t forget Trish Aandahl, or that parting shot she had given me.

I called the first travel agency that opened at seven-thirty and told them to get me to Taos with a fellow traveler ASAP. It was a heavy travel day. United had two flights that would put us in Albuquerque early and late that afternoon. From there I could rent a car or hook up with a local airline that would jump us into Taos. But both flights were packed. The agent could squeeze us in, but our seats would be separated by the length of the plane. The next viable flight was a red-eye special, leaving Sea-Tac at 11:18 p.m., arriving in Albuquerque at 2:51 a.m., mountain time. I took the red-eye, told the agent to deliver the tickets to the Hilton, and put the tariff on my charge card. The tickets were $800 each, typical airline piracy for last-minute bookings. I sucked it up and hoped to God I could get some of it back from the good people of New Mexico.

Then I called Slater and got my first surprise of a long and surprising day.

“Mr. Slater’s not available,” said his woman in Denver.

“When will he be available?”

“I’m not sure. He will be calling in. Who is this, please?”

“My name’s Janeway. I’ve been working a case for him. Something’s come up and I need to talk to him.”

I heard her shuffling through some papers. “I’m afraid I don’t know you.”

“Then I must not exist. I’ll bet if you tell him I’m here, though, he’ll talk to me anyway.”

I heard a spinning sound, like a roulette wheel in Vegas. “Everyone who works for us is in this Rolodex. Your name’s not here.”

“Then it’s Slater’s loss. Give him a message, tell him I tried.”

“Wait a minute.”

I heard her talking to someone, but her hand had covered the phone and I couldn’t make out the words.

“I could maybe have him call you back.”

“Won’t work. I’m heading out in about five minutes.”

“Hold, please.” She punched the hold button: elevator music filled my ear.

There was a click. Another woman said, “Mr. Janeway?…I’m sorry for the hassle. It’s just that we don’t know you and Mr. Slater’s out of town.”

“How could he be out of town? He hired me because he didn’t have time to go out of town. Where’s he gone?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. I guess I’ll have to take a message.”

“Tell him Janeway called, I’ve got the girl and I’m taking her on to Taos myself.”

“Is that what he wanted you to do?”

“It doesn’t matter what he wanted me to do. Tell him I’m not working for him anymore.”

I sat on my bed feeling the first faint gnawing of a mighty hunch.

I placed another call to Denver.

“U.S. West.”

“Howard Farrell, please.”

I listened to the click of a connection, then a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Farrell’s office.”

“Mr. Farrell, please.”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Cliff Janeway.”

Another click, followed by the familiar resonance of an old and confidential source.

“Hey, Cliff! Where the hell’ve you been?”

“Cruising down the river, you old son of a bitch.”

“Jesus, I haven’t heard your voice for what?…seems like a year now.”

“More like two. So how’re things at the good old phone company?”

“Same old shit.”

“Howard, you need to start breaking in a new act. But then what would guys like me do when they need a favor out of old Ma Bell?”

“Uh-oh. You’re not official anymore, are you?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Damn right it is. Just for old-time’s sake, what do you want?”

“Clydell Slater.”

“My favorite cop. He still playing smashmouth with Denver’s finest?”

“He does it on his own now.”

“What an asshole. Look, Cliff…this isn’t likely to cause Mr. Slater any grief, is it?”

“It might pinch his balls a little.”

“Then I’ll do it. Same ground rules as always. Give me a number, I’ll call you right back.”

Five minutes later Farrell called and, for my ears only, gave me Slater’s home number.

I placed the call.

It was answered by a recording, a woman’s voice. “Hi, this’s Tina. Me’n‘ Clyde are out now. We’ll call ya back.”

I hung up on the beep.

I lingered over breakfast in a downtown cafe. Read the high points in last night’s Times . Looked for her byline but it wasn’t there. Drank my third cup of coffee over the local homicide page.

Went back to the hotel. Took a shower and went upstairs to the lobby. My tickets had arrived. I slipped them into my inside jacket pocket with my court papers and went to the jail to see Eleanor.

It was still early, well before ten. They led her in and we sat with glass between us, talking through a bitch box.

“How’re you doing?” I said.

“Just wonderful.”

“I wanted to see you and say a few things.”

“You don’t have to.”

“What are you now, a mind reader?”

“I know what you’re gonna say, I can see it in your eyes. I know you’re bothered by all this. Don’t be…you don’t owe me a thing.”

“In a cold-blooded dog-eat-dog world, that would be one way to look at it.”

“Well, isn’t that what it is?”

“Only sometimes.”

“I’ll bet this was your big failing as a cop. People can look in your face and see what’s in your heart.”

“Would you believe nobody’s ever said that to me?…Not once. In some circles I’m known as a helluva poker player, impossible to read.”

“Amazing.”

We looked at each other.

“If you’re waiting for absolution, you already have it,” she said. “You were doing a job. You’ve got a strange way of doing it, but I’ve got no kick coming. If it makes you feel better, you’ve got my unqualified permission to deliver me up and get on with your life, forget I ever existed.”

“That’s not going to happen, Eleanor. That’s one promise I’m making you.”

“What can you do, tell me that…what can you do?”

“I don’t know. Did you do the burglary?”

“Yes, I did. So there you are.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Did you take a gun into the house?”

“Does it matter?”

“Does it matter? Hell, yes, it matters. It can be the difference between a first-time offender asking for probation and a gun moll doing heavy time.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You said something back in the restaurant when we were talking about your stalker. The subject of a gun came up. Do you remember what you said?”

She looked at me through the glass. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

“Did the cops do a gunshot residue test?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“So I’ll ask you again. Did you take a gun into that house?”

“No. Believe it or not.”

“Okay, I believe it. Did you get a gun while you were in the house, maybe from the guy’s gun rack. Was it you that did the shooting?”

“I never shot at anyone. I was the one shot at. I’m lucky to be alive.”

“If we can prove that, you’ve got a fighting chance. You were still wrong to be there. You broke in, they had every right to shoot at you. But almost any judge would wonder why they’d lie about it.”

“I guess they want me to go to jail.”

“For a long time, apparently.” I leaned closer to the glass. “I’d still like to know why you broke in, what you were looking for.”

“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. But not today; I don’t think I know you well enough to get into the wired-up hell of my life with you. When do we leave?”

“Late tonight. I’ll come for you around seven-thirty.”

“Lots of dead time for you to fill. What’ll you do, hit the bookstores?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s the only part of this that really surprises me. I never had a hint you were a book dealer. You played that card very well.”

I tried to smile at her. “I’d better go.” But something powerful held me there. Then, so quickly that I didn’t know how it happened, I stepped off the straight and narrow for the first time that day. I stepped all the way off and said something that could never be unsaid.

“How’d you like to get out of here?…go with me?…be my guide through the Seattle book jungle?”

She looked like a person half-drowned who had suddenly been brought back to life. “Can you do that?”

“Probably not. The jailer will look at my tickets and wonder what the hell I’m doing taking you out ten hours early. The judge’ll schedule a new hearing, I’ll get drawn and quartered, and you’ll end up riding back to Taos handcuffed to a deputy.”

I shrugged. “We could try.”

She reached out as if to touch my face. Her fingertips flattened against the glass.

“You’ve got to promise to behave.” I felt a sudden desperation, as if I’d taken a long step into the dark. “I’m taking a big chance, Eleanor. It’s my responsibility now. I’ll take the chance because I like you. I owe you one for the big lie. And it just occurs to me that you’d probably rather spend the day in bookstores than chained by your neck to the wall of some crummy jail cell. But you’ve got to behave.”

“Absolutely. Who wouldn’t love a deal like that?”

The jailer gave our tickets a cursory glance. He looked at my papers, read the judge’s order, and at half past ten Eleanor Rigby and I walked out into a drippy Seattle day.

13

It was a day of magic. The two of us were charmed: Seattle was our oyster and every stop coughed up a pearl. She took me to a place called Gregor Books on Southwest California Avenue. The books were crisp and fine and there were lots of high-end goodies. You don’t steal books out of a store like that—the owner is far too savvy ever to get caught sleeping on a live one, but Rita McKinley’s words echoed in my ear. You can double the price on anything if it’s fine enough . Gregor had the finest copy of Smoky I had ever seen. Signed Will James material is becoming scarce, and James had not only signed it but had drawn an original sketch on the half title. Gregor was asking $600, $480 after my dealer’s discount. I took it, figuring I could push it to $800 or more on the sketch and the world’s-best-copy assertion. I figured James was a hotter property in the real West, Colorado, than here in Seattle, and when the day came for me to go in the ground, I could rest just fine if they threw this book in the hole with me. Speaking of dying, Gregor had a dandy copy of If I Die in a Combat Zone , Tim O’Brien’s 1973 novel of the Vietnam War. He had marked it $450, but I was making his day and he bumped my discount to 25 percent for both items. I took it: the O’Brien is so damn scarce that I thought it was overdue for another price jump, and I left the store poorer but happier. Eleanor directed me downtown. We stopped at the Seattle Book Center, a lovely store on Second Avenue with half a dozen rooms on two floors. I bought a Zane Grey Thundering Herd in an immaculate 1919 dust jacket for $160.1 was flying high now. There were books everywhere we looked, and even if the Seattle boys weren’t giving them away, I saw decent margin in almost everything I touched. “This is one of those days, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “I’ll bet if you went back there and flushed the toilet, books would come pouring out.” We went to a mystery specialist called Spade and Archer. It was in a bank building downtown, in a fifth-floor office that old Sam Spade himself might have occupied in the thirties. The owner was a young blond woman whose credo seemed to be “keep ‘em moving.” She had two of the three Edgar Box mysteries at a hundred apiece, cost to me, and I took them, figuring they’d be good $200 items in the catalog I was planning. As mysteries they’re just fair. But Gore Vidal had written them, hiding behind the Edgar Box moniker when he was starting out in the early fifties, and there’s always somebody for a curiosity like that.

In another store I fingered a sharp copy of White Fang , amazed that the asking price was just $75. Eleanor warned me off with a look. In the car she said, “It was a second state, that’s why it was so cheap.” I felt like amateur night in Harlem, but I asked her anyway, what was the point of it, and this kid, this child, gave me another lesson in fly-by-your pants bookscouting.

“There was a mistake on the title page. Macmillan just sliced it out and glued a new one on the cancel stub…You look perplexed, Mr. Jane way, like a man who’s never heard the terminology. You don’t know what a cancel stub is?…How long have you been in the business?”

“Long enough to know a lot about a few things and damn little about most of it.”

“Well, this kind of thing happened a lot in the old days. The publisher would make a mistake in a line or word, but by the time they noticed it, ten thousand copies had been printed and maybe five thousand had been distributed. If it was an important author, like Jack London, they didn’t want to release any more with the mistake, but they didn’t want to redo all those books either. So Macmillan printed a new title page, in the case of White Fang , then they sliced out the old ones on all those flawed copies and just glued the new one right onto the stub.”

“They just tipped it in.”

“Sure. Labor was cheap then, and even those factory grunts could do a decent job of it. The average book collector won’t even see it, but a bookman can’t miss it unless it’s done with real finesse. Just look down in the gutter and there it is, like a man who had an arm cut off and sewn back on again. Doran did the same thing with one of Winston Churchill’s early books, My African Journey . They bought the remainder from the British publisher and just slashed out the title page and put in their own on the cancel stub. That’s why the first American edition comes in a British casing, with Hodder and Stoughton on the spine and a tipped-in Doran title page. It was one of Doran’s first books, and he was lowballing to save money.”

“Oh,” I said lamely.

We stopped for lunch. I wanted to talk about her case but she wouldn’t get into it: it would only screw up an otherwise pleasant day, she said. We drifted back toward the Kingdome. Her car was gone: her father had picked it up for her and had it towed to a gas station a few blocks away. We drove past and saw it there in the lot. We were in the neighborhood anyway, so we stopped in the big Goodwill store on Dearborn. I don’t do thrift stores much anymore— usually they are run by idiots who think they are book dealers, without a lick of experience or a grain of knowledge to back them up. In Denver the Goodwills have become laughingstocks among dealers and scouts. They have their silly little antique rooms where they put everything that looks old—every ratty, worn-out never-was that ever came out of the publishing industry. They mark their prices in ink, destroying any value the thing might have, and when you try to tell them that, they stare at you with dull eyes and say they’ve got to do it that way. The store in Seattle didn’t ink its books to death, but it didn’t matter—they had the same mentality when it came to pricing. The shelves were clogged with common, crummy books, some still available on Walden remainder tables for two dollars, marked six and seven in this so-called thrift store. Naturally, they missed the one good book. Eleanor found it as she browsed one side while I worked the other. She peeked around the corner with that sad-little-girl-oh-so-lost look on her face. “Scuse me, sir, could you loan me a dollar?…My family’s destitute, my daddy broke his leg, my little brother’s got muscular dystrophy, and my mamma’s about to sell her virtue on First Avenue.” I made a convulsive grab at my wallet. “Damn, you are good!” I said with forced admiration. “You’re breaking my damn heart.” She grinned with all her teeth and held up a fine first of Robert Traver’s wonderful Anatomy of a Murder . It was a nice scarce little piece, worth at least $100 I guessed: a good sleeper because the Book of the Month edition is exactly the same size and shape and so prolific that even real bookpeople won’t bother to pick it up and look. Goodwill wanted $4 for it. She paid with my dollar and her nickels and dimes, then haggled with me in the parking lot: “Gregor would give me at least forty for this, and I’m waiting breathlessly to see if you’re inclined to do the honorable thing.” I gave her forty-five, but made a point of getting my dollar back, and we both enjoyed my good-natured grumbling for the next half hour.

After wading through the dreck, it was good to be back in a real bookstore again. In a place downtown, she spent most of her money on a miniature book, a suede-leather copy of Shakespeare no larger than the tip of her thumb. “I’m really a sucker for these things,” she said. “I’ll buy them if there’s the least bit of margin.” I knew almost nothing about the miniature-book trade, only that, like every other specialty, it has its high spots that are coveted and cherished. Eleanor filled me in as we drove. “This was published by David Bryce in Glasgow around the turn of the century. Bryce did lots of miniatures, some of them quite special. I once had a Bryce’s dictionary, which they called the smallest dictionary in the world. It was only about an inch square and it had about four hundred pages, with a little metal slipcase and a foldout magnifying glass. You could carry it on a key ring.”

I held the Shakespeare between my thumb and forefinger. “You think there’s any margin in this?”

“I don’t care, I didn’t buy it to get rich. Maybe I could double up wholesale, but I think I’ll keep it for a while as a memento of this day. It’ll be my good-luck piece. I think I’ll need one, don’t you?”

Bookscouting gives you the same kind of thrills as gambling. You flirt with the Lady in much the same way. You get hot and the books won’t stop coming: you get cold and you might as well be playing pinochle with your mother-in-law. I was hot, and when Luck is running, she flaunts all the odds of circumstance and coincidence. I found two early-fifties Hopalong Cassidy books by a guy Eleanor had never heard of, some cowboy named Tex Burns. I savored the pleasure of telling her that Tex Burns was like Edgar Box, a moniker…in another lifetime he had been a young man named Louis L’Amour. Amazing to find two such in a single day, but I take Luck where I find her. These cost me $4 each and were worth around $250.1 razzed Eleanor for not knowing. We headed north and I said, for at least the fifth time, “I thought everybody knew about Tex Burns.” She crossed her eyes and looked down her nose at me, a perfect picture of rank stupidity.

It was the damnedest day, full of sorrow and joy and undercut with that sweet slice of tension. I’ll blink and she’ll be gone, I thought at least a dozen times: I’ll turn my head for a second and when I look up, she’ll be two blocks away, running like hell. But I had set my course and the day was waning, and still there had been nothing between us but the most cheerful camaraderie. Out of the blue, in midafter-noon, she said, “I guess it’s a good thing you turned into an asshole when you did: I may’ve been on the verge of falling in love with you and then where would we be?” Coming from nowhere like that, it put me on the floor. It also brought to a critical point a problem I had failed to consider—I had to pee in the worst possible way. I told her to stay put, disappeared into the rest room, and found her still there, working the shelves, when I came hustling out a minute later. I didn’t worry much about her after that.

She took me to a place near the university called Half Price Books. It nestled modestly on a street named Roosevelt Way, a cornucopia of books on two floors. There were no real high spots, but I could’ve spent two hundred on stock, it was that kind of place. I bought only what I couldn’t leave and got out for less than eighty. We were going out the door when Eleanor spied a copy of Trish Aandahl’s book on the Gray-sons. “You oughta buy this,” she said. “It’s a helluva read.”

She was a little curious at how fast I did buy it. I still hadn’t told her about my interest in Grayson and probably wouldn’t now until we were on the airplane and well away from here. “You drive,” I said, throwing her the keys. “I want to fondle my stuff.” But all I did as she wove through the crowded, narrow streets was browse through Aandahl. The jacket was an art deco design, with elegant curlicues and old-style fringe decorations. It was dominated by black-and-white photographs of the Grayson brothers, a little out of focus and solving none of the mystery of the men. The art director had overlapped the pictures and then pulled them apart, leaving parts of each infringed upon the other, the ragged gulf between them suggesting disruption and conflict. The title, Crossfire , stood out in red: under it, in black, the subtitle, The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard Grayson . Richard’s resemblance to Leslie Howard was more real than imagined: Darryl Grayson’s image was darker, fuzzier, barely distinguishable. His was the face on the barroom floor, and not because it had been painted there. The jacket blurb on Trish Aandahl consisted of one line, that the author was a reporter for the Seattle Times , and there was no photograph. If the lady wasn’t interested in personal glory, she’d be the first reporter I had ever known who felt that way. I thumbed the index: my eye caught the name of Allan Huggins, the Grayson bibliographer, mentioned half a dozen times in the text. Gaston Rigby made his appearance on page 535, and there were three mentions for Crystal Moon Rigby. Archie Moon was prominent, entering the Grayson saga on page 15 and appearing prolifically thereafter. A section of photographs showed some of Grayson’s books, but, strangely, the only photographs of the subjects themselves were the same two of poor quality that had been used on the jacket. It was 735 pages thick, almost as big as the Huggins bibliography, and packed with what looked to be anecdotal writing at its best.