Booked to die

Copyright © 1992 by John Dunning

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Charles Scribner’s Sons Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.

Macmillan Publishing Company 200 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 200

866 Third Avenue Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1 New York, NY 10022

Macmillan Publishing Company is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunning, John, 1942—

Booked to die: a mystery introducing Cliff Janeway/John Dunning.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-684-19383-3

I. Title.

PS3554.U49394B66 1992 813.54—dc20 91-26889

10 987654321 Printed in the United States of America

To Warwick Downing,

who got me started again,

and

to the Denver antiquarian book trade: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Certain unique books discussed in Booked to Die (Hawthorne’s copy of Moby Dick and Mencken’s copy of This Side of Paradise, among others) have been fictionalized for the sake of the story and may actually reside in real libraries, public or private. Dealers who would argue with the author over prices should remember that the story takes place in 1986. Values on some books have risen dramatically in five years. Catcher in the Rye, for example, is now a $1,500 piece. Interview with the Vampire is usually seen at $600 plus. And so it goes.

BOOKED to DIE

A MYSTERY INTRODUCING CLIFF JANEWAY

Bobby the bookscout was killed at midnight on June 13, 1986. This was the first strange fact, leading to the question, What was he doing out that late at night? To Bobby, midnight was the witching hour and Friday the thirteenth was a day to be spent in bed. He was found in an alley under one of those pulldown iron ladders that give access to a fire escape—another odd thing. In life, Bobby would never walk under a ladder, so it would seem ironic to some people in the Denver book trade when they heard in the morning that he had died there.

You should know something about bookscouts and the world they go around in. This is an age when almost everyone scouts for books. Doctors and lawyers with six-figure incomes prowl the thrift stores and garage sales, hoping to pick up a treasure for pennies on the dollar. But the real bookscout, the pro, has changed very little in the last thirty years. He’s a guy who can’t make it in the real world. He operates out of the trunk of a car, if he’s lucky enough to have a car, out of a knapsack or a bike bag if he isn’t. He’s an outcast, a fighter, or a man who’s been driven out of every other line of work. He can be quiet and humble or aggressive and intimidating. Some are renegades and, yes, there are a few psychos. The one thing the best of them have in common is an eye for books. It’s almost spooky, a pessimistic book dealer once said—the nearest thing you can think of to prove the existence of God. How these guys, largely uneducated, many unread, gravitate toward books and inevitably choose the good ones is a prime mystery of human nature.

They get their stock in any dusty corner where books are sold cheap, ten cents to a buck. If they’re lucky they’ll find $100 worth on any given day, for which an honest book dealer will pay them $30 or $40. They stand their own expenses and may come out of the day $30 to the good. They live for the prospect of the One Good Book, something that’ll bring $200 or more. This happens very seldom, but it happens. It happened to Bobby Westfall more often than to alll the others put together.

In one seventy-two-hour period, the story goes, Bobby turned up the following startling inventory: Mr. President, the story of the Truman administration, normally a $6 book unless it’s signed by Truman, which this was, under an interesting page-long inscription, also in Truman’s hand—call it $800 easy; The Recognitions, the great cornerstone of modern fiction (or the great unreadable novel, take your pick) by William Gaddis, also inscribed, $400 retail; The Magus, John Fowles’s strange and irresistible book of wonder, first British edition in a flawless jacket, $300; and Terry’s Texas Rangers, a thin little book of ninety-odd pages that happens to be a mighty big piece of Texas history, $750. Total retail for the weekend, $2,000 to $2,500; Bobby’s wholesale cut, $900, a once-in-a-lifetime series of strikes that people in the Denver book trade still talk about.

If it was that easy, everybody’d be doing it. Usually Bobby Westfall led a bleak, lonely life. He took in cats, never could stand to pass up a homeless kitty. Sometimes he slept in unwashed clothes, and on days when pickings weren’t so good, he didn’t eat. He spent his $900 quickly and was soon back to basics. He had a ragged appearance and a chronic cough. There were days when he hurt inside: his eyes would go wide and he’d clutch himself, a sudden pain streaking across his insides like a comet tearing up the summer sky. He was thirty-four years old, already an old man at an age when life should just begin.

He didn’t drive. He packed his books from place to place on his back, looking for a score and a dealer who’d treat him right. Some of the stores were miles apart, and often you’d see Bobby trudging up East Colfax Avenue, his knees buckling under the weight. His turf was the Goodwill store on Colfax and Havana, the DAV thrift shop on Montview Boulevard, and the dim-lit antique stores along South Broadway, where people think they know books. Heaven to Bobby the Book-scout was finding a sucker who thought he knew more than he knew, a furniture peddler or a dealer in glass who also thought he knew books. On South Broadway, in that particular mind-set, the equation goes like this: old + bulk = value. An antique dealer would slap $50 on a worthless etiquette book from the 1880s and let a true $150 collectible like Anne Tyler’s Celestial Navigation go for a quarter. When that happened, Bobby Westfall would be there with his quarter in hand, with a poker face and a high heart. He’d eat very well tonight.

Like all bookscouts, Bobby could be a pain in the ass. He was a born-again Christian: he’d tell you about Christ all day long if you’d stand still and listen. There was gossip that he’d been into dope years ago, that he’d done some hard time. People said that’s where he found the Lord, doing five-to-ten at Canon City. None of that mattered now. He was a piece of the Denver book world, part of the landscape, and the trade was a little poorer for his death.

He had been bludgeoned, battered into the bookscout’s hereafter by a heavy metal object. According to the coroner, Bobby had felt no pain: he never knew what hit him. The body was found facedown in the alley, about three blocks from the old Denver Post. A cat was curled up at his feet, as if waiting for Bobby to wake up and take her home.

This is the story of a dead man, how he got that way, and what happened to some other people because of his death.

He was a gentle man, quiet, a human mystery.

He had no relatives, no next of kin to notify. He had no close friends, but no enemies either.

His cats would miss him.

No one could think of a reason why anyone would kill Bobby. Who would murder a harmless man like that?

I’ll tell you why. Then I’ll tell you who.

BOOK ONE

1

The phone rang. It was 2:30 a.m.

Normally I am a light sleeper, but that night I was down among the dead. I had just finished a thirteen-hour shift, my fourth day running of heavy overtime, and I hadn’t been sleeping well until tonight. A guy named Jackie Newton was haunting my dreams. He was my enemy and I thought that someday I would probably have to kill him. When the bell went off, I was dreaming about Jackie Newton and our final showdown. For some reason—logic is never the strong point of a dream like that—Jackie and I were in the hallway at East High School. The bell brought the kids out for the change of classes; Jackie started shooting and the kids began to drop, and that hell kept ringing as if it couldn’t stop.

In the bed beside me, Carol stirred.

“Oh, Cliff,” she groaned. “Would somebody please get that goddamn telephone?”

I groped for the night table, felt the phone, and knocked the damn thing to the floor. From some distant galaxy I could hear the midget voice of Neal Hennessey, saying, “Cliff?… Cliff?… Hey, Clifford!” I reached along the black floor and found the phone, but it was still many seconds later before Hennessey took on his bearlike image in my mind.

“Looks like we got another one,” Hennessey said without preamble.

I struggled to sit up, trying to get used to the idea that Jackie Newton hadn’t shot me after all.

“Hey, Cliffie… you alive yet?”

“Yeah, Neal, sure. First time I been sound asleep in a week.”

He didn’t apologize; he just waited.

“Where you at?” I said.

“Alley off Fifteenth, just up from the Denver Post. This one looks an awful lot like the others.”

“Give me about half an hour.”

“We’ll be here.”

I sat for another minute, then I got up and went into the bathroom. I turned on the light and looked in the mirror and got the first terrifying look at myself in the cold hard light of the new day. You’re getting old, Janeway, I thought. Old Andrew Wyeth could make a masterpiece out of a face like that. Call it Clifford Liberty Janeway at 36, with no blemish eliminated and no character line unexplored.

I splashed cold water on my face: it had a great deal less character after that. To finally answer Hennessey, yes, I was almost alive again. The vision of Jackie Newton rose up before me and my hand went automatically to the white splash of scar tissue just under my right shoulder. A bank robber had shot me there five years ago. I knew Jackie Newton would give a lot to put in another one, about three inches to the left and an inch or so down.

Man with an old bullet wound, by Wyeth: an atypical work, definitely not your garden-variety Helga picture.

When I came out of the bathroom Carol was up. She had boiled water and had a cup of instant coffee steaming on my nightstand.

“What now?” she said.

As I struggled into my clothes, I told her it looked like another derelict murder. She sighed loudly and sat on the bed.

She was lovely even in a semistupor. She had long auburn hair and could probably double for Helga in a pinch. No one but Wyeth would know.

“Would you like me to come with you?”

I gave a little laugh, blowing the steam from my coffee.

“Call it moral support,” she said. “Just for the ride down and back. Nobody needs to see me. I could stay in the car.”

“Somebody would see you, all right, and then the tongues would start. It’d be all over the department by tomorrow.”

“You know something? I don’t even care.”

“I care. What we do in our own time is nobody’s business.”

I went to the closet and opened it. Our clothes hung there side by side—the blue uniform Carol had worn on yesterday’s shift; my dark sport coat; our guns, which had become as much a part of the wardrobe as pants, shirts, ties, badges. I never went anywhere without mine, not even to the corner store. I had had a long career for a guy thirty-six: I’d made my share of enemies, and Jackie Newton was only the latest.

I put the gun on under my coat. I didn’t wear a tie, wasn’t about to at that time of night. I was off duty and I’d just been roused from a sound sleep; I wasn’t running for city council, and I hated neckties.

“I know you’ve been saying that for a long time now, that stuff about privacy,” Carol said dreamily. “But I think the real reason is, if people know about me, I make you vulnerable.”

I didn’t want to get into it. It was just too early for a philosophical discourse. There was something in what Carol said, but something in what I said too. I’ve never liked office gossip, and I didn’t want people talking about her and me.

But Carol had been looking at it from another angle lately. We had been seeing each other, in the polite vernacular, for a year now, and she was starting to want something more permanent. Maybe bringing our arrangement into the public eye would show me how little there was to worry about. People did it all the time. For most of them the world didn’t come to an end. Occasionally something good came out of it.

So she thought.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Wake me when you come in. Maybe I’ll have a nice surprise for you.”

She lay back and closed her eyes. Her hair made a spectacular sunburst on the pillow. I sat for a while longer, sipping my coffee. There wasn’t any hurry: a crime lab can take three hours at the scene. I’d leave in five minutes and still be well within the half hour I’d promised Hennessey. The trouble is, when I have dead time—even five minutes unfilled in the middle of the night—I begin to think. I think about Carol and me and all the days to come. I think about the job and all the burned-out gone-forever days behind us. I think about quitting and I wonder what I’d do. I think about being tied to someone and anchoring those ties with children.

Carol would not be a bad one to do that with. She’s pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She’s good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn’t understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I’m a government-inspected horse’s ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he’d signed it. Faulkner was her most recent god, and I had managed to put together a small but respectable collection of his first editions. You’ve got to read this stuff, she said to me when she was a month deep in his work. How can you collect the man without ever reading what he’s written? In fact, I had read him, years ago: I never could get the viewpoints straight in The Sound and the Fury, but I had sense enough at sixteen to know that the problem wasn’t with Faulkner but with me. I was trying to work up the courage to tackle him again: if I began to collect him, I reasoned, I’d have to read him sooner or later. Carol shook her head. Look at it this way, I said, the Faulkners have appreciated about twenty percent in the three years I’ve owned them. That she understood.

My apartment looked like an adjunct of the Denver Public Library. There were wall-to-wall books in every room. Carol had never asked the Big Dumb Question that people always ask when they come into a place like this: Jeez, dya read all these? She browsed, fascinated. The books have a loose logic to their shelving: mysteries in the bedroom; novels out here; art books, notably by the Wyeths, on the far wall. There’s no discrimination—they are all first editions—and when people try to go highbrow on me, I love reminding them that my as-new copy of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake is worth a cool $1,000 today, more than a bale of books by most of the critically acclaimed and already forgotten so-called masters of the art-and-beauty school. There’s nothing wrong with writing detective stories if you do it well enough.

I’ve been collecting books for a long time. Once I killed two men in the same day, and this room had an almost immediate healing effect.

I’ve missed my calling, I thought. But now was probably years too late to be thinking about it.

Time to go.

“Cliff?”

Her eyes were still closed, but she was not quite asleep.

“I’m leaving now,” I said.

“You going out to see Jackie Newton?”

“If this is what it looks like, you better believe it.”

“Have Neal watch your flank. And both of you be careful.”

I went over and kissed her on the temple. Two minutes later I was in my car, gliding through the cool Denver night.

2

I crossed the police line and walked into the alley. The body was about thirty yards in. Strobe lights had been set up and pictures taken. The lights were still on for the benefit of the sketcher, and the narrow canyon was ablaze. The sketcher stood at the edge of things, working with a pencil and clipboard while two assistants checked measurements with a tape. The coroner had arrived only a short time before me, but an assistant coroner had been there for more than an hour. The two men stood over the body talking. I didn’t interrupt: just hung back and watched. Hennessey appeared out of the gloom with two cups of coffee. I took mine and he filled me in on what little he knew. Police had responded to an anonymous call at 1:32 a.m.: report of a dead man, which checked out affirmative. Officers arrived at 1:37: homicide detectives had been sent over and the crime lab summoned. Then, because the case strongly resembled a series of such apparently random derelict murders, Hennessey had been called. Hennessey was my partner, and he called me. We had been working that chain of cases for two years: if this one fit the pattern, it would become ours.

There had been no one to interview at the scene. The caller, who was described by the dispatcher as a white-sounding male, probably under fifty, had hung up when asked for his name. Later we’d want to listen to a tape of that conversation, but I didn’t have much hope for it. Chances were we’d never find the guy because, chances were, he was just someone who had stumbled over the body and didn’t want to get involved.

The scene itself wasn’t a good bet for evidence. The alley was narrow and paved. On one side was an old department store; on the other, an old hotel. The walls of the hotel were red brick, worn smooth by many years. The department store had a fake marble facade, which continued into the alley to just about the place where the body lay. Orange powder had been dusted on both sides, and it looked like they’d come up with some prints. In all probability they’d turn out to be everyone but the mayor of Denver and the guy we wanted.

That was all we had. That was all we ever had. The first murdered bum had been found in an alley much like this one two years and two months ago, April 1984. His head had been kicked in. There had been three more that year and two the next, all the same general method of operation: a helluva beating, then death. The guy’s hatred for street people, winos, and the homeless seemed compulsive. Hennessey thought he might be a skinhead, one of those jerks with a brownshirt mentality and an irresistible need to take out society’s lower elements. I thought his motives were simpler. He was a sadist: he didn’t care who he killed, as long as he got his little shot of violence when he needed it. Street people were easy marks, so he did street people. If you murder women and children, society will try to track you down, but the best effort society gives the killer of a bum is a quick shuffle. Time is fleeting and manpower limited: we do what we can, and sometimes a killer gets away because we can’t do enough.

It turned out Neal and I were both right. The guy we’d fingered for all these jobs was Jackie Newton, ex-con, refugee from the coast, a real sweetheart in anybody’s book. Jackie wasn’t a skinhead but he might as well have been: his mind Worked the same way. We now knew all about his sadistic streak. Jackie hated everybody who didn’t think, act, and look just like him. He particularly hated people whose personal, racial, or intellectual characteristics could be summed up in one cruel gutteral word. Queers, freaks, spies, shines, gooks, dopes—Jackie hated them all, twenty-four hours a day. And let us not forget cops. Pigs. Jackie was a product of the sixties, and pigs were the group he hated most of all.

The feeling was absolutely mutual on my part. There’s something in the book, I know, about a cop keeping his feelings out of his work. If detection is a science, which I believe, it should probably be done with unfettered intellect, but God damn it, I wanted Jackie Newton dead or locked away forever. Don’t tell me it shouldn’t be personal: we were way beyond that little phase of drawing room etiquette, Jackie and I. I had been working on him two years and was no closer to putting him away than I was when I first heard his name, almost three years ago.

He had blown into town, broke, in 1983. Today he was involved in two $30 million shopping center deals and owned property all over the city. There are guys who have a streak of genius for generating money, and Jackie, I will admit grudgingly, was one of them. He owned an estate in undeveloped Jefferson County, where he lived alone and liked it, and reportedly he was connected to what passes in Denver for the mob. This alone brought him to our attention before we learned that he murdered drunks for a hobby. It was a strange case that way: we knew who the killer was before the first victim was killed. A cop in Santa Monica told us not to be surprised by a sudden rise in derelict deaths. This had happened in California and in Newark, where Jackie lived fifteen years ago. We knew before the fact what Newark knew, what Santa Monica knew, and we still couldn’t stop it and we couldn’t prove it once it had started. It had almost seemed too pat, and we went through a phase of exploring other ideas— the skinhead, the unknown sadist—before we learned, without a doubt, that Jackie was our boy.

In the killing of Harold Brubaker, we’d had a witness. Jesus, you never saw such a beating, our boy had said: this guy has sledgehammers in his fists and what he does with his feet…it’s like something inhuman. The witness was a highly credible young man who had watched from a dark doorway less than ten feet away: a kid working overtime who had stepped out for a smoke and seen it all. It was like Providence was suddenly in our corner. A light had come on and Jackie had looked straight up at it. The kid had seen him clearly, not a doubt in the world. I had the son of a bitch where I wanted him at last. I brought Jackie in and ran him through a lineup. The kid had no trouble picking him out: he was a first-rate witness all the way. I did everything according to Hoyle and the Miranda ruling: the last thing I wanted was for the bastard to slide on tainted evidence or technical bullshit. We threw a protective shield around the witness, for Jackie had friends in slimy places, but what can I say? Things happen… court dates get postponed, his attorneys drag it out, weeks become months, and in all that time there’s bound to be a breach. They got to our boy, and when they were done he had no heart for testifying against anybody. They never put a hand on him, but they sure made him see things their way. He stammered in court, he hesitated, he wasn’t sure… and the case against Jackie Newton went down the drain.

Jackie had been quiet since then: we had scared him with Harold Brubaker and he had been lying low. Now he was starting up again, and I’d bet there’d be another one before long. Success breeds success. There’s nothing worse than a cunning killer who strikes down people he doesn’t know, for no reason other than a blood lust.

3

I waited until the coroner was finished, then I moved in for a look at the body. They had turned him over, and he lay on the pavement with his arms crossed gently over his chest. He looked like he might get up and walk away. His eyes were closed and he had the unwashed, unshaved look they all had. But there was something different about this one, something vaguely familiar, as if I had known him once, long ago.

“What can you tell us, Georgie?” I said. The coroner, a spectacled man in his fifties, spoke while his assistant looked on.

“It’s a lot like the others, but there are some significant differences. As you can see, the victim is a guttersnipe, body not well nourished, white male, probably mid-thirties, five foot seven inches, hundred fifty, sixty pounds. Murder weapon was a heavy blunt instrument, a pipe wrench or a crescent wrench or some steel tool would be my guess. The victim was hit twice in the center of the rear cranium, once for business and once for good measure. There was no doubt in the mind of the killer what the objective was. I think the first one did it—we’ll know more in the morning. Time of death was within the last three hours.”

“Call came in about one-thirty,” Hennessey said.

“He had probably been dead a little over an hour then,” the coroner said.

I looked at the face of the dead man and again felt that disquieting rumble deep in my brain.

“There’s some evidence he was killed somewhere else, then dumped here,” the coroner said.

“That’s new,” Hennessey said.

“What evidence?” I asked.

“I think there’s a good deal of blood unaccounted for,” the coroner said. “Again, we’ll know more in the morning, but let’s say I’m about eighty percent sure. That pipe really opened his head up. A wound like that will bleed like a geyser, but this one didn’t, or, if it did, where’s the blood? This little puddle’s just leakage, as if the heart had stopped some time prior to his being put here. I think that’s what happened. Somebody did this man in somewhere else, then dropped him here.”

“Any signs of a beating?”

The coroner gave me a look. “You don’t consider this a beating?”

“I mean injuries to other parts of the body… indications that he was beaten severely before he was killed.”

“Nothing so far. Looks like he was hit twice and that’s that.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen this guy somewhere. I can’t make him.”

Hennessey asked the coroner if they had a name. The coroner looked at his notes and said, “The deceased had no driver’s license. There was a fragment of a social security card. Most of the number had worn away, but we were able to get a name. Robert B. Westfall.”

The name clicked. “Yeah, I know him,” I said. “He’s a bookscout.”

“A what?”

“A guy that hunts for books. That’s where I’ve seen him, selling books in the neighborhood stores.”

“I always heard you were the intellectual type, Janeway,” the coroner said.

“Is that what you hear?” I said dryly.

“It’s a small world, my friend, and the night has a thousand eyes.”

“You’ve been observed reading books again, Clifford,” Hennessey said. “I guess I’m the man of action on this team.”

I turned my attention back to the corpse. The coroner hung over my shoulder like a scarecrow. I was trying to place the guy, to remember where and when I had last seen him.

“In the bookstores they call him Bobby the Bookscout,” I said. “He was pretty good, from what I hear.”

“How does a bum get to be good at something like that?” the coroner asked.

“They’re not bums in the usual sense. Most of ‘em work like hell, don’t drink, and stay out of trouble.”

“What about the ones that don’t like to work, do drink, and don’t stay out of trouble?” Hennessey said.

“I guess there are some of those.”

“I don’t know much about this kinda stuff,” Hennessey said. “You tell me, Cliff. Could one of these boys find something, say a book, since that’s what they look for, that’s so valuable another one might kill him for it? And where does that leave us with Jackie Newton?”

“I’ll let you boys hash that out,” the coroner said. “Call me tomorrow.”

“Thanks, George.”

We stood for a moment after the coroner had left. Hennessey’s questions kept running through my mind. I felt a pang of disappointment that Jackie Newton might slide on this one for the plain and simple reason that he hadn’t done it.

“Cliff?”

“Yeah, Neal. Just give me a minute.”

I watched them cover the body and take it away. The sketcher had left and the lab men were packing up: the sad saga of Bobby the Bookscout was just about over. All that was left was the hunt for his killer.

“We sure can’t rule out the possibility of Jackie,” I said.

Hennessey didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go see the son of a bitch,” I said.

“I’ll call Jeffco.”

As peace officers, we were empowered to investigate and arrest anywhere in the state of Colorado. Usual procedure when you went out of your jurisdiction was to take an officer from that district along, in case something happened. Thirty minutes later we had arrived at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, where Officer Ben Nasses was waiting for us. Officer Nasses was young and articulate, one of the new breed. He was also very black. Jackie Newton would love him.

Jackie lived in an expensive villa a few miles south of the town of Morrison. He wasn’t quite in the mountains, but the house was perched at the top of a bluff where you could see most of Denver and the front range south, halfway to Colorado Springs. We pulled into the driveway. The house was dark, with no sign of life. I had a sinking feeling that we’d find Jackie Newton asleep, that he’d been asleep all night. I had the feeling, not for the first time, that I’d never be able to make him on anything.

But Jackie wasn’t home. Nasses rang the bell three times and knocked, but no one came. “What now?” he said. I told him we would wait, if he had nothing better to do, and he said that was fine. “I’d like for us not to be visible when he comes home,” I said, and Hennessey went to move the car on down the street. By the time Neal came back, Nasses and I had moved off the step and into a gravel walkway that skirted the house. Hennessey was nervous. “I don’t think we want to mess around here, Cliff,” he said. He had been my partner for a long time: he knew all about my impatience with oppressive procedure, and he also knew how much I wanted to put Jackie away. Don’t be stupid—that’s what Neal was saying. But I was very much aware of the rules of evidence. I had never had a case thrown out because I was weak in court, and Hennessey knew that too. Sometimes you play by the book, sometimes you had to take a chance.

“I’m going to take a look in the garage,” I said.

Hennessey whimpered but stayed with me. I moved around the house. “You boys’re crazy,” Nasses called. He wasn’t going anywhere. Hennessey tugged at me in the dark. “Cliff, the kid’s right. This makes no sense. Even if you find something you won’t be able to use it. Let’s get out of here.”

“If I find something, I’ll find a way to use it.”

The bastard’s liable to come rolling in here any minute.“

“Then let’s do it quick.”

The garage was locked but that was no problem: I had it open in less than half a minute. There were two vehicles inside, a Caddy and a Jeep four-wheel. There was an empty space for the third car, the one Jackie Newton was now driving.

I felt the hood of each car, then went through the glove compartments. There was just the usual junk—papers, ownership, registration. John Randolph Newton was listed as the owner of both vehicles, but I knew that. I knew where and when he had bought them, that he’d bought the Jeep on time, paid it off in six months, and paid cash for the Cadillac. I knew the salesmen who had dealt with him. A real laid-back guy, one salesman had said, a pussycat. Money wasn’t anything to a guy like Jackie: he had made, lost, and made again three times over more money than those boys would see in their whole lives. That’s one thing you could say for Jackie Newton: he was free with his money, and salesmen loved him.

There was an unpaid ticket on the seat of the Caddy. I took down the information. Jackie had been tagged for speeding— fifty-five in a twenty-five, a four-pointer. This was good news: the last time I’d looked at his record he had had nine points against his license. Jackie liked to drive fast, and it was costing him. I knew he hadn’t paid the ticket because of the points: he’d have his lawyer go in and plead it down, try to get two points knocked off in the city attorney’s office before it ever got to a judge. A word from me in the ear of the city attorney might not be out of order. Anything that hassled Jackie Newton was a good use of my time. From little things big things grow. Get Jackie’s license suspended and I knew he’d drive anyway. Then I could bust him for something bigger. Al Capone never got indicted for murder, just tax evasion, but it was enough.

I put everything back the way it was. Hennessey was standing at the door, the man of action watching for headlights. I looked along the shelves. There were paint cans, tools, boxes of screws, all meticulously in their places. Jackie Newton was a neat man: the compulsively neat killer.

“Cliff,” Hennessey said. His voice fluttered in his throat.

“All right,” I said. “There’s nothing here.”

I turned off the lights and locked the door. We started across the yard but a vision brought me up short. I thought I saw a body hanging from a tree. It was one of those sights that makes you wonder if your eyes are getting old. “Look at that,” I said, but Hennessey still didn’t see. I took out a penlight and cut across the lawn, and slowly the thing came into focus. It was a dog, the Doberman, hung by the neck like some western desperado. “It’s Bruno,” I said numbly. Again I realized what an obsession Jackie Newton and I had become to each other: I knew everything about the guy, even the name of his dog. Supposedly, Jackie had loved the dog: the only thing Jackie Newton had ever been said to love. This was what happened if he loved you: you didn’t ever want to give him cause to hate you, as I had.

“Looks like somebody’s got it in for Jackie,” Hennessey said.

“I don’t think so, Neal. I think he did it himself.”

I was playing my light around the barbecue grill, which had been turned over and spilled. There was a half-eaten steak in the grass, many hours old. The steak had been chewed as if by an animal. Beside it were two upset plates. “I’ll tell you what happened here,” I said, “you tell me how it sounds. Jackie had been entertaining somebody—probably a woman since there were just the two of ‘em. Something happened to take him away for a minute… maybe the phone had rung… but something made him go inside. When he came back, the dog had turned over the grill and eaten one of the steaks and was starting on the other. Jackie went into a rage. We’ve seen him in action, we know how he can be. He strung the poor bastard up with the clothesline. Then he did what he always does when he gets like that. Took his fastest car, the Lamborghini, and went out for a drive. That’s where he’s been tonight, out in the country driving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

“You could make me buy that,” Hennessey said.

“Then I’ll tell you what else he did. He couldn’t get rid of it, the rage just wouldn’t go away. Nothing worked. He hated killing that dog, hated himself for doing it, so he went down-town and killed the bookscout. Somebody he didn’t know or care about… just an outlet for all that murderous energy. That’s why the bookscout wasn’t beaten before he was killed: that’s why he was different from all the others. Jackie didn’t do this one for pleasure, he did it because he needed to.”

“I don’t know about that part,” Hennessey said.

“What’s the matter with it?” I snapped.

“For one thing, you want it too much. You want it to fit, Cliff. I know where you’re coming from with Jackie Newton, you’d pin the goddamn Kennedy assassination on Jackie if you thought you could make it stick.”

“It does fit,” I said impatiently. “It fits, Neal.”

Hennessey didn’t say any more, which was probably a good thing. We didn’t touch the dog except to confirm that it had been dead for some time. It was very stiff. Its eyes were open. If a dog’s face can show feelings, this one showed shock, sadness, and, finally, disbelief. Its front paws had been clawing the air and had finally come to rest, frozen there, in a posture much like a man in prayer. I had to fight an impulse to cut it down. Hennessey was right: we had no warrant, no authority, no right to be here. This was very bad police work. The dog didn’t exist for us, even assuming that it might be relevant to our case, until we established some proper groundwork.

We had pushed luck about as far as it can go. We went around to the front of the house, where Officer Nasses again told us his opinion, no offense intended, that we were out of our minds. I still wanted to be here when Jackie came rolling in: I wanted to see what time it was, how he looked, what his car looked like. I wanted to see as much as possible of what he did, what the state of his mind was. I put Hennessey and Nasses out front, in the trees across the road, and I went around to watch the back. This could be a very long wait. Jackie might be in Wyoming by now: that’s the kind of state a Lamborghini was made for, empty roads and wide-open spaces and cops who didn’t care how fast you went. He might be gone for a week.

So I’d wait. If the wait got too long, I’d let Hennessey and Nasses go in, but I would stay. Jackie Newton was turning me into an eccentric. I had a disturbing vision of myself waiting here for days, then weeks, into the changing seasons, my beard coming in, my clothes becoming tattered and worn, Hennessey bringing me food and water once a day. I was like Fred Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: I had started out a sane and decent man and slowly the obsession had turned me crazy. I looked at my watch: the sky was getting light in the east. Sanity came with the dawn. I’d give him till eight o’clock, nine at the latest, then I’d go in and catch him later. Hennessey was right again: I had nothing on Jackie. It didn’t fit, the pattern was broken. For once, Jackie Newton wasn’t my man.

I snuffed that thought fast. One of my problems was beginning to resolve itself. In another twenty minutes it would be daylight: then, I thought, we could see the dog from the road. That would make it legitimate discovery, as long as Jackie didn’t find out that we’d been here earlier. I wasn’t going to tell him. Hennessey wasn’t. Nasses was the unknown factor. I gave up the idea of confronting Jackie as he stepped from his car. I decided to do it by the book from here on out. I would join the boys in the bushes across the road. When Jackie did come home, we’d go get the car and pull up in front and ring his doorbell, as proper as Emily Post.

Let the fun begin, I thought.

4

We waited almost another hour before Jackie came home. We heard him first—the squeal of the tires, the angry, impatient growl of the engine. “Helluva way to treat a car like that,” Hennessey said. The Lamborghini roared past in a swirl of dust. It made the turn and went behind the house and into the garage. Jackie came out, looking as he had the first time I’d seen him, like some plastic hero from Muscle Beach. He was a serious bodybuilder: his arms looked like a pair of legs, his chest like a fifty-gallon drum. He had grown himself a mustache and he needed a haircut. The image was formidable, a guy you don’t mess with. He stopped for a moment and looked at the dog, and the anger began again. “Get out of that car!” he shouted, and the woman peeped meekly through the open garage door. “Come on, come on!” Jackie said. She was none too happy about it: I could see that even from where we crouched in the bushes. Jackie grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and pushed her toward the house. They disappeared inside.

We waited. Nothing happened.

“Looks like the ball’s in our court,” Hennessey said.

“Yeah. Let’s go see the son of a bitch.”

We walked down the road to the car; then we drove back and turned into Jackie Newton’s drive, three officers of the law, proper to the bone. We stepped out and started up the walk. You could see the dog even from there, swinging grotesquely from the tree.

“Jesus, look at that,” Nasses said. “You boys see that last night?”

“See what?” I said.

Nasses gave a dry laugh. “Play it that way, then. I’ll help if I can.”

“Translate it for us, Nasses.”

“Don’t ask me to lie to cover your ass. I won’t volunteer anything, but don’t ask me to lie.”

“Ring the doorbell,” I said.

I had my badge pinned to my belt, like some cop on a TV show. I was pumped up: I always was when I was about to face Jackie. I heard him coming. The door opened and he filled the space.

“Mr. Newton?” Nasses said.

Jackie had seen me right off. He looked straight through Nasses and locked eyes with me. He probably didn’t even notice yet that Nasses was black.

“I’m Officer Nasses, Jeffco Sheriffs Department. These gentlemen are from the Denver police. They’d like to ask you a few questions.”

His eyes cut to my badge. Nasses had taken a little involuntary step to one side. There was nothing between Jackie Newton and me but two feet of violent air.

“Hello, Jackie,” I said.

“What the fuck do you want, Janeway?”

“You must be having trouble with your ears. The man just told you, I want to ask you a few questions.”

“You arresting me for something?”

“Maybe.”

“Go fuck yourself. Bust me right now or come back with a warrant.”

“How do you know I don’t have a warrant?”

“If you did you’d use it. Go away, you’re wasting my time.”

He started to close the door. I stepped past Nasses and put my foot in it. I started reading him his rights, thinking maybe it would throw him off, buy me a minute. At least if he slipped and said something, we’d be protected.

He listened, uncertain.

“Where were you last night?” I said.

I drove out on the plains. I was gone all night and, yeah, I had company. I got an alibi for any goddamn thing you want to dream up about last night.“

“Where’s your alibi, Newton? I want to see him.”

“Her, flatfoot, her… my alibi’s a girl.”

“Bring her down.”

“Come back with a warrant.”

Again he tried to close the door. Again I put my foot in it.

“I told you, Newton, you’ve got the right to remain silent. That doesn’t mean you can keep me from a witness. Now bring the girl down here or I’ll have your ass in jail for obstruction of justice.”

It was a bluff and I figured Jackie would know it. He didn’t know it, not for sure. He went and got the girl, who actually was a woman in her late twenties.

He had slapped her at least three times: there were that many distinct welts on her face. In another day she’d look like she’d been face-first through a gauntlet.

“Would you step outside, miss?”

She did. She was blond, and might’ve been pretty in a glassy kind of way. She wasn’t pretty now.

“What’s your name?”

“You haven’t got to tell him one fucking thing,” Jackie Newton said. There was an implication in his voice that she’d better not.

“What’s your name, miss?”

“Barbara.”

“Do you need help?”

She looked confused, scared.

“We can take you out of here if you want to go,” I said.

“She doesn’t want to go anywhere with you, cop,” Jackie Newton said.

“Miss?” I tried for eye contact, but I couldn’t get a rise out of her. “Did this jerk beat you up?”

“She ran into a door,” Jackie Newton said.

“You’d better get that door fixed, Newton. Looks like she ran into it three or four times.”

“She ran into a goddamn door, okay? You want to make something out of that?”

“Miss,” I said. “Do you want to go with us?”

“I don’t know,” she said shakily.

“We could go over to the car and talk it over. Come on, let’s do that.”

“She’s going nowhere with you, cop.”

“Don’t pay any attention to that,” I said. “If you want to go, you go. Fatso’s got nothing to say about it.”

I knew that would get to him. He balled up his fists and said, “I’ll show you fat, motherfucker. Take off your badge and I’ll beat your fuckin‘ head in.”

I gave him a bitter, pathetic smile, the kind you’d give a talking worm. I kept looking at him the whole time I was talking to her. “I want you to be very sure, miss, what your options are. It’s all up to you. If this jerk beat you up, you can file charges against him. He can do some good time for that. Maybe when he gets out he won’t feel so frisky.”

“I’ve had about enough of this shit,” Jackie Newton said.

“I don’t think so, Newton. You and me, we’ve got a long way to go with each other.”

“You wanna go now, Janeway? You wanna go now, huh? What do you say, cop, just you and me, bare hands, an old-fashioned fight to the finish.”

“I see you’ve been reading comic books again, Jackie. I wish I could accommodate you, I really do. You could show me how you beat up women and murder dogs. Or murder bums on the street.”

“Is that what this is about? Are you still trying to stick me with that?”

“I’m going to stick you with it, pal. You watch me.”

“Why don’t you fight me, Janeway? Just pick the place and time.”

“I wish I could. We don’t do things that way.”

“That don’t surprise me. Now if you’re all through, I’m going in.”

I had been working my way slowly around, putting more distance between Newton and the woman. Now I put an arm out and moved her completely aside.

‘Barbara,“ I said. ”Why don’t you come on with us?“

“All right.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jackie Newton said.

“You wouldn’t do anything unless it was stupid or mean,” I said. I got my hand on her shoulder and guided her away from the house. We got her to the car and inside, and there she broke down in a fit of sobbing. Her whole body trembled. I took off my coat and covered her shoulders, but it was a long time before she was ready to tell us about it.

We let Nasses off in Jeffco and were coming down Sixth Avenue toward Denver when I started to get her story. Hennessey was driving and Barbara was huddled against the shotgun door. I was in the back, leaning over the seat. I started with the little things. Her last name was Crowell. She lived in a Capitol Hill walk-up near Eleventh and Pearl. She worked for one of the companies that did business with Jackie Newton. Yesterday was the first time she had seen him… socially. She was flattered that he had asked her: he was rich and some people found him attractive. No one had warned her what he was really like.

It had happened pretty much as I had figured. Jackie’s idea of a date was apparent soon after they arrived at his house. He had a waterbed the size of a football field, with a hot tub, mirrors, the whole nine yards. That hadn’t bothered her much: she wasn’t entirely indisposed to going down with a guy the first time out, if she liked him. If a guy knew how to treat a girl, what was the harm in it? But then the dog ate the steaks and Jackie went crazy. You wouldn’t believe how strong he was. That was a big dog, and he’d pulled it up over that limb like it weighed nothing. She had tried to stop him: she hated cruelty, she just couldn’t stand there and watch that animal kick its life out. She had tried to cut the rope and Jackie slugged her. He was strong, all right, no mistake about it. With one punch he knocked her senseless.

The next fifteen hours was a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was in the car. They were on the interstate heading east out of Denver. He drove the same way he did everything, always one inch from the brink of insanity. He kept his foot jammed on the floorboards—Jesus, you couldn’t imagine a car could go that fast. Later he’d gone off the freeway into a narrow country road. Once they’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t seem to want to go into that, but I had started to taste blood and there was no way I was going to let her drop it.

“Barbara,” I said softly. “Did he rape you?”

She shook her head.

“Because if he did, you know, we can give him a lot of grief.”

“I didn’t struggle.”

“You don’t have to struggle for it to be rape.”

She took a deep shivery breath. I gave her a handkerchief and she dabbed her eyes.

“Barbara,” I said.

“I just want to forget about it.”

“I can see that you do, and I understand that. But if you don’t do something he’ll just do it again.”

“Not to me.”

We didn’t say anything more for a minute. Hennessey drove smoothly into the city, turning north on Santa Fe. From there we could go easily to her place or to Denver General.

“We need to go to the hospital,” I said. “Get you examined, get a doctor involved. You can make up your mind what to do later, but we need to get this done now.”

“I want to forget it. I want to go home.”

I sighed tiredly. “Jackie wins again.”

“He’d win anyway. They’d let him off, and then where would I be?”

I couldn’t argue with her. The way I had taken her out of there, without a warrant or probable cause, might give a judge fits. We could make the probable cause argument to some judges and win, based on what we had seen from our stakeout across the road. But there was another kind of judge who always held a cop’s nuts to the ground, who’d view everything said and done after I’d stuck my foot in the door as tainted evidence. It was the luck of the draw.

We pulled up at her place on Pearl Street. She didn’t want us to come in, but I had a few more questions. I wanted to hear all of it, everything they’d been doing since yesterday afternoon. Nothing much to tell, she said: he just drove like a maniac and she huddled in the car and expected death every minute. Once he had run over a flock of chickens. If there was anything on the road, a squirrel, chipmunk, any living thing, he’d swerve and crush it.

That car, though, was something else. That car was amazing.

She had been with Jackie Newton without a break since 3:00 p.m. yesterday. They had gone halfway across Kansas before he’d turned and come back.

She knew nothing about a dead man in an alley.

5

Sometimes when i get going, I can work thirty hours without a break. This is tough on my partner, especially a guy like Hennessey, who needs his beauty rest. Neal went home to catch up on lost sleep and I went running. I used to be a marathon man in college. I can still do thirty miles, but it’s harder and I’m slower now. I’m not bad for my age and I go through a lot of pain to keep it that way. I run two, three times a week, and every year I run in the Bolder Boulder and finish respectably. I don’t try to beat the world anymore: if I can just hold up my little part in it, that’s enough. When I was young I had thoughts of a career in the ring, but the cops won my heart and my mind and balls soon followed. You’ve got to be realistic, as people keep telling me. It’s a long way from the Golden Gloves to any kind of fighting career, and I had seen enough of the fight game to know it wasn’t for me. While I was at it, I was pretty good. I had people comparing me to Marciano. I was light for a heavyweight, just over one ninety, but so was Marciano. I was fast and tough: no one had ever been able to knock me down. It was said that I could hit like a mule and take any punch ever thrown. I liked it when they said that.

This is all by way of saying that I’d‘ve been delighted to take on Jackie Newton some dark night. He had me by four inches in height, at least that much in reach, and thirty pounds that would never be called excess baggage. On paper he should whip my ass. But that’s what they said about Jess Willard when he ran into another of my old heroes, Jack Dempsey. Dempsey put that lardbucket flat on the floor, and when it was over Willard’s corner was screaming about plaster of paris and everything but the Rock of Gibraltar being in Dempsey’s gloves. It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, is it? And I had a feeling that, under all that bullshit, Jackie Newton didn’t have much heart.

The one sure thing was that I’d never find out. It got tiresome, always having to play by the rules while the other guy did his mugging and raping under a cloak of protections and rights. I jogged out Sixth Avenue, past expensive homes along the parkway. Somewhere, somehow, I was missing something: I didn’t know what. I had stepped off the treadmill way back when and didn’t know how to get on again. I was molded by a conservative father; I had rejected him and everything he stood for, I’d fought in the last stages of Vietnam, returned a fiery liberal, and slowly, over the past decade, I had watched those values trickle away as well. Today I’m a mess of contradictory political views. I believe in human rights: I liked Jimmy Carter for that reason alone, though I later came to believe that he had sold out his own cause in the game of pure Politics. I think the Miranda ruling has generally been good, though the public will never know what a pain it can be to work with. I believe in due process, but enough is enough: I’m a fan of a just and swift execution where vicious killers are concerned. It’s just ridiculous to keep a guy like Ted Bundy on death row for ten years. I don’t believe it when psychologists tell me the death penalty doesn’t deter—take a look at kidnapping statistics in the 1930s, when it was made a capital crime after the murder of the Lindbergh baby, before you start to argue with me. I think justice started collapsing under its own weight when they let shrinks into the courtroom. The plain fact is, for some murderers, I just don’t care whether they were incapable of reason, were whipped as children for wetting the bed, or had a mother who bayed at the moon. Gacy, Bundy, Manson, Speck—you’ll never make me believe the world is a better place with that quartet alive and kicking. I hate abortion, but I’d never pass a law telling a woman she couldn’t have one. I believe in the ERA, find it hard to understand why two hundred years after the Bill of Rights we’re still arguing about rights for half our people. I like black people, some of them a lot. I supported busing when it was necessary and would again, but there’s something about affirmative action that leaves me cold. You can’t take away one man’s rights and give them to another, even in a good cause. I was burned out, and never more than today. My police career had been solid, some said brilliant, but I was on a long slide to nowhere, a treadmill to oblivion, as Fred Allen called it. These are the days that try men’s souls. I wanted to fight Jackie Newton with a broken bottle and a tire iron, and society, decency, and my own good sense said, You can’t do that. There was something about gun law that was immensely appealing: it really cut through the crap and got to the heart of things. Barbaric? Maybe. But I’ll tell you this: watching a guy kill people and not being able to do a damn thing about it, that’s no bowl of cherries either.

My apartment, as always, was the great healer. I stripped off my sweats, turned on a light, and sat surrounded by treas-ures. I looked for a while at an old AB: my fascination in the life of the bookman was almost as acute as my interest in books, and I had been a faithful subscriber to the bookseller’s trade journal for almost five years. I thumbed through Wyeth’s Helga pictures, lingering on that lovely scene in the barn. Carol Pfeiffer, of course, had long gone: she had been gone when I had come in earlier and changed for my run. I took a cold shower and dressed slowly, planning my day. Barbara Crowell’s statement seemed to alibi Jackie Newton nicely, which meant I had to start from scratch. It never occurred to me to call Hennessey, or to check downtown and see if we’d been assigned to the case. Hennessey would just be turning over for his second forty winks, and downtown they’d know we were on it. They knew all about my work habits.

I drove out Sixth to Colorado Boulevard, went north to Colfax, then east to the bookstores. This was my turf: I was as much at home along Book Row as I was in the world of hookers and pimps that surrounded it. Colfax is a strange street. It used to be known as the longest street in the world: people with more imagination than I have used to say, in the days before interstate highways, that it ran from Kansas City to the Great Salt Lake. Its actual length is about twenty miles, beginning on the plains east of Denver and dwindling away in the mountains to the west. Just about every foot of it is commercial space. About twenty years ago, urban renewal came in and ripped out old Larimer Street, and the whores and bums who lived there landed on Broadway south and Colfax east. Lots of whoring goes on on East Colfax Avenue. It starts at the statehouse, where they know how to do it without ever getting in a bed, and works its way through the porno shops between Broadway and Colorado Boulevard. From Colorado east, for about thirty or forty blocks, the street goes respectable in a chain of mom-and-pop businesses of every imaginable type. Here you’ll find produce stands, garages, video rentals, fortune-tellers, antique dealers, 7-Elevens, liquor stores, and, of course, Book Row.

More than ten years ago, an old-time book dealer and his wife hung their shingle on an East Colfax hole-in-the-wall. Those people are gone now—the old man died and the wife lives in another state. Their store has passed along to a succession of younger bookmen: it has spawned other bookstores until, today, the area has become known as Book Row. This is the honey-draws-flies concept of bookselling: put two bookstores in one block, the theory goes, and business doubles for everybody. It seems to work: the stores have all stabilized where business was lean for one before. As a book collector, I did Book Row at least twice a month. A couple of the dealers knew me well enough to call me at home if something came in with my name on it; the others knew me too, though some of them were a little shy about calling a cop. Book dealers are like everyone else: they come in all sizes and shapes and have the same hangups that you see in a squad room or on an assembly line. If you picture a wizened academic with thick spectacles, forget it. Once they get in the business, they have little time to read. They are usually a cut or two smarter than the average Joe. I’ve never met a stupid book dealer who was able to make it pay. Some of them, though, are definitely crazy. There are a few horse’s asses, a few sow’s ears, but today’s bookseller is just as likely to be an ex-hippie ex-boozer ex-junkie streetfighter like Ruby Seals.

I liked Ruby: I admired the old bastard for his savvy and grit. He had pulled himself out of the gutter the hard way, cold turkey and alone. He was a bottle-a-day drunk and he’d kicked that; he had been on cocaine and later heroin and had kicked that. He had been busted for possession, beginning in the days when, in Colorado, you could get two years for having a leaf of grass in your car. Ruby had served a year on that bust, another year for speed, and two years of a seven-year rap for heroin. By then the laws had been liberalized or he might still be languishing at Canon City. I had known him all this time because I was into books, and Ruby, when he was straight, was one of the keenest book dealers in town. A lot of what I knew I had learned watching Ruby work. “I’ll tell you something, Dr. J,” he had said to me long ago. “Learn books and you’ll never go hungry. You can walk into any town with more than two bookstores and in two hours you’re in business.”

You did it the same way the scouts did, only on a higher level. While the scouts looked for $2 books that could be turned for $10, you looked for the $100 piece that would fetch a McKinley. You bought from guys who didn’t know and sold to guys who did. If nobody in town knew, you wholesaled to people on the coast. You worked the AB when you could afford the price of it; you put a little bankroll together and before you knew it, you had three or four thousand books. Ruby had done this more times than he could remember.

Seals & Neff was the last store on the block, but I went there first. It was in their store, about a month ago, that I had last seen Bobby Westfall. I vaguely remembered it now: Bobby had come in to sell something, and there had been a dispute over how much and in what manner Ruby would pay for it. I hadn’t paid much attention then: I was wavering on the price of a nice little Steinbeck item. There wasn’t much to the argument anyway, as I remembered it: Bobby didn’t want to take a check and Ruby didn’t have the cash, so Bobby had left with the book. But that was the last time I had seen him and it seemed like a good starting place.

Ruby and his partner, Emery Neff, were sorting books from a new buy when I came in: they were hunkered over with their asses facing the door and didn’t see me for a moment. The stuff looked pretty good: lots of fine modern firsts, some detective novels, a Faulkner or two. My eye caught the dark blue jacket of Intruder in the Dust. Carol’s birthday was coming up: maybe I’d buy it for her, see how she liked it when she actually owned a book like that. A $100 bill flitted through my mind. That’s what the book was worth, though I expected a good deal of preamble before we got to that point. I didn’t like haggling. I wasn’t one of those cheapskates always trying to pry a book away from a dealer for half its value, but I didn’t want to pay twice retail either. I knew how Seals & Neff operated. They tended to go high with stuff they’d just bought. That sometimes worked with pigeons and sucker books. But then the rent would come due or the sheriff would call for the sales tax, many months delinquent, and they’d scramble around, wholesaling their best books for pennies on the dollar in a mad effort to keep from being thrown out or padlocked.

Ruby was dressed in his usual country club attire: jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. He wore a heavy black beard that was streaked with gray. His partner was neater. Emery Neff had blond hair and a mustache. Taken together, they were a strange pair of boys. Ruby was gritty, down-to-earth, real; Neff put on airs, oozed arrogance, and, until you passed muster, seemed aloof and cold. Ruby could sell birth control to a nun; Neff seemed reluctant to sell you a book, even at high retail. Neff wasn’t quite a horse’s ass, but he was close: I guess it was his deep well of knowledge that saved him. He really was a remarkable bookman, and I seemed to like him in spite of himself.

They still hadn’t seen me: they were engrossed in the hypnotic, totally absorbing business of the bookman—sorting and pricing. I had seen the ritual before and had always found it interesting. Ruby would pick up a book and fondle it lovingly, then they’d bat the price back and forth and finally they’d settle on something, which Neff would write in light pencil on the flyleaf. They were just getting to the Faulkner when I leaned over their backs.

“Buck and a half,” Neff said.

“Too high,” Ruby said.

“It’s a perfect copy, Ruby. I mean, look at the goddamn thing, it’s like it was published yesterday, for Christ’s sake.”

“You never see this for more than a bill.”

“You never see a copy like this either.”

“Go ahead, if you want the son of a bitch to grow mold over there on the shelf.”

“Buck and a quarter, then. That’s rock-friggin‘-bottom.”

Neff penciled in the price. I cleared my throat and got their attention.

“Well, Dr. Janeway, I do believe,” Ruby said, brightening. “We just got in some stuff for you.”

“So I see. The masters of overcharge are already at work.”

Neff gave me a pained look, as if the mere discussion of money was a blow to one’s dignity.

“Always a deal for you, Dr. J,” Ruby said, and Neff’s pained look drifted his way.

I put the Faulkner out of my mind for the moment. I never could split my concentration effectively.

“I want to ask you boys a few questions.”

“Jesus, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said seriously. “This sounds official. Let me guess what it is. Somebody knocked off the sheriff and right away you thought of us.”

I gave him a mirthless little smile. “When was the last time you saw Bobby Westfall?”

“Jeez, I don’t know,” Ruby said. “He ain’t been coming around much.”

“What’s he done, rob a bank?” Neff said.

“See if you can pin it down for me,” I said.

“Well,” Ruby said, “he come in here maybe two weeks ago. Ain’t that right, Em? About two weeks ago.”

“About that,” Neff said. “What’s it about?”

“I told you, I’m trying to pin him down,” I said. “Did he have something to sell when he came in?”

“Just a few turds,” Ruby said. “Nuthin‘ I wanted.”

“Bob was on a losing streak,” Neff said. “He hadn’t found much all month long.”

“He was bitchin‘ up a storm about it,” Ruby said. “Bobby never bitches much, but I guess he needed the money and for once in his life he couldn’t find any books.”

“You have any idea what he needed the money for?”

“Hell, Dr. J, I just buy books from these bastards, I don’t go home and sleep with ‘em.”

“They always need money,” Neff said.

“Who doesn’t?” Ruby said. “But bookscouts… yeah, Em’s right. Those guys’re always scraping like hell just to get two nickels to rub against each other. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.“

“When was the last time Bobby had a big strike?”

“Oh, Jeez,” Ruby said, shaking his head.

“What do you call big?” Neff said.

“I don’t know, Neff,” I said. “What do you call big?”

“Big to him might be this Faulkner you’re looking at. We’d give him thirty, forty bucks for that. Nothing to sneeze at if you got it for a quarter.”

“Bigger than that,” I said.

Ruby’s eyes went into mock astonishment. “You mean like maybe he found Tamerlane in the Goodwill? Something like that, Dr. J?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re kidding.”

They had stopped grinning now and were hanging on my next words. I let them wait, and finally Neff stepped into the breach.

“That’s been done. Remember the guy who found Tamerlane in a bookstore for fifteen dollars a few years ago? Do you know what the odds are of that happening, anywhere in the world, twice in a lifetime?”

“I’m not talking about Tamerlane,” I said. “Just maybe something like it.”

They both looked at me.

“What’s going on, Dr. J?”

“Somebody beat Bobby’s brains out last night.”

“Holy Christ,” Ruby said.

“Killed him, you mean,” Neff said numbly.

I nodded.

“Now who the hell would do that?” Ruby said.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Let’s go back to what I asked you. When was the last time Bobby had a big strike?”

“Oh, hell, I can’t remember,” Ruby said. “Jesus, Dr. J, this’s terrible.”

“You’re asking us when Bob might’ve had something somebody would kill him for,” Neff said.

“Let’s make like I’m asking you that.”

“Hell, never,” Ruby said.

Neff nodded immediately. “Even that big score he made a few years back, when he found all four of those big books in one weekend…I mean, that’s the biggest score any of them ever make, and all four of those books don’t add up to more than two grand. Who’d kill a guy for that?”

“Some people, maybe,” I said.

“Nobody I know,” Ruby said. “Goddamn, this’s terrible. I can’t get over it.”

“Let’s say he had something worth two or three thousand,” I said. “That’s a lot of money to guys on the street.”

“It’s a lot of money to me,” Ruby said.

“But to a guy who lives like they live, it’s more money than you’ll ever see again in one place.”

“You think that’s what happened… Bobby found something and some other bookscout took it away from him?”

“I don’t think anything,” I said. “I’m trying to find out something and put it together with what I know. It’s unlikely Bobby found anything worth a real fortune. You said so yourself. Pieces like Tamerlane don’t just drop off trees into somebody’s lap. The reason they’re worth a quarter of a million dollars is because there are no copies out there to be found. A guy would have a better chance of winning the Irish Sweepstakes, right?”

“I’d give him a better chance,” Ruby said.

“And yet it happens.”

“In movies it happens.”

“Once in a while it really happens.”

“I’d sure hate to chase that down,” Ruby said. “Talk about a needle in a goddamn haystack.”

“On the other hand, if Bobby found something worth a few thousand, you’d have to ask yourself a different set of questions. Anybody might kill for a quarter of a million, but who’d kill for three grand?”

“Three grand wouldn’t begin to solve my problems,” Ruby said. “Hell, I owe the sheriff more than that.”

“But it’s a lot of money to a bookscout,” I said.

“I see what you’re saying.”

“So,” I said, “who did Bobby go around with?”

“Well, there’s Peter. I’ve seen the two of ‘em walking together, that’s all. Doesn’t mean they were fast and tight. Other than that, old Bob ran alone. I’ve never seen him with anybody else.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“I can’t remember his last name. You remember it, Em?”

Neff shook his head.

“Just called him Peter the Bookscout, just like Bobby. Hell, half those boys never had a name, or don’t want you to know it if they do.”

“Does Peter come by often?”

“He was in here yesterday,” Neff said.

“Comes in three or four times a month,” Ruby said.

“When did you see Bobby and Peter together?”

“Oh, maybe a year ago,” Ruby said. “They were going up to Boulder together, to a book sale. Bobby didn’t drive, so he was hitching a ride with Peter.”

“What do you mean Bobby didn’t drive?” Neff said. “I’ve seen him drive. Don’t you remember that old car he had?”

“That was a long time ago, pardner,” Ruby said. “The cops busted him for no valid license, no insurance. He cracked up the car and ain’t had one since. I know damn well he didn’t have a license.”

“I think you’re wrong about that,” Neff said.

“There was no driver’s license found on the body,” I said.

Neff shrugged. “Then I guess you’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” Ruby said.

“Why would one bookscout drive another one up to a sale?” I said. “It sounds like cutting your own throat to me.”

“That’s what makes me think maybe they were friends,” Ruby said. “At least as much as those guys get to be friends.”

I made a note in my book. “Any idea where I can find this Peter?”

“The only time I see him is when he comes by,” Ruby said.

“If he comes by again, tell him I want to see him.”

“Sure, Dr. J. You bet.”

I looked through my notes. There are many reasons why people get murdered, but ninety-nine percent fall into four broad motive categories: love, hate, greed, insanity. I had looked at two of these.

“Did Bobby have any girlfriends?” I said.

“Not that I ever saw,” Ruby said.

“He ever talk about women he knew, or might have known in the past?”

They shook their heads.

“Anybody you boys can think of who’d want to see Bobby dead?”

“Oh no,” Neff said.

“He was the easiest of ‘em all to deal with,” Ruby said.

“Who’d he sell most of his books to?”

“Us, as much as anybody,” Neff said.

“Not so much anymore, though,” Ruby said.

“Why not?”

Neff gave a little shrug. “We’ve been going through some lean times, Mr. Janeway. We’ve had a few setbacks.”

“Oh, let’s call a spade a bloody fucking shovel,” Ruby said. “We bounced a few checks on him. That’s no big deal, people do it all the time. We always made it good. But these book-scouts hate to take a check anyway. They go all the way down to the bank and the check’s no good. I know where they’re coming from. I understand why they get pissed off.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“You mean write a hot check? You know that, Dr. J, I know you do. It’s book fever. You’ve got it just like I have. You see a book you want, you do what you have to do to get it. My intentions are honorable, it’s my performance that lags a little.”

“Where else did he go to sell his stuff?”

“Might be any one of a dozen places. You know the scene, Dr. J: hell, there’s thirty bookstores in Denver. Probably half of ‘em pay well enough for bookscouts to be able to deal with ’em. Not many places will pay forty percent across the board, but some do. You could narrow it down that way, I guess. Start with the boys up the street, see if they know anything.”

I thought for a minute. Then I said, “Do either of you know where Bobby lived?”

“I do,” Ruby said. “I drove him home a couple of times.”

“You think you could show me where it’s at?”

“Sure. You want to go now?”

“In an hour. I want to talk to the boys up the street first.”

“I’ll be here whenever you say. You better let me sell you this Faulkner before you leave. It’s the world’s best copy and it won’t last long.”

“How much?”

“For you…Today?…Ninety-five bucks.”

Neff groaned as I reached for my checkbook. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “I get tired of selling Faulkner anyway.”

6

I walked up the street carrying Mr. William Faulkner under my arm. The next store along the row was Book Heaven, owned by Jerry Harkness.

Denver is a young man’s book town. In the old days there were only two dealers of note: Fred Rosenstock and Harley Bishop. Those boys died and the book trade fractured into twenty or thirty pieces. The new breed came in and the books changed as well. In Rosenstock’s day you could still find documents signed by Abraham Lincoln or the framers of the Constitution. The trouble was, you couldn’t get much for them. Forty years later, those papers and books are worth small fortunes but can’t be found. What can be found, and sold for good money, is modern lit. We live in a day when first editions by Stephen King outsell Mark Twain firsts ten to one, and at the same price. You explain it: I can’t. Maybe people today really do have more money than brains. Or maybe there’s something in the King craze that’s going over my head. I read Misery not long ago and thought it was a helluva book. I’d put it right up with The Collector as an example of the horror of abduction, and that’s a heavy compliment since I consider Fowles one of the greatest living novelists. Then I read Christine and it was like the book had been written by a different guy. A bigger crock has never been put between two covers. What the hell do I know? I sure can’t explain it when a book like Solent’s Lot goes from $10 to almost $1,000 in ten years. That’s half again what a near-perfect Grapes of Wrath will bring, if you need a point of reference. You can buy five copies of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea for that, or six copies of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. You can buy first editions signed by Rudyard Kipling or Jack London for less money. So the business has changed, no question about it, and the people in it have changed as well. The old guard is dead: long live the new guard. But I can still remember old Harley Bishop, in the year before he died, stubbornly selling King firsts at half the original cover price. The big leap in King books hadn’t yet happened, but even then The Shining was a $100 book. Bishop sold me a copy for $4. When I told him he should ask more, he gave me a furrowed look and said, “I don’t believe in Steffan King.”

Jerry Harkness most definitely did believe in Steffan King. He specialized in King and his followers—Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, et al, the little Kinglets. Behind every big ship you’ll find a dozen little ships atrailing. Most of their plots make absolutely no sense, but again, they stand tall where it really matters in today’s world, at the damn cash register. There’s something seriously wrong with a society when its best-selling writer of all time is Janet Dailey. Don’t ask me to prove it: it’s just something I know. I don’t mind a good scare story once in a while, but Jesus Christ, the junk that goes down! The stupidity of some of these plots that sell in the billions is the scariest thing about them. The Exorcist is a truly scary book because it only asks you to believe one thing—that Satan does exist. There are no talking dogs or curses lingering from antiquity: there’s no literary sleight of hand, no metaphorical bullshit. Accept the guy’s premise (and who can totally deny it?) and he’s got you where you live. All it takes after that is talent. The trouble today (do I begin to sound like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man when I get on one of these soap boxes?) is that show biz is often mistaken for talent. Get to the end, though, and ask yourself what it all meant, what was it all about? The answer’s usually nothing. Relieve the author from the obligation to make sense, and what’s there to be afraid of?

I have come to the conclusion that the people who buy these books don’t care much about books at all. You will seldom see a King guy or a Koontz guy browsing in a bookstore. I’ve been in Ruby’s store and watched the action myself. A guy opens the door. He doesn’t even come inside. He stands on the street with his head sticking in and asks his three questions. Got any King? got any Koontz? got any Barker? If the answer’s no, he’s gone. Ruby points him up the street, to Jerry Hark-ness, and later learns that the guy dropped two grand with Jerry. Unbelievable! What else can you say but absolute around-the-bend insanity? “All a guy needs to make it in this business,” Ruby says, “is an unlimited amount of Stephen King.”

Jerry Harkness had started in the book business as a teenager. He had worked for Harley Bishop and had learned the ropes, but had gone on to do things his own way. He knew his market and his people. His shop contained many items of general interest, but it was his horror, fantasy, and sword and sorcery sections that drew people from all over the country. Harkness had the only copy I’ve ever seen of the signed, very limited edition of King’s Firestarter, a $3,000 piece.

Twenty years have passed since Harkness worked for old Harley Bishop. He must have been young then, full of dreams of this—his own business. I looked in the window and wondered, not for the first time, how the reality matched the dream. I might like it myself, if I wasn’t a cop, if I hadn’t been born a cop. Where’s the truth in that, I wondered: was I really born to wade through guts and mop up blood every Saturday night? Suddenly I had the strangest feeling of my life, almost what they call deja vu in the superspook trade. I have been here before. I have walked these paths and done these things. I’ve missed my calling, I thought for the second time in ten hours. I’ve been a book dealer before, I’m a book dealer now, I already know more about books than ninety percent of the bozos in the trade. I’ve always thought I might be a book dealer someday, maybe when I retire. I had begun to put some things in storage for that distant day. Maybe it ain’t so distant, I thought for the first time ever: maybe I’ll just chuck all this crap and do it. I had already made one incredible buy, an act of good judgment that I’d be hard-pressed to duplicate. Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across John Nichols’s Milagro Beanfield War on a B. Dalton’s remainder table for ninety-nine cents. I read the book in a weekend and loved it, and I went all over town, to every Dalton’s I could find, buying them up. They were all unmarked first editions. At the end of that week I had seventy-five copies. I was twenty-two years old when I did that. I’ve run into Nichols a few times over the years and he’s always been happy to sign books. I had gotten about half of them signed. The book now goes for $150, probably $200 with a signature. I had at least $12,000 worth of books sitting in storage for my $75 investment. Maybe the time had come to do something with it.

Jerry Harkness was long and lean and still fighting the good fight against middle age. He perched on a stool behind his counter and watched me all the way past his front window and through the front door. He had been reading a Clive Barker paperback when I came along, and he put it aside for the customary greeting as I came in. I went straight to the counter and got to the point.

“When was the last time you saw Bobby Westfall?” “

You mean the bookscout? I don’t see him, unless he’s got something for me. He knows I don’t buy stock from scouts. They want too much for the run-of-the-mill stuff. He comes in if he’s got a King or a Burroughs, or maybe an early Gene Wolfe. He knows I’ll pay him more than anybody if it’s something good in my field.”

“So you see him what… once a month?” “

If that. I did see him about two weeks ago. I think he was up the street trying to sell Ruby Seals some books. I don’t know, he didn’t bother showing ‘em to me.”

“Did he seem any different than he usually did?”

“I don’t know how he usually seemed. These bookscouts are almost nonentities after you’ve seen ‘em around awhile. I don’t think about things like how they usually are. But since you asked me, I guess he seemed the same as ever.”

“Which was what?”

“Quiet. Almost mousy. He just walked around looking at my stuff. That’s how they learn, you know… look at the books on the shelves and see how they’re priced. None of ‘em ever have any reference books, they can’t afford that, so they have to keep it all up here.” He tapped himself on the head. “What’s the matter? Bobby get himself in trouble?”

“Bobby got himself dead.”

Harkness opened his mouth and it hung there for a moment. “Did you ever talk to him?” I said.

“As a matter of fact, we passed a few words that day in the store.”

“About what?”

“Usual run of stuff. How bad business is, on both his end and mine. This is the slow time of the year. I’m used to it. In the early summer, right after tax time, you’ll go whole days without seeing more than ten people. Then a dealer will come through and drop five hundred, and in the end the figures balance out okay. But bookscouts have it tough. Books have been drying up. Even the Goodwill is putting horrendous prices on their books lately. God, I wonder who’d kill Bobby.”

I looked at him strangely. He got my drift and shrugged. “You’re a homicide cop; I put two and two together and assumed he’d been murdered.”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what I can tell you. Bobby was singing the blues about those stupid asses at Goodwill. People are just plain greedy: they don’t want to leave anything for anybody else, they don’t want the next guy to make even a dime. Goodwill’s trying to play bookstore again. They’re a thrift store, for God’s sake, and they put everything out at bookstore prices. They’ve got some clerk there who can’t find her ass with both hands, and she’s gonna figure out what a book’s really worth. Right. Of course they get it all wrong. They go on weight and glitz. They’ll put out some useless novel about two lesbians fighting for control of their dead aunt’s cosmetics company for five dollars. Then they’ll let a King first go for fifty cents.”

“How does that hurt the bookscout?”

“It’s the stock he makes his bread and butter on. You don’t find Kings every day. What the bookscouts used to be able to do is grab up a handful of these glitzy titles for a buck apiece and double or triple their money in one of the big general bookstores. They can’t do that anymore. Goodwill goes through this silliness once every three or four years. Somebody in the front office gets a wild hair up his ass and they start marking everything through the roof. After a while they learn they can’t sell the damn things and they go back to the old prices. But while they’re at it, guys like Bobby really hurt.”

So this is the gist of what Bobby was complaining about?“

“That’s what he said to me.”

“Did he give you any indication that he might’ve made a recent score?”

“Are you kidding? The way he was talking, he didn’t have bus fare back downtown.”

“Maybe he found something and hadn’t had a chance to sell it yet.”

“I doubt that. I don’t think he had a prayer of seeing any money in the immediate future. He was just too down, too pissed off at the world.”

“Who else did he do business with?”

“Almost everybody. You’re gonna have to go to every bookstore in Denver if you want to touch all of Bobby’s bases.”

“But they have their favorite guys they sell to, isn’t that right?”

“Sure. They all do that. They’ll find a dealer who pays ‘em well and they’ll stick with that guy for a while. Then something happens—either they get pissed off or the dealer does—and they go somewhere else. But it’s never perfect and eventually they come back. It’s a vicious circle. When a book doesn’t sell to anybody reputable, they wind up giving it away for pennies to jerks like the one two doors down.”

“You mean Clyde Fix?”

“What an idiot. I wish we could get that junkman off the block.”

“Can you think of anybody else Bobby might’ve sold to regularly?”

“I think he was in with Roland Goddard. Don’t tell Goddard I sent you, though. He used to be my partner.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah. But don’t bring it up. We don’t get along now.”

“How come?”

“You don’t really want to get into that. It’s ancient history.”

“Humor me a little.”

“When we were kids we both worked for Harley Bishop. Then we moved on to the Book Emporium, you remember, that big place that used to be on Fifteenth, across from Public Service? They closed it up and Goddard and I bought out the stock and used it to start our first store together. It didn’t work out, that’s all. We’ve got different aims in life, different tastes. At the bottom of it, we just didn’t like each other. Sometimes you’ve got to go into business with somebody to find out how little you like each other. So we flipped a coin to see who would buy the other out. Goddard won. Or lost, depending on how you look at it.“

“That’s a pretty classy shop he’s got.”

“Yeah, but so what? Everything in life has a trade-off. He’s got a great shop and a super location in Cherry Creek, probably makes two hundred grand a year. But the overhead’s got to be unreal. Me, I was out of the business for a couple of years after the big coin flip, but I’m back again. I’ve got what I want.”

“Can you think of anybody else I should see?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. Go talk to Rita McKinley.”

“Who’s that?”

He raised his eyebrow. “You’re a bookman in this town and you’ve never heard of Rita McKinley?”

“I guess I never did.”

“Well, Officer Janeway, you’ve got a treat in store for you.”

“Who’s Rita McKinley?”

“She’s got a closed shop in Evergreen. Appointment only, that kind of place. Operates out of her house.”

“What’s she got to do with Bobby?”

“I don’t know, except when he was here he dropped a piece of paper with her name on it.”

“You still got it?”

“Sure. I’ve been waiting for him to come in again so I could give it back to him.” He reached into the cash drawer and took out a small sheet of notepaper. In pencil, someone had written the name and a phone number.

I looked at Harkness. “You ever met the lady?”

‘She was in here once, a year or two ago. A real looker, young and pretty and sharp as a new brass tack. She knows books, brother. She knows as much as I do, and I’m talking about books in my field. You know what she did? Bought two copies of Interview with the Vampire out of here for fifty bucks apiece. That’s what the son of a bitch was going for then. Now it’s three hundred, and it’s gonna go to five, I’ll betcha. I’d love to have one of those babies back; hell, I’d pay her four times what she paid me. It’s not often that somebody teaches me a lesson in my own field, but Rita McKinley did it. A real cool customer. And I got the feeling talking to her that she knows every field like that. And she can’t be much over thirty.“

“How long has she been up there?”

“A few years, I guess. I’ve never seen her place. She’s goddamned intimidating if you want to know the truth. You don’t just call her up because you’re out for a drive some Sunday and you want to scout her shelves. At least I don’t.”

“How does she sell her books?”

“She’s got clients who come in from out of town. Does mail order. And deals in very expensive stuff.”

I wrote her name down.

“It doesn’t sound logical, does it?” I said. “Her and Bobby?”

Harkness shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you.”

I believed him for the moment, and left.

There were two more dealers on Book Row. One was a specialist in collectible paperbacks, who kept odd hours. His store was closed. Near the end of the block was a junk shop called A-l Books, owned by Clyde Fix. I had never dealt with Fix, for two reasons: I have never seen a book in his store that I wanted, and his hatred for cops was well known and documented. He and Jackie Newton might make a great pair that way, but that was the only way. While Jackie was carving out land deals, Clyde Fix was struggling to stay alive. Where Jackie had brains, Clyde Fix had only animal cunning. It was a safe bet that Clyde Fix had never heard of a Lamborghini: he clattered around town in a red ‘62 Ford that always seemed two miles from the scrap heap. He was in his forties, with thinning hair and a gaunt, consumptive profile. He had owned bookstores all over Denver in the last fifteen years, all of them dumps like this one. Ruby had known him for years. Before he had discovered books, Ruby said, Clyde Fix had been a seller of graveyard plots; before that, he had sold shoes. With books, he had found a way of keeping body and soul together without having to punch a time clock. There are lots of customers for cheap books, and a junkman in almost any kind of junk will usually make a living.

He had a deceptive manner: he could ooze charm and in the same moment turn on you like a snake. People who had never seen his bad side thought of him as a nice man; the rest of us knew better. Fix had been busted half a dozen times for disturbing the peace, and Traffic had pulled him in a few times for speeding. He always argued with the cop. He was his own worst enemy. Once, I knew, he had talked himself from a simple taillight violation to creating a disturbance and ultimately resisting arrest. Cops have a lot of discretion in things like that.

My interview was a short one. Fix was hostile, as I knew he would be, and he wouldn’t give me much. He didn’t seem to know or care that Bobby Westfall was dead. “Why should I worry over that fool? That’s just one less fool out there working my territory.”

“Where’s your territory?” I asked.

“Wherever the hell I say it is.”

I knew that mentality well. Beat me to a book and you’re my enemy for life. Turn over all your best books to me. Sell that to me for ten cents on the dollar, and don’t give me any damn guff about it either. Fix would intimidate if he could, cheat if he could do that. He’d buy a $ 1,000 book for a quarter, then laugh all year at the sucker who’d sold it to him.

It occurred to me suddenly that there was a lot of latent anger in the Denver book world. I could easily see Clyde Fix bashing Bobby’s head in. But with Fix it wouldn’t be calculated: more likely it would be a spur-of-the-moment thing, in broad daylight with fifteen witnesses looking on. They had had one run-in last year: the story had gone through the trade like a shot and quickly taken on the characteristics of an urban legend. I remembered it now and could almost see it: Bobby and Fix at the Goodwill store, both spotting a treasure nestled among the junk. James Crumley’s One to Count Cadence, a $100 book then, two or three times that now. The mutual lunge, the struggle, the tumble into a counter of glassware, Fix coming up with the book, whirling and knocking a little old lady flat. The cops arrived, but Fix and Bobby were gone. So was the book.

I hassled him for a while: it was good for my constitution. Where were you last night, Fix? Anybody there with you? Can you prove where you were between ten o’clock and midnight? You didn’t like Bobby much… did you kill him?

Pleasantries like that help get me through a dull day. If only I had something to do with my hands.

I moseyed back up the street. It was a quiet day on Book Row. At Seals & Neff a few customers had come and gone and the day was quickly settling into its inevitable, uneventful course. There was a young woman in the store, who had brought in a bag of books. Bookscouts, like dealers, come in all sizes, colors, and sexes. This one was a cut above the others I had seen, at least in the category of looks, but it was clear from what was being said that she had more than a smattering of ignorance when it came to books.

Neff was explaining to her why her as-new copy of Faulkner’s The Reivers wasn’t a first edition. “But it says first edition,” she protested. “Right here on the copyright page… look. First edition. How much clearer can it be than that? Random House always states first edition, right? You told me that yourself the last time I was in here. Now I’ve got a first edition and you’re telling me it isn’t a first edition. I don’t know what to believe.”

“Believe this, honey,” Neff said. “I don’t need the grief. If you think I’m trying to steal your book…”

“I didn’t say that. I’m not accusing you, I just want to know.”

“It’s a Book-of-the-Month Club first,” Neff said, enunci-ating each word with chilly distinction. “It’s printed from the same plates as the first, or maybe the same sheets are ever used; that’s why it says first edition. But the binding is different, there’s no price on the jacket, and the book has a blind stamp on the back board.”

“What’s a blind stamp?”

“A little dent, pressed right into the cloth. Look, I’ll show you. You see that little stamp? That means it’s a book club book. Whenever you see that, it came from a book club, even if it’s written ‘I’m a first edition’ in Christ’s own blood inside. Okay?”

She sighed. “I’ll never learn this stuff. How much is it worth?”

“This book? Five bucks tops. There are eight million copies of this in the naked city.”

“I paid more than that for it. Didn’t I come in here last week and ask you what it was worth? You said fifty dollars. That’s why I went and bought it.”

“We’re talking about two different animals. You asked me a question, I answered you. How was I supposed to know you couldn’t tell one from the other?”

“I paid seven-fifty,” she said sadly.

“You got rooked.”

“Damn shit,” she said.

“You tell her, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “Lady, this guy is a Denver cop. Would a cop lie to you? He’s a cop and he’s also a damn good bookman. Show him the book.”

She handed it to me. I looked at it and told her Neff was right. It was a $5 book and you had to pray mighty hard to ever get the five.

“Let me see your badge,” she said. “You don’t look like a cop to me.”

I showed her my badge. She sagged in final defeat.

“It’s a tough world, hon,” Neff said.

“Don’t give me that. I see some of the characters who sell you books. They don’t look like any Einsteins to me. If they can do it, I know I can. I’ve got as much brains as they have.”

“I’m sure that’s true. The difference between you and them is that they’ve already made their mistakes.”

“Seven dollars and fifty cents, shot to hell,” she said. “Bet you won’t even give me two for it.”

“I can pick those things up in thrift stores all day long for fifty cents.”

“Aw, give her the money,” Ruby said, coming out from the back room. “We’ll subsidize this mistake. Just don’t make any more, and bring us all your good books first. Give her the seven-fifty, Em.”

“No wonder we’re going broke,” Neff said.

“This’ll pay big dividends down the road, I can feel it in my bones,” Ruby said. “What’s your name, lady?”

“Millie Farmer.”

“Here—here’s your money back. I’m taking a two-buck loss, that is if I ever sell the son of a bitch. Bring me a good book next time.”

“I will,” she said determinedly. “By God, you watch me.”

“It’s easy,” Ruby said. “Like taking candy from a baby. When you see a box of books, don’t take any bad ones and don’t leave any good ones. That’s all there is to it.”

I had been taking all this in as a spectator. Now, at the end of it, I couldn’t help shaking my head and asking her one question.

“Why would you want to be a bookscout?”

“I’m a teacher,” she said. “Would you like to try to make it on what they pay you to teach third grade in this town? I need the extra money.”

“All right,” Neff said. “Stick around, I’ll show you some ropes. It doesn’t look like much else is gonna happen today.”

“Ruby,” I said, “I’m ready to go to Bobby’s place if you are.”

We picked up my car and headed down Seventeenth Avenue toward Capitol Hill. Ruby talked as we drove, a seemingly endless chain of stories about Bobby Westfall and his adventures in the book trade. Ruby knew all the scuttlebutt. “I can’t believe the little bastard’s dead,” he said at one point. I told him he could believe it. “I sure hope you get the son of a bitch that did it, Dr. J,” he said. I told him I would, but you never know about that. You just never know.

Bobby lived in one of those old tenements on Ogden Street. It was a garret, up three long flights of stairs. We stopped at the manager’s on the ground floor. I showed him my badge and told him the news. He was shocked. The manager was about fifty: he wore a sweatshirt and had a dark, unhealthy look. His name was Marty Zimmers. I told him we’d need to see the apartment and he got his spare key. At the top of the stairs, I said, “I don’t want you boys to touch anything. In fact, I think I’m gonna ask you to wait out here.”

I opened the door and the cats came running. I went in alone.

It was a small place, one room with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom. It was a maze of books, a veritable cave of books. There were books piled from the floor to the ceiling, books stacked around the hideaway bed he’d slept in, books on the toilet, on the kitchen counter. I could see at a glance it was mostly crap, the kind of things a bookscout buys on a wing and a prayer, because it’s cheap, because he has a hunch that never pays off, because he makes mistakes. Millie Farmer ought to be here now, and see what it’s really like, I thought. There were later printings and books without jackets and books with vast, unfixable problems. Later I’d have to go through every piece in this room on the off chance that, if Bobby had found something, it might still be here. For now the main job was to get the area secured.

“This the only key?” I called out into the hall.

Marty Zimmers stuck his head in. “Well, he had one.”

“This is the only spare, though.”

“That’s it.”

I gave the place one quick looksee before going down to call the lab. The only things that stood out were the cats and a cheap little notepad that he had used for a telephone book. I picked up the notebook carefully and thumbed through it. Everybody was in it, all the book dealers in Denver by name and address. For some he had home numbers. Ruby and Neff were there, both home numbers and the store. On the back page of the book he had scrawled “Rita McKinley,” and a telephone exchange that I recognized as Evergreen, in the mountains. I checked it against the number on the paper that Bobby had dropped in Jerry Harkness’s bookstore. The numbers were different. I copied the new number in my notebook and left Bobby’s book on the rickety little table beside the bed.

In the manager’s office I made my calls. The first was the new Rita McKinley number. It rang once and was answered by a machine. The cool female voice said, “You’ve reached 670-2665. No one’s here now. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon.” The phone beeped. I didn’t leave a message.

I tried the other number. A cutoff recording came on and said that the call could not be completed as dialed.

I called downtown. Hennessey had come in. I told him I was at Bobby’s place and I gave him the address. “We’ll need a crew over here to comb through things. You come supervise, will you? Tell them to leave the books for me. I want to go out and talk to some more book dealers.”

“Will do. You had a couple of calls while you’ve been out. One of them might be important. Barbara Crowell.”

“When did that come in?”

“Time on the message said one-fifteen. Just a few minutes ago.”

“Did she say anything?”

“The dispatcher wrote ‘urgent’ on it, underlined in red. Said the woman sounded scared to death. But she wouldn’t talk to anybody else.”

“What’s her number?”

He read it to me. I hung up and dialed it. Another goddamn answering machine.

“Hi, this’s Barbara. I can’t come to the phone right now, but…”

I slammed the phone down. I had a very dark vision suddenly. Jackie Newton walked over my grave.

“Ruby, I want you to stay here and keep Mr. Zimmers company. I’m leaving you the key, so you can give it to Hennessey when he comes. I don’t want either one of you guys to go into that apartment. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I think I do, Dr. J.”

“You boys need to vouch for each other that nobody’s been up there between the time I left and when the cops came. Okay?”

“Sure. What’re you gonna do?”

“I’ve got to be somewhere, right now.”

Five minutes later I pulled up at Barbara Crowell’s place on Pearl Street. The Lamborghini was parked out front.

7

The house where Barbara lived had two apartments on each floor. I parked in the loading zone behind Jackie Newton’s car, got out, went inside, and started up the stairs. The place seemed like a mausoleum, still and deathly quiet. The steps creaked as I moved up, but that was the only sound until I got to the second floor and heard the radio. It was soft rock music, trickling faintly from above. I knew it was her radio playing—the apartment across the way was vacant. I took a grip on my gun and started up to the top. The radio came closer but still there were no voices. At her door I stopped and listened. Nothing. It was one of those oh-hell bad times in a cop’s life. You want I should maybe knock on her door? Not this boy. I’d walk in and catch him in flagrante delicto, my only witness the terrified victim. Can’t you just see it? No. Your Honor. I didn’t invite him in. That’s me she’s talking about now, not Jackie Newton: we know from past experience what she’d say about a guy who could make her heart stop just by saying boo. I asked Mr. Newton over to make up a quarrel we’d had… I certainly didn’t expect or want Detective Janeway to come walking into my bedroom…

Why couldn’t she scream? Throw something against the wall? I’d take any help I could get, any way I could get it.

But there was only profound stillness and the refrain from A Lover’s Concerto on the other side of the door.

Ah, fuck it. I turned the knob. It was unlocked. I pushed it just a crack, enough to see into the front room. The radio got suddenly louder and that was all. I could see it blaring away on a table across the room. I pushed the door a little wider and I could see through to the kitchen. Still nothing. Nothing. No… living… thing. The bedroom door across the room was closed. Here I come, ready or not. I pushed the door wide and stepped in, the gun pointing my way like a beacon. I saw that the wood had been shattered where she’d had a chain lock fastened. That had stopped him for all of twenty seconds. I took four long steps to the bedroom door and listened again. It wasn’t going to happen, was it? They just weren’t going to invite me to their little party. I stood on the verge of big trouble, a brilliant, silly line from James Jones running through my head. They can kill you but they can’t eat you. I had news for Mr. Jones, whatever corner of Eternity he’d gone to. They could kill you, yes, and they could eat you too.

I opened the door. They weren’t there.

They weren’t anywhere.

The bed had been neatly made up, not a ripple showing on the pink-and-white spread.

I looked in the closet and found nothing I could call unreasonable. I looked in the bathroom. Finally I went into the kitchen and began to see what had happened. There was a door that opened onto an outside landing, and a wooden stair-case that ran down the rear of the apartment house to a small parking lot. The door had been slammed open with such force that the glass was broken. I walked back into the main room, the gun still in my hand. The scenario was becoming fairly clear. The curtains were drawn back: the Lamborghini was parked directly below. Barbara had looked out this front window and had seen Jackie Newton down in the street. She had called me: when I wasn’t there, she had hung up. The recorder had activated automatically, and here we were. She had panicked when she heard him coming up the stairs. She took the only way out—down the back way. The lock had bought her a few seconds, then he came through the door and went down after her. That’s where they were now, playing a game of chase on the streets.

Probable cause had dropped in my lap like a plum. I had never been in here—that was my story before God, Mother, and the state of Colorado. I had come up on a response to a phone call. I had come to her door and knocked: when on one answered, I had gone away. If I happened to spot them in the course of cruising the neighborhood, if it looked to my casual eye like Barbara Crowell was being unlawfully pursued… well, events could take care of themselves.

I didn’t think it would be hard to find them. Barbara had run without any money, it seemed—her handbag was still on the table beside the radio. She wouldn’t be jumping into any buses or cabs, and I didn’t think she’d be flagging any cops, either. There was too much fear in her: it was an old story to me, I had seen it so many times. As for Jackie Newton, he was out there in hog heaven. This was the kind of game he loved: the cat-and-mouse, the heading-off, the dodging up alleys and down side streets. Playing with people, working on their fear.

I went downstairs and opened my trunk. In the toolbox I found a rubber hammer and a punch. I flattened one of Jackie’s tires and the Lamborghini sagged back on its haunch, hissing.

I drove in a widening circle, coming back to Pearl Street every few minutes to check on the Lamborghini. It took me twenty minutes to find them. I came upon Jackie on East Eighth Avenue, a few blocks from the governor’s mansion. He was standing under a tree like a predator, watching. I drove on by. He didn’t see me: like the leopard, his attention was fixed on the prey, on the place where the prey was hiding. I couldn’t see it at first: all I knew was that she was there somewhere. I circled the block, parked the car, and got out. I walked to the corner and got behind a tree of my own. That’s the way we did it for half an hour: Barbara hiding in a place unknown, Jackie watching her, me watching Jackie.

It was all a lot of fun till it started to rain.

I went back to the car and pulled into a vacant lot that had a clear view up Eighth. Jackie hadn’t moved. He looked almost like a statue, every muscle chiseled in infinity. The rain fell. From a slight drizzle it had become a summer storm, water swirling in the street in the wind. It didn’t seem to bother Jackie: he watched with an intensity that was almost scary, as if to watch all week, all year, wouldn’t worry him a bit. Only once in that hour did he look up the street. But I was in an unmarked car, settled back with only my eyes above the dash, and he turned away none the wiser.

Rainstorms in Denver are often fast and furious. This one was over in forty minutes, becoming what had started it, a drizzle. I saw Barbara come out of a flower shop and look around nervously. Was he there? Of course. When someone scares you that bad, he’s always there.

She had to do something, even if it was wrong. She walked to the corner, looked around again, and started up the block to the north.

Jackie leaped into action. He ran straight toward me, then doubled up the next block toward East Ninth Avenue. He was going to cut her off, try to get close enough to grab a wrist before she knew he was there. I started the car, drove up Eighth and hung a right. Barbara Crowell was half a block ahead, walking briskly. But she kept stopping and looking back, not trusting the evidence of her eyes that he was gone. Once she stood for half a minute, giving him plenty of time to get in place on Ninth. I had pulled to the curb about forty yards behind her, opposite side of the street. When she started up again, so did I.

I could see him now, a shadow behind a tree on Ninth near the corner. I don’t think I knew what I was going to do until that moment. She had reached the corner and looked both ways. He was now no more than ten yards away and could have caught her easy. But no… he was waiting for the big shock when he could grab her after she thought she’d made it. He wanted to see the fright, the heartbreak on her face. She had stopped on Ninth to look around, and I got out of the car and gave her the high sign.

I had my finger to my mouth, the universal gesture for quiet. I came up beside her and took her arm. With my other hand I got out my gun. I turned her east on Ninth, a course that would carry us right past the tree where he hid. She started to speak: I shushed her with a low hiss. The tree loomed up, then we were by it and Jackie leaped out. This all happened in less than five seconds. Jackie made a grab for my arm, still thinking it was Barbara he was grabbing. I said, “Hello, sweetheart,” and jammed him in the ribs with the gun. I saw him start to swing and I brought the gun up and let him taste the barrel, hard. It knocked him down and split both lips. He rolled over in the grass and got to his feet. He stood like a panther ready to spring and I stood there waiting for him.

Then nothing happened. He didn’t say a word: his eyes said it all. You are dead, Janeway, his eyes said, you are one dead cop. He had me quaking like Mount Saint Helens. With his eyes, Jackie said, I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but I am gonna bury you. With my mouth, I said, “I told you before, Newton, you better fix that door.” He didn’t think that was funny. He turned his evil eye on Barbara. She couldn’t look at him: her skin had gone white with goose bumps. I stepped in front of her and locked eyes with Jackie for what seemed like forever. He turned and walked away first. He was going up the hill toward her place, where his car was parked.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll go a different way.” Again she had been taken by a fit of shivering. I draped my coat over her shoulders. “I’m gonna have to start charging you rent for this coat,” I said. It didn’t cheer her up. We cut up alleys and went in the back way to her place. I sat her on the couch and put on a pot of water for instant coffee. While it was coming to a boil I went to the window and looked down where Jackie Newton had discovered his flat tire. I saw him throw his jack halfway across the street, then flip off a passing driver who had blown his horn. He was a bad son of a bitch, Jackie. All that remained to be seen was how bad.

8

I got the coffee down from a cupboard. I found her liquor cabinet and stirred in a generous shot of brandy. She sipped it, then sat staring at the oval rug under her feet. I went to the window to check on Jackie’s progress. He was still in the stage of initial disgust and hadn’t done much yet. I should’ve punched two out, or maybe all four, I thought.

“How you feeling now?” I asked without turning away from Jackie.

Numbly, she said, “Why is this happening?”

“You’re letting it happen.”

I turned in time to see the anger in her eyes. But she didn’t say anything.

“You’ve got to play his game by his rules,” I said. “He’s like a bully in a schoolyard. Either you stand up to him or he kills you, piece by piece, day by day.”

Her voice trembled, from anger, fear, or both. “How the fuck do I stand up to that?” she shouted.

“Start showing him you mean what you say.”

She shivered, drawing my coat tight around her neck. “A week ago I’d never heard of the goddamn man. Now he’s got control of my life.”

“Take it back.”

“You keep saying that. I’m sick of it. It’s easy for you to say.”

“I didn’t say it was easy. But it may be your only choice.”

“Then tell me, please, what exactly do you want me to do?”

“Show some guts, Barbara. Maybe it’ll get you killed, but how do you know this won’t?”

I got her some more coffee. She had gulped the cup and it seemed to be doing her some good. Her shivers had subsided and in another minute she let my coat hang loose on her shoulders.

“For starters,” I said, “if he ever touches you again, get the cops involved. Don’t just hang up because I’m not there. I’m a homicide cop; you don’t need me here unless he kills you. There are other cops who handle this kind of stuff. I’ll give you some names; I’ll grease the skids downtown so you’ll get priority treatment. In other words, I’ll do what I can.”

She shook her head.

“Look, you had a start on him this morning, then you let him get away. He raped you. What you should’ve done right then was go to the hospital. Swear out a warrant. Let him cool his heels in jail for a few hours. Take him to Denver District Court. Take him all the way. If you get one of those lemon-suckers on the bench, he gets off. But at least he knows you’re ready to play hardball.”

“Which means I go to the morgue next time.”

“Or maybe there won’t be a next time. I’ve got a theory about our friend Jackie. If you show a white flag, he’ll tear you to pieces. Jackie takes no prisoners: he loves to take on people who won’t fight back. If you do fight, he’ll give you a hard look before he comes back again.”

“I think you’re wrong. I think he takes it very personally when you fight. I think he’s going to kill you for what you did to him today.”

“I’m not gonna argue with you. I didn’t become a cop because of my grades in psych. You asked me what to do and I told you. Rack his ass if he blinks at you twice. Get yourself a restraining order and then the cops can bust him if he doesn’t leave you alone. That’s the first step.”

“And the last. Oh, Christ, you can’t protect me.”

“We can try. We can do the best we can do.”

“Then what? You can’t take me by the hand and walk me to work. You can’t sleep with me…”

We looked at each other. She said, “What if you do the best you can do and it still isn’t good enough? What do I do then, challenge him to a duel? Quit my job and leave my friends and start over in another state?”

“I got no guarantees, ma’am. All I can do is tell you this— I’m on your side and so is the police department. We got a guy out there who thinks he’s one tough cowboy. Our job is to show him he isn’t. There are many ways of doing this, and some of them you don’t need to know about.”

She took a deep breath. “It’s really bad between you two, isn’t it?”

I gave her my sour little smile in return.

I told her I’d be back in a minute. I had looked out the window and seen that Jackie Newton was now hard at work on his flat tire. I didn’t want him to leave without saying goodbye.

I went down and sat on the coping and watched him work.

Jackie was into his silent act. It was supposed to be intimidating, and I guess it was. He knew I was there: I could tell by the way he breathed. He had scraped his hand and blood had oozed out between his knuckles.

I started a running line of chatter, thinking it would annoy him.

“I sure wouldn’t leave a car like that on the street,” I said pleasantly. “You never know when you’ll come back and find a door kicked in.”

He grunted over his lugs. I heard them squeak as he jerked on the lug wrench.

“There’re gangs around who do stuff like that,” I said. “Just bash up expensive automobiles.”

His lugs squeaked.

“Scumbags,” I said. “Everywhere you go.”

Squeak.

“It’s getting so you can’t do anything without running into some scumbucket who wants to take away a piece of your life.”

Squeak.

“Take the lady who lives here,” I said. “There’s a certain asshole I know who won’t leave her alone. Tries to screw around with her head, make her wish she’d never been born. What do you think of a man who’d do something like that?”

Squeak-squeak.

“Some man, huh?”

Squeak.

“Tighten those things too tight and you’ll have a helluva time getting them off again.”

There was a sharp clang as he threw the lug wrench down on the street.

“Never know when you’ll have another flat.”

He came around and let the car’s weight jiggle down off the jack. Then he stood up tall and gave me a look. His face was a mess: blood had dripped onto his fine white shirt and his hair for once was tousled. He threw the tire and jack into the car and made ready to go.

“When this guy comes back again, he’s gonna pay a heavy price,” I said. “A real heavy price.”

He pulled up the door and stood there for a minute. I thought he might say something then but he didn’t. He ducked his head and got in his car, and I stood up and backed away under the shadows of the front porch. You never knew when a guy might have a piece hidden in the car, and if something serious started I wanted some cover.

But he drove away. Calmly. Like a man of reason. He didn’t even peal rubber.

A real scary guy, Jackie. A bad son of a bitch.

I knew an old man once who swore he saw a sailor beat the hell out of Gene Tunney in a barroom brawl. Tunney was at his peak then, the heavyweight champion of the world. Titles don’t mean much when you’re getting your lunch eaten.

The meanest son of a bitch in the world can only be the meanest while he’s at his absolute peak and the other guy hasn’t quite come up to his. Say a month on the long end, a few minutes on the short.

I know guys who could make Jackie Newton wish his mamma had never set eyes on his daddy. I grew up with one of them. Vincent Marranzino wrote the book on tough guys. I haven’t seen Vince in a long time: his life and mine have taken different paths and we both understand that. But Vince still owes me one—a certain fight with knives in a north Denver backlot when we were sixteen. I had taken his side against a pack of wolves and the two of us had kicked ass against great odds. Guys like Vince never forget something like that: they have a streak of loyalty that goes to bedrock.

A simple phone call was all it would take. Before morning, Jackie Newton’s anatomy would be rearranged.

Tempting, isn’t it?

A nice hole card, if the system couldn’t be made to work.

This was what I had meant when 1 told Barbara that there were things in life she’d be better off not knowing. The genie was out of the bottle, just a phone call away.

But of course I wouldn’t do it. Like Brutus, I am an honorable man.

9

I spent another futile hour with Barbara Crowell. There’s no way to talk common sense to someone who’s that scared, so there wasn’t much else to do but wait for the locksmith to come fix her door. While I waited, I made some calls on the Bobby Westfall case. I called Bobby’s apartment and talked to Hennessey. Our boys had been there for an hour and weren’t finding much. They had lifted some prints, probably the victim’s, and had arranged for the pound to come pick up the cats. They had sent Ruby Seals back to his bookstore in a police car. It didn’t look like the apartment was going to give us much. There were still piles of books to go through, but that would take a bookman’s eye—my job, and I’d be at it far into the night.

I tried Rita McKinley: same answering machine, same message.

I sat with the telephone book opened to “Book Dealers, Used and Rare,” and I went through the stores in my mind. Some eliminated themselves from my priority list—junk shops, paperback exchanges, dealers in comic books: these I’d get to, eventually, if something didn’t pan out higher up. I called Roland Goddard in Cherry Creek and told him I wanted to see him tomorrow about the murder of Bobby Westfall. There was no use pussyfooting around anymore. The book world is amazingly tight, and even now the word of Bobby’s death would be racing from one store to another. By tomorrow it would be all over town.

I called three or four other dealers who might have bought books from Bobby. All of them had. I told them I’d want to see them, and would try to stop in in the next couple of days.

This was going to be a long haul.

I tried calling Carol, to tell her I’d be late tonight. She was out on the streets and I didn’t want to leave a message. The only world tighter than the world of books is the world of cops.

The locksmith had fixed Barbara’s back door and was installing a deadbolt in the front. Nobody was coming through that door once that baby was put in, the locksmith said. I wasn’t too sure of that, but I didn’t say anything.

I went back to Bobby’s place. The boys were gone, all but Hennessey. We sat and talked the case out, as it stood to now. It didn’t stand anywhere. We had nothing: we were shooting in the dark. We might be dealing with something totally outside Bobby’s book-dealing activity, and in that case it might never be solved.

Hennessey had talked to the coroner, and the guesswork of last night had been confirmed. Bobby was killed somewhere else, then dumped in the alley. Time of death was sometime between eleven o’clock and midnight. This told us nothing, as we had been going on that assumption anyway. “Let’s forget about it till morning,” Hennessey said. “Come on home with me, we’re having a big pot roast tonight.” I took a rain check: I wanted to get started on Bobby’s things, and I knew that I wouldn’t stop till the last scrap of paper had been sifted to the watermark. This is just the way I work. It made Hennessey feel guilty, but that’s life. “I should stay here and help you, Cliff,” he said. “I’d probably just get in your way. I don’t know from Shinola about this stuff.” I agreed and told him to go home. It was getting dark outside. I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours, so I asked Marty Zimmers to call Domino’s and have a deep pan pizza and a bucket of swill sent over. Then I got to work.

It was a long, thankless job. You wouldn’t believe the crap that accumulates in a bookscout’s den. Book after book came down from the pile and went into another pile that I had labeled “Junk” in my mind. I thumbed each piece carefully, I went page by page to make sure a $50,000 pamphlet wasn’t hidden inside a $2 book. It wasn’t. There were some real heartbreakers—a fine little Faulkner poem, original 1932 issue, paper wraps, a $250 piece that Bobby could’ve sold to me on the spot except that someone had lost his supper on the title page… an early Steinbeck, nice, except that somebody had ripped out the title page… Robert Frost’s first book, inscribed by Frost on the half title, very quaint except that a kid had been at the book with crayons. There were so many books eaten by mold that I had to wash my hands after handling them. My pizza came and I washed my hands again. I went munching and sorting my way into the early night. At nine-thirty I seemed to be about half through. I went downstairs and called Carol, told her I’d be another two or three hours, and said she’d better not wait up.

I chugged my swill, burped, and went back to it.

I was resigned by then to coming up zero. I took a break at ten-thirty and let my eyes skim over the books as a lot. If there was anything worthwhile in that mess, I sure couldn’t see it. I started on the books in the toilet. Nothing. I was mucking it out pretty good now. There were a few papers in the closet and some books in the kitchenette. No great secrets were hidden there that I could see. Nothing the Russians would kill for: nothing anybody would kill for. Slowly the one natural motive—that Bobby had found something valuable—was dwindling before my eyes. Of course, the killer might’ve taken it away with him: I was going on the slim, bare hope that he had killed Bobby and had failed to find what he had killed for. But I was beginning to believe it was something as simple, and insane, as an old grudge, or a sudden fight between rivals.

Then I found the good books.

There were two stacks of them in the cupboard in the kitchenette. They stood like sentinels, acting as bookends for the Cheerios and the Rice Chex. The first thing I noticed was the quality. There were some very good pieces, some real honeys. I took them into the living room and sat with them, browsing. There were fifteen titles, and I made a list, adding my own idea of what they were worth.

Gardner, Erie Stanley. Case of Dangerous Dowager. $200.

Finney, Jack. Time & Again. $150.

Uris, Leon. Battle Cry. $150.

Kennedy, William. The Ink Truck. $200-250.

McMurtry, Larry. Last Picture Show. $200.

Heinlein, Robert A. Glory Road. $250.

Cain, James M. Postman. A biggie—maybe a grand.

Bellow, Saul. Augie March. Buck and a quarter.

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. $150.

Bradbury, Ray. Illustrated Man. $200.

Miller, Henry. Books in My Life. $100.

Isherwood, Christopher. Berlin Stories, signed by C.I. $150.

Irving, John. 150-Pound Marriage. $200.

Bloch, Robert. Psycho. $200.

Rawlings, Marjorie. The Yearling. $150.

I did a quick tally. Call it three grand retail and put me down as momentarily confused. When we last saw Bobby Westfall, through the eyes of Jerry Harkness, Ruby Seals, et cetera, he was broke, pissed off, and without hope. Books had been drying up: Harkness doubted that Bobby even had bus fare back downtown. That was two weeks ago, and now I had discovered a stash of books, extremely wholesalable at a thousand dollars. There was simply no way for this stack to have been scouted in two weeks, probably not in two years. I looked at it again. No way, I thought. Even a titan of bookscouts couldn’t‘ve done it piecemeal. So where did they come from and what did it mean? Here were the possibilities that initially occurred to me.

Bobby had come upon them as a lot, sometime within the past ten days, and had stolen them from some ignorant soul for pennies.

He had literally stolen them.

He had been hoarding them for a long time.

It was possible, I guessed, though not likely, that he had been hoarding books. There are people like that, guys who pigeonhole things for a specific reason and then have the will-power—no matter how bad the times are—never to touch the stash. Say Bobby had been building this pile for three or four years. When he found a book he particularly liked, it went into the Good Pile marked NFS, not for sale. Sometimes he had to sell books that he’d like to’ve put there, but once a book actually went in the cupboard he never, ever took it out again.

That made sense, didn’t it?

I looked at the books again, singly and as a group. Hoarding was possible, but thievery was likely. Bobby had shafted someone; then that someone had found out what the books were really worth and had come after Bobby with a crescent wrench. Maybe, maybe. I stared at the books and let my mind play with them. Common denominators, I thought. For one thing, they were all modern lit. They were all easily disposable—any bookstore worth the name would buy any or all at forty percent. I revised my estimate of condition upward. These were uniformly pristine. There wasn’t a tear anywhere: even on the Cain and Gardner and Rawlings, the three oldest, the jackets were fresh and bright and had minimal sun fading to the spines. Three grand might actually be very low retail for stuff this nice: books don’t come along every day in this condition. So Bobby had a standard, if I wanted to go back to the hoarding theory, and that was another common denominator. Nothing went in here unless it was damn near perfect. One hundred retail seemed to be the cutoff point on the low end. There was a healthy mix of mainstream and genre fiction, but you had to keep going back to one sure thing: the books were all desirable, all eminently salable.

Now I began to examine them page by page. Tucked into a back page of The Last Picture Show, I found the sheath of notes.

They were figures, chicken scratches, columns of multiplication like a kid might have to do for homework. There were lots of figures on four separate sheets. The sheets were small, the kind you might tear off of a memo pad. At the top of each was a printed name: Rita McKinley. She had signed each with scribbled initials. One had some writing at the bottom. It said:

“These are the good ones. Not much gold, I’m afraid, for all the mining. R.M.” I took the papers, handling them carefully, and dropped them into an envelope. Then I put the books back in the cupboard, closed the door on them, and turned off the kitchen light. I felt an almost physical pain leaving them there.

Good thing I’m an honest cop.

I drank the last of my swill, and that pretty well threw a wrap on it.

I picked up Bobby’s little address book and put it in my pocket along with the Rita McKinley notes. I turned off the light in the bathroom and felt the first wave of weariness wash over my aging bones.

Then I heard a noise, a creaking sound, like a man trying to be quiet.

I waited. It came again, then died and went away.

I listened.

Rats, maybe?

Rats with two legs.

I took out my gun and eased up to the door. I put my head against it and in a minute I heard it again. Someone had come up the steps and was standing just outside in the hallway.

I leveled the gun and ripped open the door.

He let out a yell and cringed back against the stairwell.

“Jesus Christ, Dr. J! God Almighty, don’t shoot me!”

I sighed and put the gun away. “Ruby, what the hell are you doing here?”

He held up his hand and with the other hand clutched his heart. “Jesus, you scared me out of ten years’ growth. You better let me come in and take a leak before I lose it right here in the hall.”

“Not in here you don’t. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came up to see if I could help.”

I looked at him.

“Swear to God, Dr. J. I was over to some friends, shootin‘ the shit and listenin’ to some old Dylan records. We just broke up. I drove by and saw the light on and I figured it was you. Thought you might be able to use a hand, you know, from somebody who’s been around the Cape and knows his books.“

“You know better than that. Look, I appreciate the thought, but you can’t come in here. I thought I made that clear this afternoon.”

“Yeah, but the cops’ve already gone through the place. What do I know about po-lice procedure. I just thought a question might pop up that you couldn’t pin down for yourself. The last thing I want to do is get in the way. I want you to catch the prick that did this, that’s all I want.”

“All right, Ruby. I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Took ten years off my goddamn life is all.”

“Just stay away from here. Don’t even think of stopping here again. If I need any help, I’ll come to you.”

“That’s all I want, just to help out. You know how tricky this stuff can be, trying to figure out what’s what in books. I know you’re pretty good, Dr. J, but a real bookman could maybe help you knock some time off the clock.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

“You think it’d be okay if I took a leak? I got a sudden urgent need, Dr. J, and that’s no lie.”

“I’ll have to watch you.”

“Hey, I ain’t proud.”

I walked him through to the bathroom. I lifted the lid on the toilet and stood back in the doorway while he did his business. His eyes ran down the book titles on the back of the toilet, a natural bookseller’s habit.

“Some crap,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He zipped up his pants and flushed the toilet. “Thanks, Dr.J.”

We walked back to the door. Suddenly, I said, “What do you know about Rita McKinley?”

“The ice lady?”

“Is that what you call her?”

“That’s what everybody calls her. Once every year or so she makes a sweep through all the Denver stores. Drops a ton of dough. Buys anything unusual but cherry-picks like hell. She’s got the best eye I’ve ever seen. Won’t touch a book with a bumped corner, no matter how much it’s got going for it. She won’t take anything that’s got even a little problem, but doesn’t mind paying top money for those perfect pieces.”

“And that, I guess, is why she’s called the ice lady.”

“That’s part of it. The other part is that people in the trade think she’s got a cold shoulder. She don’t stand over the counter engaging in mindless bullshit. She don’t seem to be interested in shoptalk at all.”

“How do you like her?”

“Man, I love her. I wish she’d come twice a week; maybe then I could get out of the poorhouse. She’s not bad-looking, either. Brightens up the joint while she’s in there.”

“How come I never heard of her before today?”

“Beats me. Maybe ‘cause she don’t do retail.”

“How long’s she been here?”

“In Denver? I don’t know, a few years I guess.”

“Where’d she come from?”

“Back east, I think. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t exactly ask her this stuff when she comes in.”

“When was she in last?”

“It’s been a while… maybe a year? Longer than usual. I remember that last time because we had some great stuff for her. She dropped six grand in our place alone. Man, what I could do with six grand now.”

“What else do you know about her?”

“Not a damn thing, really. Is she mixed up in this?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“It don’t make much sense to me. I mean, Bobby Westfall and Rita McKinley? It just don’t play in Peoria.”

I had said the same thing a few hours before. But the human comedy makes some strange whistle-stops on the way to Peoria.

I kept looking at him, encouraging him.

“Look, Dr. J… almost anything you hear about Rita McKinley is gonna be rumors. Nobody knows her well enough to talk about her. That doesn’t stop ‘em from talking anyway, though. Sure, I hear some shit. You can’t help but pick up stuff in this business, but I hate to spread trash about people when I really don’t know. You see what I’m saying?”

“Ruby, I’ve got a dead man and no suspects. You see what I’m saying?”

He sighed. “Some people think she’s a gold digger.”

“What people?”

“Who the hell knows where something like that starts? One day you just start hearing it. If you hear it enough, you might even start believing it.”

I looked at him.

He shuffled and said, “For one thing, she didn’t always have money. Didn’t always have books. She’s got a lot of both now. I know plenty of rich book dealers, but very few who started with no money. It’s hard to work your way up in this business without a bankroll to start with. There are damn few ways, inside the law, to get that much money and that many good books in that short a time… divine intervention excluded.”

“Where do people think she got ‘em?”

“Oh, everybody knows where she got ‘em. There wasn’t any mystery about that—it was all wrapped up in a big AB spread a few years ago. What nobody knows is the circumstances of that deal. That’s what the mystery is. What I remember about it is this. She had been dating a book collector. She moved in with him. He died, and when he went he left her everything… books, estate, money… the whole works.”

“Was this man old?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you know anything about when and where he died?”

He shook his head. “I can’t remember. You could write to the AB, I’m sure they’d send you the article. There was another piece about Rita McKinley when she moved her stuff here and opened her business. I remember reading it. It wasn’t much of a piece, just a little one-column job saying she had come here and was open for business… about three, four years ago. The guy’s name escapes me just now… I ought to remember it, he was a good enough collector that the AB devoted two pages to his death.”

“Did the article say how he died?”

“Sure. That’s the part that keeps the tongues wagging. He killed himself.”

10

Ruby’s visit to Bobby Westfall’s apartment bothered me, and on second thought I decided to take the good books along with me when I left. Carol was sitting by the bed reading Faulkner when I came in. I put Bobby’s books on the floor and pushed the bag containing her birthday present behind the stack.

“Hi,” she said. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Just some stuff for the evidence room. I didn’t want to leave it in that empty apartment.”

She came over and looked. “These are valuable?”

“Yeah, but this is all of it. The rest is like total junk.” I looked at my watch: it was one-fifteen. “What’re you still doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep. What’s your excuse?”

“Liftin‘ that barge. Totin’ that bale… payin‘ my debt to the company store.”

“So how was your day?”

“Ducky.”

“Did I ever tell you, Clifford, that the thing I love best about you is your communications skill? Did you go out to see Newton?”

“Uh-huh.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “And?”

“He’s gonna be my date at the policeman’s ball.”

“Wonderful. You girls will look great together.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’d really rather talk about the cockroach problem some other time. Right now I’m gonna grab a shower and mount a major assault with heavy artillery on your body.”

Later, in bed, she lay in the crook of my arm. She was a great lover, good for what ailed me after a twenty-four-hour shift. Now, I thought, I could sleep. But again I found myself thinking about us, our situation, permanence, and me., I was in the middle of a vast sea change. I wondered what she would think of me if I suddenly wasn’t a cop anymore. She had been a tomboy: being a cop was all she’d ever wanted. She had never mentioned children: we had simply never talked of it. In my mind I could hear her saying, I’ve got to tell you. Cliff, I don’t want kids—I’m just not cut out for the motherhood bit. I could see her staring in disbelief when I told her I’d rather be a bookman, I think, than a cop, and not thirty years from now. Maybe she wouldn’t do any of those things. She had been in the department long enough now—almost eight years—to be building up her own case of burnout. Maybe she was getting ready to hear what I was thinking but was still not inclined to talk about.

“What’re you thinking?” she said.

“Think I’m gonna turn in my badge and become a book dealer,” I said.

But I said this in a safe, singsong voice, the same tone you use when you say you’re going to the policeman’s ball with Jackie Newton. She couldn’t do much with it but laugh.

Only she didn’t laugh. She just lay there in my arm and we didn’t speak again for a long time.

It was the telephone that finally broke the spell.

“God Almighty,” I said wearily. “If that’s Henness;ey I’ll kill the bastard.”

“I’ll get it,” she said, reaching over me. “I’ll tell him you’ve died and the funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

She picked up the phone. I heard her say hello and then there was a long silence. Without saying another word, she hung up.

“What’s that all about?”

“A guy trying to sell me a water softener.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?”

She didn’t say anything.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“I seem to’ve got myself a heavy breather. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. It started about eight o’clock and he’s been calling back every hour or two.”

“Does he say anything?”

“He whispered once.”

“What’d he say?”

“The usual stuff. Cunt, bitch, whore. Some other stuff.”

“Did he say anything personal… anything to indicate that he might know who you are?”

“Why would he know who I am? Those kinds of calls are mostly random, you know that.”

“I don’t think this one is.”

She sat up and turned on the light.

“What happened out there today?”

I told her about my day with Jackie. I could see it wasn’t convincing her that Jackie had taken up telephone harassment for revenge.

“I’m taking the phone off,” she said. “If you don’t get some sleep you’ll be a zombie tomorrow.”

The phone rang.

“Let it go,” she said. “He’ll get tired of it and hang up.”

But I picked it up. Didn’t say anything, just listened. He was there, listening too. This went on for almost a minute. Then I said, “You having fun, Newton?”

He hung up.

“It’s Newton,” I said. “He hung up when I called him by name.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“All right, then, I can smell the son of a bitch, okay?”

“Okay, Cliff. I’m sure not going to argue about it at two o’clock in the morning.”

“Listen,” I said sometime later. “Jackie and me, we shifted gears out there today. There never was any love lost between us, you know that. But it’s different now, it’s on a whole new plain.”

She had propped herself up on one arm, a silhouette against the window.

“He’ll do whatever he can to get at me. I don’t think it matters to him that I’m a cop, or that you are. I don’t think anything matters. It’s him and me.”

“Hatfields and McCoys.”

“Yeah. It’s gotten that deep. I may’ve given Barbara Crowell some very bad advice today.”

“Cliff, you need a vacation.”

“I need to get something on that weasel. That’s the only vacation I need. To get him good and make it stick.”

“You’re a classic type-A, you’ll die before you’re forty. You need to go and lie on a beach and listen to tropical breezes blowing through luscious palm trees.”

“And go crazy with boredom. That’s not what I need.”

“I’d go along too… try to keep you from getting too bored.”

More long minutes passed.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Carol said.

“As a matter of fact, there is something you can do.”

“Just tell me.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, Cliff, that’s not going to help anything.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since I gave Jackie the thirty-eight-caliber lollipop. Newton doesn’t know who you are. All he knows is, he called my place and a woman answered. Nobody knows about us. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to keep what’s ours private.”

She took a deep, long-suffering breath.

“Well? Will you do it?”

“Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “But God damn it, don’t ask me to like it.”

I patted her rump. “Good girl.”

“You sexist bastard.”

We laughed. At that moment I came as close to asking her the big question as I ever would.

It was a long time before we got to sleep. When I did sleep, I slept soundly, untroubled by dreams. In the morning we got her things together and I carried them down the back way and put them in her car. I watched the street for ten minutes before I let her come down and drive away.

She rolled down her window. “I’m not afraid, you know.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “But I am.”

11

I called rita McKinley and got the same recording. This time I left a message, telling her who I was and that I needed to speak with her on official business regarding a homicide investigation. I left both numbers, home and office.

I called the AB in New Jersey. Also known as Bookman’s Weekly, the AB is the trade journal of the antiquarian book world. Each week it lists hundreds of books, sought and for sale by dealers everywhere. Thus can a total recluse operate effectively in the book business without ever seeing another human being: he buys and sells through the AB. In addition to the listings, which take up most of the magazine, there are a few articles each week on doings in the trade—obits, career profiles, book fair reports. Sometime during the past few years, I explained to the editor, a piece or pieces were run on Rita McKinley. He was a wise gentleman who knew his business, and he knew right away who McKinley was and about when the stories had run. He promised copies in the next mail.

I went to see Roland Goddard, in Cherry Creek. This is a neighborhood of high-class and expensive shops in east Denver. Nestled in the center of things was Roland Goddard’s Acushnet Rare Book Emporium. Goddard had a cool, austere manner, almost like Emery Neff only somehow different. You could break through with Neff, if you were patient enough and gave a damn: with Goddard, you never could. He had an icy, slightly superior attitude about books and his knowledge of them, and he could intimidate a customer or a bookscout before the first word was said. If he had friends, they were not in the book business: no one I had ever spoken to knew Goddard personally.

It would be hard to imagine two guys less alike than Goddard and Harkness. At least with Ruby Seals and Emery Neff, their differences seemed to complement each other: Harkness and Goddard were ill-suited for partnership in almost every way. It’s hard sometimes to look back over twenty years and know why the boys we were then did things so much at odds with the attitudes and philosophies of the men we had become. Goddard was fastidious: Harkness tended to be sloppy. Goddard disdained everything about the book business that Harkness found interesting. Oh, he’d sell you a Stephen King— whatever else you could say about Roland Goddard, he was a helluva bookman and he knew where the money came from—but you might leave his store feeling faintly like a moron.

Goddard dealt primarily in Truly Important Books—incunabula, sixteenth-century poetry, illuminated manuscripts, fine leather stuff. He had some great things. Even the name °f his store simmered in tradition. Acushnet was the whaler Melville served on in the 1840s. I liked his store and I loved his stock, though I never did much business there. When I marry one of the Rockefellers, Goddard will have a big payday, most of it from me.

Acushnet was one of only three bookstores in Denver that could afford full-time help. The man who worked there was Julian Lambert, a good bookman in his own right. Lambert bought and sold as freely as his boss did: Ruby, in fact, had told me once that bookscouts preferred dealing with Goddard because he paid them more. Goddard wasn’t in when I arrived, but I busied myself looking through the stock until I saw him come in through a back entrance. The morning rush had waned: he and Lambert sat behind the counter cataloging. I knew that Goddard issued catalogs a few times a year, though no one in Denver ever saw one. He had the best reference library in the state, but played it close to the vest when it came to sharing information.

Goddard and Lambert were surprised when I introduced myself. I knew they had seen me around—we had spoken a few times in passing—but until this moment they had not put my face together with the Detective Janeway who had called on the phone and asked to see them. I got right down to cases. When was the last time they had seen Bobby Westfall? The same questions, the same answers, with Goddard doing most of the talking. It had been almost two weeks since Bobby had been in. He had come in one day just about the time he was last seen on Book Row. “He had a couple of books he was trying to sell me,” Goddard said, “but they weren’t the kind of things I use.” I told him I had heard through the grapevine that he had been dealing with Bobby rather heavily. He frowned and said, “That must be Jerry Harkness talking, and as usual he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Westfall made one very lucky find about a year ago and I bought all the books he had on that particular day. I wouldn’t make any more out of it than that. He had some books and I bought them.”

“What were the books?”

“Oz books. Westfall stumbled over them in a garage sale. Thirty-two Oz books for a dollar apiece. Most of the time when you see those they’re in poor condition. These were very fine, beautiful copies.”

“Were they firsts?”

“Only a few were. None of the Frank Baum titles were, but there were a couple of Ruth Plumley Thompson firsts and the one Jack Snow. The main thing about them was the condition. Half of them still had dust jackets. All the color plates were fresh and unscuffed, even the plates on the covers.”

“You got any of ‘em left?”

“Oh no. They didn’t last the month.”

“Nice little strike for both of you, then. What did you pay him?”

He looked offended and tried not to answer.

“I’d really like to know that,” I insisted.

“I prefer keeping my finances private.”

“You’d have every right to, if the man hadn’t been murdered.”

He hedged. “I don’t remember exactly.”

“Did you pay him in cash?”

“Not for something that big.”

“Then you wrote a check. Which means you’ve got a record of it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Do I have to talk to you about this?”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s just that I don’t want people knowing my business. Most of the time I pay more money per book than anyone in town. But you never want people knowing exactly what you’re doing.”

“This is a homicide investigation,” I said. “I’m not gonna take out a billboard and plaster it with evidence.”

“I just don’t see how a transaction that we did a year ago can have anything to do with evidence. But if you promise me you’ll keep it private, I’ll tell you. I gave him seven hundred.”

“You have the cancelled check?”

“At home, yes. I can produce it if necessary.”

“I’ll let you know. How did the books price out?”

“I’m not sure exactly. Julian?”

“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” Lambert said.

“So you paid him a little less than one-third,” I said.

“Which was fair, under the circumstances,” Goddard said. “

He had thirty-two dollars in it.”

“Which shouldn’t matter. That is very salable stuff.”

“Yes it is.”

“All right,” I said with a little sigh. “You’re right, it probably doesn’t matter anyway, but if it does I’ll ask you for that check. Now you say he was in here a couple of weeks ago. What happened?”

“Like I told you, he had a couple of books. One was a good book, but the condition wasn’t there.”

“So you bought nothing from him?”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s the last time you saw him.”

“That’s the last time I saw him.”

Something unfinished hung in the air. It took me a moment to realize what it was. Lambert, who had been busily engaged writing book descriptions on index cards, had looked up and caught his boss’s eye.

“That is right, isn’t it, Julian?”

“He did come in once since then,” Lambert said. “You weren’t here, and it was a busy morning, like today. He was only here for a few minutes. It was unusual because he didn’t do anything. He didn’t look at any of our books and he didn’t have anything to sell.”

“When was this?” Goddard said.

“Recent. No more than a week.” Lambert closed his eyes and went into deep thought. “I think it may’ve been Thursday.”

“What went on?” I said.

“Nothing. He just came in to see Roland. He said he had a deal cooking and he wanted to see Roland.”

“Was that his exact language?”

“Just like that,” Lambert said. “He had a big deal cooking and he wanted to see if Roland was interested.”

Roland was far more annoyed than interested. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” he said.

“I was busy that morning; I didn’t have time to talk to the man. Then I just forgot about it. I didn’t think it was anything that would set the world on fire. You know how these guys are. Everything’s important. Everything’s a big deal.”

“It’s not like you to forget something like that,” Goddard said.

“I should etch it in stone every time one of these characters opens his mouth? I was busy. I was running the bookstore. I assumed if it was important he’d be back. Then I forgot about it.”

“If you guys don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to get back to my questions. You can grumble at each other all day after I’m gone.” I flipped a page in my notebook. “Have either of you got any idea what Bobby would be doing with Rita Mc-Kinley?”

Goddard just stared. Lambert laughed out loud.

“Who told you that?” Goddard said.

“Everybody.”

“Well, it’s the first time I’ve heard it.”

I looked at Lambert. “How about you?”

His laugh had been cut off in the middle of a ha-ha, and his face had begun to turn red. He had busied himself with a book and was pretending to be somewhere else. That’s a sure sign with a guy like Lambert that he knows something more—something he’d rather not tell.

“Don’t fall all over yourself answering the question,” I said. “It’s just that a man has been murdered, and I’m supposed to make some kind of effort to find out who did it.”

He looked up defiantly. “All right, I just this minute remembered. When he walked out that day, he was kind of angry. He had been waiting for Roland for more than an hour, and I finally said I didn’t know how much longer it would be. I hat’s the day you went to get license plates for your new car,” he said to Goddard. “How can you ever tell in advance how long that’s going to take?”

“I was there three hours,” Goddard said.

“That would make it… what?” I said. “You thought it was Thursday.”

“It was Thursday,” Goddard said.

The day before the murder.

“So what happened?” I said, looking at Lambert.

“Suddenly Westfall gets impatient. He stalks over to the door like he’s going to leave. But before he does, he turns and says to me, ‘I guess Rita McKinley would be more interested in what I have to sell.’ And he stomped out.”

Goddard shook his head. “This just gets worse all the time. How could you forget something like that?”

“I told you,” Lambert said. “The store was a madhouse that day. I can’t buy, sell, and be a secretary all at once.”

“Let’s get back on the point,” I said. “Did Bobby say, or even hint, what he might have to sell?”

“No, and like I told you, he wasn’t carrying anything with him.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No,” Lambert said.

We looked at each other for a moment.

“You’ve got to remember one thing,” Lambert said. “You’ve got to consider the source. How many times have these guys come in thinking they’ve found a thousand-dollar book and it turns out to be nothing? I don’t consider it my first line of business to keep up with people like Westfall. Especially when we’re doing seven hundred in real business in the space of an hour.”

“All right, forget it,” Goddard said.

But it wasn’t over yet. “What can you boys tell me about Rita McKinley?” I said.

“I can’t tell you a thing,” Goddard said. “I never met the lady, wouldn’t know her if I saw her on the street.”

“You’re aware of her reputation, though?”

“I know she has some good books. That’s what I’ve heard. But I don’t scout the other dealers. I don’t do business that way.“

I looked at Lambert. Again he had gone red around the ears. He’d be a terrible witness in court, if he had anything to hide.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t kill Bobby, Lambert,” I said.

“All a cop would have to do is ask you.”

He looked up shakily. “I went up there once,” he said.

Then, after a long pause, he said to Goddard, “I didn’t say anything to you because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

Goddard didn’t like it. The temperature in the room dropped another five degrees.

“I wanted to see her stock, that’s all,” Lambert said. “There’s been so much talk, and I wanted to see what she had.”

“I hope you didn’t represent yourself as a buyer for this store,” Goddard said.

“I didn’t have to. She knew exactly who I was. She knows everybody.”

“When did you go up there?” I asked.

“Last fall, before Thanksgiving.”

“Could you show me how to get there… draw me a map?”

“Sure. It’s not that hard to find. You’ll need more than a map, though. There’s a high fence all around her place, and nobody gets in without calling ahead. You have to call and leave a message.”

“Is she pretty good about calling back?”

“She called me back. I heard from her within a couple of hours.”

“What was she like?”

“All business.”

“But she gave you no trouble about coming up?”

“Why wouldn’t she have me up? She’s in the business to sell books.”

“I just heard that she doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”

“You won’t hear that from me. She’s a real lady,” Lambert said, his face reddening. “She’s got perfect manners and I’ll tell you this. She knows her stuff. I was damned impressed.”

“Obviously,” Goddard said.

“What did you think of her stuff?” I asked.

“Absolutely incredible. I’ve never seen books like that. She’s got a This Side of Paradise, signed by Fitzgerald, with H. L. Mencken’s bookplate and a personal note from Fitzgerald practically begging Mencken for a review. The book is in a bright, fresh jacket with no flaws. She’s got a whole wall of detective stuff—prime, wonderful books. Have you ever seen perfect copies of Ross Macdonald’s first three books, or the first American edition of Mysterious Affair at Styles‘? She’s got a Gone With the Wind signed by Margaret Mitchell, Clark Gable, and Vivien Leigh. Gable wrote a little note under his name that said, ’And now, my dear, everyone will give a damn.‘ There’s so much great stuff, you don’t know where to start.”

Goddard grunted.

“Here’s another thing,” Lambert said. “You remember that old rumor about Hemingway and Wolfe signing each other’s books?”

It was a rumor I had never heard, so I asked him to fill me in.

“Sometime in the thirties, a woman in Indiana was supposed to have sent a package of Hemingway and Wolfe books to Max Perkins, begging for signatures. The books sat around in Perkins’s office for months. Then one night Hemingway and Wolfe were both there and Perkins remembered the books and got them signed. But both of them were three sheets to the wind and Hemingway thought it would be a great joke if they signed all the wrong books. He sat down and wrote a long drunken inscription in Look Homeward, Angel, and signed Wolfe’s name. Wolfe did the same with A Farewell to Arms. They started trying to outdo each other. Wolfe’s inscription in Green Hills of Africa fills up the front endpapers and ends up on the back board.”

“Thomas Wolfe never could write a short sentence if a long one would do just as well,” Goddard said sourly.

“But the point is,” Lambert said unnecesarily, for by then even I knew what the point was, “McKinley has all those books, with the handwriting authenticated beyond any question. She seems to look for unusual associations, offbeat sig-natures, and pristine condition. Hey, she’s got a Grapes with a drunken Steinbeck inscription and a doodle of a guy, drawn by Steinbeck, who has a penis six feet long. I mean, a guy would fall on his face from the force of gravity if he had a schmuck like that. Under the picture, Steinbeck wrote, ‘Tom Joad on the road.’ All I can say is, I’ve looked at a lot of books, but I’ve never seen a collection quite like that.”

I had some more questions, mostly insignificant, which they asnwered in terms that were generally inconsequential. Then I had Lambert draw me a map to Rita McKinley’s house and I left them to their unfolding squabble. I called headquarters and talked to Hennessey. Rita McKinley had not yet returned my call. I gave Hennessey the names of additional book dealers to check out, and twenty minutes later I was in the foothills, heading for Evergreen.

It was pretty much as Lambert had said, a waste of time. She lived near the top of a dirt road that snaked up the mountainside. You went through Evergreen, a bustling little mountain town about thirty minutes from Denver; then, eight or ten miles out of town, doubled back onto a road that was clearly marked private. There were half a dozen places up there, McKinley’s being at the far end. She had the entire mountaintop to herself. Her privacy was protected, just as Lambert had said, by a locked gate and a fence ten feet high. I wondered about covenants: I didn’t know you could build a fence like that anymore, but there it was. I looked through the chain links and followed the fence through the woods, until it became clear that I was simply circling the mountaintop and the fence went the distance. At one point the trees thinned out and I could see her house, the glass glistening two hundred yards above my head. I called up through the break—cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted her name—but no one came.

I talked to people on the way down: stopped at each of the houses and asked about the mystery woman at the top. She remained that, a faceless enigma. No one knew her. She never stopped to chat. All people saw as they passed on the road was a figure, obviously female, in a car. One man had put together a Christmas party last year for all the neighbors on the mountain. Everyone had come but Rita McKinley, who had sent regrets.

In Evergreen, I called her number again and got the re-cording. I left her a stiff message, telling her I wanted to see her right away. But I had a hunch that I wasn’t going to hear from the lady, that I’d have to track her to earth and pin her down. I had another hunch, that that might prove to be heavy work.

12

For all my alleged expertise, it was Hennessey who got the first break in the case. While I was spinning my wheels in the mountains, Neal had hit the streets and talked to more book dealers. He had come to a store on East Sixth Avenue where Bobby had sometimes been seen. The owner was a man in his forties named Sean Buckley. He had a good eye for books and he sold them cheap. His store was dark and was sometimes mistaken for a junk palace, but Buckley was no Clyde Fix. He knew exactly what he was doing. His books were priced intentionally low, sometimes drastically low. People talk when they find bargains like that, and Buckley’s store was always crowded with eager treasure hunters.

It was not a place for a claustrophobic: it was dusty, shabby, disorganized; books were piled on the floor and shoved into every nook. Buckley was a pleasant man, easygoing, shy, well liked, highly intelligent. I had spent a rainy afternoon a year ago talking with Buckley about politics, police work, and the intricacies of the book trade. He had just sold a $250 Naked and the Dead to another dealer for $85, knowing full well but not caring much what the price guides said the book was “worth.” The other dealer might eventually get that high-end money, but it wasn’t easy. Norman Mailer has lost a lot of luster since 1948. People don’t care much anymore, so let the other guy take the chance. If it worked, more power to him. The book had cost Buckley eight-five cents at a flea market. Buckley was the best example I had ever seen of the “keep the stock moving” school of bookselling.

I had put him fairly low on my list of people to see. Book-scouts didn’t do much business there: they don’t like to sell to a low retail man because the margin just wasn’t good enough. But Bobby had come in about a week ago with his pockets stuffed with cash. He had flashed a wad bigger than a man’s fist, and no small bills either. It looked like all hundreds from what Buckley could see: it must’ve been several thousand dollars at least. After much prodding, Hennessey had pinned Buckley down to a date. Last Tuesday it was, three days before the murder.

There was another thing. Bobby was dressed to the hilt, three-piece suit and tie, hair and beard trimmed and combed, shoes shined. It had taken Buckley some time to recognize him. He had come to the store at quarter to five, just before closing. Buckley had been on the phone and hadn’t paid much attention at first. Bobby just moved back into the store and started browsing the stacks. As time passed, Buckley began getting restless. He was a man who ran by the clock—he opened and closed on time and seldom stayed open late for anyone. At five-fifteen, Buckley began turning off the lights. At last he walked back and said, in a soft, apologetic voice, “I need to close now.”

Bobby looked up and grinned. Buckley had to take a few steps back, so great was his surprise. No one had ever seen Bobby the Bookscout in a coat and tie.

“My gosh, Bobby,” Buckley said. “Where you going, to a funeral?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Tonight I’m burying my old life.”

You could see right away how much he was enjoying it, Buckley said. There was always a tendency in these street people to strut when they got a little money—delusions of grandeur, you know. “Tonight I’m making the biggest deal of my life,” Bobby said expansively.

That wouldn’t be much of a deal, Buckley thought, but he was too much of a gentleman to say it.

“I’m not gonna be a bookscout anymore, Buckley,” Bobby said. “Not gonna be anybody’s doormat.”

“What are you gonna do?” Buckley said.

Bobby grinned, a sly that’s-for-me-to-know look crossing his face. “You’ll see soon enough. I’ll tell you this much. After tonight I’ll be a book dealer, same as you guys. That’s all I ever needed, just a stake.”

That’s when he pulled the money out, just for effect.

“Well,” Buckley said, “looks like you got it.”

“This is just pocket money. I’ll be shopping here a lot from now on, Buckley. It kills me to see you selling books for a quarter on the dollar and I can’t buy them myself. That’s all gonna change.”

“Well,” Buckley said, “whatever’s happening tonight, I wish you luck.”

“Don’t need luck; just need to be there at seven o’clock. This is the biggest deal Denver’s ever seen, and nobody even knows about it.”

“Good luck anyway.”

This was the gist of the conversation between Bobby and Buckley, as Buckley told it to Hennessey.

* * *

“So,” Hennessey said, “what’s it mean?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Looks like a motive anyway.”

“You mean simple robbery?”

“Sure. The guy flashes a wad like that one time too many. There’s plenty of people who’ll kill you for a roll like that… especially out on the street where this guy worked.”

“That might make sense if it had happened the same night,” I said. “But he was going somewhere just to spend that money. He was due there in two hours: all he was doing in Buckley’s was killing time. That’s why he didn’t buy any books there— he didn’t have any money to spend.”

“You mean the big wad was spoken for.”

“To the last dime. In real life, Bobby was still broke.”

“What’s it mean, then?” Hennessey said again.

“Let’s think about it. Where’d he get the clothes, for one thing? I went through his place, you know, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a necktie or a three-piece suit.”

“You were looking for books. I’ve seen you lose track of time when you’re looking at books.”

“Maybe. I’ll go back and look again, but if there’s a coat and tie anywhere in that apartment I’ll eat your shorts.”

“Whether there is or whether there ain’t,” Hennessey said, “the question still remains, what does it mean?”

“It means Bobby had a coat and tie for one night only. It means he either borrowed or rented it. It doesn’t sound like a rental—not formal enough. Buckley didn’t say he showed up in a tux, did he?”

Hennessey gave a little laugh. “Suit and tie is what he said.”

“I think we’d better ask Buckley how well the clothes fit. I think he borrowed that coat and tie, from someone who was just about his size.”

“Could be anybody,” Hennessey said. “He was pretty average.”

“It didn’t have to be a perfect fit for one night. My guess is he got the coat and tie from the same guy who gave him the money. And I think he was as broke as ever two hours after Buckley saw him. Three days later he was in Goddard’s store trying to sell something. Lambert says he didn’t have anything with him, but maybe it was something small. The fact was, he didn’t have that money anymore. He had given that to someone on Tuesday night, and they didn’t have to kill him for it. I think the fact that he wasn’t killed till Friday night rules out robbery as a motive.”

“It might’ve still been robbery,” Hennessey said. “Maybe not for money. Maybe whoever did it took what Bobby got for the money.”

“That makes it robbery of a different kind, though, doesn’t it? Not your garden-variety thug. The average thug would walk right past fifty thousand dollars’ worth of books to lift twenty bucks from the cash register. This would’ve been somebody with a fairly sophisticated span of knowledge. And a damn cold motive for what he was doing.”

“Well,” Hennessey said, “there are guys like that.”

“There are a lot of guys like that.”

“I’ll tell you how it looks to me. Somebody pays Bobby to do a job. Say he was taking delivery of some literary masterpiece. At this point we don’t know how Bobby got involved—we don’t know why whoever hired him couldn’t‘ve taken delivery himself instead of hiring a bookscout to do it for him. Maybe that part of it isn’t important. The bookscout gets hired, then does a double cross and keeps the merchandise. It takes the client three days to track him down.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“How small can something like that be?”

I looked at him, not understanding the question.

“Bobby had several thousand dollars on him the night he went to Buckley’s,” Hennessey said. “Presumably he was going to buy something at a wholesale price.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far.”

“What’s the retail valuation on something you’d pay up to five grand for?”

“Hell, Neal, it could be anywhere from ten to twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Could it be more than that?”

“If it gets to be much more than that, it stops being wholesale and starts being fraud. Most honorable book dealers figure twenty-five to forty percent as a fair wholesale price. Twenty would be rock-bottom. But for a big-money piece, sometimes you have to go higher than forty percent. If you fall into a piece that’s worth a quarter mil, you might have to put up three-quarters, maybe even eighty percent. That’s still a lot of change for the book dealer.”

“If he can sell it.”

“On that level he can always sell it. The easiest thing in the world to sell is a truly rare book. The biggest problem would be getting the money to buy it.”

I still didn’t see where his mind was going. Hennessey tends to plod in his thinking—that’s why we were a good team. I tend to leapfrog, and sometimes it takes a guy with a more fundamental approach to rein me in and make me see what’s been in front of my face all along.

This time he didn’t seem to know where he was going. He was groping, trying to find a handle.

“You said something a minute ago,” he said. “That most honorable dealers figure such-and-such. How honorable do these guys tend to be?”

“As a group, they’re just like everybody else. There are some old gentlemen straight out of the last century. Fewer of those every day. There are egomaniacs… more of those every day. There are shysters, a few scumbags, a nut or two. There are some guys who’ll take your pants off if you don’t know anything. But I think as a group they have a pretty good standard of ethics. They’ll vary right up and down the scale.”

Hennessey nodded.

“Neal, I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

He blinked and brought himself back to his premise. “Robbery. Bobby bought something and somebody brained him and took it away from him. That idea works, Cliff, if it was something small enough for him to carry it around with him. I think this is going to be a very stupid question, but does it sound feasible for something that small to cost so much money?”

“Hell yes. Why would you think otherwise?”

“It just seems like, for five g’s, you ought to get something more than a booklet.”

I told him the Tamerlane story—how some guy had found one in a bookstore for fifteen bucks and sold it at auction for two hundred grand.

“I hate to say it, but I don’t know what Tamerlane is.”

“Poe’s first book. Just a booklet, like you said, but some of the most expensive stuff in the world is very small. Broadsides, pamphlets, papers…”

“Stuff you could put in a pocket.”

“Sure. That’s the first thing a dealer or a bookscout has to learn. Always look at the little stuff.”

“So it’s not farfetched to think that the bookscout might have been carrying something that somebody would kill him for.”

“Not at all. Just imagine that somebody had found a little piece of scroll signed by Jesus Christ. A silly example—I don’t know who the hell they’d get to authenticate it—but for the sake of argument, okay? How much do you think something like that would be worth?”

“I get your point. And I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to pin down… a motive for robbery. Something so tiny he could carry it in his pocket, but worth big bucks. That’s what he was sent to buy, and somebody killed him and took it away from him.”

“If that’s true, it points back to the book trade. It wasn’t a sudden fight or an old enemy. The answer is in the money. Where did the money go, where did it come from? If we can follow the money, we’ll know a lot more than we know now.”

“There’s one more thing we could check,” Hennessey said. “How about the religion angle?”

I saw it suddenly, what Neal had been pushing around in his head all day.

“They say our boy was religious,” Hennessey said. “Found the Lord in prison a few years ago. That means he went to church somewhere. That means he had a life outside the book business. Maybe friends on a whole different level. Maybe a minister he’d confide in. You only see one side of him when you see him in a bookstore.”

I sat up straight in my chair. “How the hell could I miss something like that?”

“You’re too busy looking at the books,” Hennessey said.

13

The body of Bobby Westfall lay unclaimed in the morgue: if there was a church in Bobby’s life, it had not yet made its presence known. No one had stepped forward and offered Bobby a Decent Christian Burial. The coroner had done more for Bobby in death than most people had in life: his office had spent many man-hours on a long and fruitless search for next of kin. They had found a rumor of a sister living in Salt Lake City, but that had not checked out. Bobby had told people that his mother was dead and he never knew his father. He had mentioned Pennsylvania to several people, but that had not checked out. At seventeen, he had once said, he had been in the army: medical discharge, flat feet. Amazingly, that had not checked out. The army had no record of a Robert Westfall in its service at the time and place that Bobby would have been there. This was important, the coroner said, because if military service could be established Bobby would qualify for burial at Fort Logan. They still had a few leads to check: sometimes a body had to be kept on ice for weeks, until everything petered out. Lacking everything—church, service, next of kin—Bobby would go to an unmarked pauper’s grave at Riverside, and have the earth plowed over him by a bulldozer.

In the morning, I went back to the bookstore beat and Hennessey began checking churches around the neighborhood where Bobby lived. I visited some new stores and went back to the old ones with new questions. Did Bobby ever mention what church he attended? Did he ever mention any names of ministers or people he knew outside the book world? I talked to Ruby Seals, Emery Neff, Jerry Harkness, and Sean Buckley. I went back to Cherry Creek and talked to Roland God-dard and Julian Lambert. It was a wasted morning. Even two bookscouts in Ruby’s store didn’t know much about Bobby. One of them had seen him a few times with the scout called Peter, but no one knew where Peter lived or what his last name was. I wrote down some stuff in my notebook, but I had a feeling that none of it meant anything.

Meanwhile, Hennessey found the church before noon. We thought it likely that Bobby would go to church in his own neighborhood. He didn’t have a car, and probably wouldn’t want to spend Sundays doing what he did every other day of the week—walking or riding a bus. We looked closely at churches that would appeal to born-again types rather than older establishment religions. Ruby remembered that Bobby had once referred to Catholicism disparagingly—“not a true faith,” he had called it—so he wouldn’t like the Episcopal church any better. He probably wasn’t a Lutheran, and anything from the outer limits, such as Unitarianism, was unlikely. No, Bobby was probably caught up in some evangelical splinter group formed by a diploma mill preacher with a slick tongue and a ready supply of hellfire. It was easy: Hennessey found the church on the fifth try. It was one of those little chapels off University Boulevard, the Universal Church of God, it called itself. The preacher recognized Bobby’s picture at once. Yes, Bob was a regular: he seldom missed a Sunday and usually came to Bible studies on Wednesday nights as well. He always came with a fellow named Jefferson or Johnson, good friend of his. They were always together. Hennessey asked it they had come last Wednesday. As a matter of fact they had, the preacher said. Suddenly Jefferson or Johnson became the last known man, except Julian Lambert, to have seen Bobby Westfall alive.

The preacher got the man’s name from the church registry. Jarvis Jackson lived on Gaylord Street, just a few blocks away. The preacher didn’t know either Jackson or Bobby well. They kept to themselves and were quiet and reflective in church. The preacher looked a lot like those birds you see on TV Sunday mornings: sharp and cunning, and dressed in an expensive tailored suit. Hennessey didn’t like him much.

“What does the church do about burying its members?” Hennessey asked.

“That all depends,” the preacher said.

“On what?”

“On whether they’ve made arrangements.”

“In other words, on whether they’ve got any money.”

“Money runs the world, Mr. Hennessey.”

“It looks like old Bob’s headed for a potter’s field funeral, unless somebody stands the tab,” Hennessey said.

The preacher cocked his head and tried to look sympathetic.

Riverside loomed a little larger for dear old Bob.

We met at Ruby’s bookstore and went to talk to Jarvis Jackson together. Jackson lived in the south half of a shabby little duplex. He lived alone except for half a dozen cats. The cats, he explained, were what first drew him and Bob together. The place smelled strongly of sour milk and well-used kitty litter. There was a case of books in the front room and I gravitated toward them and let my eye run over the titles while Hennessey and Jackson went through the preliminaries. There wasn’t anything in the bookcase—some condensed books and other assorted junk. The bottom shelf was well stained with cat piss, the books all fused together. I would’ve cried if there’d been a Faulkner first in there.

Jackson and Bobby had met a year ago at the church. They had sat on a bench after the service and talked cats. After that riveting conversation, Jackson had invited Bobby home for some lemonade and lunch. They had soon become friends. Jackson thought of himself as Bobby’s best friend. He was fifteen years older, but age doesn’t matter when the chemistry’s right. They liked the same things, shared the same philosophy. They liked the Lord, books, and the smell of cat poop, in approximately that order. They never ran out of things to talk about. Twice a week they would meet in a cafe on East Seventeenth and eat together. They discussed the Lord and the Lord’s work. Bobby had an idea that the Lord had something in mind for him. It was probably a surprise, I thought, when he found out what it was. Bobby had always wanted to do missionary work, but he’d spent all his life putting out brush-fires. Jackson had heard of Bob’s death only this morning, when he’d read about it in the paper.

“When did you see him last?” I said.

“Wednesday night. He always came by here. We’d eat something, then walk over to church. Neither of us drove. We always walked together.”

“Did you talk about anything?”

“We discussed the Lord’s work over dinner.”

“Anything other than that?”

“Not then, no.”

“Some other time, then?”

“After church we came back here and talked some more. Bob didn’t seem to want to go home. Me, I’m retired…I don’t mind staying up late to talk things over.”

“What did you talk about that night?”

“He said he’d done a big book deal. But it wasn’t working out like he’d thought.”

“When had he done this?”

“The night before. He had been up all night.”

“Did he tell you what the deal was?”

“Not exactly. He did say it involved a lot of money. But it wasn’t working out.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“He didn’t go into any details. Just said things never seemed to work out right for him, somehow it just never went right. He couldn’t understand why the Lord always wanted him to fail. The only thing he could figure out was that the Lord was still angry from the things he’d done as a young man. That’s why he wanted to talk to me—he needed reassurance that the Lord is good, not vengeful, that the Lord doesn’t always work in ways we can understand. He doesn’t do things for our convenience or personal glory. There’s a bigger purpose to His acts. We all need to be reminded of that on occasion.”

“Yes sir.”

“So I listened and we talked. It seemed to help him to talk about it. I think he was trying to make up his mind.”

“About what, sir?”

“What to do about it. He was angry. I think he was even angry at the Lord until we talked about it. I think I got him to focus that anger where it really belonged.”

“Where’s that, Mr. Jackson?”

“At himself. At his failings and weaknesses.”

“Or maybe at someone else?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t tell him to do that. It would never be any advice of mine that one man should hate another.”

“Did he say he hated somebody?”

“He was angry. He felt he’d been lied to and cheated. And I think he was trying to make up his mind what to do about it.”

“But he never mentioned any names?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe a name you’ve half forgotten.”

He looked at me blankly.

“Did he give you any idea where he’d gotten the money for the deal?”

“I assume someone gave it to him. I know he didn’t have any money of his own.”

“Did he say anything that might indicate where the deal was done?”

“No… nothing.”

I looked at Hennessey. He gave a frown and turned his palms up.

“I’m sorry I’m such a dead end,” Jackson said. “I want to help if I can. It’s an awful thing, what happened to Bob. I want to help, but it was his business and I just didn’t pry. All I know is that he worked all night on it. He borrowed a coat and tie from me…he wanted to make a good impression… said it was to be the first day of his new life. He was sorry later that he hadn’t gone in his old clothes. There was too much work for him to be dressed like that. He brought the suit back in pretty bad shape.”

“Could we see that suit?”

“It’s right back here in the closet.”

He went into a back room and returned a moment later with the coat and tie. The pants hung loosely under the coat. It had a vest, as Buckley had said, and it looked worn and limp in the light of day.

“He was sorry he had taken it,” Jackson said again. “It’s pretty well ruined, as you can see. He apologized and said he’d buy me a new one if he ever got enough money together. Bob was like that. He never thought ahead. He wanted to dress up and see what it felt like, and he never gave a thought to the work he had to do.”

“Then there were a lot of books?”

“Oh, yes… that much I do know. It took him all night to move them.”

I went through the coat pockets, then the vest. In the pants I found two receipts from a 7-Eleven store.

“Are these your receipts?” I asked.

Jackson looked at them and shook his head. “Must be something he left in there.”

I showed them to Hennessey. “No telling which store,” Neal said “Must be hundreds of ‘em in Denver.”

Suddenly Jackson said, “It was on Madison Street. I remember it now, he went in that store late that night. He was hungry, he hadn’t had anything to eat in almost two days. He had been working about four hours and was feeling faint. He went out on the upper porch for some air. He saw the sign, 7-Eleven, about half a block away. It was the only place open that time of night. It was unusual that way—usually they don’t put those places in residential areas like that, but there it was… like the Lord had sent it just for him. He had two dollars in his pocket. So he walked up and got a soft drink and a Hostess cake.”

I asked for his phone book. There was only one 7-Eleven on Madison Street. It was in the 1200s, only a few blocks away.

We found the house without much trouble after that. It was half a block north of the 7-Eleven, on the opposite side of the street. It was the only house in the block with an upper porch. The doors were open and there were people inside, pricing stuff for an estate sale. There were signs announcing that the sale would be this coming weekend. Inside were bookshelves. There were bookshelves in every room, all of them empty.

14

“Where’re your books?” I said from the open doorway.

The man looked up. “We don’t open till Saturday.”

“I’m just wondering where all your books went.”

“Come back Saturday and I’ll tell you.”

A smartass, I thought. I walked into the room and Hennessey came in behind me. I flashed my tin and said, “How about telling me now.”

He looked at the badge, unimpressed. “So you work for me. Big deal. Am I supposed to hyperventilate and lose control of my body functions because you can’t find a real job?”

“Look, pal, I’m not trying to impress you. I’m asking for your cooperation on a murder case.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s been killed?”