Booked to die

“How about letting me ask the questions.”

I knew it was a bad start. I meet a lot of characters like him, cop-haters from the word go, and I never handle them well.

“You can ask all you want,” he said. “There’s nothing that says I have to talk to you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“I should be. I’m a lawyer.”

Wonderful. So far I was batting a thousand.

“I don’t owe you bastards one goddamn thing,” he said. “I got a ticket coming over here this morning.”

Now the woman looked up. She was in her mid-thirties, five to ten years younger than the man. Pretty she’d be, in a cool dress, relaxing by a pool: pretty in the bitchy way of a young Bette Davis, mean and intelligent and all the more interesting because of that. Now she was dirty and hot, doing a job that must seem endless—cataloging and sifting and fi-nally putting a price tag on each of the hundreds of items of a man’s life.

“You have just made the acquaintance of Valentine Fletcher Ballard,” she said. “Charming, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to make of the two of them, didn’t know if they were playing it for laughs or if I had come in in the middle of something. The look he gave her seemed to say that they weren’t playing anything.

“You’d think the goddamn mayor of this goddamn city would have better things for the goddamn cops to do than sit in a speed trap with goddamn radar guns harassing the hell out of honest citizens,” he said.

“Don’t even try to talk to him,” the woman said. “You can’t talk to a fool.”

The guy went right on as if she hadn’t said a word. “Have you seen what they did on Montview? Lowered the goddamn speed limit all of a sudden to thirty miles an hour. It’s four lanes in there, for Christ’s sake, it ought to be fifty. You think the mayor gives a rat’s ass about safety? Don’t make me laugh. They bring ten cops in on fucking overtime just to write tickets and generate revenue. When you get your cost-of-living raise this year, copper, remember whose pocket it came out of and how you got it.”

I hate the term copper, but I couldn’t argue much. I’ve never liked the city’s use of cops that way. If you have to bring a cop in on overtime, let him do the legwork on a murder case or chase down a rapist. Let him walk the streets in a high-crime area, where his presence might mean something. Don’t put him in the bushes with a radar gun on a street that’s been deliberately underposted. Don’t make sneaks out of cops. The guy was right, people don’t like that, and that’s how cop-haters are born.

“Goddamn pirates,” he said. “You fuckers are no better than pickpockets.”

All I could do was try to lighten it up. “Hey, I’m doing my part,” I said. “I’m looking for a killer.”

“So I’ll ask you again,” the guy said. “Who’s been killed?”

“The guy you sold these books to.”

He blinked. The woman stood up and looked at me.

“You want to talk to me now?” I said. “Maybe we can get off on a better footing. I’m Detective Janeway. This is Detective Hennessey.”

The guy finally said, “I’m Val Ballard.”

He made no attempt to introduce the woman: wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. I thought it was strange that neither had spoken directly to the other, but maybe that was just my imagination.

It wasn’t. She said, “I’m Judith Ballard Davis. The klutz you’ve been talking to likes to pretend he’s my brother. Don’t blame me for that.”

He ignored her fairly effectively: all she got for her trouble was a look of slight annoyance. I was beginning to see a pattern emerging in the hostility. He ignored her: she heaped insults upon him, but only through another person.

I said, to anyone who wanted to answer it, “Whose house is this?”

They both began talking at once. Neither showed any willingness to yield, and the words tumbled over themselves in indecipherable disorder.

“Let’s try that again,” I said. “Eeeny meeny miney mo.” Mo came down on her. That was a mistake, for Ballard began immediately to sulk, and in a moment he went back to his work. I’d have to warm him up, if you could call it that, all over again.

“The house belongs… belonged…to my uncle. Stanley Ballard.”

“And he died, right?”

“He died,” she said.

“When did he die?”

“Last month. Early May.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Old age… cancer…I don’t know.” She didn’t seem to care much. “When you’re that old, everything breaks down at once.”

“How old was he?”

“Eighty, I guess… I’m not sure.”

“He was your father’s brother?”

“Older brother. There was almost twenty years between them.”

“Where’s your father?”

“Dead. Killed in an auto accident a long time ago.”

“What about your mother?”

“They’re all dead. If you’re looking for all the living Ballards, I’m it.”

I looked at him. “What about you?”

“I told you what my name is.”

Something was slipping past me. “Are you two brother and sister or what?” I said.

Neither wanted to answer that.

“Come on, people, what’s the story? Do you inherit the old man’s estate?”

“Lock, stock, and barrel,” she said.

“Both of you?”

She gave a loud sigh. At last she said, “Yes, goddammit, both of us.”

“All right,” I said pleasantly. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? You inherit the house and all the contents equally, right?”

“What’s this got to do with anything?” Ballard said. “Whose business is it, anyway, what I inherit and what I do with it?”

“I have to watch every goddamn penny,” Judith said to no one. “If he gets a chance, he’ll screw my eyes out.”

“Gee, but it’s nice to see people get along so well,” I said. “Have you two always been so lovey?”

“I hate his guts,” she said. “No secret about that, mister. The only thing I’m living for is to get this house sold and the money split so I won’t ever have to see his stupid face again.”

“When you decide you want to talk to me, I’ll be in the other room,” Ballard said, and left.

“Son of a bitch,” Judith said before he was quite out of the room.

I had this insane urge to laugh. She knew it, and did laugh.

“We’re some dog and pony show. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s with you two?”

“Just bad blood. It’s always been there. It’s got nothing to do with anything, and I’d just as soon not talk about it.”

“How do you manage to work together if you don’t even speak?”

“With great difficulty. What can I tell you?”

“What happened to the books?”

“We sold them. You know that.”

“You split the money?”

“You better believe it.”

“Did you know the guy you sold them to?”

“Never saw him before. We were in here working and he just showed up. Walked in on us just like you did. Said he heard we had some books and wondered if we wanted to make a deal for them.”

“Did he say where he’d heard about it?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. The man had cash money, that’s all I care about.”

“Did you go through the books before you sold them?”

“What do I care about a bunch of old books? Besides, I told you we were in a hurry to sell them. I don’t want to stay around him any longer than I have to.”

“So neither of you looked at the books, or had a book dealer look at them, before you sold them?”

“Look,” she said shortly. “There weren’t any old books in there, okay? It was just run-of-the-mill crap. Anybody with half a brain could see that.”

She was angry now. The thought of blowing an opportunity will sometimes do that to people. She said, “Everybody knows books have to be old. Everybody knows that.”

I shook my head.

“What do you know about it?”

“Not much. A little.”

“What could a cop know about books? Don’t come in here and tell me what I should’ve done. You see those bookshelves? They were all full. There are more like this in every room. He had the basement laid out like a fucking library. Do you have any idea how many books were in this house? I haven’t got enough to do, now I’ve got to go through all this crap looking for a few lousy books that might be valuable?“

I shrugged.

“Besides,” she said, “Stan did that.”

“Did what?”

“He had a book dealer come do an appraisal. It was three, four years ago, when he first got the cancer. He had an appraisal done and it was there with his papers when he died.”

“Do you remember the name of the appraiser?”

“I don’t have enough to do without remembering names?”

“I’ll need to see that appraisal.” I made it a demand, not a request. “Do you have a copy?”

“You better believe it. I’ve got a copy of everything. With a son of a bitch like him around, I’d better have a copy.”

Ballard, in the next room, had heard this, and he came in fuming.

“If you want to talk to me, talk,” he said. “I’ve got things to do today.”

I shifted easily from her to him.

“Did you look at the books?”

“Hell no. There wasn’t anything there worth the trouble. Read my lips and believe it, there was nothing there. This joker wanted them, I say let him have the damn things. I told him he could have my half.”

“Is that the way you sold ‘em?”

“I sold him my half,” Ballard said. He still refused to admit that his sister shared the same planet.

“He came here and took all the books,” Judith said. “Is that what you want to know, Detective? The little man came and took all the frigging books, okay? He gave me some money and the rest went…” She jerked her thumb at her brother, who stiffened as if he’d just been slapped.

“Let’s talk for a minute about the man who came and took the books. You say he just showed up one night?”

“We were in here just like we are now. I looked up and he was standing in the doorway. I thought he was full of shit.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke. “He was wearing this cheap suit that didn’t fit and strutting around like one of the Rockefellers. He came in the night we started and said he wanted to buy the books.”

“Who the hell is telling this?” Ballard shouted. He made sure he talked to me, not her. “God damn it, are you talking to me or what?”

“Oh, I don’t care,” I said wearily.

“I said the only way I’d sell the damn books before the sale started was all in one fell swoop. I didn’t want any damn picking and choosing, you see what I’m saying? Get ‘em all out of here, that’s what I wanted.”

“What did he say to that?”

He gave a sweep of his hand. “They’re gone, ain’t they?”

“I’m not asking you the question, Mr. Ballard, to belabor the obvious. I want to know what the man said when you told him he’d have to buy all the books. Did he act like he wanted to do that or not?”

“He didn’t act any way. He just said put a price on ‘em.”

“And what price did you put on them?”

“In a sale I thought they’d be worth a buck or two apiece. For a guy to take ‘em all, I told him I’d knock something off of that.”

“Could we maybe get to what the final price was?”

“He gave me two thousand dollars. What he did with the other two thousand’s none of my business.”

I looked at Judith, who managed to look quite sexy smoking. “Did you get the other two thousand, Mrs. Davis?” I asked in my best long-suffering voice.

“You better believe it.”

Ballard took me on a tour of the house. Judith followed at a distance, as if she didn’t trust him long out of her sight. I tried to imagine what long-ago rift had ripped them so deeply and permanently apart. I tried to imagine them locked away in here for days on end, divvying up the old man’s loot without speaking. The picture defied me. Only greed could motivate them, greed and hate and the all-powerful ego motive to come out on top.

The basement was impressive, but then, I could see what it had been with all the books in it. It was lined with bookcases, against the walls and in rows, library-style, in the center of the room. I did some quick arithmetic and figured that the shelves here and upstairs might hold as many as nine thousand books.

“The old man really loved his books,” I said with admiration.

“Some guys like sex,” Judith said from the doorway. “Stan liked books.”

“So you sold the books for forty, fifty cents apiece?”

“I wasn’t gonna quibble,” Ballard said. “The guy came back with two grand. Two grand is two grand, and I wanted the crap out of here.”

I took a picture of Bobby Westfall out of my notebook. “Is this the guy?”

“That’s him,” Ballard said. “That a dead picture?”

I nodded and showed it to her. She nodded and looked away.

“Who do you think killed him?” she said.

“We’ll see,” I said.

We talked some more, and it all boiled down to this: They had struck a deal and Bobby had come one night last week and stripped the house of everything that remotely resembled a book. He had worn that same silly suit for the heavy work. They didn’t know anything else about him— where he’d come from, where he’d gone—the only record of the transaction was the receipt that Ballard had written out (copy to her, and you’d better believe it) to keep it straight and legal. Bobby had signed it with an undecipherable scrawl and left his copy on the table. All he wanted was to get the books and get on the road.

He had come for the books in a huge truck, a U-Haul rental. Now we were getting somewhere. Ruby had said that Bobby had no driver’s license: that meant someone else had to have rented the truck. I was hungry for a new name to be thrown into the hopper: I was eager to begin sweating that unseen accomplice. I felt we were one name away from breaking it, and I wanted that name and I wanted it now.

But Bobby had come to Madison Street alone. If someone else had rented the truck, why not ask that buddy to give a hand with the heavy lifting? The obvious answer was that Bobby wanted no one to know what he had really bought from Stanley Ballard’s estate. He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. Ballard and his sister kept after their own work and before they knew it the night slipped away. Bobby loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.

During all of this, Hennessey had not said a word. This is the kind of cop Neal is: he melts into the woodwork; he listens, he looks, he adds two and two, then stares at the number four to see if there’s any broken type. I didn’t notice when he’d stepped away: I found him on the front porch talking with a neighbor.

“Cliff, this is Mr. Greenwald. He and Mr. Ballard were friends for fifty years.”

We stood on Ballard’s front porch and Greenwald stood on his, and we talked easily across the hedge. Ballard was already living here when Greenwald moved in in 1937. They had a great mutual passion—books. In a very different way, they reminded me of Bobby Westfall and Jarvis Jackson—two lonely guys held together by honest affection and one or two deep common denominators. Ballard was an old bachelor: Greenwald’s wife had died in 1975, and the two men took their dinners together at a place they liked, a few blocks away.

Greenwald was a leathery old man, bald with white fringe hair and a white mustache. I could see his books through the window. They had belonged to the book clubs together, Greenwald said: every month they’d get half a dozen books, read them and discuss them. They weren’t collectors in the real sense, though both had accumulated a lot of titles over fifty years. It was a comfort, Greenwald said, to see a copy of a book you loved on the shelf. It didn’t have to be a fine expensive edition. This was how they both felt: books were meant to be read, not hoarded. Both of them gave a lot of books away—to nursing homes, library sales, and other worthy charities. “What’s the use of having a book that’s too good to read?” he said. “Half the fun is giving the books away.”

I could see his point, though I hadn’t agreed with it for years. “Did Mr. Ballard ever have anything that might be called valuable?”

Greenwald looked away and shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t imagine. We didn’t do it for that reason.”

“Still, sometimes people pick up things, sometimes by accident.”

Greenwald shrugged again.

“Did Mr. Ballard ever go to estate sales or junk stores looking for books? Maybe he found something that way.”

“Never, and I can tell you that with absolute certainty. He wasn’t a book hunter, he was a book buyer. He never went to used bookstores. He bought them when they were new and read them all. He was in the Book-of-the-Month for as long as I knew him, maybe longer. I think he started soon after the clubs came in, in the early thirties. You can check on that—he kept all his records from the clubs, all the way back to when he started.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. He kept all the flyers and bulletins…I know you’ll find them there in his den, in that big filing cabinet. He used to keep the club flyers and write his notes in the margins. He’d never write in a book, of course, but he’d mark up those advance flyers they sent every month, little notes to himself—which books to buy, which ones to keep, which to give away. I do the same thing, but it’s a habit I picked up from him. I’ve only been doing it about twenty years. His files go back much further.”

“May I come over, sir, and see your books?”

“Certainly.”

We walked across and went into Greenwald’s house. It was like a branch library: row upon row, bookcase after bookcase, all cheap editions of great books. The two old men had fine taste. Anyone could see that.

“We had a lot to talk about, Stan and I. We had been around the world together many times, without ever leaving this block, if you know what I mean.”

“I sure do,” I said. “It’s a wonderful hobby.”

“Oh, it is. It’s harder today, though. You can’t find the good books, like you once could. People don’t read anymore, or when they do read they read things that couldn’t have been published in the old days. I don’t know: my days are all in the past. Everyone I knew is dead, and no one is writing anything worth reading. This is a different world from when I was a boy. I can’t read the stuff they publish today, can you?”

“Some of it,” I said. “Every once in a while it still happens, Mr. Greenwald. I don’t know how it happens, or why, but it still does. Sometimes a great book not only gets published but read, by one helluva lot of people.”

“Stan would’ve liked you,” Greenwald said. “He liked everybody who read and appreciated good things. He was an old gentleman, I’ll tell you that. Not like those two next door, squabbling with their silly silent feud over every last dime. Stan’s turning over in his grave this very minute. Money never came first with Stan. Honor, trust, friendship, those were the qualities he believed in. A great old man. His like will not come this way again.”

We went back to Ballard’s house. I told Judith I would have to see her uncle’s files. The two of them followed us into the den and watched while I went through a great old filing cabinet. It was all there as Greenwald had promised—the entire record of Stan Ballard’s love affair with the Book-of-the-Month Club: receipts, billing statements, flyers so annotated and footnoted that I groaned at the thought of wading through it. But Ballard came from a generation that was taught penmanship: his writing was small but precise and, in the final analysis, beautiful. It looked to me like the old man had kept the economy of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, going strong since March 1931. He had bought the main selection and six other titles that month. The average price was around a dollar: not much in today’s world of the $20 novel, but in 1931 there were men working a sixty-hour week for less money than Stan Ballard was spending per month on books.

“What did your uncle do for a living?” I asked.

“He was a stockbroker,” Judith said.

“He got into the book club in 1931. That couldn’t‘ve been much of a year for stockbrokers, but he seemed to have plenty of money to spend on books… even in the Depression.”

“He inherited money,” Judith said. “I don’t know how much; he sure didn’t leave much cash in his estate. He probably spent it all on books. It didn’t matter how the times were, he always had money for that.”

I thumbed through the papers. “I’ll have to take these files.”

They didn’t like that. They were on guard now, full of new suspicion. I could almost hear the wheels turning in their heads. Maybe the old man had kept his cash hidden somewhere. Maybe there was a big, juicy stack of thousand-dollar bills tucked into the book file—book money unspent.

“I don’t think you should just walk out of here with that stuff,” Ballard said.

“I can get a court order if I have to, and I think you know that,” I said. “Why don’t we make it easy on ourselves?”

“What is this stuff?” Judith said. “Is there anything in there worth any money?”

“I’d be amazed if there was. You can look for yourself while we pack it up. I’ll give you a receipt and after this is over you’ll get it all back.”

“Who’ll get it back?” Ballard said.

“Whoever the hell wants it.”

We started packing the files. I could see it was going to take some time, because Ballard and Judith wanted to examine each file microscopically as we went.

“This could take all night,” I said. “Let’s try to cut to the chase. Where’s the original copy of that appraisal he had done?”

“The executor has it,” Judith said. “A lawyer named Walter Drey fuss. I think he and Stan were soldiers together in the Revolutionary War.”

“One of us ought to go see him,” I said to Hennessey.

“I’ll go. I’ll have to take a cab.”

“Good. If you hurry you might make it before his office closes. I’ll call and tell him you’re coming.”

It was dark before I was finished at Ballard’s. We packed all the contents of Stanley Ballard’s filing cabinet into six big cardboard boxes and I loaded them into my car. Neither Ballard nor Judith offered to help. I thanked them and left them to their awful job. I hope I never hate anyone the way they hate each other, I thought as I drove downtown to fetch Hennessey. Then I thought of Jackie Newton, and the world was a darker place again.

Hennessey was waiting for me on 17th Street. Under his arm he had a single folder, which contained Stanley Ballard’s will and a copy of the appraisal. He had made no attempt to read the will—Walter Dreyfuss had given him a verbal summary—but he had looked the book appraisal over.

“What’s it say?”

“Book club fiction, almost without exception. Worthless.”

“W’ho did the appraisal?”

“That dame up in Evergreen. Rita McKinley.”

I grunted.

“So where does this leave us?” Hennessey said.

“Right back where we started. It was something small, and Bobby had to buy the whole damn library to get it; something so tiny you could carry it in your pocket, but so potent it makes the hair stand up on my neck just thinking about it.”

“How’re we gonna find it?”

“I’m gonna dig. I’m gonna comb through every piece of paper in this state if I have to.”

I dropped Hennessey at Ruby’s store, where he had parked his car, and I started back to my apartment for what I thought would be another long night’s work.

Then something happened that changed my life for all time.

15

I was full of nervous energy: I wanted something to break that would engage me fully and keep me going through the night. I had two possibilities, either of which ought to do it. I took the Ballard files up to my place, but when I started to work I decided to run down the U-Haul lead.

There are almost fifty places in Denver that rent U-Hauls. A lot of gas stations are subagents and rent them out of their back yards. I sat at the phone with a Yellow Pages and began to work. I did it the same way we had found the church, beginning at Bobby’s place and working in a widening circle between there and Madison Street. This is what police work is all about: your trigger finger always gets more action on the telephone than in any gunplay. I hummed “Body and Soul” between calls, trying to get a hint of the way Coleman Hawkins used to play it. “Dah-dah de dah-dah dumm.” It didn’t work. Nothing worked. I gave them Bobby’s name on the insane chance that someone somewhere might’ve had soup for brains and rented a $25,000 truck to a guy with no driver’s license. You never can tell. Lacking a file on Westfall, they would have to look through all their receipts for the night of June 10. I waited through interminable delays. Most of the little places had no extra help—the guy who rented the U-Hauls was the guy who pumped your gas. Customers came and went while I dangled on the phone. One place took almost thirty minutes, and it turned out that they hadn’t rented any trucks on the night in question.

The truck outlets themselves were, if anything, slower than the corner gas stations. Those places are all on computer now. This is supposed to make finding information faster and easier, but in real life it doesn’t turn out that way. Have you noticed how much longer you have to wait in bank lines, and at Target and Sears stores, since the computer came in? I hate computers, though I know that without them police work would be like toiling in a medieval zoo. After three hours of being told that the computer was down, that there were no such rentals, that they’d have to check and call me back, I was ready to adjourn to my favorite beanery. I couldn’t raise Carol, but when I’m that hungry I don’t mind eating alone.

Before I could get out of there, the phone rang.

It was Barbara Crowell. Her voice was quaking, terrified.

“Janeway! My God, I can’t believe you finally got off that phone!”

“Hello, Barbara,” I said without enthusiasm.

“Can you come over here?”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s… him.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I know he’s out there.”

“Out where?”

“Somewhere outside. I saw him.”

“When did you see him?”

She breathed at me for fifteen seconds. Then she said, “I think I’m losing my mind. 1 see him everywhere. I don’t know what to do. Everywhere I look I see his face. Then I look again and he’s gone. Then he’s there again. I hear a sudden noise and I freak out. I’m afraid of the dark. The telephone rings and I jump out of my skin. I answer it and there’s no one there. I know it’s him. All of a sudden I’m afraid of the goddamn dark. I’ve never been afraid of anything and now I see shadows everywhere.”

“All right, calm down. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

I parked a block away from her place and walked over. I came up carefully, keeping in shadow. For a long time I stood across the street and watched her apartment, and nothing happened. Her light was a steady beacon at the top. I walked down the street and around the corner and came up from the back. There was no one around: I could see quite clearly. I skirted the house and went in through the front, and I stood in the dark hall and watched the street. It was quiet: people were settling in for the night.

I climbed the three flights to the top and knocked on her door.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me.”

She clawed at the locks and ripped the door open.

“Jesus, what took you so long?”

“I wanted to walk around and look the place over.”

“Did you see him?”

“Barbara, there’s nobody there.”

She closed her eyes and collapsed against me. I held her with one arm and closed the door with the other. Eventually I got her to the sofa and sat her down. Then I went through it all again, the same routine we’d done before: the coffee, the calming words, the lecture. She looked like a little girl, ready to explode in tears. I couldn’t help being angry and sorry for her at the same time.

“Jackie doesn’t need to torture you, honey,” I said. “You do a good enough job on yourself.”

“I know I saw him this morning. That’s what set me off.”

“Where did you see him?”

“I was on my way to work. I had stopped at a red light and he pulled up beside me. I could sense him there looking at me.”

“What do you mean you could sense him? What does that mean?”

“I couldn’t look at him.”

“It might’ve been the man in the moon sitting there for all we know.”

“It was him. I saw his car. There couldn’t be another car like that, so don’t tell me I’m imagining it. When the light turned green he pulled out ahead of me and turned the corner. I couldn’t be mistaken about that car.”

I left her alone for a while. I turned down the lights and went to the window and looked down in the empty street.

“While you’re scaring yourself to death, Jackie’s probably home watching TV,” I said. Or breaking in a new dog, I thought.

“He’s not home,” she said. “He’s out there somewhere.”

I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“Call him up if you think he’s home,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Go ahead, call him and see. You’re not afraid of him; call him and see if he’s home. If he is, I won’t bother you anymore.”

“All right.”

I didn’t need to look up the number: I had known it for more than a year. I dialed it and waited. No one answered.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Looks like Jackie’s hiding out there in the bushes, just waiting for you to show your face.”

She shivered and the goose bumps started.

“I guess you can go hide in the bedroom,” I said. “Tremble in the dark for the rest of your life.”

She cried at that. She cried a good deal. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t know how to push her off the dime. What was worse, I wasn’t sure anymore what Jackie was ca-pable of, or what I wanted Barbara Crowell to do about him.

“God, I hate having you hate me,” she said at one point.

“If I hated you I wouldn’t be here. I told you before, this isn’t my line of work. I should be well fed and home by now, settling in for a long night’s work.”

I kept looking down in the street. Softly, I said, “Jackie’s probably working somewhere. Trying to figure out a new way to rip somebody off. Maybe he has a date tonight. Maybe he’ll like her better than you. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll be her problem.”

“You bastard!” she cried.

“Yeah, 1 know. It’s the company I keep. Pogo was right. We have met the enemy and it is us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time.”

“It doesn’t matter. You got anything to eat here?”

“I could fix you some bacon and eggs.”

“Jesus, that sounds marvelous.”

We ate. The coffee and the food warmed her up. I tried to get away from that judgmental tone I had taken with her, and after a while we were able to converse in a more or less normal way, the way men and women have always done. I even managed to make her laugh. When that was over, she said, “What do people call you… friends, I mean.”

“Cliff usually does it.”

She turned it over in her mind. “That’s a good man’s name. Can I call you that?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

Suddenly she said. “Will you stay with me tonight?”

I was off duty. I didn’t have anything better to do. The murderer of an unknown bookscout could wait till tomorrow.

“Sure,” I said.

She was surprised. “Do you mean it?”

“Yeah, I’ll stay,” I said.

She looked at the bedroom, then at me. Clearly, she didn’t know how to read me.

“It’ll be all right if you want to…you know…if you don’t hate me too much.”

“I’m not staying here tonight for a shackjob, Barbara. I’ll make you an even trade-off. I’ll get you through the night, then you’ve got to do something for me.”

The look of frightened warmth faded, till only the fright was left.

“I know what you want. The only thing you ever cared about was putting him away. You’ll do anything for that, won’t you?”

My silence was like a nolo plea.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“Then I’m leaving.”

I started toward the door.

“Wait!” she cried.

I stopped and turned.

“Please wait… please. Look, I’ll try, okay?”

“You’ve got to do better than that.”

“Help me, Cliff… please don’t leave.”

“I’m trying to help you. I don’t know what the answer is. I may only end up getting you killed…I don’t know. 1 know you can’t go on the way you are. So tomorrow morning, accompanied by me, you will drive out to the Jeffco DA’s office. You will swear out charges of kidnapping, assault and battery. I don’t know, it’s probably too late for the rape charge, but we’ll tell him about it and let the DA decide. Then we come back to Denver and find us a judge and get you a restraining order. If the son of a bitch comes near you after that, you will call a number I will give you and we will come and bust his ass. If you won’t meet me that far, there’s not much I can do.”

She didn’t say anything. I said, “We just keep going over the same ground. It won’t get any easier. One way or another, you’ve got to face it.”

“Don’t tell me what I’ve got to face. You won’t be here, you won’t have to face it. Why should you care? You just want one thing; you don’t care what happens to me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. You hate him so much you’d use me to get him. At least be honest enough to admit that. Who was it that took me out of his place? If you’d left me alone I’d probably be fine now. He’d‘ve done what he wanted and that would be the end of it. But you had to take me. You had to put me between you, and now you tell me there’s nothing you can do. Go on, get out of here.“

I couldn’t go after that. I still didn’t know what to say to her.

“I don’t understand you two,” she said. “How do two men come to hate each other that much?”

“I don’t know. It’s not covered in the police manual.”

“It’s called human nature,” she said. “I guess they don’t have writers for that.”

Here’s how it happened. I put Barbara to bed and settled down on her sofa. I watched TV till my brain went limp, then I turned it off and lay quiet with my own thoughts. At 2:30 I heard a car door slam. I went to the window and looked out. Jackie was across the street, looking up at me. I knew he couldn’t see me with the light out, so I stood still and watched him. Poor Barbara, what a mess she’s in, I thought. He really is crazy, I thought—here he comes now, across the street, into the dark places under the window, up the stairs. In another moment I could hear his footsteps. I had maybe twenty seconds to decide what to do. Whatever I decided, there wouldn’t be any logic to it. None of this made any sense: it never does when you’re dealing with a Jackie Newton. I will kill him, I thought: when he comes through that door I’ll blow his brains out and take all the heat tomorrow. This was a rational, cold decision: in that twenty seconds all the consequences raced through my head. I saw it with crystal clarity: all the flak that would trickle down from City Hall to the cop on the beat. All over town tomorrow, guys in blue would be asking one question: What the hell was Janeway doing there at that time of night? Did I set Jackie up? Did I goad him, then execute him with no more thought than a gangster gives his enemy? Everyone knew I hated the man: even Barbara knew it, and she barely knew me. All this flashed through me with the power of instinctive knowledge, something as simple as your own name, something you don’t have to ponder or weigh. (live me some time and I could describe every memo and phone call, everything they’d be saying tomorrow from the mayor to the manager of safety, and from there to the chief of police. Give me time, I thought.

Then Jackie came to the door, and my time was up.

I eased back into the bedroom and woke Barbara. “Don’t make a sound,” I said. “Just get up and put on a robe. Jackie’s here.”

I had to put my hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Luckily, I had anticipated that.

I got her up, though it wasn’t easy. She had gone rigid with fear. I pushed her into the closet and closed the door. Then 1 got in her bed and pulled the covers up to the top of my head. I’m as crazy as she is, I thought: I’m as nuts as Jackie. Is this police procedure? Is this the way you catch a guy? All I can say is, it felt right. I took out my gun and held it like a hot water bottle, tight against my heart. I savored the surprise Jackie had coming: I could hardly keep from laughing.

Nothing from then on seemed real.

I heard him kick the door in. It’s amazing how quiet that can be when it’s done in one swift blow. The unbreakable deadbolt ripped through the wood like so much cardboard and he was coming fast. He crossed the room in four giant strides and came into the bedroom. He jerked back the covers and even then I didn’t know whether to kill him. 1 came up with the blanket, the gun leading the way. “Kiss me, sugar,” I said, and I cracked steel against his head. He went down like I’d shot him, and before he could move I had the light on and the gun cocked against his head.

I had him facedown on the floor beside the bed, the gun jamming him behind the ear. One move and Barbara Crowell would have Jackie Newton’s brains for a throw rug. He knew it too: the blow had dazed him but he was coming out of it now. He kept trying to look back at my gun. He was bleeding out of the left eyebrow where 1 had opened his head to the bone. I kept him there, kissing the floor for another minute while I patted him down. He wasn’t carrying anything, the arrogant bastard. I backed off slowly. “Just stay where you are, Newton. Don’t even think about getting up.”

When I was ready, I told him to get up. “Get against that wall,” I said, “face-first.” He didn’t say a word, just let his eyes rake me over like before. I was terrified so it must’ve worked. “Turn around,” I said again. I shoved him against the wall and jerked his hands behind him. Then I got the cuffs and shackled him. I made it tight; I didn’t care much about chafing him. I called Barbara out of the closet but she wouldn’t come. I called her again, louder.

“Just stand there, punk,” I said. “Keep your face to that wall and you might make it downtown in one piece.”

I went to the closet and opened it. Barbara was sitting with her hands over her eyes. I took her by the arm, but she looked to be in shock. I told her it was okay, she could come out now, but she didn’t seem to believe it.

“Come on,” I said. “You’ve got to get dressed and go downtown with us.”

She didn’t seem to understand simple F.nglish. She couldn’t look at Jackie, who had turned slightly so he could see her. Jackie knew what intimidation was: he knew what a hold he had over her. I kicked him in the ass, hard enough to break a bone, and he turned slowly back to the wall. Blood was everywhere, on the wall, on the floor, and all over Jackie.

“Get dressed,” I said to Barbara.

She didn’t move. I went to her closet and took out a blouse and a pair of jeans. “Go in the bathroom and put these on,” I said. When I looked in her face, I saw a picture of fear and despair so absolute it was heartbreaking. “C’mon, Barb,” I said, as gently as I could. “Get dressed, hon, we’ve got work to do.” She shook her head and dropped the clothes on the floor. I picked them up and guided her to the bathroom. I left the door open a crack, and every so often I peeped in and tried to talk her into her clothes. Put on the jeans, Barbara. That’s good. Now the blouse. Real fine.

Suddenly she found her voice. “Tell him to go away,” she said through the door. “I don’t want him here.”

When she came out of the bathroom, I took her under my arm and gave her a big hug. It only got the tears started again. She began to tremble and whimper and I didn’t know what to do with her.

Jackie began to laugh.

1 knew how to stop that. I whipped him around and cocked the gun and rammed it in his mouth. “Laugh now, asshole,” 1 said. He didn’t seem inclined to. I held him like that for a full minute, my eyes burning into his: I let him see my hand tremble, my finger waver on the trigger. “I may kill you yet, Newton,” I said. “Just give me an excuse, just any at all, and they’ll be picking pieces of your head out of that wall for a month. You got me, pardner?”

Jackie got me. I turned him to the wall and tried to work on Barbara. She had begun talking again, dangerous, mindless drivel in monologue, nonstop. “I think we could just let him go,” she said. “Just make him promise not to come back if we let him go this time.” The same thought came up, over and over, in different words. Let him go. Turn him loose. Get him out of here. Do this and Jackie, I guess out of gratitude, would leave her alone in the future. Bullshit, I said. She talked over my one-word argument as if I weren’t there. “Bullshit, Barbara,” I said, louder. This was not looking good: she’d make the worst kind of witness, assuming I could get her downtown to sign the papers in the first place. I don’t know what else I expected: the fact was that, for the first time in my career, I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to deal with even the most obvious problem. The victim was going to let Jackie walk: I had to’ve known that, so why was it making me so angry? I was almost beside myself with rage.

“Bullshit!” I shouted, loud enough to wake the block.

Barbara just stared at the floor and said she was sure he’d leave her alone if we let him go this time.

And Jackie was laughing again. He wasn’t, really, but I could hear him anyway.

Something frightening happened inside me. Sometimes it happens to an old cop when one asshole too many has been patted on the head and turned back on the streets—you want to go out and take care of a few of them yourself, the fast and easy way. A few cops had done it: maybe I would too. I grabbed Barbara by the scruff of her worthless neck and pushed her to the front door. Jackie I handled a good deal rougher. I pushed them down the dark stairs and into the deserted street. Barbara was still muttering about turning him loose. I told her to shut up and walk, and a moment later we reached my car.

I opened the trunk and got a roll of electrical tape out of my tool box. I fished a handkerchief out of Jackie’s pocket and told Barbara to bind up his wound with that. I didn’t want his crappy blood all over my car. But Barbara wouldn’t touch him, so I wrapped the tape myself, right over his hair. Then I pushed his head down and forced him into the front seat. Barbara said she didn’t understand why we couldn’t just let him go, if he’d just promise not to come back. 1 told her to get in back. I got behind the wheel and started the car. I made Newton roll over with his head against the door. Then I drove up to Speer Boulevard and turned north.

We weren’t going downtown, that much was certain. Jackie didn’t say anything, but there was a feeling of tension in the car, of an act yet to come. He had misread me all the way: I had seen the fear in his eyes when I stood him up with the gun in his mouth, and he waited now for a telltale sign. You assume when you’re dealing with a cop that everything gets played according to Hoyle. It doesn’t always happen that way. Cops roll with the tide like everyone else. The good ones don’t let the tide swamp them and so far I had been one of the good ones. But tonight I hadn’t even read Jackie Newton his rights.

I hit the interstate, heading north, then east. Now they were both quiet, waiting to see what I was going to do. I didn’t know either. I was driven by long frustration and the dim outline of a foolish idea. As a cop I had only two choices— let Jackie go or take him downtown and try to make a good case out of bad evidence—and I was quickly pushing myself to a third choice that, as a cop, wasn’t mine to make. Procedure was out the window, but as I drove that mattered less and less. All I can do now, as I look back on it, is plead temporary insanity. It works for the assholes, why not for me? Answer— I’m supposed to be better than that. I’m supposed to know what the law says. I knew this much: there comes a point when a cop stops breaking procedure and starts breaking the law. An arrest becomes an abduction, and blame shifts easily, almost casually, from his shoulders to mine. Go far enough and you might as well go all the way.

The city limit slipped past us and so, in my mind, did that fine line.

Ahead lay five hundred miles of open prairie. We were playing on Jackie’s court now, with his rulebook. That didn’t seem to please him much. I didn’t blame him; it wouldn’t‘ve pleased me either, in his place. I understood suddenly that this was a solitary thing between Jackie and myself: Barbara had no place in it; she was simply the instrument that had pushed us over the limit. I’m not thinking clearly, I thought— should’ve left her home. But by then we were fifteen miles out of town.

I pulled off the road. The morning was still very dark. I bumped along a dirt trail until I came to the river. There I told them to get out of the car.

Jackie found his voice. “What do you think you’re doing, Janeway?” His big bad silent act was finished. He was trying to sound tough but it wasn’t working: his voice was thick with worry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said. Barbara said, “What are you gonna do, Janeway?” as if she hadn’t heard the question just being asked. There was no fear in her now, just wonderment. They had both glimpsed the shadow of my foolish idea.

“I think I’ll kill him for you, Barbara,” I said. “Would you like that?”

She didn’t say no. Again I told them to get out. Jackie was convinced: he turned to me and his mouth moved in the dashboard light as if to form a word, but nothing came out. He looked a lot like Barbara had looked back at the apartment. I guess real fear is the same all over.

We got out. A streak of light had appeared in the east and we began to see each other not as dim shapes but as people, faces, types. The thug, the brittle beauty, and me. What type was I? What type was I?

I gave Barbara my keys. “Here. Take the car and get out of here. Park in your spot behind the house. Lock it up. I’ve got an extra set of keys… I’ll come by for it later.”

She looked reluctant, suddenly unwilling to leave. “What are you gonna do?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“How will you get back?”

“Barbara,” I said, anger rising in my voice, “get out of here, right now.”

She got in the car and drove away. Jackie Newton and I stood alone on the empty prairie and looked at each other.

I pushed him down toward the river. He was trying to talk again—“Listen, Janeway,” he said—but I told him to keep walking and shut up. We came to a little grove of trees. Daylight was coming fast: I could see the fear working at him. I took off my coat. Jackie Newton watched every move I made. I folded my coat and put it on the ground. “What are you doing?” he said, his voice suddenly shrill. I was taking off my gun, unstrapping the holster from under my arm. I draped it over a low-hanging branch. “Head down that way,” I said, pushing Newton along a path by the river. We went about thirty yards. He turned and his eyes went past me, to the gun hanging from the tree. It drooped like a piece of deadly black fruit.

He began to grin as he realized that I wasn’t going to shoot him.

Slowly, he understood.

I had circled him a couple of times. The last time, I came in close and unlocked the cuffs.

All that stood between Jackie Newton and the gun was me.

“Okay, tough guy,” I said. “There’s the gun. Why don’t you go get it?”

He took a deep breath. The old arrogance came rippling back. He flexed his hands, rubbing the circulation into his chafed wrists. He threw the handcuffs to the ground and stood up tall.

“That’s the biggest mistake you ever made,” he said.

I walked up through the trees, alone. I had come with a question and was going home with an answer.

What type was I?

You’re a killer, Janeway. Oh, what a killer you are. I knew what Kong felt like after the big tyrannosaurus fight, how the soul of David must’ve soared when he cut down Goliath. I felt the joy of victorious underdogs everywhere. It was a crummy fight, if I have to hang a label on it. Jackie hit me with everything he had: when I didn’t go down, that was the end of it. His little chicken heart crumbled and broke into a thousand pieces. I ducked under his next punch and pounded his guts on the inside. He exploded in a hurricane of bad breath. I came up fast and got him on the button. He tottered and 1 punched him again and he went down. He sat on his ass in the dirt and I knew he wanted to quit but he couldn’t. 1 let him get up in his own time and I moved in and let him hit me. I started to talk to him. Fuck you, Jackie, I thought you had some balls. I punched his stomach into great swollen slabs of meat, then went upstairs, for his eyes and chin. He toppled and went down. He rolled in the dirt and I waited for him to get up. Three more times he got up, just enough to salvage some pride and get his face caved in. I punched him with both hands, butted him with my head, and put him down for the count.

Hallelujah, brother. I had no illusions about what this would cost me, and it felt great.

I looked back once. He was still lying in the dirt. I thought he had a broken nose and two or three cracked ribs. I had the skin peeled off my knuckles and a mouse under one eye. It didn’t hurt a bit.

A killer. God, I shoulda stayed in the ring.

The thug, the beaut, the killer.

Me.

I was finished as a cop. I strapped my gun on and threw my coat over my shoulder.

Soon I was on the highway, heading west. The morning rush hour was getting started and there was a steady flow of traffic into Denver.

I walked for a while, not wanting company.

My police career was over. I didn’t need a mystic to tell me that. A line kept running through my head, that famous speech of Lou Gehrig’s when he was losing not only the job he loved but also his life. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

For the first time in years, 1 knew where I was going.

I flagged a state cop, showed him my badge, and let him drive me home.

16

Ruby seals and Emery Neff were working late, still pricing books from their big score.

They hadn’t been listening to the radio. The newspaper accounts were still twelve hours away, but the TV and radio guys already had it.

I wanted to buy something I couldn’t begin to afford.

“What’s the best piece of fiction in the store?” I asked.

Ruby showed me a Catcher in the Rye, crisp, lovely in its first-state jacket. I stared into the impenetrable eyes of J. D. Salinger and bought it.

Four hundred dollars, a steal.

“What else’ve you got?”

Ruby looked at Neff and Neff looked back at Ruby. They cleared their throats and went to work.

“Got some King, but I know you don’t care about that,” Neff said.

“Which ones?”

“Carrie, The Stand, and that book of stories…ah, Night Shift.”

“I’ll buy ‘em if you want to wholesale ’em,” I said.

“We’d consider that,” said Ruby, his face a wall of dignity. “Yes sir, I believe we would. We bought these right, didn’t we, Em? 1 think we could do a little wholesaling and still come out on top.”

I gave a little laugh. “I’ll bet you could.”

“Screwed a little old lady out of her life savings, kicked her shins and took her books away,” Ruby said.

“Now 1 don’t feel so bad, offering you three-fifty for the three of ‘em.”

“We’ll take it,” Ruby said in a heartbeat.

“Not so goddamn fast,” Neff said. “Ruby, these books don’t just walk in here every day.”

“Do I need to remind you again that the Greeks are at the gate?” Ruby said. “That’s not a wooden horse they’re knocking with, that’s a battering ram. And that’s not Helen of fucking Troy I hear calling my name.”

Neff just stared.

“Sold to American,” Ruby said. “Now, Dr. J, since you’re in such a buying mood, take a look at these.” He pushed a Lie Down in Darkness at me, the most beautiful copy I’ve ever seen of the only salable Styron. There was an Out of Africa in the same condition, and a great copy of Pynchon’s V.

“God damn it, you’re wholesaling the heart of this goddamn collection,” Neff said.

“There’ll be another collection, but not if we don’t get the sheriff paid. This gentleman is gonna help us get well again.”

“Oh, we’re never gonna get well,” Neff groaned.

“That’s because you guys’ve got too many bad habits,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ruby said, “we like to eat.”

I took the Styron, the Dinesen, the Pynchon. I took the Kings, too, and wrote them a check for $1,000.

“Don’t it feel great to buy good books?” Ruby said.

“Yeah,” I said, and it did.

“So when are you opening your place?” Neff said suddenly.

“Why the hell would I do that? Maybe I’ll stake somebody, just to get my hand in.”

“You want to stake somebody, stake us,” Ruby said. “We are, after all, the most knowledgeable sons of bitches we know. Besides, I know where there’s twenty thousand good books just waiting to be picked up for pin money.”

“What kind of pin money?”

“Twenty-five grand. You might even get ‘em for a buck a book, cash money.”

Twenty thousand dollars was just about all 1 had in savings. Such a coincidence.

“Why don’t you tell me where those books are, Ruby? You know, for old time’s sake.”

Ruby grinned through his beard and waved at me with his most prominent finger.

Neff, from on high, said, “The books are in a very safe place, Mr. Janeway. They’ll be there when we’ve got the means to go get them.”

“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” 1 said. “Who knows when somebody else will come along with twenty grand?”

“Not… very… likely.” Neff peered through his glasses at a cracked hinge he was gluing, then smiled at me without much humor.

“Not where these books are hidden,” Ruby said. “You couldn’t root out these babies if you had the Lost Dutchman himself to lead you there.”

“Must be in Arizona,” I said. “You know… Lost Dutchman… Arizona?”

“Dammit, Ruby, don’t screw around with this,” Neff said. “This man is a detective, for Christ’s sake.”

But Ruby was enjoying the game. “Arizona’s a big state.”

“With not much going on in the empty spaces,” I said. “There can’t be many places to hide twenty thousand books in the Petrified Forest, so we must be talking about… ah, Phoenix.”

Ruby chuckled.

“Tucson,” 1 said, watching his eyes. “Tucson, Phoenix…or Flagstaff.”

“Guess,” Ruby said.

“Tucson.”

Neff sighed with disgust.

“Your eyes moved when I said Tucson,” I said. “Just a little, but it was enough.”

“They’re sittin‘ in a Tucson warehouse where they’ve been the last twenty years. There’s nothing startling in there, just new blood; fresh faces that people in Denver haven’t seen over and over for the past hundred years. Damn good stockers that you’d price in the seven-to-ten-buck range. Biography, his-tory, some scholarly religion, some anthropology. I’ve known about ’em since the day they were put in there and never had the money to do anything about it. If you can spring those books, Dr. J, more power to you.”

“I think I’ll quit this business and take up something easy, like rolling queers in the park,” Neff said.

“Em, it just don’t make any difference. You see us ever having twenty grand? Why shouldn’t somebody make use of those books, and why shouldn’t it be a good guy we both like? I hate to see good books sit. And I think Dr. J would treat us right. Hell, I know an honest cop when I see one.”

Neff’s mind was shifting to that place where Ruby’s had already gone. “I suppose we could release any claim we’d have on first dibs,” he said, “for a finder’s fee.”

“What would you want?” I asked. “Assuming I’d be interested and the books could be sprung.”

“Oh, I think a thousand dollars would be fair.”

Ruby brightened suddenly. “I got a great idea. You go down there, Dr. J, and take me with you. Let me do all the talking. This is a weird bird that’s got these books and you gotta stroke him. I’ll get those books for fifteen grand, sixteen tops. You give me a two-grand finder’s fee and let me pull out fifty books. You get out for eighteen and I get a new lease on life.”

“Until next month,” Neff said with a sigh.

“And what do I do with twenty thousand books?” I said, knowing the answer so thoroughly it seemed I’d always known it.

“I don’t think I have to tell you that,” Ruby said.

“We’ve seen it coming, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “We know all the signs. You’re hooked, you just don’t know it yet.”

“We’ve got a bet going, if you want to know the truth,” Ruby said. “Em’s betting you’ll go this year. Me, I think you’ll spend your whole life dreaming about it. A guy’d have to be crazy to give up your job—good money, prestige, interesting work, ten years already on the greasepole. And you’re gonna give up that for this?”

“Ruby jests, of course,” Neff said. “This is God’s own occupation and he knows it. What would you rather be, Rubes, a bookseller or a cop?”

“Rather be a stinkin‘ garbage man if it put a beefsteak on my table tonight.”

“Every day is like a treasure hunt,” Neff said. “You never know what might walk through that door five minutes from now.”

“Most likely it’ll be shit,” Ruby said. “Neff don’t tell you about that side of it—the jackoffs that come through your front door every day and grab off a piece of your life.”

“Are you talking about our beloved customers?” Neff said.

“My beloved ass. I’ll tell you what a customer is, my friend. That’s a guy who comes in here and knows what he’s doing. He knows as well as I do what the damn book’s worth, so I don’t have to waste my time justifying the seven lousy bucks I’m asking for it. If you don’t have a book he wants, he goes on about his business: he don’t stand in your face for two damn hours telling you about it—how his grandma read it to him when he was five years old, over and over till they were both brain-dead. On the other hand, there are the jackoffs. You got any idea how many jackoffs you see in the book business on a given day, Dr. J?”

“This man is trying to win a bet, that’s all there is to it,” Neff said. “Trust me: he wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything else.”

The door opened suddenly and a ragged man in jeans came in.

“Hiya, Peter,” Ruby said.

“You buyin‘ books?”

“Does a cat have an ass? You ever known me when I wasn’t buying?”

The bookscout opened his bag. I knew enough about bookstore etiquette to move away while they did their business. Their voices dropped to a dim hum. I heard Neff say, “Where’d you get this book?” Then the bookscout said something, then they were all talking at once, the scout lost in the flanking din between Seals and Neff. It turned angry. Ruby cursed and walked away. Neff continued to negotiate with the scout, who quietly stood his ground. “It don’t matter where it came from,” the bookscout said. “I didn’t steal it, but I don’t have to tell you my sources either.” Ruby came back to where I stood, shook his head, rolled his eyes, turned, and walked back into battle. The fray went on for some time. At last it was quiet, but I could still hear them breathing up there.

“Dr. J?”

I came up from the shadows.

“Wanna buy a book?”

“I just bought a bunch of books, Ruby.”

“Wholesale, man. All of a sudden Peter here don’t trust our check.”

“I need the cash,” Peter said stubbornly.

“The hell with it,” Ruby said. “You guys are all alike. I’m tired of the bunch of you. Maybe this gentleman will buy your book for cash money.”

I looked. The book on the counter was a fine American first of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

I wasn’t sure what to pay for it. But when I looked up, Ruby had moved behind Peter and was holding up two fingers, pointing with his other hand to the ceiling. The signal seemed to mean two hundred, high retail. I had two bills in my wallet, a hundred and a ten. Peter took the hundred gratefully.

When he had gone, Ruby said, “You paid him too much. You don’t want to go over forty percent when it’s a wholesale deal. Eighty bucks you shoulda paid. You’re still thinking like a customer. You gotta be mean and lean if you’re gonna make it in the book biz.”

Neffs hand trembled as he picked up the book. “On the other hand,” he said in a dull voice, “this is such a nice copy, I think I’d mark it three.”

“Two seventy-five, that’s the perfect price for it,” Ruby-said.

1 looked at the book, and at the seven others I had bought. “There sure are a lot of good books showing up all of a sudden.”

“It goes like that,” Neff said. “You get a run, then it peters out. When that happens, you can’t find a goddamn Dr. Atkins diet book.”

“Millie Farmer found the Kings,” Ruby said. “She’s gonna be a good bookscout yet. I told you we’d get our seven bucks back.”

I nudged the Golding. “This one’s yours. Your store, your book, I’ll take your check, if you want it for a hundred.”

Ruby had already started reaching for the checkbook. Neff said, “Can’t do it.”

“The hell we can’t.”

Neff reached across the counter and snatched the checkbook away. Ruby bristled and for a moment I thought a fight was coming. The moment passed and Ruby laughed it off, though his face was still flushed with anger.

“Everybody in this business is crazy, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “That probably includes me. But I’m not so crazy that I’ll let my partner write a hot check to a cop. You keep the book.”

“I’ll tear up my check,” I offered. “Write you one for a hundred less.”

Neff sighed. “We need every dime of that check, Mr. Jane-way.”

“I just remembered something,” Ruby said. “I just plain forgot about it in the heat of battle. That’s Peter the Book-scout… you wanted to talk to him about Bobby, remember? If you hurry, maybe you can catch him before he gets to the bus stop.”

We went outside, but Peter was gone.

I guess we all had a lot on our minds that day.

“When he comes back, tell him to call Hennessey,” I said. I packed my books carefully in a small box and again opened the door.

“I’m not on that case anymore,” I said.

17

The press was ugly. You could avoid radio and TV, but those newspaper headlines, when they came, were everywhere.

I had made the decision to go light on myself. I would read each paper once, to know what I was up against: then I’d forget it.

The Denver Post was simple and sweet: cop charged with brutality, it said. Beneath that, in a smaller headline: handcuffed and beaten, jeffco man alleges.

The Rocky Mountain News wanted me shot at sunrise: cop’s badge demanded in wake of brutal attack was what News readers read over their morning coffee. Nice objective slant.

I had made top headlines in both daily rags.

They were, as usual, about ten hours behind the tubes. The later developments, I knew, would help keep the story on the front pages for another day.

I had been summoned to Internal Affairs to give my statement on the charges of John Randolph Newton. I told it to two steely cops I barely knew, and they took it down without comment and asked only a couple of questions at the end.

It all sounded silly and unjustified a day later. I must seem like a character out of a 1945 movie: a cop with an Alan Ladd complex. And that was according to my version, which was supposed to make me look good. Jackie’s version was another story. In that, I had beaten him with his hands cuffed behind him. He had the scars for evidence—the chafed wrists, the broken nose, the hamburger face. And he had a witness, Ms. Barbara Crowell, who was prepared to back up his version in court.

Let no one doubt that this was going to court. Even as I gave my statement to Internal Affairs, Jackie and his lawyer— a tough New Yorker named Rudy Levin—were still in the building raising hell.

Boone Steed, chief of detectives, was not happy. Boone was a tough cop who knew the ropes. He told me what to expect, what I already knew. Jackie would sue. He would sue us all, but it was me he really wanted. He would break me if he could. The department would do what it could for me, but I had acted illegally and that gave our insurance a loophole. I might end up having to mount my own defense, at my own expense. Goddamn lawyers and insurance companies, Steed said. I could run up a $20,000 legal tab in no time. And the weights of the system were all on Newton’s side: they were always on the side of the guy with the dough. Newton would drag me over every bump in the courts: he’d stall and prolong it so that he could drain my account of its last dime.

I was called to Steed’s office again at the end of the day. I had been suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation by Internal Affairs.

That night I went out to Ruby’s and dropped another grand on books.

I bought wholesale, and I bought well.

By the time the second-day stories appeared I was hardened to it: cop suspended, they both said. There was a picture of Jackie, looking like the sole survivor of Nagasaki. There I was, too, plastered next to him, one mean-looking bastard. They had used my old mug shot, my killer pose. You’d never know from just a look which of these two guys is the real hood, 1 thought. Take a look and guess.

I didn’t get much comfort from my friends. I talked to Hennessey and that was okay—Neal never changes: he reminds me of a Saint Bernard dog, always there with a keg of cheer at exactly the right moment. Others in the department weren’t so hot. Somebody leaked the gory details of my long feud with Jackie, and the papers picked that up and ran with it. It looked like 1 had had a long vendetta against the guy, without a helluva lot in the proof department. All the times I had picked Jackie up were examined and dissected. It didn’t look good.

Finally there was Carol. We talked several times over the next few days and nothing came of it. She wanted to come over but somehow it didn’t happen. There was a coolness now, a distance between us. I thought I knew how that was going to turn out too.

18

In the middle of the third day, my phone rang.

“Dr. Janeway, I presume.”

“You got me.”

“Rubio here. That’s quite a beating you took in the papers this morning.”

“You should see the other guy.”

“I did, my friend. His nose looked like one of my legs flopping down between his eyes. But look, I didn’t call just to be sociable. I’ve got three questions for you. Ready?”

“Shoot.”

“Number one. You want to make a fast two bills on that Golding item?”

The book happened to be on the table before me. I looked at it and thought. No, hell no, I’ll never see another one this nice.

Ruby, catching my drift, said, “If you’re gonna deal books, Dr. J, you can’t fall in love with the bastards.”

“Sure,” I said, and my rite of passage began.

“Number two,” Ruby said. “Will you let me make a little money on it?”

“That seems fair.”

“All the right answers so far. Now for the big one. You ready to take the plunge?”

“I might be.”

“I thought you might after I read the papers. A lot of things started coming clear after that.”

“What’ve you got in mind?”

“Tell you when I see you. Meet me at the store in an hour, and bring the book.”

The client was a man in his fifties who had been looking for the Golding for a year. “Pickiest bastard you ever saw,” Ruby said. “He’ll pay top dollar, but it really has to be the world’s nicest copy.” He had seen and rejected half a dozen copies, Ruby said, and was primed for this one. Ruby had warned him that the tariff would be four hundred dollars.

The guy bought it without a whimper. He paid with a check to Seals & Neff and left a happy man.

I felt strangely elated, inexplicably confident. In that moment, every book I had was for sale.

“Mr. Janeway, it looks like you’re a book dealer after all,” Emery Neff said. “All you need now is a place to hang your shingle and the guts to take the leap.”

“Which brings us back to that third question,” Ruby said. “The place on the far corner has been empty about six months. It used to be a Greek restaurant and nobody thinks of it any other way. But man-oh-man, what a great bookstore that’d be. Plenty of room, lots of atmosphere—I’d rent it myself if I had the money and wasn’t tied in here with a five-million-year lease.”

I walked up the street and looked in the window.

It was one of those old places with alcoves and side rooms and high ceilings. The house had been built, I guessed, around 1910: a residence long ago, before Kast Colfax had hardened and become Hustler’s Avenue. When the hustlers had moved in, the place had gone commercial: the porch had been stripped away and bricked up; a storefront had been added and grates put over the windows. The last tenants had not been kind: there was grime on the walls and grit on the floor; the ceiling sagged and the carpet, where it existed, was a nest for all the rats and bugs of east Denver. But if you could see past the dirt to what it could be, none of that mattered.

I copied the number from the sign in the window, went back to Ruby’s and called the man. He wanted $800 a month and a two-year lease: he would maintain the outside and I’d take care of the inside. The place was 2,500 square feet, which included two rooms in the basement. I told him I was interested, and we agreed to meet later in the afternoon and talk some more.

“If I do it we’ll be in competition,” I said to Ruby.

“That never scared me any.”

“Do it and in a year this block will be known from coast to coast,” Neff said.

“Believe that, Dr. J,” Ruby said. “Believe it. Have faith. Know that the good guys always win.”

“I’ve been a cop too long to buy into that, Ruby.”

“Believe this, then,” he said, holding the check between two fingers.

“He made the check out to us,” Neff said. “If you’ll allow us fifty for selling it, I’ll write you our check for three-fifty and we’re square.”

“Things must be looking up,” I said cheerfully. “You’re writing checks again.”

“Cash it fast, Dr. J,” Ruby said. “There’s still a little left over from your check the other day. I’m goin‘ down to the bank and put this in right away. But you cash that check real fast.”

19

I met the guy and signed the lease. Then I quit the department.

I called in and told Steed. We talked for ten minutes. Most of what he said could be wrapped up in a couple of short sentences.

You’ve been a damn good cop, Janeway: don’t throw it all away because of a stupid mistake. Fight the bastards.

I didn’t have the heart for that fight anymore. I went home and put it in writing.

It swept through the department like wildfire. My phone started ringing and didn’t stop for three days.

20

I wanted to build it myself. I wanted to feel it going up around me. I had no sense of urgency: I hadn’t touched my savings yet, and what I’d get in mustering-out pay, back vacation, and my refund from the retirement pool would more than keep me going. I bought lumber, paint, and carpet. There was a bank less than a block away, perfect for a book fund checking account. Bookscouts, who hated checks, could cash them on the spot. I knew I’d need a name and I didn’t want the obvious: Clifford L. Janeway, Books. I wanted something soft and literary, not cute. I settled on Twice Told Books, and I called a sign man and told him what I wanted.

I knew it would take at least a month to get it ready. The first night I spent getting rid of the old carpet, a rotten job. Ruby came by and pitched in, unasked. He had been a carpenter in the old days, long before books, before booze and dope had jerked him screaming through life’s most ragged porthole. He wasn’t fast anymore but he was good. We walked through the store and he pointed out things and made suggestions, and he said he’d be back now and then with his tools to help. I slipped him a double sawbuck. He said he wasn’t doing it for money and I knew that, but he was too broke to refuse. He came two or three times that first week. Our evenings settled into a routine. I had pizza brought in and we worked till ten. We talked and laughed and I felt the first faint stirrings of a new comaraderie.

In the second week the book editor of the Denver Post called. He wanted to do a story on the cop-becomes-bookman motif. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea, since the papers were still gorging themselves on my resignation under fire, as they called it, but I knew I’d need all the help I could get. The piece ran in the Sunday supplement. The headline said, he swapped his badge for a bookstore. The picture of me looked almost human. “Look at that,” I said to the empty store. “I ain’t such a bad guy after all.” The article was okay, too. There were a few disparaging remarks from unnamed sources within the department: there was a brief recap about the two guys I had killed, and a couple of lines about Jackie Newton. All this I could’ve done without. But there was a quote from Ruby, too. Ruby Seals, longtime Denver antiquarian book dealer whose store is half a block east of Janeway’s new establishment, said, quote, Janeway is the best bookman I’ve ever seen outside the trade; I know he’s been thinking of this move for years, and he’ll do extremely well. He has an eye for books that will carry him to the very top of his new profession. Unquote. “Awt damn, did you really say that?” I asked incredulously. He gave me his scholar’s profile and farted loudly. “I think what I said was, he ain’t bad for an old flatfoot. Jeez, that shrimp curry does it every time.”

I never saw Emery Neff at all that week. “Neff don’t like to sweat,” Ruby said with a laugh. He told me he and Neff had become partners a few years ago after an on-and-off ten-year acquaintance. “Man, we thought we’d grab the book business by the ass,” Ruby said. “Neff knows everything about early books. He knows seventeenth-century English poetry like I know the whorehouses of Saint Louis, Missouri. Neff’s an expert on magic and ventriloquism. He used to perform and give shows but he don’t do that anymore. Too much hassle, not enough pay. He had one of the best collections of magic books in this state, but like everything else he sold the high spots and the rest just trickled away. Me, I know illustrated books, American lit, and offbeat stuff. I like books about strikes, headbusters, radical politics. I got a real feel for what can be milked out of a good book that nobody’s ever heard of. Both of us have good juice in all the other fields. Turn the two of us loose in a store that hasn’t been picked in a while and it’s tantamount to rape. We’re damn good bookmen, Dr. J: between us, we thought we’d have all the bases covered. The problem is…well, you know what the problem is. You said it yourself. We got too many bad habits, especially together. We see a book we’ve got to have and we pay too much. Then we’ve got to wholesale for less than we paid to cover the rent. You can’t keep doin‘ that, but we can’t seem to stop. Books’re like dope, and me and Neff seem to feed off of each other’s worst habits. We egg each other on.”

“Then why don’t you split?”

He shrugged. “Eor one thing, we really like each other. I’ve still got the feeling we could be the most dynamic duo since Batman and Robin if we could just get our shit together. And we’d damn near have to declare bankruptcy and start all over again if we split. I’m too old for that. So we keep after it, day after day, trying to keep from losing too much ground, looking for the big score.”

“Big scores don’t come along every day, Ruby.”

“Tell me about it. They do happen, though. They happen when you least expect ‘em. But I’m beginning to believe what Neffs always said, the big score always happens to the guy who isn’t looking for it.”

We were at the end of another night. 1 was packing the tools and putting things away.

“And then there’s the problem of gettin‘ old,” Ruby said. “I can’t do this forever, I can’t keep hauling books all my life. Frankly, I don’t care if I never see another ten-dollar book. I want to do expensive stuff, like Rita McKinley. But almost everybody I know who does that has money to begin with. The rest of us just break our backs and get old.”

“You sure find your perspectives changing.”

“Ain’t that the damn truth. Everybody gets old in different ways. Me, I’m just slowing down. Neffs becoming a recluse. His uncle died a year or so ago and left him a scruffy broken-down ranch in Longmont. He lives up there on weekends now, and you know what?…he won’t even give me his goddamn phone number. He’s like Greta Garbo, he vants to be alone. He says if the store burns down he don’t want to know about it anyway, and he doesn’t want to be bothered for anything less. But I’ll tell you a secret, Dr. J, if you don’t tell anybody you heard it from me. 1 think he’s gettin’ in that Millie Farmer’s pants. She let something slip last week about the ranch, so I know she’s been up there. She thinks Neffs the most brilliant bastard she’s ever met. Hard to believe, considering she’s also met me.”

I was still at least two weeks from opening, but already the books were piling up. Bookscouts were coming by at all hours, tapping on the glass, offering their wares. People were curious and that was good. Neighbors looked in and some gave me a thumbs-up gesture as they walked away.

I knew I would open with good stock, but it wouldn’t begin to fill the place up. I had to decide about the books in Arizona. Ruby waved his hand, a gesture of dismissal. “I’ll tell you something, Dr. J, and I’ll tell you this in good faith because you and me, we’re becoming friends, I hope. You don’t need that stuff. I would really give my left nut for that finder’s fee, but if I were you I’d build this mother from the ground up. That’s how you learn, that’s how you keep deadwood off your shelves. Trust me. You’ll be up to your ass in books before you know it. As soon as people find out you’re paying real money, you won’t know where all the damn books came from.”

We had barely begun work that night when the girl arrived. It was still midsummer and the door was open to catch the early-evening breeze. I looked up and she was standing in the doorway, looking about seventeen in her spring-green dress. She had long coppery hair and when she spoke her voice had Scotland stamped all over it.

“Is this the bookstore? The new one the paper wrote about?”

“You’ve found us,” I said. “You’re a little early, though. I haven’t put out the Shakespeare folios or the Gutenbergs yet, and we won’t open for another week or two. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a job. I’m honest and I work hard, I’m pleasant to be around and I like books.”

“You’re hired,” Ruby said from across the room.

“Pay no attention to this street rat,” I said. “I’m the boss.”

“I knew that from your picture. I did think when he spoke up so forcefully that perhaps he’s the power behind the throne.”

“Hire this kid, Dr. J,” Ruby said. “In addition to all the obvious stuff, she sounds smart.”

“I am smart. I’ve got a brain like a whip. Ask me something.”

“What’s your name?”

“That’s too easy. Ask me something bookish.”

“What’s the point on The Sun Also Rises?” Ruby said. “Every bookman knows that.”

“What’s a point?”

We laughed.

“You can’t expect me to know something I never learned. But tell me once and I’ll never forget it. Oh, I forgot to mention one other thing. I work cheap.”

“Hire this woman, Dr. J, before the word gets out,” Ruby said.

“Don’t pressure the man, I can see he’s thinking it over. Why don’t you make yourself useful and tell me what a point is.”‘

“Three p’s in ‘stopped,’ page 181,” Ruby said. “That’s a point.”

“In other words, the first edition has a mistake and the later ones don’t. Now that I know that, I’m a valued employee.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“What difference does that make?”

“I’d like to know I’m not aiding and abetting a runaway.”

“For goodness sakes! I’m twenty-six.”

“In a pig’s eye.”

“I am twenty-six. What are you looking at, don’t you believe me? That’s another of my virtues—I never lie. My judgment’s good, I’ll always give you a sound opinion, and I’m compulsively punctual. What more do you want for the pittance you’re paying me?”

We looked at each other.

“I have a great sense of humor,” she said.

“You don’t look a day over fifteen,” I said.

“I’m twenty-six. When I come back tomorrow, I’ll bring you something to prove it.”

“We won’t be open tomorrow. I won’t be ready for a couple of weeks.”

“I know that. I’m coming in to help you paint and stuff.”

“Look, miss, I haven’t even opened the door yet. I don’t know if I can afford an employee.”

Ruby cleared his throat. “May I interject, Dr. J?”

“I haven’t found a way to stop you yet.”

“A word to the wise is all. You don’t want to shackle your legs to the front counter. You don’t want to be an in-shop bookman. You want to keep yourself free for the hunt.”

“Exactly,” the girl said.

“You need to be out in the world. Meet people. Make house calls.”

“House calls are important,” the girl said.

Our eyes met. Hers were hazel, lovely with that tinge of innocence.

“If you’re twenty-six, I’m Whistler’s mother,” I said.

“I’m nineteen. Everything else I’ve told you so far’s the truth, except that I do fib sometimes when I have to. I’m hungry and tired and I desperately need a job. I need it bad enough to lie, or to fight for it if I have to. I’ll come back tomorrow in my grubbys if you’ll let me do something—no charge, just a bite to eat during the day. I’m wonderful with a paintbrush. I could save you a lot of time staining those shelves.”

I started to speak. She cried out: “Don’t say no, please! Please, please, please don’t say anything before you at least see what I can do! Just have something for me tomorrow; in a week you’ll wonder what you ever did without me. I promise… I promise… I really do.”

She backed out the way she had come and hustled off down the street.

“Well,” I said. “What do you make of that?”

“I told you what I think,” Ruby said. “She’s a Grade-A sweetie, right off the last boat from Glasgow. She’s just what this place needs, the piece de resistance. She might even be two pieces.”

We went back to work. After a while Ruby said, “Remember what Neff told you about the book business, Dr. J? Honey draws flies. Truer words were never said, and it works on more levels than one.”

“She never even told us her name,” I said. “Five’ll get you ten she’ll never come back.”

* * *

But there was something relentless about her, something that didn’t give up, something I liked. She was sitting on the sidewalk in the morning when I got there; she was wearing an old gingham dress that had seen better times.

“You’re late,” she lectured. “I’ve been here since eight. Here, I brought you a plant for the front window.”

She handed me a tin can in which grew a pathetic little weed.

“It’s a symbol,” she said. “It starts out little and insignificant, almost nonexistent like your business. Both will get strong together.”

“If this thing dies, I guess I can give up and close the doors.”

“It won’t die, Mr. Janeway. I won’t let it.”

I opened the door and we went inside. The early-morning rays from the sun came through the plate glass, making everything hazy and new. The place smelled like fresh sawdust, tangy and wonderful.

“Are you gonna tell me your name or is that some deep secret you’re keeping?”

“Elspeth Pride.” Her hand disappeared into mine. “What friends I’ve had have called me Pinky, for my hair. You may call me Miss Pride.”

I laughed.

“I believe in keeping things professional,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Let’s get to work.”

She started in one of the back rooms, staining while I worked the shelving up front. In a while the smell of the stain mingled with the sawdust and made a new smell, pleasant but strong. I propped open the front door. The sound of the saw buzzed along the street: people stopped and looked in and some of them asked questions. I’ve never been good at idle chatter, but these were potential customers and I was now a businessman. I didn’t get as much done as I might have, but Miss Pride worked steadily through the morning and never took a break. At noon I went back to ask if she’d like some lunch. She had done two-thirds of the room and her work was excellent.

I went to a fast-food joint and brought back some sandwiches. We ate together in the front room. She was very hungry, and it didn’t take long and she didn’t say much. Personal questions were put on a back burner. Now there was just the job: the work finished and the work yet to come. She was relentless. When she spoke it was to make suggestions about color schemes and decorating and what the walls would need. “Are you going to do art as well as books?” she asked. When I told her I believed in learning one difficult trade at a time, she said, “Then you’ll need a picture for that wall, not for sale, for show.” The interest she took was personal and real, and by midafternoon I found her promise coming true: I was beginning to wonder what I’d have done without her.

At three o’clock I looked up and Peter was standing in the door. “I got a box of sports books, Dr. J.” They had all taken to calling me that, taking their cue from Ruby. I went through his books and bought about half. I bought with confidence and paid fair money. I knew what I wanted and nothing else qualified. I would buy no book that had a problem: no water stains, no ink underlined. I set a standard that still holds: if one page of a book is underlined, that’s the same as underlining on every page; if the leather on one volume of a fine set is chipped, the whole set is flawed. I would have only pristine copies of very good books. I would do only books of permanent value, not the trendy cotton-candy junk that’s so prevalent today. I paid Peter out of my pocket and reminded him that Hennessey still wanted to see him about Bobby Westfall’s death. “I don’t know nuthin‘ about that,” he said, and went on his way.

When I turned back to my work, Miss Pride was standing there. “I’m not sluffing off, you know. I wanted to see how you bought these things. I’m going to be your buyer someday, so you might say this is my first lesson. Why did you buy these and not something else? Why pass up the Jane Fonda book? I thought that was an enormous seller.”

I sat beside her on the floor and went through them book by book. Some of it Ruby had told me. Baseball books are all wonderful, Dr. J. Football books are a waste of paper. For some reason baseball fans read and football fans drink beer and raise hell. Basketball sucks and hockey can be slow. But always buy golf books, any damn golf book that comes through the door will sell. Buy anything on horses or auto racing. Buy billiards and chess, the older the better, but don’t ever buy a bowling book. On my own, I added this: a good biography on Jackie Robinson is worth ten books on Joe Namath. Robinson’s story had conflict and drama and racial tension, not to mention baseball. It would still be interesting a hundred years from now.

And as for the Jane Fonda Workout Book, phooie! There are two distinct kinds of book people, best-seller people and the others. Sometimes they cross over, but usually a best-seller like Jane Fonda or Dr. Atkins lives and dies on the best-seller list. Every single person who wants one gets it while it’s hot: six months later you can’t give them away.

We worked on toward evening. I could see she was getting tired, but I was just coming into my second wind. Every so often she’d come out and stretch, then go back in for another hour. She asked if Mr. Seals was planning on coming tonight. I said I didn’t know: Mr. Seals came and went according to his own whim. That night Mr. Seals did not come. At eight o’clock I told her to go home: I’d stay and putter around a little more. She said she’d stay and putter with me. We ate a late supper, delivered, and I pushed on to eleven o’clock. 1 could’ve gone another three hours, but it’s no fun working with a zombie. She was making a heroic effort, however, for a dead person.

“Come on,” I said, “I’ll drive you home.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to. But it’s midnight and you’ve worked hard and this is East Colfax Avenue. Get your stuff and let’s go.”

“Well the fact is, Mr. Janeway, you’re embarrassing me. I have no home. There’s no place to drive me to.”

“Then where are you staying?”

“At the moment I’m, um, between things.”

“What the hell are you doing, sleeping in the park?”

“I hadn’t quite decided yet, for tonight.” She went into the back room and fetched the little valise she’d been carrying. “The fact is, I just got to Denver an hour before I turned up on your doorstep. I got here with five dollars and spent half of that in the Laundromat. That’s how I found out about you—there was an old newspaper there from Sunday. Fate, Mr. Janeway.”

“Well, Miss Pride, tonight you sleep in a good bed.” I reached for my wallet.

“No you don’t, I’m not taking any money for this. I told you—”

“Pardon my French, Miss Pride, but bullshit.”

“I want a job, sir, not day wages.”

“Day wages would look pretty good to me right now if I had two bucks in my pocket. Besides, nobody works for me free, not now or ever. So take the money”—I shoved $60 in her hand—“and we’ll go find you a motel.”

“I will take it, then, but only if you agree that it’s a loan against wages.”

“Don’t push me, Miss Pride. You’ve been real good today; don’t try to back me into a corner at the last minute. Now let’s button it up and get out of here.”

It had been a good day. We had gone from strangers to those first halting steps into friendship. We had sat on the floor and broken bread together, which is a fairly intimate thing: we had talked about books and points, and about hope. What we didn’t know about each other would fill its own book: what we did know was a simple broadside. I sure liked what I did know. I liked her. She brought out something I had never felt before, an unexpected sensation of paternity. I felt suddenly responsible for her welfare.

The motel we found was a few blocks from the store: she’d be able to walk back and forth easily. I gave her a key so she wouldn’t have to wait on the sidewalk in the morning, and I went into the motel and paid her up for a week.

The next day was a copy of the first: we worked, we ate, we said little. Bookscouts came to sell their wares, and Miss Pride stood and watched over my shoulder. In the evening Ruby joined us and we worked till ten. I paid them both and Miss Pride did not argue. Ruby never argued when money was coming his way.

The three of us got along fine. The place was shaping up. “Lookin‘ booky, Dr. J,” Ruby said. It felt solid, good; it felt great. We talked and laughed, especially at dinnertime, and I paid the tariff and was glad I had these people around me.

Miss Pride was from Fdinburgh, “Auld Reekie,” she called it. In natural conversation she spoke a Scotch dialect that was all but undecipherable: I was so glad she had learned English as well. Her story—what she chose to share of it—might have been one of those Horatio Alger tearjerkers of the 1890s. She was an orphan, desperately poor in her own land. America had always been her big dream. She was here on a one-year work visa, which, she hoped, could be extended. She had been here six months, mostly in New York, but the last three weeks on the road. New York had disappointed her: her sponsor had died suddenly, leaving her to cope in the tough Big Apple. But Denver felt right. She felt good about Denver. Denver was where her version of the American dream was to begin.

Ruby draped himself in a drop cloth and stood with his paintbrush pointing up. “Send us your tired, your wretched, your bookscouts,” he said, and we got a good laugh out of that.

We finished up one night ten days later. The place looked like new; it looked truly marvelous. Miss Pride went over it with a vacuum while Ruby packed his tools for the last time. I just walked from room to room, unable to remember when I’d last felt such peace and satisfaction.

Now came the books. I emptied out my apartment and brought in everything from storage. Ruby was astounded at what I had. “I’m tellin‘ you right now, Dr. J, this fiction section is gonna be the most important one in the West. Good God, look at the Milagros! I can’t believe it. John Nichols hasn’t got this many.” I told him I thought I’d make a pyramid of Milagros in the glass case, but he shook his head. You put these out one at a time, he said: in a rare book section, you never put more than one copy out, it would undercut the illusion of scarcity. You wanted that feeling of urgency to always be a customer’s companion, the notion that he must act now, today, else it be gone forever. The three of us sat up all night pricing. Miss Pride priced the common stock using the standard ratio: she’d look it up in Books in Print, and if ours was a perfect copy she priced it half of the in-print tariff. Ruby and I priced the collectibles, arguing incessantly about high retail and low, scarcity, demand, and, always, condition. “Remember, Ruby, I don’t want to be high,” I would say, and Ruby would look at me with great disgust. “You still haven’t learned anything,” he would say. “You still don’t know that it’s easier to sell a good book high than low. Dammit, people like to think that what they’re buying is worthwhile. Price it too low and it looks like you don’t value your own stuff.” He would hold a book against his head and close his eyes as if the book could speak. When it spoke to him, he would make his pronouncement, “Seventy-five bucks,” he’d say, and I would argue, and he’d throw up his hands. “Seventy-five dollars, Dr. J, you can’t sell the son of a bitch for less than that. Do you want to look like a fool?”

And so it went, till well after dawn. The night had passed in a wink and suddenly it was over. “It’s always that way when you’re lookin‘ at books,” Ruby said. “An hour goes by in a minute: you don’t know where the hell the time went. It’s like making love to a woman… the most hypnotic business a man can do.”

Then they were gone. Ruby went home for a few hours’ sleep and Miss Pride went to her room. I walked through the store and only then did it hit me—what I had taken on, what I’d left behind, how drastically my life had changed in only one month. I took a deep breath. The place smelled of paint fumes and sawdust. It smelled like a new car, though the actual odor was nothing like that. It was real, it was alive, and it was mine. It was sweet and exciting. I had a sense of proprietorship, of direction. I had a lifetime of work ahead of me, and it was very good.

21

That was all some time ago.

We had a sensational opening week. I sold two signed Mil-agros the first day, and did almost $1,000 before the day was out. The three Stephen Kings flew out the door on the second day. By the end of the week I had taken in $3,000. I started a beard, shaved it, started it again and shaved it. I never, ever, wore a necktie. People said I was in danger of becoming a bohemian.

Jackie Newton sued me for $10 million. It looked like something that would drag on for years. I had a lawyer who was also a friend, and he said not to worry, we’d work it out.

I didn’t worry. I had one or two regrets: occasionally I dreamed about Bobby Westfall and his unknown killer, but I told myself I was out of the worrying business forever.

Today it seems as if my years as a cop were all part of another lifetime. I never hear sirens in my sleep, and even a report of a gunfight in progress between police and drug deal-ers leaves me strangely detached. I’ve gone to a few funerals since I quit the department, but as time goes by I’m treated more and more like an outsider. I still run. I keep in good shape because it makes good sense. I keep my gun because that makes good sense too, but I’ve got a permit now, just like any other law-abiding citizen.

I see a few old friends a few times a year. I never see Carol. I hear she’s living with a sergeant over on the west side. Hennessey’s the same old buffalo. We sit and drink beer and talk about old cases, old times.

I get the feeling he doesn’t try as hard these days. He never did talk to Peter. He never found Rita McKinley. The U-Haul lead fizzled and went out.

The cops weren’t about to solve the Westfall case. As it turned out, I had to do that.

BOOK TWO

22

My days settled into a glorious routine. I was up at seven; I ate breakfast in a cafe a few blocks from my apartment, I read the paper, had my coffee, and was on the streets by nine. I left the opening of the store to Miss Pride. She had her own apartment now, still within walking distance; she was there faithfully by nine-thirty, leaving me free for, as Ruby put it, the hunt. From the beginning I was amazed by the stuff I found. In the old days I had gone into thrift stores and junk shops occasionally and never found anything. From the moment I became a book dealer, good things began to happen. Suddenly there were real books on the shelves of those dust palaces where there’d been only dogs before. I know two things now that I didn’t know then. Then I had been looking with a much narrower eye, seeking out titles in my area of interest only. Now I bought a medical book on eye surgery, a fat doorstop with color plates, circa 1903, that I never would’ve touched in olden times. It cost me $1: I lowballed it to an out-of-town medical specialist for $100. I bought a two-volume set on farming from the early 1800s, very technical, for $10; I think $125 would be very reasonable for it in a store. The second thing I learned is that books are seldom found on a hit-or-miss basis. The hunt is not a random process. I had to be where the books were, and I had to be there all the time. A good book placed in the open for a small price could be expected to last only hours, maybe minutes—then a bookscout would come along and pick it off. I tried to be there first, and I was, a fair number of times. I drifted across town and sucked them up like a vacuum.

I bought extensively and well in my chosen field, first edition lit and detective fiction. I read the trades and saw trends coming. I got on the Sue Grafton bandwagon, though I don’t care much for her stuff, at just the right time. Her first book, A Is for Alibi, has been going crazy in the used book world, appreciating at around a hundred percent a year until now people are asking $300 to $400 for a fine first. Grafton is breezy and readable, entertaining but never challenging. Her father, C. W. Grafton, once wrote one of the cleverest, most gripping novels in the literature. His book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is by most accounts a cornerstone, but if I want to sell it I have to do it on her popularity. I put one away for a more enlightened time. I discovered Thomas Harris when people were still selling Black Sunday for $6.50. His Red Dragon put me on the floor, even if he did make a sophomoric break-and-enter mistake with a glass cutter in the early going. You can’t break into a house that way, you might as well use a hammer and knock the glass out, but writers and the movies keep the myth going anyway. Gimme my glass cutter, doc. I’ll just cut a little hole in this here glass case and pluck the Hope diamond out. Uh-huh. Try it sometime. Somehow it didn’t matter. Red Dragon was such a good book that Harris could’ve fed me the untreated discharge from the Metro Denver Sewer Plant and I’d‘ve been standing there like little Ollie Twist with my gruel-bucket in my hand, begging for more. More? You want MORE! Even then he was putting the polish on that big riveting pisser of a book, Silence of the Lambs, simply the best thriller I’ve read in five years. I thought of old Mr. Greenwald all the time I was reading it and I wondered if he’d like it. It proves, I think, the point I was trying to make that day, that wonderful things can come from anywhere, even the best-seller list. Thomas Harris. All he is is a talent of the first rank. I hope the bastard lives forever, but in case he doesn’t, I’ve been squirreling him away. Collectors are starting to find him now: in recent catalogs I see that Black Sunday is inching toward the $100 mark, and I’ve got six perfect copies hidden in a safe place.

Janeway’s Rule of the Discriminating Bookscout was born. Buy what you like, what you read. Trust your judgment. Have faith. The good guys, like Melville, might die and be forgotten with the rest, but they always come back.

I was practicing what Maugham has called the contemplative life. At night I read some of the books I’d found. I read things I had never imagined or heard of, and I listened to good music, mostly jazz, and studied incessantly the catalogs of other dealers. I learned quickly and never forgot a book I had handled. This is how the game is played: you’ve got to be part businessman, part lucky, part clairvoyant. The guy with the best crystal ball makes the most money. The guy in the right place at the right time. The guy with the most energy, the best moves, the right karma.

I had been here before: I knew things that hadn’t yet happened. I was home at last, in the work I’d been born for.

I had been in business three months when I was pulled back suddenly into that old world. It started a few days before Halloween. 1 had two visitors in the store: Jackie Newton and Rita McKinley.

23

I had come to the store late that day after a tough round of fruitless bookscouting. The days were getting shorter: we were off daylight saving time and darkness had fallen by five o’clock, the time we normally close for the night. Usually I tried to get in by four—Colfax is a rough street and I didn’t like leaving Miss Pride to close up alone—but that day I had scouted Boulder and had run later than expected. It was almost five when I pulled up in front of the place and parked. I saw Miss Pride, alone in the front room, adding up the day’s receipts. When I came in she rolled her eyes toward the back rooms, and when I came closer she held up the calculator to show me what she’d done that day. The total was $1,425, my best day ever. I gave a little whistle. “Couple of high rollers,” she said. “They’re still here, in back.”

She showed me the receipts. They had bought John Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, a very nice 1843 first edition in the original boards, and the expensive Louise Saun-ders-Maxfield Parrish Knave of Hearts, which I had bought from a catalog only last month. The tariff for the two items came to almost $1,200.

“Just an average day if it wasn’t for them,” I said.

“They are definitely strange ducks, Mr. Janeway,” she said, keeping her voice down. “But when they spend this kind of money, who’s going to quarrel?”

“Strange how?” I asked.

“Well, they came in here about three-thirty. The one did all the talking. He asked for you right off. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked when you’d be back. I said probably before five. He asked to see the best books in the house. I showed him the Stephens and the Parrish. He said, I’ll take these, just like that. Paid with hundred-dollar bills.” She cocked the cash drawer open slightly, so I could see the wad of money. “Then he wouldn’t take any change. He gave me twelve hundred-dollar bills and said keep the change. I told him it was against policy, we didn’t accept tips, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. I thought he was going to leave but he didn’t. He walked all around the store. Like I said, he’s in the back room now.”

I shrugged. “No accounting for people, Miss Pride. I’ll take his money.”

“I thought you would.”

I sat where she had been sitting and started looking through the other sales. “You can take off now if you want.”

“Oh, I’ll hang around a bit. Mr. Harkness is coming by in a few minutes to take me to dinner.”

I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”

“Something wrong with that?”

I went back to my bookkeeping. Far be it from me to tell her who she could see. But yes, dammit, now that she mentioned it, there was something a little wrong. She was a sweet young girl and Jerry Harkness was a relatively old man. Honey draws flies, remember? And yeah, I was a little ruffled and I didn’t like it much. Hell, I was too old for her, and Harkness had me by a good eight years. I had gone around the horn to keep my relationship with Pinky Pride on a purely professional level, and she was going out with Jerry Harkness.

“Mr. Janeway? Is something wrong?”

“It’s your business, Miss Pride. He just seems to be a bit old, that’s all I was thinking.”

“Funny I never thought of him that way. But you’re right, he’s got to be almost as old as you are.”

I stared at the ceiling.

“I’m kidding, Mr. Janeway, where’s your sense of humor? Of course he’s too old for me, I’m not going to marry the man… unless…”

“What?” I snapped. “Unless what?”

“I might consider it if he’d be willing to do one of those convenience things that would let me stay in the country per-manently. I might consider anyone who’d do that for me. But Mr. Harkness isn’t going to do that. He wants to buy me a supper and I said yes: nothing more to it than that. If you’ve got something for me to do, though…”

I shook my head. “Just don’t get in any dark corners.”

“I never do, sir, unless they’re of my own making. I hope he’ll tell me some of the finer points of his specialty.”

“I’m sure he will,” I said dryly.

“I want to know it all.”

“Someday you will,” I said, and meant it.

She was learning fast. It’ll be a national tragedy if we have to send her back to Scotland, I thought. The enormity of the book business—the fact that most of the books that even a very old dealer sees in a year are books that he’s never seen before—simply did not faze her. She was fearless and confident at the edge of the bottomless pit. A genius, confining himself to the narrowest possible specialty, could not begin to know it all. This was the task Pinky Pride had set for herself.

She had learned so much in three months that I had her added to my book fund as a co-signer. She bought from book-scouts and signed away my money as freely as I did. She made mistakes but so did I: she also made at least one sensational buy a week. I knew that someday, in the not-too-distant future, she’d be gone, if not back to Scotland then away to a place of her own. For now, for this short and special time we shared, my job was to keep her happy.

“By the way, I’m giving you a raise,” I said.

She considered it for a moment, as if she might turn it down. But she said, “I guess I deserve it.”

I heard a laugh from the back room. It had a familiar ring, like something from an old dream. I heard the two guys talking in low voices, and again one of them laughed.

Then they came up front.

It was Jackie Newton, with some gunsel straight out of old Chicago. Jackie wasn’t carrying anything, but the enforcer was packing a big gun. You learn to spot things like that. My own gun was on my belt, in the small of my back. I couldn’t get it easily, but I’d get it quick enough if something started— probably a lot faster than Jackie would believe.

The gunsel was a bodyguard, a bonecrusher, a cheap hood. They circled the store together and pretended to look at books. I fought down the urge to say something cute (“No coloring books in here, boys” would be a nice touch) and let them do their thing. Miss Pride inched close to the counter and I saw her pluck the scissors out of our supply box.

She was no dummy, Miss Pride.

I looked in her eyes and said, “Why don’t you go home now?”

“Uh-uh. Harkness, remember?”

“Go home, Miss Pride.”

She didn’t move. Jackie turned and looked at her and she stared back at him.

“Wanna go for a ride in a big car?” he said.

She shook her head.

He started coming toward her, looking at me all the time.

“How ya doin‘, fuckhead?” he said.

It was the opposite of our little meeting the day I had flattened his tire. Now I was playing it mute and Jackie was doing the talking. “I sure wouldn’t want to have a place like this…all these valuable books… such a rough part of town. I hear there’re gangs who don’t do anything but go around smashing up places like this.”

When he was three feet away, he stopped and said, “There’s always a scumbag waiting to tear off a piece of your life.”

He was doing all the talking.

“Broken window… somebody throws a gallon of gas in at midnight. Poof!”

Then he opened his bag and took out the two books he had bought. I knew what was coming and couldn’t stop it. He had paid for the books: he had a receipt; the books were his.

He opened the Stephens, ripped out the 140-year-old map and blew his nose in it.

He ripped out two pages of the second volume and did it again.

He tore a page out of the $800 Maxfield Parrish, set it on fire, and lit the cigar the gunsel had been chewing.

“No smoking in here,” I said calmly.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see your sign,” Jackie Newton said. He dropped the flickering page on the floor and stepped on it. Then he opened the Parrish and held it out, and the gunsel dropped his soggy cigar inside it. Jackie rolled the book up in his hands and passed it to me over the counter.

“You got a trash can?”

I took the book with two fingers and dropped it into the can.

They headed toward the door.

“Come again,” I said.

Jackie laughed as they went out. Miss Pride let out her breath. The scissors slipped out of her fingers and clattered on the floor.

“I recognized him too late,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was until I remembered his picture just now.”

“It’s okay.”

“Pretty expensive way to show his contempt, wouldn’t you say?”

“Depends on your perspective. He can afford it.”

“What a terrible way to use your money, though.”

I saw Jerry Harkness come to the window. Go away, I thought, I’m not in the mood for this.

But of course he wasn’t going away. He opened the door and came in. He had slicked his hair and put on a tie and he wore an electric blue blazer. He looked like the well-dressed man of Greenwich Village, Mr. Cool of 1968.

“You ready?”

Miss Pride got her coat and wrapped her neck in a scarf. Harkness shifted his weight back and forth. His eyes met mine and the cool image melted and flushed. He looked uneasy.

“Okay with you, Janeway?”

“Hey, I’m not her guardian. Just watch your step.”

We looked at each other again. What passed between us didn’t need words: it was sharp and unmistakable. We were both years away from puberty: we had those years and that experience and a male viewpoint in common. I knew what he wanted and he knew I knew, and I was saying Don’t try it, pal, don’t even think about it, and my voice was as clear as a slap. Only Miss Pride didn’t hear it.

I faced a bleak evening alone. Happy Halloween, Janeway. A light snow had begun falling. Tomorrow, I thought, I’d mosey up the block and have a little visit with Mr. Harkness. I shelved that plan at once. Mind your own business, I thought: make her mad and she may just quit and go to work for him. But the night was dark and so was I. Newton had put me on the defensive, Miss Pride had put me on edge, and I didn’t know where to go to get a shot of instant light. I didn’t want to read, work, go home, or stay where I was. I was at one of those depressed times when nothing seems to help.

It was then that the door popped open and Rita McKinley walked into my life.

24

I knew it was her. I had this vision of her in my head, and she seemed to fit it. Weeks ago I had received a package of photostats from the AB, but they contained straight news articles with no pictures; I had read the material through once and passed it on to Hennessey. It wasn’t my job anymore, and yet, at odd times of the day or night I’d find myself thinking about her. Somehow she was at the crux of what had happened to Bobby Westfall. We had damn few hard facts, but my gut told me that. Almost everything about her fit the picture I’d had: she was damn good-looking, with dark hair and hazel eyes. I had been told that much by those who knew her, but my mind had filled in the blanks with amazing accuracy until the vision formed that now stood there in the flesh. The only thing I hadn’t got right was the wardrobe: I had seen her in furs and jewels and she wore neither. What I could see of her dress under the old and rather plain coat looked common and conservative. She wore a little hat, tilted back on her head. It couldn’t‘ve been much protection against the wind. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold. In her hand she carried a cloth bag (I had pictured her with leather) that opened and closed by a frayed cord that looped through it. She was everything, and nothing, that I had imagined her to be.

“Are you Mr. Janeway?”

I said I was.

“I’m Rita McKinley.”

I felt at once what others had felt in her presence—small and insignificant in the bookseller’s cosmos. I’d like to know how she does that, I thought: I’ll bet it’s a helluvan advantage in certain situations. Then I did know. She projected an aura that was totallv real. You could look in her face and see it: not an ounce of bullshit anywhere. She came to the counter and said, “That was a blunt message you left on my machine a while back.”

“I tend to get blunt when I don’t seem to be having any effect. Don’t you ever return calls?”

“I’m very good about returning calls. This time there was a mix-up. I’ve been out of town.”

“You’ve been out of town a long time.”

“I’ve been out of touch almost six months. I’m supposed to be able to get my messages when I call in, but it didn’t work.”

“What’d you do, take a world cruise?”

I didn’t expect an answer to that, and I didn’t get one. She went right to the point. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, now.”

“The phone said something about a murder.”

“I thought you didn’t get the message.”

“My machine recorded it, I just didn’t get it when I called in. Now what’s this about a murder?”

“I’m not in the murder business anymore.”

“So I see.”

She looked around at the store, and again I felt small and insignificant. I felt irritated too, for reasons I only half understood.

“Don’t pay any attention to this place,” I said. “This is just something to while away my golden years.”

“You’ve done a nice job.”

I looked at her for traces of sarcasm, but I couldn’t see any. She browsed her way around the room, glancing into the back as she passed the open doors. “You seem to know what you’re doing,” she said.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Sure. It’s not something I’d expect a policeman to know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to beat up people too. There’s a good deal more to me than pure intellect.”

My sense of humor was lost on her. “This is very nice stuff,” she said without a hint of a smile.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You must’ve been putting it away for a long time.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You have very good taste.”

“For a cop,” I said. I grinned to blunt the mockery and turned my palms up.

“I guess it proves that a good bookman can come from anywhere. Even a librarian has a chance.”

“You don’t like librarians?”

“I used to be one. They’re the world’s worst enemies of good books. Other than that, they’re fine people.”

She fingered a book, opened it, and read something. But her eyes drifted, came up and met mine over the top edge. She had the deadliest eyes. I’d hate to have to lie to this lady with my life at stake, I thought.

“If you don’t know it yet, there’s an endless war going on between libraries and book dealers,” she said. “At best it’s an uneasy truce.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes; we really hate each other.”

“Why is that?”

“For obvious reasons. We’re all after the same thing: in some cases, things that are unique. They see us as mercenaries, motivated by greed and excessive profits.”

“That’s a laugh.”

“Sure it is. Try to convince them of that.”

“And how do we see them?”

“I know how I see them, having worked with them. I can show you libraries that would make you cry. Priceless, wonderful books given to the library, then put in some moldy basement to rot. Old-timers die and think they’re doing the world a favor when they leave their books to the library. They might as well take them out and burn them. Public libraries particularly. They just don’t have the staff or knowledge to handle it. And after all, the public’s got to have its Judith Krantz and its Janet Dailey. So the library buys fifty copies of that junk and then cries that it has no budget.”

“Where’d you work?”

“I started in a library back in Kansas, a good case in point. That library was given a gorgeous collection thirty years ago. It’s still right where they put it then, in a basement room. Part of the ceiling came down five years ago and the books are buried under two thousand pounds of plaster. I’d give a lot of money to get that stuff out of there.”

“Why don’t you try that? Most people respond favorably to money.”

“Forget it. There are all kinds of complications when you get into deals like this. Sometimes you win and save some fabulous things. More often you lose. But that’s another story. What did you want to ask me?”

“I think you better talk to the man who’s handling that case.” I wrote Hennessey’s name on the back of a bookmark and gave it to her.

“What’s it about?”

“I think I should let Hennessey tell you that.”

“You said something on the phone about a man named Westfall?”

I nodded. This was tricky water we were navigating. I knew I shouldn’t be discussing it with her, but I had been curious for a long time.

“Am I supposed to know him?” she asked.

“Are you telling me you don’t know him?”

“Never heard of him before this day.”

“What about Stanley Ballard?”

“Him I know. I did an appraisal for him. Nice old man.”

“You looked at all his books?”

“Every bloody one. A colossal waste of time.”

“You found nothing there?”

“He was in two book clubs, and that’s where ninety-nine percent of it came from. You know as well as I do what that stuffs worth.”

“The history can be okay.”

“But Mr. Ballard wasn’t a historian, was he? He was literati, and it was all book club fiction.”

Junk, I thought.

She said, “When he called for the appraisal, I told him it wouldn’t be a good use of his money unless the books were worthwhile. I don’t work cheap, Mr. Janeway. My expertise is every bit as specialized as a lawyer’s and just as hard to come by. When I get a call like that, cold, I tend to ask some questions before I jump in the car and go racing down the hill.”

“What questions?”

“The same ones you’d ask if you were me. Why they want the appraisal done, for starters. This eliminates most of them right out of the gate. Most of the time they say they just want to know what they’re worth. They’re just fooling around, wasting their time and mine. When I tell them that the fee for an appraisal starts at sixty dollars an hour, they back off fast. Once in a while you get a real one. He wants to get his books insured and he needs an appraisal before a policy can be written. Maybe he’s had a loss, a flood in a basement, and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay off. I do a lot of work like that. I don’t like insurance companies—they all try to lowball: some of them even claim that the books were never worth what they were insured for. That’s where I come in. I’m not shy about telling you, there’s nobody better at sticking it to a shyster insurance company. But I’m sure you know all this.”

“I don’t know any of it. I’m too new at it; I haven’t done any appraisals yet.”

“It’s like money from heaven. Take my advice and the next time you run a Yellow Pages ad, put ‘appraisals’ in big letters. You go out, look at the stuff, do a little research, write up a report, and collect more money than an auto mechanic makes in a week. These days, that’s substantial.”

“Do you do mostly insurance claims?”

“No, but I do get a lot of them. I had one just before I left town. It was typical. The guy had lost his whole library in a flood. The pipes broke, the guy was visiting a friend… you know the story. There were books in the basement that this man had collected for twenty years. The books had never been appraised, they were supposed to be covered by his homeowner’s policy… the replacement value, you know the clause. Well, the company wouldn’t pay. The guy submitted a bill for two lousy thousand dollars and they rejected it. That’s the biggest mistake they ever made. The guy called me and I went over and looked at the stuff. Christ, all he wanted was what he had in them, which was a fraction, believe me, of what it would cost to replace them today. There were some wonderful books; it broke my heart to see them all scummy and ruined. But I went through them and when I was done the guy had a retail valuation of thirty-five thousand dollars.”

“And on your say-so, the insurance company rolled over and coughed up.”

“They did what they always do, they sent some hot dog up the mountain to challenge my competence. You can imagine how I got along with him. So it looked like we were going to court. That’s okay with me if that’s how they want to play it. But all of a sudden somebody in that company got his head straightened out. All of a sudden they wanted to settle. They called and asked me to make up a book-by-book manifest, giving retail and wholesale values chapter and verse. I was delighted to do that. Suddenly I’m working on the company’s nickel. If I had a cup of coffee while I was putting that list together, it cost the company five dollars. I don’t mean to sound crass, but that company could’ve done what was right and got out of it cheap. When they decided to cheat, the bill went way up. So I gave them a list with references and footnotes and comparatives that they couldn’t possibly challenge. It ran sixty pages and took me three days to put together, at eighty-five an hour. They settled with my guy for a little more than a third of the appraised value, eleven-five. What really killed them was having to pay my bill on top of that.”

I did the mental arithmetic. “You must’ve cost them just about what the guy had originally submitted as a total bill.”

“Two thousand, forty dollars. And people say there’s no justice in the world.”

“So what about Ballard?”

“I went through the whole routine with him. Asked him why he wanted the appraisal done, so I could be sure it was a good use of his money. That’s what it’s all about. If you’ve got any ethics, this is the first thing you’ve got to find out.”

“What difference does it make, if you find out and you still do the appraisal?”

She recoiled from the question as if a snake were wrapped around it. Her eyes narrowed in anger. “Don’t sit there and judge me, sir. It makes a hell of a difference.”

“What difference?”

“Are you trying to needle me, or do you really want to know?”

“Like I told you before, it’s none of my business anymore.”

“Fine. Then I’m wasting my time.”

I thought she was going to leave then, but she didn’t. She did the store, looking more carefully now at items that had caught her eye earlier. I went back to my bookkeeping and let her browse. It took more than half an hour for her to work her way around the room.

“Look, I’ll tell you something and then I’ve got to go,” she said. “I don’t care what you think of me or why, but here’s what happened. The man told me he’d been in the clubs for fifty years. In all that time, he had bought only the fiction. I told him my bill would be higher than the whole library was worth. He said he didn’t care about the money, he just wanted a record left for his heirs so everything would be easy after he was gone. I took it from what he said that the heirs don’t get along.”

“That’s the understatement of the year.”

“Well, there you are. He didn’t care about the money, he just wanted them to have one less thing to fight about after he’d gone. God damn it, that is a good use of his money, if that’s how he decides to use it. As long as they know what they’re getting into, who am I to tell them they can’t do it? I still didn’t want to do it. This isn’t the kind of work I usually do, and there are plenty of people in Denver who’d be glad for the job and do it well and for a lot less money. If you want to know the truth, I just can’t get excited about looking at five million book club books, even if I’m getting paid for it; I don’t need the money and I don’t do anything anymore unless it excites me. But this old gentleman wanted me. He wanted a document that wouldn’t be questioned. It may sound arrogant, Mr. Janeway, but he made it sound like a man’s last request.”

“It doesn’t sound arrogant, it’s probably true. He died this summer.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. He was a grand old man and I liked him.”

“Everybody says that.”

She seemed to thaw a little. “He was like… my grandfather… only his taste in reading was better. There were some fantastic titles in there, but they just won’t sell in those cheap editions. What more can I say?”

“You did the appraisal?”

“Yeah; three weeks later I drove down and did it. It didn’t take long and I didn’t charge him much—just enough to keep it on a professional level.”

“How did you do it?”

“What do you mean, how did I do it? I looked at the books and wrote them up. There wasn’t anything in there that needed to be itemized individually. They needed to be counted and we did that: rather, he did it before I got there. I told him to do that. There’s no sense paying an appraiser for something you can do yourself. All I had to do was look at them. There wasn’t a single book that needed to be researched. It took me about four hours to go through it and I was really moving.”

“Was there a chance you might have missed something going that fast?”

“There’s always a chance with a library that large. All I can tell you is, I looked at every book on those bookshelves. It was just what the man said it was, book club fiction top to bottom. Not worth the paper it was printed on.”

“What did your written appraisal say?”

“Just that. No value, except as salvage books. Maybe a decorator might want them, to fill shelves in model homes.”

This was her statement and it was now finished. What she had told me so far was harmless: it was what she would tell Hennessey tomorrow or the next day. This was where the questioning began, for a cop. I wasn’t a cop anymore and I had to be careful of what I said to her. You don’t tell someone what questions the cops are likely to be asking: it sets her on edge, gives her an advantage.

But I couldn’t resist this. “Would it surprise you to know that someone bought that library, Miss McKinley? Thought he was getting a helluva deal.”

I saw the anger again, but this time she kept it in. “Nothing surprises me,” she said. “There’s always someone who’ll buy something, and there’s always someone who’ll pay too much. You’ll find that out when you’ve been in it a while.”

I gave a little shrug. “This guy knew books,” I said, and my alarm went off and that was the last thing I was going to say to Rita McKinley about the Ballard books until she had given her statement to Hennessey.

Her anger simmered to the surface. “Maybe he didn’t know them as well as you think. Maybe he lost his mind, Mr. Jane-way. Maybe I was in cahoots with someone. What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you think I lowballed the appraisal just so somebody could buy it cheap? Is that what this is all about?”

“It doesn’t matter what 1 think. I’m not the police anymore.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said again. “Show me a couple of things in your glass case first.”

I took the books out and she looked at them carefully. “Let me see those too, please.” She was all business now. I tried to be too. I showed her the books and eventually she put most of them back. What she finally bought were Saul Bellow’s two rare novels, perfect copies I had bought from Peter less than a month ago. Ruby had priced them, high retail I had thought at the time: Dangling Man at $400; The Victim at $250.

She didn’t ask for a discount: money seemed to mean nothing to her. I gave her the usual twenty percent and she wrote a check for $520.

And I fell into the pit of aimless chatter. Suddenly the night looked very long and dark, and I hated to see her go.

“I’m surprised you bought those: an old bookman I know said I’d probably die with them. Bellow’s supposed to be like Mailer and Roth and Henry Miller. Nobody cares enough to collect them.”

“I guess your friend was wrong. At least about these Bellows.”

She was heading for the door. I wanted to grab her by the sleeve and show her something. It didn’t matter what, as long as it was interesting and she hadn’t seen it before.

How would you like to see how a cop really interrogates, Miss McKinley?

What I said, though, was “Look, I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

She turned at the door and gave me a look. I gave up the fight and made my betrayal of the Denver Police Department complete.

“I knew the books weren’t worth anything,” I said. “We saw the statements from the club. He kept them all, a complete record, all the way back to the beginning. I could’ve done that appraisal, just from the records he’d kept.”

“Well, then,” she said crisply. “I guess I won’t go to the electric chair after all.”

She had the door open. Now or never, I thought.

“How about dinner some night?”

“I don’t think so,” she said in the same heartbeat. “Thank you for asking, but no.”

The door pulled shut in her wake. I stood again in an empty room on an empty world. A faint trace of her cologne lingered. Her memory lingered a good deal longer.

25

I dreamed about her. We swam together through a sea of books, in my dream. This was wonderful stuff. I hadn’t had much to do with love, quote-unquote, in a very long time. Perhaps a bachelor heading into senility doesn’t believe in the quote-unquote; maybe it’s the one thing he’s truly afraid of. But Rita McKinley had lit a fire under me and I knew it. I had gone up like an ember doused with gasoline. This may be normal for an adolescent, but for a man in his thirties who deals in “relationships” rather than “love,” the feeling was heady and strange. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but with it came the unease of knowing that it would probably turn out to be.

In the morning I called Hennessey to square things away. I was still enough of a cop to do that. I told him about McKinley’s after-hours visit, what we’d said, and how much I’d given away. He didn’t seem to care much. The mayor wasn’t exactly demanding that cops be called in on overtime to solve Bobby Westfall. He would be happy to talk to McKinley, when they made connections, but he wasn’t hopeful that anything would come of it.

Two hours later, he called back and said McKinley was coming in around eleven o’clock. After that she was fair game.

Fair but elusive.

I called her number around two. She had the recording on, but she called back less than an hour later.

Her voice was cool and distant. “Well, Mr. Janeway, have you figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out, the murder or the book business?”

“If you ever get the book business figured out, let me know how you did it. What can I do for you?”

“Help me figure it out.”

“I told you last night, and I told your Mr. Hennessey again this morning, I don’t know anything about it.”

“I was talking about the book business. I’d like to come up and see your books.”

I felt completely transparent, stripped before the world. I braced for another rebuff and got it.

‘There’s no margin for you up here,“ she said. ”Everything I’ve got is very high retail.“

“I bet I’ll find something.”

“1 don’t think so. You couldn’t possibly make any money, and look, I’m very busy now. I just got home, I’m still tired, and I’ve got a million things to catch up on. Add to that the fact that I’m just not feeling very hospitable. I don’t feel like having company.”

“Well, that’s plain enough.”

“I’m sorry. Good-bye.”

Strike two on Janeway: bottom of the ninth, two out, and the fans begin to head for the turnstiles. I left the store in Miss Pride’s care and made my rounds. I reached the DAV on Montview just as books were being put out. It looked like crap. I looked at it through Rita McKinley’s eyes, and all I could see was crap: small-time books eagerly coveted by eternally small-timers. Book club mysteries. Book club science fiction. Dildo books: the Cosmo Book of Good Sex, How to Make Love to a Man, screwing seven ways from Sunday, blah blah blah. I hope these aren’t the books we’re judged by, by archaeologists of the future.

I’d been staring, thinking of Rita McKinley, when my eyes focused on the title JR and the name Gaddis. I reached out and plucked it just in time. A shadow loomed over my right shoulder.

“Hiya, Dr. J.”

I turned. “Hi, Peter. How’s tricks?”

“Could be better. Y‘ almost missed that one. What’s it worth?”

I opened the book, took off the jacket, sniffed for mold. It was a nice enough first: the flyleaf had been creased and some bozo had written his name in it.

“Oh, for this copy, thirty, forty bucks.”

Miss McKinley probably wouldn’t pick it up, even at $2. But to a guy like Peter, it was a little shot of life.

“Damn,” he said. “Another minute and I’da had it.”

“You can have it anyway,” I said, and I gave it to him.

“Jesus, Dr. J…”

“Merry Christmas, two months early.”

“Jesus.”

We walked out together. In the parking lot we stood and chatted for a moment. I asked if he was finding any books. He said yeah, he had some nice stuff to show me. One or two real honeys. Maybe he’d come in later in the week.

Then he seemed to go stiff. I looked at his face and thought he might be having a heart attack. He tottered and would’ve fallen if I hadn’t grabbed his arm.

“Hey, Pete, you okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He didn’t look okay. He looked like a gaffed fish.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“No…no ride. Here comes the bus.”

He broke away and ran across the street. A car swerved and almost hit him. He spun around and without breaking stride ran full-tilt to the bus stop. He had dropped the copy of JR at my feet.

I picked it up and watched the bus roll away. What the hell was that all about? I wondered.

It was about fear. Peter had been so scared of something that his mind had stopped working. Something had scared the hell out of Pete.

I stood where I was and looked around. A busy but harmless intersection: cars raced through on four lanes and people hustled along the sidewalk. Two convenience stores faced each other across the street. On the third corner was a little shopette and a Mexican cafe. The thrift store took up the fourth corner. I tried to remember what Peter had been doing, where he’d been looking, when it had happened, but I couldn’t be sure. I walked across the street and went into one of the convenience stores. I bought some gum. Then I shrugged it off and went back to work.

26

“Rita mckinley called,” Miss Pride said when I came in. “About fifteen minutes ago.”

I played it cool. Checked the day’s receipts. Verified my suspicion that it had been a lousy day. We had barely broken a hundred: cleared expenses was all.

I walked up the street and visited Ruby. He was getting ready to pack it in. Neff had gone home for the day. The firm of Seals & Neff had taken in less than fifty dollars.

It had been a lousy day on Book Row all around.

I didn’t go down as far as Jerry Harkness. I could see a light coming from his window, so I knew he was there. I could see a light in Clyde Fix’s place as well.

Night had come with a vengeance. I felt alone in the world and I had a hunch that, whatever Rita McKinley had to say to me, it wouldn’t make that feeling go away.

But it did. When I called her, she was full of apologies.

“I’m not usually rude to people, Mr. Janeway. Put it down to jet lag.”

“I didn’t notice at all,” I lied.

She spoke into the sudden yawning silence. “If you still want to come up, of course you’re welcome.”

“Just say when.”

“Tomorrow afternoon would be as good a time as any. Make it late afternoon and that’ll give me time to wind down from the trip.”

I felt light-headed, almost giddy. Janeway’s still at bat, folks: as incredible as it is to believe, he’s been standing at the plate popping fouls into the bleachers for more than twenty-four hours, and the game’s still hanging in the balance.

Miss Pride was watering her plant, which had been repotted twice and was growing into a small tree. I had never seen anything grow like that in just three months.

“What kind of thing is that?” I said.

“I have no idea. Just something I dug up myself.”

“If it grows teeth, kill it.”

We began to go through the nightly ritual, preparing to close.

“So you didn’t tell me,” I said: “how was Harkness?”

“A dear. A perfect gentleman.”

I sighed.

“I know you’d love an excuse to go up there and tear his head off, but I’m afraid I can’t give you one. He was just fine. His manners were beyond reproach.”

“Just watch your flank, Miss Pride, just watch the water fore and aft, port and starboard. Now what do you say we lock this baby up and call it a bad day?”

“It was pretty dreary. I’ll get the lights and put the recording on.”

She disappeared into the back room. I locked the front door and began counting the money. I had just got started when I felt my hackles go up. I turned and looked through the glass. Jackie Newton was sitting in a car at the curb, watching me. It was a long black car, not one of his. The gunsel was behind the wheel.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Miss Pride, coming from the back room, said, “Did you say something to me?”

“I said we’ve got company.”

“Oh, God.”

“Don’t even look at ‘em; don’t let ’em faze you at all. Just go on about your business and get ready to leave.”

I turned the sign around, in case they had any notions of coming in. Miss Pride bustled about gathering her things.

“Are we ready to go?” I said.

“I am.”

“Good. I’m driving you home tonight, by way of west Denver. Don’t argue with me, let’s just go. We’ll walk right past the sons of bitches and get in my car and drive away. Got that?”

“I got it.”

I flipped the front room lights. The telephone rang.

I heard the machine kick on and then begin recording. I don’t like machines that answer telephones, but Miss Pride had talked me into it, so we wouldn’t miss anyone with a big library to sell. As usual, she was right: the damned machine had made its cost back, three times over.

“I’m gonna see who that is,” I said. “You wait here. Don’t look at those guys and don’t look worried. I’ll be right back.”

By the time I got into the office, the recorder had cut off. It was probably Rita McKinley, I thought, cancelling tomorrow. I rewound the tape and played the message.

It was Peter. His voice was tense, strained. “I need to talk to you, right now,” he said.

I waited. I knew the line was still open, but he didn’t say anything. He was like a man whose attention has suddenly been captured—like the poor scared fool he’d been in the thrift store parking lot.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and hung up.

I ran the tape back and replayed it. It didn’t make any more sense than anything else he had done that day. I had no idea where he lived or how to reach him. Maybe Ruby knew.

I reset the tape, went up front, killed the last of the lights, and took Miss Pride by the arm. “Let’s go.”

I locked the door and we walked past the car where Newton and his thug sat waiting. The gunsel started the engine and the car rolled along beside us. I’m gonna put up with this about ten seconds, I thought; then I’m gonna kick some ass. I walked up to Ruby’s. The store was closed and locked. I walked past Harkness’s, which was also closed. Only Clyde Fix was still open: he sat in the window and watched the street like a vulture.

We went around the corner to the small lot where everyone on Book Row kept their cars. The headlights of the gunsel’s car swung behind us in a slow arc. I held the door for Miss Pride, then I walked back to the gunsel’s car, which was sitting still with its motor running.

I tapped on the window. Jackie rolled it down a crack.

“That’s all for you, Newton. If I see your ass again tonight there’s gonna be trouble.”

“Izzat so,” the gunsel said.

I kept looking at Jackie. “Does this guy speak English? Keep your hands on the wheel, dogbreath; touch that gun and I’ll blow you right through the door.” There was a long quivering pause. The gunsel’s fists clenched around the steering wheel. “Now I’m gonna tell you something, Newton, and this goes for you too, Anton. If you want to live to celebrate your next birthday, don’t fuck with me. You want to put that in Mon-golese, Jackie, so the ape can understand it? Don’t… fuck… with me.”

“Tough guy,” the gunsel said. “I’m gonna walk on you, tough guy.”

“You couldn’t walk the plank without losing your way. Now get this crate down the street.”

Jackie wanted to look amused, but he couldn’t sell that. He rolled up his window and motioned with his finger and the car pulled away from the curb. I watched the taillights go and thought again of Vinnie Marranzino. I stood for a long moment after they’d gone, watching the empty street.

Just another day on Book Row.

27

The next day began like every other. How it ended was another matter.

I made my rounds and found nothing of interest. The entire day was colored by my coming meeting with Rita McKinley. I was on edge, nervous and apprehensive and in a very real but strange way, thrilled. I had an early lunch with Hennessey and we talked a little about the Westfall case. Hennessey liked Rita McKinley and was inclined to believe everything she said. The line from the police department now seemed to be that Bobby Westfall had been killed by a petty thief, who was likely to remain unknown until he was caught for another crime and confessed to this as well. “Right, Neal,” I said, and he gave me a look over a ten-pound sandwich and decided to say no more about it.

I had time to kill and I didn’t want to go into the store. I called in instead, and told Miss Pride I was heading west and probably wouldn’t see her till tomorrow. “Well, that’s going to be a problem for Peter,” she said. “He was here a while ago looking for you. He seemed quite put out when you weren’t here. I told him to come back at closing time, you’re always here by then.”

“Well, tonight I won’t be. Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, but he certainly made it sound urgent.”

“When he comes in, try to help him. He mentioned to me yesterday that he might have some pretty good books to sell. If he needs some money, give him some. Give him up to a couple of hundred if that’s what it takes. Write him a check on the bank up the street and tell him I’ll square it with him tomorrow.”

“Well, all right, but I don’t think that’s what it’s about. He didn’t have any books with him and he didn’t say anything about money.”

“All right, if worse comes to worst, have him call me up at Rita McKinley’s place. Now, one more thing. Call your friend Harkness and let him know you’re gonna be alone at closing tonight. Tell Ruby and Neff too.”

“I’ll be fine, Mr. Janeway.”

“Listen to me. Do what I tell you. That’s the most dangerous time of day for businesses run by women alone. Just let the others on the block know that you’ll be closing up alone tonight. That way they can keep an eye on you.”

I heard her sigh with feminist impatience.

“Miss Pride? Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Mr. Janeway.”

“Do it.”

“Yes, Mr. Janeway.”

I decided to scout west Denver, work my way through Golden and Morrison and let my momentum carry me to McKinley’s place by late afternoon. For some reason, west Denver is a bookscout’s ghetto. There are a few thrift stores, but nothing to write home about, and Golden is a complete wash. Morrison is an interesting little mountain town, full of antique stores that will sometimes cough up a garnet in the sea of junk. It was, however, less than a blue-ribbon performance: the sum total of the day’s work was less than a dozen books, none even on the fringe of greatness. Some days are like that.

It was almost dark when I drove up the road to Rita McKinley’s. The clock in my dashboard said 4:53. I was run-ning a little later than I’d planned—a place in Evergreen had caught my eye, and you know how bookscouting is. She had left the gate open and I drove right through. She was working when I arrived: she had a fire going in the yard and huge piles of trash waiting to be fed to it. It was chilly. She wore faded jeans and a red flannel shirt and a heavy coat. The house was perched on top of the mountain, a great stone building with a porch that looked east, toward Denver. You couldn’t see the city from there, but that didn’t hurt the view. Miss McKinley gave a wave as I came into the yard. I parked beside her car, a plain Dodge about four years old.

From a distance she looked very young, an illusion that dissolved as I came closer. She was one of those women who look better with some age. She’d be a knockout at forty, about six years from now. We said our hellos and I apologized for intruding. She waved that off and led me inside. “My books are all over the house,” she said. “It’ll take you a long time to see them all. Maybe we should confine ourselves to the big room today.”

The house smelled musty, the way a place gets when it’s been closed for six months. Her living room was long, with a fireplace and a high ceiling. She had an enormous print of a whale, the picture Rockwell Kent had done for the 1930 edition of Moby Dick. There were other whales about—knick-knacks on the shelves, pictures on the walls, paintings, photographs. Over the fireplace she had a blown-up photograph of a lone man standing on the bow of a speedboat. A larger boat was in the background, bearing down. I knew what it was: someone from Greenpeace, putting himself between an unseen whale and a boatload of modern whalers.

There weren’t many books in the living room, and these she said were junk, “just things I’m reading.” The main event was two rooms removed. The whole east wall was made of glass. There were heavy drapes, open now, which she used, probably in the morning, to protect her books against the sun. All the other walls were lined with books.

“Before you get started, there was a call for you about ten minutes ago. It may’ve been your girl at the store. It sounded pretty confused. Here, I got part of it on the tape machine.”

She flipped a small cassette player. The first thing I heard was Peter’s voice. He was in the middle of a sentence, as if he’d been talking over the recording. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice sounded almost panicky. He turned away from the phone and there was a jumble of voices. A woman’s voice said, “Let me talk to him, Peter… Peter, would you give me that phone… give it to me, Peter, right now.” There was a click and a bump and Miss Pride came on. “Mr. Janeway, are you there? Hello?” Then I heard her say, lower, as if she’d turned away. “There’s nobody on the line, Peter, are you sure you dialed it right?” Then Peter screamed—literally screamed—“It’s a fucking tape recorder!” and I heard him shout something but I couldn’t make out the words. They were both talking for about ten seconds; then Miss Pride came back on and said in a low voice, “Look, I’m sorry, someone’s come in…I’ll call you back.”

The line went dead.

“You certainly know some strange people, Mr. Janeway,” Miss McKinley said.

“I can’t imagine what was going on there.”

“I think you’d better call her back.”

She went out of the room while I called. The phone rang and rang. The clock on the wall said five twenty-five: the store had been closed for twenty-five minutes.

I sat for a moment and stared at the machine. Miss McKinlev poked her head in.

“Everything all right?”

“I don’t know. Could I hear the tape again?”

But there was nothing on the tape that hadn’t been there the first time.

I called Seals & Neff. Ruby answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Rube, this’s Janeway. Listen, would you walk up the street and see if everything is okay at my place?”

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“Peter was just in there. I’m afraid he may’ve been giving Miss Pride some grief.”

“Sure… gimme your number where you’re at…I’ll call you right back.”

I hung up and sat down to wait.

“How about some coffee?” Miss McKinley said. “I’ve got some whiskey if you’d like a drink.”

“As a matter of fact, it is almost decent time for a bourbon.”

“How do you like it?”

“Just like it comes.”

She came back with the drink just as Ruby called. She motioned to the phone, that I should answer it, and I did. Ruby said, “Place looks shipshape to me, Dr. J. All locked up tight and the night-light on.”

“Did you try the doors?”

“All both of’em. Walked around, rattled the windows, sang three stanzas of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ through the keyhole. Nobody’s there, Dr. J. Whatever the bug up Pete’s ass was, she must’ve handled it and got him out of there.”

“Okay,” I said in a doubtful voice. “Thanks, Ruby.”

I looked at Miss McKinley. “What a crazy thing.”

“There’s probably a simple explanation.”

“Yeah…but you’d think she’d call back.”

“Maybe it slipped her mind. She did say someone had come in. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Might as well do what you came for.”

28

Everything julian lambert had said about her books was true, except that even then you weren’t prepared for them. You just don’t see that many sensational books in one place. It was all literature, published since the mid-1800s, and it was all letter-perfect. You need a bookman’s eye to appreciate what a perfect copy of a fifty-year-old book looks like. It does not look like a new book—it looks so wonderfully like an old book that’s never been touched. Never been touched by human hands—that’s the feeling her books gave you. There were things in that room that I knew hadn’t been seen in that condition in half a century. She had a shelf of Jack Londons in crisp dust jackets from before 1910. She had a little poetry piece that had ushered Ernest Hemingway into the book world. She had Mark Twain’s copy of Kim, signed by Kipling when he and Clemens had met, in 1907. There were so many signed books, variants, unique pieces, books with unusual associations, books from authors’ personal libraries, letters, and manuscripts that mere first editions seemed unexciting and trite. She had factory-fresh copies of Look Homeward, Angel, and Steinbeck’s first, awful, but extremely scarce novel, Cup of Gold. After a while this becomes meaningless: it degenerates into a simple list of the great, the rare, the wonderful. When I came upon Hawthorne’s copy of Moby Dick, inscribed by Melville in great friendship and lavishly annotated in Hawthorne’s hand, I heard a long deep sigh fill the room. I realized a moment later that it had been my own voice.

The phone rang, and I thought of Miss Pride. I heard the recorder kick on and Rita McKinley’s voice repeating the message I had heard so often. At the beep, a man said, “Rita, this is Paul… Call me back when you can.” It rang again, almost immediately. The recorder played and beeped and a voice said, “This is George Butler the Third calling from New York. I have decided to buy the four books we discussed yesterday. Would you please ship and bill as soon as possible?” Of course I knew who Butler the Third was. I saw his self-aggrandizing ads in the AB all the time. “Mr. George Butler III announces his acquisition of…” That kind of thing. George Butler was one of the so-called big boys of the book world. You read his ads and you knew he never put on his pants like a mortal man, he just drifted up and floated down into both legs at once. I wondered what four books George Butler had decided he couldn’t live without, and what the tariff would be. Ten thousand? Twenty? Just routine business for Ms. McKinley, who was certainly operating on a high level from her ivory tower in the mountains.

I took a break and called Miss Pride’s home number. She wasn’t home. I looked through some more books. I had done most of one short wall and still had the long wall and another short one left. I felt light-headed, like a drunk just coming back from a three-week bender. It had been too rich, this feast of her books, and I decided to pack it in for the night. I got up, stretched, and moved to the door. There was no sound in the house, other than the grandfather’s clock ticking in the hallway. The clock said it was eight-thirty. I went through the dark hall, drawn by the light at the end. Suddenly I smelled food cooking. When I came into the kitchen, I saw that she had set a table for two.

I didn’t see her at first. She was standing by the glass door, perfectly still, lost in thought, looking away into the night. I cleared my throat. She turned. There was a pensive, lonely, almost sad look on her face. I didn’t know what else to call it but a window to the soul. It disappeared at once and the mask came up. She looked surprised, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“Well, Mr. Janeway. You all finished?”

“Give me another week and I might be just getting started.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I thought I’d buy something,” I said. “I guess I wanted to show off. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know where to begin.”

“It has that effect on people. It can be overwhelming.”

“I hope when you go away for months at a time you have some way of protecting it.”

“I do lock the gate.”

“Don’t you even have a burglar alarm?”

She shook her head. “You think I should?”

“Yes, and an armed guard, and spotlights, a siren, and killer dogs. I’d also put a moat around the house and fill it with crocodiles. That’s for starters.”

“Oh, it’s no fun having something if you’ve got to lock it up… if it makes you paranoid.”

“There’s a difference between paranoia and common sense. You’d hate to come home someday and find all these books gone.”

“Yes, but they’re only books. I’d just go get some more.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

She said, “I love what I do but I’m not very materialistic. If I don’t have them, somebody else will. As long as they’re not destroyed, the world’s no worse off.”

“I don’t believe you said that. I could spend a week in that room without water, food, or air.”

“Speaking of food and water, I’m fixing us something to eat. Hope you don’t mind fruit and veggies. I’m trying to stop eating meat.”

It was an Eastern dish, very tasty, with nuts and shoots and broccoli under a golden baked crust. She had a good bottle of wine and a little chocolate cake for dessert.

We talked over dinner. She was giving up meat for both main reasons, health and politics. She was an environmentalist, but I had already guessed that. I didn’t think the individual could make much difference. She bristled at that and said, “As long as you think that way, you are the enemy. The individual is the only one who can make a difference.” I didn’t believe that but I didn’t want to ruffle her. She was a woman who mattered to me, very suddenly, very keenly, and I wished we could talk without having our conversation sprinkled with land mines. I said, and meant it, that I probably agreed with most of her political views, I just didn’t believe some of them could be won that way.

She looked at me with a blank expression. “I can’t figure you out, Janeway.”

“That makes us even. I can’t figure you out.”

“I don’t know whether you’re a poet or a thug.”

I laughed at that: couldn’t help myself. She shook her head and didn’t seem amused.

“What do you do in the summer?” I asked.

“Travel. What do you do?”

“What I do all the time anymore. I look for books. Do you look for books in the summer, in exotic and faraway places?”

“I don’t have anything to do with books in the summer. I am, for all practical purposes, closed down between May and September. I don’t even read books in the summer.”

“What do you do if you get a call on the first of May from some guy in New Mexico, who says he’s got ten thousand perfect books and he’s selling them all cheap?”

“I tell him he’ll have to call someone else. I might refer him to you, if I like you.”

“You give me the impression that none of this matters.”

“It matters. This collection was put together with tender loving care, so it does matter. It’s just not the most important thing.”

“What is?”

“I don’t think I’ll answer that question yet. Maybe I will, if I ever get to know you better. For now, it’s none of your business.”

We ate in silence for a moment. Then she said, “Tact is not one of my strong points. If you were still a policeman, I guess I’d have to tell you, wouldn’t I? You can find out if you want: your friend Mr. Hennessey knows.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Good. And really, it’s no big deal. I’m just very… very… private. I value my privacy more than anything but my freedom.”

“Hey.” I held up both hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

The phone rang: the recorder kicked on. It was another dealer, in San Francisco, asking if she still had the first edition Phantom of the Opera. I knew she had it: I had seen it on my tour of the short wall.

“You’ve got your phone amplified all over the house?” I said.

She nodded. “That way I can weed out the pests. The answering machine puts a buffer between me and the world; the amplifier lets me know if it’s someone I want to talk to now. But I never get calls that can’t wait.”

“Not even George Butler the Third,” I said with false awe.

“George is a very large pain. I don’t know why I fool with him.”

“You know what I’d like to have?” I said suddenly. “Your Steinbeck, with the penis doodle.”

She laughed, the first time I’d seen her do that. “ ‘Tom Joad on the road.’ It’s one of my favorite books. Very expensive for that title.”

I felt my throat tighten. “How expensive?”

“If you’ve got to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Seriously, you don’t have to buy anything. I don’t charge admission up here.”

I took out my checkbook and tapped it lightly on the table.

Her eyes narrowed and got hard. “Fifteen hundred,” she said.

The knot in my throat swelled, but I began to write the check.

“Make it twelve,” she said. “I usually don’t give or ask for discounts, but I will this time. Make it payable to Greenpeace.”

I blinked at her. “Greenpeace?”

“Do you want me to spell it for you?”

“Greenpeace,” I said dumbly.

“Greenpeace gives me a reason to get up in the morning.”

I handed her the check. “Oh, I’ll bet you have at least a thousand very good reasons for getting up in the morning, Miss McKinley.”

She blushed when I said that. She really did. I felt a flush in my own cheeks. It had been a long time since I’d tried playing the gallant.

“So,” she said, going for more coffee, “you’ve just bought your first really nice book and paid retail for it. What are you going to do with it?”

“Gonna sell it.”

“Good for you. You think there’s any margin?”

“For something like this, there’s always margin.”

“You know, Mr. Janeway, I really do think you’re going to turn out to be a good bookman. You already know what sometimes takes people years to learn.”

“Which is…?”

“When you buy something unique, and pay twice what it’s worth, it’s a great bargain. It took me a long time to learn that. Some people never learn it. George Butler never has. Now it’s the only way I operate.”

“That’s fine if your pockets are deep enough.”

“That does help. It’s hard making it from scratch in the book business.”

“Tell me about it.”

Please tell me about it, I thought. We were going nowhere fast, on an endless merry-go-round of polite tea talk. I needed a breakthrough, something to batter down the walls she had built around herself. I had a hunch that if I walked out of there without finding that key, she’d never let me come back. There was something at work between us, and it was good but it wasn’t all good. I couldn’t get a handle on any of it. I knew she was curious about me but she’d never ask: by refusing to talk about herself, she had given up that right. I could see that if there was any opening up to do, I’d be the one to do it. Slowly I turned the talk to my childhood. She listened intently and I was encouraged to go on. It became very personal. Suddenly I was telling her things I had never told anyone.

In the first place, my birth was an accident. My father is a lawyer whose name heads a five-pronged Denver partnership on 17th Street. He makes half a million in a good year and can’t remember when his last bad year was. There’s no way I’ll inherit any of that—my old man and I haven’t spoken to each other in fifteen years, and we weren’t close even before that. Larry Janeway isn’t a man people get close to. He is, however, dignified. He’s famous in court for his dignity and composure. Once, as the song went, that composure sorta slipped, and a dalliance with a truly gorgeous woman thirty-seven years ago produced… me. Here I sit, brokenhearted. I look at my parents and on one hand I see chilly arrogance and deceit; on the other, frivolous insanity. All the Libertys were crazy, and Jeannie, my mother, was probably certifiable. It was Jeannie, I think, who caused me to distrust beautiful women. I’ll take brains, heart, and wit over beauty every time out. What’s amazing is how well I survived their best efforts to tear me apart, how, in spite of them, I turned out so well adjusted and sane. So completely goddamned normal.

“Well, sort of goddamned normal,” she said without a smile.

“Oh yeah? How goddamned normal do you think you are?”

“Pretty goddamned normal.”

Suddenly she laughed, a schoolgirl giggle that lit her up and made her young again. “Now there’s my intelligent conversation of the week,” she said, and we both laughed. I wondered if that was the break I was looking for, but it didn’t seem to be. She would listen, interested, to anything I wanted to tell her, but still she wouldn’t ask. I’ve never been brilliant at monologue, but I did my best. I told her about life at North High, about growing up in a pool of sharks. “If there’s a thug in me, I guess that’s where it comes from.” Where the poet came from, if there was such a thing, was anybody’s guess.

“It’s getting late,” she said.

Was that strike three? Her tone gave away nothing.

A bold frontal attack, then, seemed to be the last weapon in the old Janeway arsenal.

“Look, give me a break. Why don’t you open that door, just a little, and see what’s on the other side?”

“I know what’s on the other side. I haven’t exactly led a monastic life.”

“C’mon, let’s cut to the chase, Rita. Dinner Friday night and a tour of Denver’s hottest hot spots.”

“Nope. Not my cup of tea, Mr. Janeway.”

“Then I’ll rent a tux and we’ll go to the Normandy. I don’t care.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, take the full thirty seconds and think it over.”

She shook her head.

“I know a great restaurant that serves nothing but broccoli. I’ll take you there for breakfast. Broccoli pancakes, the best in town. We’ll take a ride on the Platte River bus. Race stick-boats down the stream. Walk down Seventeenth Street and stick our tongues out at my old man’s law office. Forget about books and crime and everything else for a few hours. Come on, what do you say?”

“No,” she said firmly.

“I knew you’d see it my way.”

She gave me the long cool stare. “You’re pushing, Mr. Janeway. I don’t want to be blunt.”

“Go ahead, be blunt. I’ve got a thick skin, I can take it. I’m not gonna fall on my sword. Since we’re being blunt, let me ask you something. Are you worried that I’ll eat my fish with the salad fork? Or do you big-time book dealers have a rule about not playing with the little guys.”

“Don’t be nasty, sir.”

“I’m just trying to figure you out.”

“Then stop trying. It’s very simple. 1 don’t want to get involved.”

“And you think knowing me will involve you in something?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“How, for God’s sake?”

“How do you think? How do men and women always get involved?”

I sat back and looked from afar. “Well, now, that’s quite a thing to say.”

“A good deal more than I wanted to say.”

“So what’s wrong with that? It’s what makes the world go ‘round. If it happens, it happens.”

“It’s not going to happen, Mr. Janeway, I promise you that.”

She had been sitting rigidly in her chair: now she relaxed; sat back and let her breath out slowly. “I didn’t want to let you come up here at all. You know that.”

“Don’t give me that. You called me back, remember?”

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“You know, all right, you just don’t want to say it.”

“Doesn’t need to be said. You’re here, aren’t you? Don’t be so damned analytical. You’re here, I must’ve wanted to see you again. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you into my life. I’m sorry if that’s too blunt, Mr. Janeway, but you can’t say you didn’t ask for it.”

Then a curious thing happened: her hands began to tremble. She groped for words, reached down into a stack of newspapers and came up with THE newspaper. “I never stop my papers when I go away. There’s a boy I hire who brings all my mail and newspapers in every day. I guess I should have them stopped but I don’t. I like to see what’s been happening while I’ve been gone. Look what I came across this morning.”

The story was a little different than the one I had seen. The headline said cop named in brutality charge. They had moved my picture out to page 1 for the late edition. It lay on the table, staring up at me, glaring angrily at the angry old world.

“Is this my dessert?”

She just looked at me.

“Miss McKinley, I’m wasting a helluva lot of great one-liners on you. I’m starting to think you’ve got no sense of humor at all.”

She still said nothing. Her eyes burned into my face like tiny suns.

“You want maybe I should comment on this? Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“My comment is this. Don’t believe everything you read.”

“That’s it?”

“Tell me what you want and I’ll do my best to give it to you. I mean, look, you read that this morning, right? Plenty of time for you to call to cancel. You didn’t do that, did you?”

Her eyes never left my face. She gave a shake of her head that was barely a movement.

“Even after I got here, you could’ve shuffled me in and out. But you didn’t do that, either. You gave me a good stiff drink and free run of the place, then you gave me dinner. What am I supposed to make of that?”

She said nothing, did nothing.

“I’m going home,” I said.

I stood and paused for just a moment, my hands clasping the back of my chair. We looked at each other. Her face was a solid wall. She said nothing. I went to the door and looked back. What a great exit, I thought: I’ll just fade away like some damnfool hero in a bad cowboy movie. In the yard I looked back. She had come to the doorway, a silhouette in the yellow light. I gave her a cheery wave. The hell with you, I thought. Then I thought, Don’t walk away, it’s too important; don’t do this. What you say and do this minute will set the course of your life from this day on, I thought.

I had opened the car door, propped my foot inside, and leaned over the window. When I spoke, my voice carried strong and clear over the mountaintop. “What’s in the newspaper is his side of it. Here’s my side, in case you’re interested. That guy is a killer. I’ve tried to pin him for more than two years. I guess I finally got sick of it. He raped a woman and beat her silly and was coming back for an encore. He found me there instead. As far as brutality is concerned, forget it— he’s plenty big enough to take care of himself. When he says I cuffed him and beat him, he’s lying. I took the cuffs off and it was a fair fight. That’s the end of it. I’m going home.“

I drove down the mountain feeling depressed. But under it was a strange feeling of elation, of joy, making a mix that’s almost impossible to describe. I didn’t know what was happening but it was big. Oh, was it big! Could I have lived thirty-six years and never once felt this? I stopped at the side of the road about five miles from her house and fought the urge to go back. I won that fight… one mark for good judgment.

I’d call her in the morning.

She’d call me.

Somehow we’d get past all the problems of her money and her expertise and my brutal nature.

One way or another, it wasn’t over. That was the one sure thing in an unsure world.

29

I got to the store about quarter past midnight. The street was deserted except for an ambulance far away: the overture of another long night on East Colfax. I tucked the Steinbeck under my arm and let myself in. The place had a stale, slightly sour smell at midnight. I locked the door and put the book on the counter, then sat on my stool looking at it. I opened it and looked at the doodle Steinbeck had drawn all those years ago, when fame and glory and money were his, when his talent was at its peak. “May 12, 1940: Tom Joad on the road.” A prize, yes, one might even say a small victory, but a hollow one. You can have it back, Miss Rita, you hear that? You can have the damn thing. All you’ve got to do is ask.

I cut a piece of plastic and wrapped the jacket anew. With a light pencil I wrote in the new. price, $2,000, and looked in the glass case for the perfect centerpiece spot.

The phone rang.

It can’t be, I thought. I watched it ring three times, then I picked it up and said hello.

“I knew you’d be there,” she said.

“You’re getting pretty smart in your old age.”

“It’s what I’d‘ve done not so long ago. When you buy your first big piece, you can’t wait to see how it looks in its new home. Even if it’s midnight.”

“For the record, it looks great.”

“You’re allowed an hour to gloat. After that, it’s unbecom-ing.”

There was a long pause, what I was starting to think of as a Ritalike white space. Then she said, “I called to tell you something but I don’t know how.”

“We could play twenty questions. Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Animal,” she said. Her voice sounded thick, lusty.

“I kind of thought it would be.”

Another pause. I didn’t know what to do but fill it with more comic relief.

“Does it walk on two legs, four, or slide on its belly like a reptile?”

“This is difficult,” she said. “I know you think I’ve been manipulating you, but I haven’t. I’m just not very consistent sometimes.”

“Hey, if I want consistency I’ll buy a robot. So you give off mixed signals. That’s all part of the human comedy.”

“You’re angry.”

“Just confused, Miss McKinley. First you tell me, in barely couched terms, to break a leg and go blind. Then you call and invite me up. You fix me a dinner but act like I’m the butcher of Auschwitz when I ask you for a date. You’d already read that newspaper, you knew full well that I stomp puppies to death for a hobby, but do I worry? Nah! I’m just glad I got to see your books.”

There was white space, of course: a ten-second pause. I thought of whistling Time on My Hands, but I didn’t do it.

“You are one strange bird, Janeway,” she said.

“I’m fascinating as hell, though, you’ve got to admit that.”

“Yes,” she said, and I felt that buildup in my throat again, and I hoped I’d be able to get through this conversation without croaking like Henry Aldrich.

“I have a dark secret,” she said. “If I tell you what it is, will you promise not to try to see me again?”

“I never bet on a blind. Only fools and bad poker players do that.”

“I guess I’ll tell you anyway. I don’t want you going away thinking I’ve been playing with you.”

“What difference does it make, if I’m going away?”

“I told you before, don’t be so goddamned analytical. Take a few things on faith.”

“You haven’t said anything yet.”

“It’s very simple. I hate violence, but all my life I’ve been attracted to violent men.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, struggling past a pear-sized obstruction in my throat.

“So the reason I didn’t want you to come up here today is the same reason I finally did ask you up. The same reason I didn’t cancel when I read the paper. The same reason I wouldn’t go out with you. Does that make any sense?”

“No, but keep going. I like the sound of it.”

“You wear your violence on your sleeve. It goes where you go. You carry it around like other men carry briefcases. It’s like a third person in the room. I can’t help being appalled by that.”

I listened to her breathe. My pear had grown into a grapefruit.

“And yet, I’m always a sucker for a man who can make me believe he’ll do anything, if the stakes are big enough.”

I gave a wicked laugh.

Gotcha, I thought.

“I don’t want to see you again,” she said. “I just wanted you to know why.”

“I’ve got a hunch we’ll see each other.”

“I’m engaged, Mr. Janeway. I’m getting married next month.”

“Then it’s a good thing I came along when I did.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and hung up.

God damn it, I thought.

Whoopie! I thought. Yaahoo!

Elation and despair were sisters after all.

I called her back: got the recording. When the beep came, I pictured her sitting in the kitchen listening to my voice. Insanity, the third sister, took over. I got real close and crooned into the phone. “Oh, Rüüü-ta! This is the mystery voice calling! Guess my name and win a truckload of Judith Krantz first editions. Ooooh, I’m sorry, I’m not George Butler the Third! But that was a fine guess, and wait’ll you hear about the grand consolation prize we have in store for you! Two truckloads of Judith Krantz first editions! Your home will certainly be a bright one with all those colorful best-sellers lying around. Your friends will gaze in awe—” The tape beeped again, and a good thing, else I might’ve gone on till dawn. I replaced the phone in the cradle and stared at it for a long moment. Ring, you sonofabitch, I thought, but the bastard just sat there.

Convulsed with laughter, I was sure.

Too weak to call.

Savoring my wit in her solitude.

Damn her.

I worked it off. In a bookstore there’s always something to do. I had a small stack of low-end first editions that needed to be priced, so I did that. I watered Miss Pride’s plant again, and studied the AB. I read for an hour. Sometime after two o’clock I fell asleep in the big deep chair near the front counter.

I opened my eyes to a feeling more desolate than despair. This was not the aching loneliness of new love, it was something far more desperate and immediate. The street was still dark: the world outside was hollow and empty and nothing moved anywhere. The store was like a tomb: still, silent, eerie.

Maybe I’d been dreaming. I hadn’t had the Jackie Newton dream in months. Maybe that had come back and I just couldn’t remember.

Then it came to me.

It was that sourness I had noticed when I’d first opened the door. It was stronger now, ripe and distinct, almost sweet in a sickening kind of way. When you’ve been in Homicide as long as I was, that’s one thing you never forget.

The smell of death.

I got up and went toward the back. The smell got stronger.

Oh boy, I thought.

I opened the door to the office. I turned on the light. Nothing looked wrong. It was just as Ruby had said: everything shipshape.

But the smell was stronger.

There was one place Ruby couldn’t have seen—the bathroom across the hall. That room had no windows, nothing but a skylight, no way for anyone to look in.

I opened the door. Miss Pride stared up at me with glassy eyes. Peter sprawled across her, facedown.

Each had been shot once through the head.

30

The killer had come in just after closing time. Miss Pride had not yet locked the front door.

He had come for a single purpose. No money was missing. No books were missing. He had come to kill. By the time I tried returning Miss Pride’s call, at five-twenty-five, she and Peter had probably been dead ten minutes.

He had come through the front door. We keep the back door locked. He had forced Miss Pride to lock up—her keys were still clutched tight in her fingers—and afterward he had used the back door to escape. Unlike the front door, which must be locked with a key, the back door had a latch lock that could be slam-locked from the outside.

The weapon was probably a .38. Ballistics would tell us more.

Miss Pride had been shot first. The shot had hit her in the front of the head, exactly between the eyes: she had fallen over on her back, her head twisted grotesquely against the wall.

Peter had been a more difficult target. In his panic he had done a great deal of scrambling. One slug had missed and gone through the wall. The second one got him.

The killer, of course, had taken the gun away with him.

He had probably worn gloves. There were no fingerprints on the back door latch or on the door itself. There were many prints on the front door, from customers who had come and gone all day long. Most of these would never be identified.

He had come, done his job, and left. The whole thing had probably taken no more than two minutes.

Everything else was speculation. My guess was that Peter had known who killed Bobby Westfall. He had come to the store to tell me about it but the killer got there first. Miss

Pride had simply been unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As always, there were more questions than answers. If this tied back into the Westfall case, why had Peter waited all these months to tell me about it? How had the killer suddenly learned that Peter was a threat? Why had it happened now, and what had caused it to suddenly come on? Had there been something in the Ballard library so valuable that someone would kill for it, then kill twice more? Was it the Ballard library at all, and if so, how could Rita have overlooked it? Something small—so small that no one could see it, yet Bobby Westfall had had to take the entire library to be sure of getting it. Look at the little things, Dr. J. I heard Ruby’s voice telling me that. It’s the one lesson that even a good bookman finds hardest to learn. Look at the little stuff—pamphlets, broadsides, tiny books with no lettering on their spines—and remember that one little weatherworn piece could bring more money than an entire library done up in glamour leather.

Something small. Something you know is there but you’re not sure where. If you’re Bobby Westfall, you have to take every book: tear them apart if necessary, go page by page if necessary, slit the cloth and strip away the bindings if necessary, rip the hinges asunder and shred the pieces through a sieve if necessary. Kill or be killed if necessary. Something small and hidden, it had to be, had to, because if it were small and unhidden it would be too easy to steal. Rita McKinley could easily drop it down her dress while old man Ballard went for coffee; Bobby Westfall could’ve dropped it in his pocket, the Lord be damned, while he wandered among the stacks and ostensibly tried to make up his mind.

It all came back to money. That’s what fueled Bobby and Peter and all the guys like them. Money was the one thing they never had enough of: it was the driving force in their lives. Bobby wanted to be respected as a book dealer, not joked about as a bookscout. It took money to do that. It took other things—knowledge, taste, a keen eye, good juice, a gam-bler’s blood, and a hustler’s imagination—but without money you just couldn’t get started.

The scene at my place was like a hundred murder scenes I’d been to. Cops. Photographers. Sketchmen. The coroner.

It was the same, only different. This was me on the receiving end. That dead girl was one of mine.

From the moment I found her, I was a cop again.

A cop without a badge.

Hennessey had arrived with his new partner before dawn. Teaming Neal with Lester Cameron had been the final ironic fallout of the Jackie Newton affair, but Boone Steed worked in mysterious ways. Cameron and I had never liked each other: he was too trigger-happy and hot-collared for my taste, though I’d heard it said more than once that Cameron in action reminded people of me. I didn’t like that much, though I did respect Cameron in a professional way. I thought he was a good cop, I just didn’t like him as a man. He had a head on his shoulders and a block of ice where his heart was supposed to be. He had a take-charge demeanor that was a turnoff, but his record with DPI) was a good one. He and I had been in the same class at the police academy, long ago. We had never been bosom buddies, even then. For most of an hour, Hennessey, Cameron, and I sat in the front room talking. We were three old pros: I knew what they needed and gave them what I could. Cameron sat on one of my stools like a grand high inquisitor and fired off the inevitable questions, and I answered them like clockwork. I knew the questions before they were asked. I told him about Miss Pride, where she’d come from, when and why. I told him about Peter, and his friendship with Bobby Westfall, who had also been murdered. Hennessey stood apart as I related this. He looked out into the dark street, and even when he looked at me, he avoided my eyes. I guess he knew what I was thinking, that you can’t ever drag your feet on a murder case, can’t ever assume that the victim isn’t important enough to warrant the balls-out effort. You never know when a killer might come back for an encore.

We talked about Miss Pride. She had no enemies on this earth, I said, unless she had a dark side that I simply couldn’t imagine. I told them what I thought: that it tied into Westfall, and Miss Pride was the innocent victim. I told them how skittish Peter had been the last two days, how frantic he’d been when he tried to reach me at Rita McKinley’s. I told them about Rita, too, all the facts, all the rumors. As an afterthought, I told them that Jackie Newton had been hanging around.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This doesn’t smell like Jackie.”

“You sure thought it was before,” Hennessey said, looking out the window.

“That was then, this is now.”

“What’s so different?” Cameron said. “You boys kiss and make up?”

“It doesn’t fit Jackie. The first one did: go look up the M.O. yourself if you want to see what I’m talking about. There’s a random nature to all of Jackie’s old business. This wasn’t random. Jackie doesn’t come advertising before he kills somebody. That’s my opinion.”

“Opinions are like assholes,” Cameron said. “Everybody’s got one.”

“That’s cute, Lester,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

By then it was daylight: it was seven-thirty and word of the tragedy had spread up and down the block. People were gathering on the walk and peering in the windows.

“What’s the name of the guy who was dating her?” Cameron said.

“You mean Jerry Harkness?”

“If that’s the guy who was dating her, that’s who I mean.”

“I wouldn’t say he was dating her. He took her to dinner a couple of nights ago.”

“We need to see him. And we need to go up in the hills and see this McKinley woman. See if she’s still got that tape, for one thing. Maybe the lab can separate those voices and we can hear what they were saying when they were talking over each other. That should be the first priority. How do I get there?”

“You don’t unless you call first. That’s the way the lady operates.”

“Well, here’s the way I operate. You give me her address and let me worry about getting in.”

“You could save yourself some grief if you call her. I don’t think she did this, do you?”

“I don’t know who the hell did it.”

“Lester, she was with me at the time.”