Bookman's promise

The Bookman's Promise

A CLIFF JANEWAY NOVEL

John Dunning

Also by John Dunning fiction

Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

The Bookman’s Wake

Booked to Die

Deadline

Denver

Looking for Ginger North The Holland Suggestions

NONFICTION

On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio Tune in Yesterday

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

Copyright © 2004 by John Dunning

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Scribner and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

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Text set in Sabon Manufactured in the United States of America

13579 10 8642

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunning, John, 1942-The bookman’s promise: a Cliff Janeway novel/John Dunning.

p. cm.

1. Janeway, Cliff (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

2. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821-1890—First editions—Fiction.

3. Booksellers and bookselling—Fiction. 4. Antiquarian booksellers—Fiction.

5. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 6. Denver (Colo.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.U494B655 2004

813‘.54—dc21

2003054273

ISBN 0-7432-4992-5

To Pat McGuire,

for long friendship, timely brainstorming, and other mysterious reasons

The man said, “Welcome to Book Beat, Mr. Janeway” and this was how it began.

We were sitting in a Boston studio before the entire invisible listening audience of National Public Radio. I was here against my better judgment, and my first words into the microphone, “Just don’t call me an expert on anything,” staked out the conditions under which I had become such an unlikely guest. Saying it now into the microphone had a calming effect, but the man’s polite laugh again left me exposed on both flanks. Not only was I an expert, his laugh implied, I was a modest one. His opening remarks deepened my discomfort.

“Tonight we are departing from our usual talk about current books. As many of you know, our guest was to have been Allen Gleason, author of the surprising literary bestseller, Roses for Adessa. Unfortunately, Mr. Gleason suffered a heart attack last week in New York, and I know all of you join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

“In his absence we are lucky to have Mr. Cliff Janeway, who came to Boston just this week to buy a very special book. And I should add that this is a show, despite its spontaneous scheduling, that I have long wanted to do. As fascinating as the world of new books can often be, the world of older books, of valuable first editions and treasures recently out of print, has a growing charm for many of our listeners. Mr. Janeway, I wonder if you would answer a basic question before we dive deeper into this world. What makes a valuable book valuable?”

This was how it began: with a simple, innocent question and a few quick answers. We talked for a while about things I love best, and the man was so good that we soon seemed like two old bookscout hunkered down together after a friendly hunt. I talked of supply and demand, of classics and genres and modern first editions: why certain first editions by Edgar Rice Burroughs are worth more than most Mark Twains, and how crazy the hunt can get. I told him about the world I now lived in, and it was easy to avoid the world I’d come from. This was a book show, not a police lineup, and I was an antiquarian bookseller, not a cop.

“I understand you live in Denver, Colorado.”

“When I’m hiding out from the law, that’s where I hide.”

Again the polite laugh. “You say you’re no expert, but you were featured this week in a very bookish article in The Boston Globe.”

“That guy had nothing better to do. He’s a book freak and the paper was having what they call a slow news day.”

“The two of you met at a book auction, I believe. Tell us about that.”

“I had come here to buy a book. We got to talking and the next thing I knew, I was being interviewed.”

“What book did you come to buy?”

“Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca by Richard Burton.”

“The explorer, not the actor.”

We shared a knowing laugh, then he said, “What is it about this book that made you fly all the way from Denver to buy it? And to pay—how much was it?—if you don’t mind my asking …”

Auction prices were public knowledge, so there was no use being coy. I said, “Twenty-nine thousand five hundred,” and gave up whatever modesty I might have had. Only an expert pays that much money for a book. Or a fool.

I might have told him that there were probably dozens of dealers in the United States whose knowledge of Burton ran deeper than mine. I could have said yes, I had studied Burton intensely for two months, but two months in the book trade or in any scholarly pursuit is no time at all. I should have explained that I had bought the book with Indian money, but then I’d need to explain that concept and the rest of the hour would have been shot talking about me.

Instead I talked about Burton, master linguist, soldier, towering figure of nineteenth-century letters and adventure. I watched the clock as I talked and I gave him the shortest-possible version of Burton’s incredible life. I couldn’t begin to touch even the high spots in the time we had left.

“You’ve brought this book with you tonight.”

We let the audience imagine it as I noisily unwrapped the three volumes in front of the microphone. My host got up from his side of the table and came around to look while I gave the audience a brief description of the books, with emphasis on the original blue cloth binding lettered in brilliant gilt and their unbelievably pristine condition.

The man said, “They look almost new.”

“Yeah,” I said lovingly.

“I understand there’s something special about them, other than their unusual freshness.”

I opened volume one and he sighed. “Aaahh, it’s signed by the author. Would you read that for us, please?”

“‘To Charles Warren,’” I read: “‘A grand companion and the best kind of friend. Our worlds are far apart and we may never see each other again, but the time we shared will be treasured forever. Richard R Burton.’ It’s dated January 15,1861.”

“Any idea who this Warren fellow was?”

“Not a clue. He’s not mentioned in any of the Burton biographies.”

“You would agree, though, that that’s an unusually intimate inscription.”

I did agree, but I was no expert. The man said, “So we have a mystery here as well as a valuable book,” and it all began then. Its roots went back to another time, when Richard Francis Burton met his greatest admirer and then set off on a secret journey, deep into the troubled American South. Because of that trip a friend of mine died. An old woman found peace, a good man lost everything, and I rediscovered myself on my continuing journey across the timeless, infinite world of books.

BOOK 1 - DENVER

CHAPTER 1

If I wanted to be arbitrary, I could say it began anywhere. That radio show moved it out of the dim past to here and now, but Burton’s story had been there forever, waiting for me to find it.

I found it in 1987, late in my thirty-seventh year. I had come home from Seattle with a big wad of money from the Grayson affair. My 10 percent finder’s fee had come to almost fifty thousand dollars, a career payday for almost any bookman and certainly, so far, for me. All I knew at that point was that I was going to buy a book with it. Not half a million books riddled with vast pockets of moldy corruption. Not a million bad books or a thousand good books, not even a hundred fine books. Just one book. One great, hellacious, killer book: just to see how it felt, owning such a thing.

So I thought, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to change directions in my book life. I was sick of critics and hucksters screaming about the genius of every new one-book wonder. I was ready for less hype and more tradition, and almost as soon as I fell into this seek-and-ye-shall-find mode, I found Richard Burton.

I had gone to a dinner party in East Denver, at the Park Hill home of Judge Leighton Huxley. Lee and I had known each other for years, cautiously at first, later on a warmer level of mutual interest, finally as friends. I had first appeared in his courtroom in 1978, when I was a very young cop testifying in a cut-and-dried murder case and he was a relatively young newcomer to the Denver bench. That gulf of professional distance between us was natural then: Lee was far outside my rather small circle of police cronies, and I could not have imagined myself rubbing elbows with his much larger crowd of legal eagles.

Age was a factor, though not a major one. I was in my late twenties; Lee was in his mid-forties, already gray around the temples and beginning to look like the distinguished man of the world that I would never be. He was by all accounts an excellent judge. He was extremely fair yet sure in his decisions, and he had never been overturned.

I saw him only twice in the first few years after my appearance in his court: once we had nodded in the courthouse cafeteria, briefly indicating that we remembered each other, and a year later I had been invited to a Christmas party in the mountain home of a mutual friend. That night we said our first few words outside the halls of justice. “I hear you’re a book collector,” he had said in that deep, rich baritone. I admitted my guilt and he said, “So am I: we should compare notes sometime.” But nothing had come of it then for the same obvious reasons—I was still a cop, there was always a chance I would find myself on his witness stand again, and he liked to avoid potential conflicts of interest before they came up. I didn’t think much about it: I figured he had just been passing time with me, being polite. That was always the thing about Lee Huxley: he had a reputation for good manners, in court and out.

A year later he was appointed to the U.S. District Court and it was then, removed from the likelihood of professional conflict, that our friendship had its cautious, tentative beginning. Out of the blue I got a call from Miranda, his wife, inviting me, as she put it, to “a small, informal dinner party for some book lovers.” There were actually a dozen people there that first night, and I was paired with Miranda’s younger sister Hope, who was visiting from somewhere back East. The house was just off East Seventeenth Avenue, a redbrick turn-of-the-century three-story with chandeliers and glistening hardwood everywhere you looked. It was already ablaze with lights and alive with laughter when I arrived, and Miranda was a blonde knockout at the front door in her blue evening dress. She looked no older than thirty but was elegant and interesting in her own right, not just a pretty face at Lee’s side. The judge’s friends were also considerate and refined, and I fought back my natural instincts for reverse snobbery and liked them all. They were rich book collectors and I was still on a cop’s salary, but there wasn’t a hint of condescension to any of them. If they saw a $5,000 book they wanted, they just bought that sucker and paid the price, and my kind of nickel-and-dime bookscouting was fascinating to them, something they couldn’t have imagined until I told them about it.

Miranda was a superb hostess. The next day, as I was composing a thank-you note, I got a call from her thanking me for coming. “You really livened things up over here, Cliff,” she said. “I hope we’re going to see lots more of each other.”

And we had. I hadn’t done much rubbernecking that first night, but the judge’s library later turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be. It was a large room shelved on all four walls and full of wonderful books, all the modern American greats in superb dust jackets. At one point Lee said, “I’ve got some older things downstairs,” but years had passed before I saw what they were.

From the beginning there were differences to their most recent dinner party. For one thing I was no longer a cop, and the manner of my departure from the Denver Police Department might have chilled my relationship with any judge. I had roughed up a brutal thug, and the press dredged up my distant past, a childhood riddled with violent street fighting and close ties to people like Vince Marranzino, who later became one of Denver’s most feared mobsters. Never mind that Vince and I had only been within speaking distance once in almost twenty years; never mind that I had lived all that down and become, if I do say so, a crackerjack homicide cop—once you’ve been tarred by that brush it’s always there waiting to tar you again. By then there were rumors that Lee was on a short list of possibles for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, and though it was hard to picture Lee and Ronald Reagan as political bedfellows, I had no real idea what Lee’s politics were. All I knew was this: if there was even a chance for him in the big teepee, the last thing I wanted was to mess that up. I had been front-page news, none of it good, for most of a week, but if Lee worried about his own image and the company he kept, I never saw any sign of it. He called and asked for my version of what had happened, I told him the truth, and he accepted that. “Not the best judgment you’ve ever shown, Cliff, but this too shall pass,” he said. “I’m sure you’re busy right now keeping the wolves at bay. As soon as this settles down, we’ll get together.”

But then I was gone to Seattle, and suddenly several months had passed since I’d seen them. I came home with a big stash, my Indian money; I book-hunted across the midwest with Seattle friends, and when I returned to Denver one of my first calls was from Miranda.

“Mr. Janeway.” Her icy tone sounded put-on but not completely. “Are you avoiding us for some reason? Have we done something to offend you?”

I was instantly shamed. “Not at all,” I said, answering her second question and avoiding the first. “God, you can’t believe that.”

“Then kindly get your ass over here, sir,” she said. “Friday night, seven o’clock, no tie, please, no excuses. Come prepared to liven up what promises to be a rather drab affair.”

“You wouldn’t know how to do a drab affair.”

“We’ll see about that. This one may be a challenge, even for a woman of my legendary social talents. One of Lee’s boyhood chums is coming to town. Don’t tell anybody I said this, but he’s not exactly my cup of tea. So, will you come help me make the best of it?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’d be honored.”

“It’s been so long since we’ve seen you I’ve forgotten your face. Are you married yet?”

I laughed.

“Going steady with anyone?‘

“Not at the moment.”

I knew why she was asking. Miranda loved informality, but at a sit-down dinner she was a stickler for a proper head count. “I’ve got the perfect lady for you on Friday,” she said.

I paused, then said, “Thank you for the invitation.”

“No, Cliff, thank you. I know why you’ve been so scarce, and I just want you to know we appreciate the consideration but it’s not necessary and never was. We’ve stopped by your bookstore any number of times but we’ve never been able to catch you.”

I knew that, of course: I had seen their checks in the cash drawer. “I’m always out hunting books,” I said.

“Apparently so. But Lee and I would be pretty shallow people, wouldn’t we, if we wrote off our friends at the first sign of trouble.”

“That was some pretty bad trouble.”

“Yes, it was, but it got you out of being a cop and into the book business. So it wasn’t all bad, was it?”

This was a smaller group than they’d had in the past, with only eight of us, including the Huxleys, at the table. Lee’s boyhood pal turned out to be Hal Archer, the writer and historian who had won a Pulitzer prize six years before, coming from far left field to snatch it away from several favored and far more academically endowed candidates. At the time I was glad he had won: I always pull for the underdog and I had truly admired his book. It was a dense account of two ordinary families in Charleston, South Carolina, during the four years of our civil war. Using recently found documents, letters, and journals, Archer had managed to bring them to life despite having to deal with a mountain of detail. He told, in layman’s words and with the practiced eye of an artist, how they had survived and interacted among themselves and with others in the shattered city. It was an epic story of courage and hardship in the face of a stiff Union blockade, an unrelenting bombardment, and three years of siege, and he told it beautifully.

Archer had published only historical fiction before turning out this riveting true account, but even then I considered him a major talent. I had read him years earlier and had earmarked him at once as a writer who would never waste my time. He had a towering ability to make each word matter and he never resorted to showy prose. He made me live in his story; his work was everything I had always loved about books. With all that going for us, why did I dislike him so intensely the moment I met him?

Such a strong negative reaction often begins in the eyes. Archer’s eyes were dismissive, as if his superiority had been recognized much too late by fools like me and he had paid a damned stiff price for my ignorance. He was right about one thing: it is fashionable to adore an icon after he has become one, but it’s also easy for a writer to become a horse’s ass when fame and riches are suddenly thrust upon him. It was screwy to think that Archer had instantly made me the point man for all the years he had worked in obscurity, and I wanted this impression to be wrong because I had always liked his stuff. But it held up and deepened throughout the evening.

He was the last to arrive, forty-five minutes late. Miranda showed him in at a quarter to eight, accompanied by a pretty young woman she introduced as Erin d’Angelo. I saw Ms. d’Angelo make a gesture of apology to Lee when Archer wasn’t watching, but it was brief and his response was even more so. Miranda was unruffled at the delay in dinner: it would be perfect, I knew, because it always was at her house. She knew her guests and planned for their little quirks accordingly, and that told me yet more about Mr. Archer and his ways. A man who will keep an entire dinner party waiting for most of an hour has a pretty good opinion of himself.

Archer took center stage at once when he arrived; even Lee stood back with what I thought was a look of quiet amusement while his old friend held court. There was some talk about a new book coming but Archer turned that quickly aside, implying that whenever it came, it would certainly be important but he couldn’t talk about it now. A national booksellers association was having its annual meeting in Denver that year and the great man was in town to speak at the banquet, receive an award, and do local media appearances. Ms. d’Angelo was his escort, one of those super-competent people provided by publishers for writers on tour, and occasionally for writers between books if they are important enough and their business is somehow career-related. The Pulitzer had locked in Archer’s importance for the rest of his lifetime, and so he got Ms. d’Angelo to drive him—not forever, I hoped for her sake.

Her name suggested an Irish-Italian clash of cultures but to me she looked only like the best of America. She might have been a freshman college student straight from the heart of the country, a professional virgin with taffy-colored hair, a lovely oval face, and big eyes that radiated mischief. “She’s actually a thirty-year-old lawyer,” Miranda told me during a quiet moment in the kitchen. “She’s extremely bright and as tough as she needs to be.”

“What does that mean?”

“She could go very far in law is what it means. Sky’s the limit, if she wanted to.”

“That sounds like pretty deep exasperation I hear in your voice.”

“Yeah, it is. It’s really none of my business, but Erin’s like the kid sister I never had and she’s been like a daughter to Lee. She lived with us after her father died and we love her like family. We want the best for her and she could have it all. She’s got a great legal mind; she could climb the heights and make a ton of money while she’s at it.”

“Maybe she just wants a quieter, gentler life.”

“I should have known I’d get no sympathy from you. You couldn’t care less about money.”

“Long as I’ve got enough to keep my act together.”

“Erin’s father was like that. Until one day when he really needed it and didn’t have it. Knock wood and hope that doesn’t happen to you.”

“Hope what doesn’t happen?”

“Oh, don’t ask. It’s a story with a bad ending and I never should have brought it up.”

I didn’t say anything. She gave me a sad look like nothing I had ever seen from her. “D’Angelo and Lee were partners very early, a pair of idealistic young eagles right out of law school. Mrs. D. had died. I was a silly adolescent worshiping Lee from afar and Erin was just a child.”

She wavered, like maybe she’d tell me and maybe she wouldn’t. “I really shouldn’t have gotten into this,” she finally said. “Do me a favor, forget I said anything about it.”

“Sure.”

“Promise.”

“I promise, Miranda. I will never breathe a word to anybody— not that I have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s not important now. If Erin ever brings it up, fine. I’d just rather it didn’t come from me. She’s a great girl and we’re very proud of her. What’s not to be proud of? She got perfect grades all through college and look at her now, working in a big downtown law firm.”

“What’s she doing schlepping writers around? Can’t be much money in that.”

Exasperation returned in a heartbeat. “See, that’s what I’m talking about. She’s been doing that since her days at the DU law school, and she won’t give it up. Suddenly she’s tired of law. Now what rings her bell is lit-tra-ture. She’s even been writing a novel, God help her, in her spare time.”

“I can’t imagine she’s got any time to spare.”

“She works by day and drives by night, writes when she can. Are you interested, Cliff?”

“I don’t know—would you want me to be?”

Miranda gave me a long, wistful look. “You’re a good guy, Janeway, and I mean that. But I’m afraid you’d only reinforce all her bad ideas.”

The woman she had invited as my opposite was certainly nice enough—a ravishing redhead named Bonnie Conrad—and we spent much of the evening, when we weren’t listening to Archer, in a pleasant exchange of views on world events. But my eyes kept drifting back to Erin d’Angelo, who provided such a cool presence at Archer’s side. Once she caught me looking and her eyes narrowed slightly, as if she had picked up a whiff of my thought and found it as welcome as a fresh dose of herpes. Then she must have seen the beauty of my inner self, for she smiled, and in the heat of that moment all I could think was, Oh, mother, what a wonderful face.

Rounding out our party were Judge Arlene Weston and her husband, Phil, a plastic surgeon who had carved up some famous Hollywood noses before moving to Denver in the sixties. It was Phil who brought up the Supreme Court. “Arlene says you had an interview with Reagan.”

“You’re not supposed to talk about that, sweetheart,” Arlene said. “It’s bad luck to bring it up before the fact.”

“I don’t think it matters much,” Lee said. “It was just a visit, certainly not what I’d call an interview. Tell you the truth, I’m still not sure what started it all.”

“Somebody gave him your name, that’s pretty clear. Must’ve been a hell of a recommendation from one who’s very close to that inner circle.”

“Maybe he’s looking for a pal to come in on slow afternoons and keep him company while he watches his old movies,” Phil said, joshing.

“All his afternoons are slow,” said Archer.

“Whatever it was, it’s pretty hard for me to take it seriously at this point,” Lee said.

“I don’t see why,” said Bonnie. “You’d make a great justice.”

“That’s not how they choose them,” Archer said. “Politics is what counts in that game, not legal acumen.”

“Hal’s right about that,” Lee said. “I imagine it’s the same in academia. The good teachers get lost in the shuffle, while those who play the game get ahead.”

“And the same in books,” Archer said. “Them that sits up and barks gets the awards.”

“I never saw you barking for anybody.”

“Maybe the Pulitzer committee’s above all that,” Archer said. “Or maybe I just got lucky.”

“Maybe you’ll both get lucky,” Arlene said. “Wouldn’t that be something? A Pulitzer prize winner and a Supreme Court justice from that one graduating class in college.”

“High school, actually,” Archer said. “Lee and I have known each other forever.”

“We graduated from a tiny high school in Virginia,” Lee said. “Our graduating class had twenty-two boys and twenty-two girls.”

“Isn’t that romantic?” Miranda said. “I just love that.”

“That’s because you got somebody’s guy,” Arlene said. “You’re so evil, Miranda.”

“Yep. I love to think of the poor, weeping wench, doomed to a life without Lee.”

I said nothing during this light exchange, and it went on for a while before the inevitable swing to books came, at around ten-thirty. “So,” Miranda asked privately at one point, “how do you like Mr. Archer?” I told her I had always loved his books and prepared to let it go at that. The Westons left in the next hour, and then we were six. Miranda had sensed the spontaneous hostility between Archer and me, and now she did her heroic best to overcome it. “Cliff has been a big, big fan of your books forever, Hal,” she said, but this only made things worse. Archer’s comment, “How very, very nice of him,” was a startling breach of etiquette, too pointed and caustic even for him. He barely saved himself with a weasely “of course I’m kidding” smile, but the private look that passed between us told the real story. How dare I pass judgment, good, bad, or indifferent, and who the hell needed my approval anyway?

Normally at this point I would take off my kid gloves and bring up my own verbal brass knucks. I almost said, And listen, Hal, that was even before I knew what an accomplished asshole you are …now I’ve got two things to admire you for. I would have said this with my pleasantest smiling-cobra demeanor, and then, into the shocked silence, I’d have had to say, Yes siree, Hal, you’re way up there on my list of favs, right between Danielle Steel and Robin Cook. Damn, I wanted to say that. I wanted to say it so badly that I came this close to really saying it. In my younger days I’d have let it rip instantly, in any crowd. I caught the eyes of Erin d’Angelo, who still seemed to be reading my mind from afar with a look of real mischief on her face. Go ahead, say it, I dare you, her look said. But I had my host to consider. I gave a little shake of my head, and Erin rewarded me with a soft laugh that no one could hear and only I could see.

Then she mouthed a single word and pulled me into the screwiest, most extended repartee I have ever had with a stranger. I couldn’t be sure, but the word looked like coward.

I gave her my Tarzan look, the one that said, A lot you know, sister, I eat guys like him for breakfast.

She made a show of her indifference. Glanced at her nails. Looked away at nothing.

I stood up straight, my face fierce with my savage cavemanhood.

I had the feeling she was laughing at that; I couldn’t be sure. In another moment, people would begin noticing what idiots we were, and I looked away, cursing the darkness.

Round one to her, on points.

We were in the library by then and Bonnie was ogling the books. Suddenly Archer said, “My goodness, Lee, don’t you ever show anyone your real books?” Lee seemed reluctant, as if this would be much too much ostentation for one evening, but the cat was out of the bag and down the stairs we all went. We came into a smaller room that was also shelved all around, the shelves glassed and containing books that were clearly from another time. Archer stood back while the rest of us marveled at pristine runs of Dickens, Twain, Kipling, Harte, Hawthorne, Melville, so many eminent Victorians that my head began to spin as I looked at them. There wasn’t a trumped-up leather binding in the room, and the sight of so much unfaded original cloth was gorgeous, inspiring, truly sensual.

“This is how my book fetish started,” Lee said. “I inherited these.”

“From his good old grandma Betts,” Archer said. “Ah yes, I remember her well, what a dear old gal. Show them the Burtons, Lee.”

And there they were, the greatest works of their day. With Lee’s permission, I took each book down and handled it carefully. Archer talked about Burton as we looked, and his own zeal lit a fire that spread to us all. He seemed to know everything about Burton’s life, and at some point I figured out, at least in a general sense, what the new Archer book was going to be. You can always tell with a writer: he gets that madness in his eyes whenever his subject comes up.

The room had gone quiet. Then I heard Erin’s soft voice.

“There aren’t any men like that anywhere in the world today.”

I gave her a challenging look. She rolled her eyes. I said, “He’d go crazy today,” and she cocked her head: “You think so?” I said, “Oh yeah. Ten minutes in this nuthouse world and he’d be ready to lie down in front of a bus.” She said, “On the other hand, how would a man of today, say yourself as an example, do in Burton’s world— India, Arabia, or tropical Africa of the late 1850s?” I said, “It’d sure be fun to find out,” and she looked doubtful. But a few minutes later she slipped me a paper with a telephone number and a cryptic note, Call me if you ever figure it out.

Round two to me, for brilliant footwork.

It was one o’clock when I left the judge’s house. All my annoyance with Archer’s arrogance had dissolved and I was glad I hadn’t retaliated at his stupid insult. I felt renewed, as if the pressing question in my life—what to do now?—had just been answered. Sometimes all it takes is the touch of a book, or the look on a woman’s face, to get a man’s heart going again.

I opened my eyes the next morning thinking of Erin and Burton together. Neither gave ground to the other; each grew in stature throughout the day.

I called her number. Got a machine. Her voice promised to call me back.

I let Burton simmer.

She called the next day and talked to my machine. “If this is a solicitation call, I gave at the office. But I’m a registered Democrat, I’ll talk to anybody.”

“Nice line,” I told her machine. “I liked it almost as much when Jim Cain used it in that story he wrote thirty years ago.”

“Very impressive,” she said to my machine later that day. “I wondered if you’d catch that Cain heist. My God, aren’t you ever home?”

“I’m home right now,” my machine said to hers. “Where are you?”

“I’m off to Wyoming, dear heart,” was her final attempt, hours later. “We’re heading into what looks like a long, long trial. The environment of the very planet is at stake and the partners need my young, fertile mind far more than you seem to. Good-bye forever, I guess.”

My machine said, with an incredulous air, “Wyoming has environment?‘”

Then she was gone, a loss I hoped to hell was temporary. But Burton kept perking away like a stew in fine wine. On the morning of the fifth day I commenced strategic reconnaissance. In military terms this means a search over wide areas to gain information before making large-scale decisions. In bookscouting it’s exactly the same: I got on the phone. I ordered some reference books. I fished around for cheap Burton reading copies. Strategic reconnaissance indeed: it was the bookman’s madness, and I was hooked again.

CHAPTER 2

Within a week I had read Fawn Brodie’s Burton biography and had skimmed through three of Burton’s greatest works. I began to read Burton slowly, in proper chronological order. I read Norman Penzer’s Burton bibliography from cover to cover and I started a detailed file of points and auction prices on Burton first editions.

To a bookman a good bibliography is far better than any “life” pieced together by even a diligent scholar like Brodie—the subject is revealed through his own books and not through the eyes of a third party. Burton had been unfortunate with his early biographers. Long before Brodie made him respectable in 1967, he had been presented as a scoundrel, and sometimes, because of his frankness in translating the sexual classics of the East, as a pornographer. He was luckier with his bibliographer. Penzer was a fierce Burton advocate. His 1923 bibliography contains superb scholarship on Burton’s books, and Penzer added pages of color on Burton’s character, unusual in such a work. Penzer considered Burton the greatest man of his century, but a tragic man who could not suffer fools and was damned for all but his greatest accomplishments. Knighted near the end of his life in an empty gesture, he was treated shabbily by his government. He lived in the wrong time, said Penzer: “His queen should have been Elizabeth rather than Victoria.”

Burton’s story is a grand one in the most sweeping tradition of the book world. He was a Renaissance man long before the term came into popular use: master of twenty-nine languages, perfecter of dialects, great explorer, student of anthropology, botanist, author of thirty books, and in his later years translator of the Arabian Nights in sixteen volumes, of The Kama Sutra, and other forbidden Oriental classics. He was an excellent swordsman, a man of great physical and mental strength. He would need it all for the hardships he would face in unknown deserts and jungles around the world. His knowledge of human nature was vast, his powers of observation both panoramic and exhaustive, his memory encyclopedic. Wherever he went, he saw and noted everything, so that he was able to produce, almost immediately after a whirlwind trip across the American desert to Utah and California in 1860, a dense, seven-hundred-page work describing the flora and fauna, the people, the customs, and the land, and follow this two years later with a book of advice to the prairie traveler. His observations on the American Indian, with a long description on the practice of scalping, are classic passages of travel writing. Penzer believed Burton stood with the greatest explorers of all times: compared with Burton, he said, Stanley traveled like a king. Burton’s expeditions into unknown Africa would read like myth except for the prodigious mass of detail he recorded about everything he saw there.

These accomplishments alone should have made him a giant of British folklore, but he was also “one of the two or three most proficient linguists of whom we have authentic and genuine historical records.” He taught himself and was fluent in Arabic, Hindustani, Swahili, and Somali; he spoke Persian and Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek. Of course he knew Latin. Wherever he went he soaked up languages, often perfecting dialects in a few weeks. And, Penzer reminded, he was a master of ethnic disguise. That’s how he was able to go among natives as one of them, risking his life to breach the ancient holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Harar.

He wrote of his travels in the Congo, Zanzibar, Syria, Iceland, India, and Brazil. He wrote books on bayonets, swords, and falconry. He was one of those brilliant swashbuckling wizards who comes along rarely, who understands life and writes exactly what he sees without pandering to rules of propriety or knuckling under to religious tyranny. His kind does not have an easy life. He is resented and shunned by churches and genteel society; if he’s lucky, he may escape being burned at the stake. In Burton’s case, he was victimized after death by his pious, narrow-minded Roman Catholic wife. Lady Isabel torched his work, burning forty years of unpublished manuscripts, journals, and notes in her mindless determination to purify his image.

This is why I am not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the Dark Ages.

Darkness is what they sell.

By the middle of the second week, I had a good grasp of Burton’s life and times; by the middle of the third, I knew what I wanted to do with my fifty grand. All I needed was to find the right copy of the right book.

I sent out feelers. Booksellers around the country began calling me with tips. By the middle of the fourth week, I had been touted to the Boston Book Galleries and an upcoming Burton that was rumored to be everything I wanted. I made plans to fly East.

How can I describe the joy of pulling down those sweetheart books for twenty-nine thousand and change? I knew I’d probably have to pay what the trade considered a premium. Dealers dropped out of the bidding early, and the contest winnowed down to two collectors and me. When it went past twenty I thought the hell with it, I wasn’t buying these books for resale, this was food for the soul and I didn’t care if I had to spend the whole fifty grand. The Seattle stash was found money, in my mind. People who gamble in casinos on Indian reservations sometimes call their winnings Indian money. They put it in a cookie jar and give themselves permission to lose it all again. But a book like the Burton set is never a gamble. I wasn’t about to throw my bankroll at a roulette table, but thinking of it as Indian money made me instantly more competitive and ultimately the high bidder. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to spend so much on a single first edition. I laugh at those days.

I laughed a lot in the wake of Boston. I was amazed at how far my Burton story had been flung. It surpassed even Janeway’s Rule of Overkill, which goes like this: getting the media’s interest can be so much more difficult than keeping it. Reporters and editors are such pessimistic bastards—everyone wants a few inches of their space or a minute of their time, and they put up walls that are all but impregnable. Editors will send a grumbling reporter many miles to cover a man with a butterfly collection and ignore some shameful injustice that’s been growing in their own backyards forever. Out-of-town experts thrill them, but anyone who openly tries to lure them will get brushed off faster than a leper at a nudist colony. The key to the gate is your own indifference. Be shy enough and the media will swarm. At that point anything can happen.

I was indifferent, I was almost coy, and overnight I became the most prominent Richard Burton specialist in America. I didn’t claim to be the best or the brightest: I probably wasn’t the wisest, whitest, darkest, wittiest, and listen, this part’s hard to believe, I may not have even been the prettiest. The events that put me on the map were arbitrary and embarrassingly unjustified. A single piece in The Boston Globe, passionately written by a rabid Burton fan on his day off, led to my appearance on NPR, and to far greater exposure when a Boston wire-service bureau chief ordered a light rewrite and put that Globe piece in newspapers around the country. I didn’t kid myself—they were all using me as a modern hook for the story that really interested them, because Burton’s story had been history, not news, for more than a century. But this is how I got my fifteen minutes of fame: I was carried there on the broad shoulders of a man who died sixty years before I was born.

At home I had twenty calls on my answering machine, including one from Miranda. Because of the Denver angle, both local papers had carried my AP story from Boston. Lee had seen it, and of course he wanted to see the books. Miranda invited me for “supper” that night, making the distinction that this was not “dinner,” it was family, and there would just be the three of us. It was a weeknight; we’d make it a short evening for the good of us all. Lee was in the middle of a complicated trial and I had lots of work to do. Even Miranda had an early date the next morning, at a neighborhood old-folks’ home where she worked as a volunteer.

We ate on their patio, laughing over my close call with Archer the last time I had seen them. “I was holding my breath,” Miranda said: “For a minute I thought you were going to take him apart before God and all of us.” She glanced at Lee and said, “Not that Cliff wouldn’t have been justified, sweetheart. I know the man’s your oldest friend, and it’s certainly not my habit to apologize for my guests. But that one’s a real bastard and I just don’t like him.”

Lee smiled in that easy way he had. “Hal’s had a hard life. That’s what you need to understand about him before you judge him too harshly.”

“Why is it me who’s got to understand him?. I like people I

already understand.“

“Give him just a little break, Miranda. His family was against his writing career from the start and he had to struggle all through his life. His early books—all the ones that people are now calling modern classics—were rejected by everybody for years. He has suffered the tortures of the damned—the truly gifted man whose talent was ignored for decades, actually. If he’s bitter it’s because of the bestseller mentality and what he sees as the dumbing-down of our literature.”

“I know that but it’s such an old, tedious story. He’s hardly the first writer to feel unappreciated. How many talented people never do get recognized? You don’t see them whining about it, or causing a fuss when all someone wants to do is admire them. There’s just no excuse for boorish behavior. He should cut off his ear and enjoy some real pain.”

I asked for a truce. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I barely noticed it.”

Abruptly, thankfully, Lee changed the subject. “Let’s look at your books,” he said, and we went back into the house. He studied the three volumes in awe, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “My God,” he said. “Where on earth did these come from?” Ultimately, I didn’t know: the auction house wasn’t required to disclose consignors’ names. Miranda wondered who Charles Warren had been, how someone who had received such a warm inscription could remain so unknown to Burton’s biographers. Finally Lee brought up his own volumes to compare. There was no comparison. Lee’s were near fine, more than good enough for most collectors of hundred-year-old books. Mine were a full cut above that: unblemished, stratospheric, factory-fresh. Placing the two sets side by side gave new meaning to the words rare books.

“I’d say you did well, even at thirty thousand,” he said. “In fact, if you want to sell them and make some instant money…”

“I’m going to hang on to these, Lee. They’re going into my retirement fund.”

That night I had a message from Erin on my machine. “I am going crazy on some planet called Rock Springs. Now I know what happens when all hope dies—rock springs eternal. My desperation simply cannot be described! It’s so bad that I’m actually calling you in some misguided hope for relief. Of course you’re not there, but I guess that is my relief.”

I left an answer on her home phone—“I warned you about Wyoming, kid”—and in the morning, when I turned mine on, she had already replied: “I beg your pardon, you certainly did not say I was being sent to Mars. It looks like we’ll wrap it up here in a couple of weeks, but that sounds like eternity on this end of it. I will need some very serious pampering when I get home.”

I thought about her a lot that day. We were having some fairly intimate bullshit for two people who had yet to touch, feel, probe, or say more than a few direct words to each other. At bedtime I launched a new attack on her hated answering machine. “Look, let’s make a date. You. Me. Not this gilhickey you make me talk to. Us, in the…you know…flesh. Didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it just popped out. Didn’t mean that either. I promise to be civilized. I swear. White sport coat. Pink carnation. Night of the thirtieth. Come by my bookstore if you get in early enough. Call me if you can’t make it.”

She didn’t call. But soon the crank calls began.

For days after Boston I had crackpots calling at all hours: people who claimed to have real Burton books and didn’t, fools who wanted me to fly to Miami or Portland or Timbuktu on my nickel to check them out, wild people with trembling voices who needed a drink or a fix and had battered copies of Brodie’s biography or cheap Burton reprints that could still be found in cheesy modern bindings on chain-store sales tables. One man, certain that he was Burton’s direct descendant, had talked to Burton for years in his dreams and had written a twelve-hundred-page manuscript, dictated by Burton himself, with maps of a fabulous African kingdom that remained undiscovered to this very day. A woman called collect from Florida with a copy of Richard Burton’s autobiography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named Virginia Woolf. All she wanted for it was $1,500, but I had to take it now, sight unseen, or she’d get on the phone and after that it was going to the highest bidder. There were calls from Chicago and Phoenix and Grand Rapids, Michigan. An old woman in Baltimore said my book had been stolen from her family. She talked in a whisper, afraid “they” would overhear her, and when she insisted that the man in the inscription had been her grandfather and that he had been there when Richard Burton had helped start the American Civil War, I moved on as quickly as I could without being rude. One thing I knew for sure—there’d be another hot item in the next mail, and another with the next ringing of the telephone.

Packages arrived without notice at my Denver bookstore. Most contained worthless books that I had to return. A man in Detroit sent a nice box of early Burton reprints, which I actually bought. But the strangest thing was the arrival of a true first edition, Burton’s City of the Saints, in a package bearing only a St. Louis postmark— no name, no return address anywhere on or inside the box. I waited for some word by telephone or in a separate letter, but it never came.

By the end of the month the clamor had begun to calm down. The thirtieth came: the crackpots had faded away and my new friend in Rock Springs still had not called. My suspense was delicious. I was thinking of all the places I might take her, but then the old lady from Baltimore arrived and the mystery of that wonderful inscription came to life.

CHAPTER 3

She was not just old, she was a human redwood. I got a hint of her age when her driver, an enormous black man in a military-style flak jacket, stepped out of a Ford Fairlane of mid-sixties vintage and stood protectively at her door. A bunch of rowdy kids roared past on skateboards: six of them, all seventeen or eighteen, old enough to be frisky and not quite old enough to know better.

East Colfax is that kind of street: common, rough, unpredictable. I heard one of the kids yell, “Look out, Smoky!” and I cringed at the slur and was shamed again by the callous stupidity of my own race. I could hear their taunting through my storefront, but the driver stood with patient dignity and ignored them. He had an almost smooth face with a short, neat mustache, and I liked his manner and the way he held himself. Sometimes you can tell about a guy, just from a glance.

The kids clattered away and the driver opened the car door. A gray head appeared followed by the rest of her: a frail-looking woman in a faded, old-fashioned dress. She gripped his arm and pulled herself up: stood still for a moment as if she couldn’t quite get her balance, then she nodded and, still clutching his arm, began the long, step-by-step voyage across the sidewalk to my store. She had to stop and steady herself again, and at that moment I saw the driver look up with a face full of alarm. Another wave of reckless kids was coming, and in that half second the first of them whipped by just a foot from my glass. The driver put up his hand and yelled “Stop!” and I saw the old lady cringe as a blur flew past and missed her by inches. I started toward the door, but before I could get there, the big man had stiff-armed the next kid in line, knocking him ass over apex on the sidewalk.

I opened my door and several things happened at once. Another fool swerved past, I got my foot on his skateboard, tipped him off, and the board shot out into the street, where it was smashed by a passing car. The first kid was up on his hands and knees, bleeding at the elbows and dabbing at a bloody nose. I heard the ugly words, “nigger son of a bitch,” and two more of his buddies arrived, menacing us on the sidewalk. The car had pulled to the curb and now a fat man joined the fray, screaming about the scratch on his hood. In all this chaos the big fellow managed to get the old lady into the store, leaving me alone to handle the fallout.

The bloody nose was flanked by his pals. “I oughta beat your ass.”

I laughed at the thought. “You couldn’t beat your meat without help from these other idiots. Maybe you better haul it on out of here before you get in real trouble.”

I juked them and they stumbled over one another as they backed out to the curb. It was hard not to laugh again, they were such colossal schmucks, but I let them put on a little face-saving sideshow, to which middle fingers were copiously added, and eventually they sulked away.

Now I had to go through another song and dance with the fat guy. He said, “What about my car, wiseguy, you gonna pay for my hood?” I asked if he knew how to read, pointing out that my sign said books, not State Farm Insurance. He suggested throwing a brick through my window and we’d see how funny that was. I took obvious note of his plate number and told him I’d be inside calling the cops while he was looking around for a brick. I heard him leave, putting down a foot of rubber as I opened my door and went inside.

The old lady sat in a chair with her eyes closed. I spoke to her driver, who had a name tag sewn military-style on his jacket. “Mr. Ralston, I presume.”

“Mike’ll do.”

I shook his hand, said, “Cliff Janeway,” and gave a small bow in her direction. “Welcome to East Colfax.”

* * *

The phone rang and I had a brief rush of business. The old woman sat still through it all, her balance eerily stable in what appeared to be a light sleep. Occasionally I made eye contact with Ralston, arching my eyebrows and cocking my head in her direction, but he shrugged and waited for the calls to subside. When it got quiet again I motioned him over to the end of the counter. “So…Mike…what’s this all about?”

“Beats me. I think she just got to Denver last night.”

“Just got here from where?”

“Back East somewhere. I don’t know how she made it all alone. You can see how shaky she is, and she’s got almost no money. That had to be one helluva trip.”

“What’s your part in it?”

“Let’s call it my good deed of the month.” He smiled, a humble man embarrassed by his own kindness. “Look, I’m no professional do-gooder, but this woman’s at the end of her rope. She’s staying in a tacky motel not far from here. My wife works there and I can tell you it’s not a place you’d want your grandmother to stay. Or your wife to work, either…not for long.”

“So?”

“So Denise calls and tells me she’s got a lady there who needs some help. Denise is my wife.” He said her name so lovingly that I could almost feel some small measure of the affection myself, for a woman I had never met. “You married, Janeway?”

I shook my head.

“Well, this is one of those things you do when you are. As the line goes, to ensure domestic tranquillity. You’ll understand it someday.”

I laughed and liked him all the more.

“All I can tell you right now is, this lady came a long way to see you, and she almost made it. The least I could do was get her the last few miles over here.”

I liked Mr. Ralston but I sure didn’t like what I was hearing. The arrival of an ancient and penniless woman at my door charged me with responsibility for her welfare. Maybe I owed her nothing—that was the voice of a cynic, and I am the great cynic of my day. I can be a fountain of negative attitude, but from that moment she was mine to deal with.

“I wonder if I should wake her.”

“Up to you, friend. I’m just the delivery boy.”

It was unlikely but she seemed to hear us. Her eyes flicked open and found my face, and I had a powerful and immediate sense of something strong between us. I knew that in some distant past she had been an important part of my life, yet in the same instant I was certain I had never seen her. Her face was almost mummified, her eyes watery and deep. Her hair was still lush and striking: now I could see that it was pure white, not gray, swept across her forehead in a soft wave that left her face looking heart-shaped and delicate in spite of the deeply furrowed skin. I pulled up a stool, said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” and her pale gray eyes, which had never left my face, struggled to adjust in the harsh late-afternoon sunlight from the street. Suddenly I knew she couldn’t see me: I saw her pupils contract and expand as she lowered and raised her head; I saw the thick glasses in her lap and the lax fingers holding them but making no effort to bring them up to her eyes. The glasses were useless; she was blind. It was impossible but she had come across the country alone, trembling and unsteady…virtually sightless.

I couldn’t just shake that off, and I still felt some vague sense of kinship between us. It was probably simple chemistry, one of those strong and instant reactions that certain people have when they meet, but it had happened so rarely in my life that its effect was downright eerie. And this was doubly strange, because I now began to sense that her reaction to me was almost a polar opposite. Her face was deeply apprehensive, as if I had some heaven-or-hell power and she was finally at the time in her long life when the accounting had to begin.

“Mr. Janeway.”

Another surprise: her voice was steady and strong. She put on her glasses and squinted through the heavy lenses, confirming my original guess. She could make out colors, shades of light and dark, shapes moving past on the street; she could assess enough of my appearance to see a fierce-looking, dark-haired bruiser straddling a stool before her; she could find her way along a sidewalk if she didn’t stumble and fall. But by almost any legal definition, she was blind.

“My name is Josephine Gallant. You have a book that belongs to me.”

I thought at once of that mysterious City of the Saints that had dropped in my lap from St. Louis. This was actually going to be good news: I could pay her a thousand dollars for that copy; hell, I could give her two thousand and sell it at cost. Maybe that would make a small difference in her life and I could go back to my own life knowing I had given her my best. Then she said, “My grandfather was Charles Warren,” and at once I remembered that phone call from the crazy woman, surrounded by spooks in Baltimore. This is how quickly good news can turn into oh shit in the book business.

Before I could gather my thoughts she said, “What I meant was, it once belonged to me. Even after all these years I still think of them as my books.”

“Them?”

“There were more where that set came from.”

Again I felt her chemistry. She felt mine too, and suddenly she trembled. “You’re a formidable man,” she said; then, in a much smaller voice, “Aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”

For once I was flabbergasted into near-speechlessness. She repeated it, more certain now—“You are a formidable man”—as if she half expected me to haul back without warning and knock her off the chair. Softly I said, “Ma’am, I am no threat to ladies.” After an awkward pause I went on in a silly vein, trying my best to lighten her up. “I haven’t robbed a bank all week. I don’t do drugs. Don’t kick dogs…well, maybe little ones, but I never eat small children. That’s one good thing I can say for myself.”

She stared. I said, “Honest.” She lifted a shaky hand to her eyes and I gave up with a soggy punch line. “Those are all rumors that got started by an angry bookscout.”

I had a flashing moment of insanity when I almost told her the actual truth. By nature I am a cavalier with women, but I was afraid if I said that I’d have her for life.

Then she spoke. “When I called you on the telephone that day you were busy. I should have considered that. I only realized later that I must have sounded like a fool.”

“I think it was just that business about not letting them hear you.”

I felt a hot flush of shame but my cutting remark didn’t seem to offend her.

“I live in an old folks’ home in Baltimore. I’m on Medicaid and I’m not supposed to have unreported money of my own. That’s why I didn’t want them to hear what I was saying. It took everything I had hidden away to get here.”

This was not going well. Her answer for them had been annoy-ingly believable, so I threw her another one. “I was also a little puzzled when you said Burton had started our civil war.”

“You thought I was crazy.”

I shrugged. “No offense, ma’am. I was getting a lot of crazy calls then.”

“Well, of course he didn’t start that war. If I said that I didn’t mean it literally.” She was agitated now, whether at me or herself I couldn’t tell, but the trembling in her hands had spread to her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint.

“Are you okay, ma’am? I’ve got a cot in the back if you’d like to lie down.”

She took a deep, shivery breath. “No, I’m fine.” She didn’t look fine: she looked like a specter of death. She said, “I know I’m not going to make any headway trying to convince you about what Burton did or didn’t do,” then almost in the same breath she said, “How much do you know about his time in America?”

“I know he went to Utah in 1860 to meet Brigham Young. He was interested in polygamy and he wanted to see for himself how a polygamous society functioned.”

“That’s only what the textbooks tell you.”

It was what Burton himself had said in his books, but I nodded. “He had to get away from England for a while. He had been double-crossed by Speke, who took all the glory of discovering the African lakes for himself. I don’t know, maybe there was some truth to the story that he just wanted to come here and fight some Indians.”

“You know of course that he was a master spy.”

“I know when he was in India he often spied for the Crown.”

“And when he came to America, he disappeared for three months. What do you think he was doing here then?”

“Nobody knows. It’s always been assumed that he was on a drinking spree in the American South with an old friend from his days in India. But there’s no documentation for that time: the only evidence is Burton’s comment that they intended to do this. All Burton said was that he had traveled through every state before suddenly arriving at St. Joseph for his long stagecoach trip to Utah.”

“That’s not entirely true anymore. I heard that some pages from a journal have been found in England, supporting the view that Burton and his old friend Steinhauser were together after all. According to this account, they spent more time in Canada than in the Southern United States.”

“Well, there you are.”

“What if I told you there was another journal of that missing period, one that tells a far different story?”

“I’d have to be skeptical. A dozen biographers never uncovered it.”

“Maybe they didn’t know where to look.”

This again was possible. A man travels many roads—even a diligent biographer like Fawn Brodie never finds everything—but I still didn’t believe it. “I thought Mrs. Burton destroyed his journals.”

She simmered behind her old-lady face. “Well, this would be one she never got her bloody little hands on.”

“If such a book exists, I’d love to see it.”

“It exists, all right. Don’t worry about that.”

She fought her way through another attack of shakes. “It exists,” she said again.

“That’s pretty definite, ma’am…almost as if you’d seen it yourself.”

She nodded dreamily and I felt the hair bristle on the back of my neck. “A very long time ago,” she said. “A long, long lifetime ago. I don’t expect you to believe me. I just thought you might want to know that your book came out of a collection that was stolen from my family. But I guess that wouldn’t matter either.”

“Of course it would. But you’ve got to have proof.”

Outside, an ambulance went screaming past. In those few seconds I decided to take an objective and academic interest in what she was saying. Her great age demanded at least that much respect, so I ordered myself to go gently and save the assholery for someone who needed it.

I picked up a notepad and felt almost like a cop again. “How big a collection was this?”

“Large,” she said, and I could almost feel her heartbeat racing at my sudden interest. She had my attention: this was why she’d come, this was what she wanted.

“It was quite large,” she said. “You’d probably consider it the makings of a library. A good-sized bookcase full of books. A cabinet full of letters and papers.”

“A library like that isn’t easy to steal,” I said. “A man doesn’t just walk away with that in his hip pocket.”

“This was not a thief in the night. It was done through lies and

Immediately I asked the vital legal question. “Did money change hands?”

She said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” but her answer was too quick and her eyes cut away from mine. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. But what she said next only made it worse. “What difference does that make, if it was a crooked deal?”

That’s the trouble with a lie, it usually leads straight to another lie. A question rooted in a lie is a lie itself. I figured she knew quite well what a difference it could make, and a lie is a lie is a lie, as Gertrude Stein, that paragon of the lucid profundity, would have gushed. Ms. Josephine Gallant dodged it by retreating into her own dim past, and there, so surprisingly that it surprised us both, she saved herself.

“That collection was put together by my grandfather more than a hundred years ago. My earliest memories are of my grandfather and his books. I remember the colors of them…the textures. I remember that room, in a house that exists only in my memory. The pale blue walls. The plaster beginning to crack in the far corner, over the kitchen door. The shiny oak floor. Me, sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read, and outside, the sounds of horses in the street. The garbageman, with his speckled walrus mustache…nice old Mr. Dillard, who drove a wagon with a horse named Robert. Our windows were always open in the summer and there was noise—all the noises of the street—but it never disturbed my grandfather when he was reading. He could lose himself in a book. If I asked him, he would read aloud until I fell asleep. And if I awoke—if I nudged him—he would start reading again.”

She took a long breath. “If you’ve read Burton’s books, you know they can be difficult. But there are places where they bring a landscape to life, even for a child. My grandfather admired Burton tremendously. The cabinet was full of letters from Burton, written over twenty-five years. All of our books were inscribed to him by Burton, and he had many more that Burton had not written but had sent him over the years, on exotic topics that Burton had found interesting. There was always a little note inside, with some mention of the time they had spent together, and many of the books were extensively annotated with marginal notes in Burton’s hand.”

She smiled. “He often asked me, my grandfather, if I liked his books, and I always said oh yes, I loved them, and he said, they will be yours when you grow up.”

She cocked her head as if to say, That’s all I have. I’m sorry it’s not enough.

“These are my fondest memories. Listening to my grandfather read, in Burton’s own words, of his adventures in India, Africa, Arabia, and the American West.”

Her smile was faint: fleeting and wistful, lovely in the way a desert landscape must be from the edge of space. In that moment her small untruth seemed trivial and the general unease I had been feeling sharpened and became specific.

She wasn’t talking like a crazy woman now.

Not at all.

Suddenly I believed her.

I had spent years interrogating people, and in most cases I could smell a lie as soon as it was said. The good cops are the ones who know the truth when they hear it.

The little things were what got me. The particulars, like the blue plaster…

The pale blue plaster. The crack in the ceiling, just over the kitchen door. The garbageman with his speckled mustache and his horse named Robert, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell thinks of Robert as a name for a horse? Unless it’s real.

Suddenly she was getting all the benefit of my doubt.

Suddenly I had to give her that much simple justice. Suddenly the choices were no longer mine to make. Suddenly I had to hear what she really knew: I had to separate what she thought she knew from what she wanted to believe, and keep what I wanted to believe out of it. Suddenly I had to figure out what the truth was, because, that suddenly, I might have to ask the auction-house people to figure it out for all of us.

I could just imagine what they’d say. There are seldom any guarantees in a book auction, and at first there’d be icy disdain, the kind of ivory-tower, holier-than-thou bullshit that book people dish out better than anyone. Maybe if I made enough noise they’d have to look at it. The Boston Book Galleries was an upscale auction house with a fine reputation, and the book had been sold with a provenance that looked spotless. But in recent years even the most prestigious auction houses had been duped. Some of them had sold their souls and participated in the duping, so nothing was sacred if the book had to be checked. The inquiry would go all the way back to the day when Richard Francis Burton had signed it to some man named Charles Warren.

The old woman looked at me hard, trying to see me through her haze, and again it was as if she knew things that had not been said. She knew how close she had come to losing me. She had broken through a chink in my defenses and she knew that too, even if she didn’t quite know how. She had come with little hope on a journey that must have seemed endless, and in just these few minutes we had reached a turning point. She took a deep breath and we were back to that moment of truth she had sidestepped a moment ago. She tried to smile but didn’t make it, and in the end there was nothing to do but to say what she had come here for.

“My grandfather died in 1906. His library was pillaged immediately after his death, all of it whisked away in a single evening. It’s never been seen since.”

I coughed, politely, I hoped. But the chemistry between us was sizzling now, and I knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t just after my book, she wanted it all. Her grandfather’s library had been missing for more than eighty years and Ms. Josephine Gallant, at the end of her life, wanted me to find it for her.

CHAPTER 4

The only sound in the next half minute was the ticking of the clock. She sat waiting while my mind ran through the worst possible implications of what she had said.

I knew enough about the law in these matters to know how murky it could get. Common law says title can’t be acquired even from a good-faith seller if there’s theft hidden somewhere in the property’s history. The term caveat emptor may be part of a dead language but there are excellent reasons why it is still universally known. Richard Burton in his earliest childhood would have had a perfect understanding of it.

Things are seldom that simple in modern American law. State statutes may vary wildly on the same set of circumstances, and the passage of enough time can erode original rights in defiance of legal intent. People die, decades slip away, and what was once clearly their property can acquire a valid-looking new history of ownership.

Eighty years was a good long time, but this old lady had not died. She sat before me, a human relic, waiting tensely for some indication of what I would do. All she had going for her was a faint hope and the tiny matter of my conscience. If I chose to go happily among the world’s most notorious assholes, what could she do about it? I had bought the book fair and square: hell, I could stonewall her forever. Even if she’d had money and the law was ultimately on her side, its process was not. Given her age and the way lawyers jack each other off, she’d never live long enough to see her book again.

I had a hunch she knew these things as well as I did. Even Ralston knew: I could see him in my peripheral vision, out at the end of my art section, keenly interested in us now and no longer making any effort to hide it. Was there such stuff as three-way chemistry? Maybe so, but that didn’t account for everything. We all knew what I could have done. Only I knew what I had to do.

“What are you thinking, Mr. Janeway?”

“Just groping around the edges of a moral dilemma, Ms. Gallant.”

I could almost see her mind churning, hunting for any small thing that would make my dilemma less groping and my choice more moral. But she didn’t know how to get there, and all she could do was ask a blind question. “What can I tell you?”

I picked up my notepad, which had dropped to the floor beside my chair. “His name was Warren, yours is Gallant. You can start with that.”

“Warren was my mother’s name. Gallant was the name of the fool I married, more than seventy years ago. I kept it because I always loved the regal sound of it.”

This too sounded real, but she was still reading doubt into my questions. “Does it seem far-fetched that I might’ve found someone to marry me once, Mr. Janeway?”

“Not at all.”

“I wasn’t always a withered old prune. There was a time when even a young buck like yourself might’ve found me comely. But that was so long ago it might have been on another world.” She touched her cheek as if searching for a tear. “The first time I heard it I thought the name Gallant had the loveliest sound. Tucker Gallant. My God, he’s been dead almost sixty years. I wonder if I didn’t marry him just for his name.”

“You don’t strike me as the type who would do that, Mrs. Gallant.”

“Who knows what type I was? I was barely a grown woman when I met him.”

Her hands had begun to tremble and she looked away, squinting at the light from the street. Hope was fickle and it faded now as reality settled in. “I knew I was coming here on a fool’s errand. You’re being very kind, Mr. Janeway, but I’m not under any illusions about anything. Even if I could prove everything I say, where would I be?”

“In an ideal world, I would return the book and get my money back. Then the auction house would give it to you as the rightful owner.”

“Your tone tells me that’s not likely to happen.”

“It’s not theirs to give. Their position would be that all sales are final. In that ideal world, maybe you could discover who consigned it. But then you’d have to fight it out with him.”

“How do they think I’m supposed to do that?”

I shrugged. “Not their problem.”

“So much for the ideal world. Now what?”

I didn’t say anything. Hell, I was no lawyer: it wasn’t my place to tell her what to do. If I made a good-faith effort to find out about the book, nobody could ask more than that.

“This is some situation,” she said.

Yes, it was, but I wasn’t going to advise her.

“If you keep the book, I lose. If you give it back, I still lose.”

So far she had an excellent grasp of it.

“I guess my only recourse is to persuade you to give me the book.”

There was a touch of self-ridicule in her voice, like, That’ll be the day, when cows milk themselves dry and the ghost of Richard Burton comes back to take it away from you at the point of a sword.

“No one but a fool would do that,” she said.

She had that right. In our dog-eat-dog world, she was nothing to me. She was trouble and pain, the embodiment of bad news. But my heart went out to her.

“I shouldn’t joke about it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money to joke about.”

“Tell me about it.”

I hadn’t been aware she’d been joking—how could I tell?—but now in her self-deprecating laugh I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d been: a heartbreaker, I’d bet, in the springtime of the Roaring Twenties with her life just beginning and the world opening up. In that moment the money seemed crazily irrelevant. It was still only Indian money: If I had to give up the book, I’d miss it like a severed kidney, but how much would I really miss the stupid money? I shifted my weight on the stool and said, “I don’t know what I’d do,” and she took in her breath and held it for a moment.

“I just don’t know, that’s all I’m saying. If we could verify everything—if there were no doubts—then I guess that would be one of my options, wouldn’t it?”

She shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”

“We’re not breaking any new ground there, Mrs. Gallant.”

She squinted and peered, said, “I wish I could see you better,” but her apprehension was gone. Her fear was gone, and what was left between us was a strange and growing harmony. Was that trust I saw in her face?

“I had no idea what I’d find when I came here. I certainly didn’t expect to meet a man of honor. I thought such creatures were extinct today.”

“Don’t get too carried away, ma’am. I haven’t done anything yet.”

But there was no getting around it: in those few minutes, something fundamental had changed between us. She gave a small shiver and clutched at the collar of her dress. I asked if she was cold—I had an afghan back in my office—but she shook her head.

“Mr. Ralston?”

“Yes, ma’am?” He came up to join us.

“Would you please get my bag from the car?”

I had my own chilling moment as Ralston brought in the bag and she directed him to take out what was obviously a book wrapped in cloth. What else would it be but a Burton? I fingered its violet cloth cover, opened it to the title page, and my last doubt about her vanished. A cherry copy, an exquisite First Footsteps in East Africa, London, 1856. I touched the inscription: To Charles Warren, my best American friend Charlie, in the hope that our paths may one day cross again, Richard F. Burton. It had been inscribed in 1860.

“That’s an exceedingly rare volume today,” she said. “I’ve had it hidden away, protected it for years. I understand it’s unheard of to find one with the forbidden appendix intact.”

The notorious so-called infibulation appendix. I turned to page 591 and found it tipped in, four pages in Latin. I remembered from Brodie’s biography that it had contained material then considered so salacious that the printers had refused to bind it into the book.

“The sexual practices of the Somalis,” she said. “All spelled out for the public horrification and secret titillation of proper old hypocritical England. Penis rings, female circumcision—things they couldn’t talk about then and we can’t get enough of today.”

“Burton never did have any inhibitions when it came to describing what he saw.”

“For all the good it did him. I understand only a few copies survived.”

“How did you manage to save this one?”

“I was lucky. Charlie had taken this volume out of his library to look up something. It was upstairs where it wasn’t supposed to be the night he died. Later my mother found it and hid it. She kept it secret until she died, and it was found among her things. A few worthless relics, some worn-out old clothes, and this—the sum of her existence, but to me it was a symbol of what we’d been, who we were.”

I flipped my notepad to a new page. “So tell me who you were.”

“We were never rich, I’ll tell you that. We were always comfortable, solidly in the middle class while Charlie was alive, but people were more apt to be either rich or poor then, and the middle class was a much smaller part of the population. You could live very well in the middle class in those days.”

She slipped back into her dream face. “Everything we were in the good times began and ended with my grandfather. He was such a loving authority figure to me when I was a child. His friends called him Charlie, but of course to me he was always Grandfather; it would have been a sacrilege to think of him any other way. But on my eightieth birthday I suddenly realized I was older than him— when he died, you know, and got stuck at seventy-nine forever. That’s when he became more like a dear old friend and I started thinking of him as Charlie.”

“What about your father?”

“My father…” She struggled for a word but couldn’t find it. The moment stretched and became strained. “What do you want to know? I tried to love my father…but he wouldn’t let me. He wasn’t a bad man…just a weak one.”

“Did he drink?”

I saw her recoil in surprise.

“I’m not a mind reader, ma’am, it just figures.”

She fidgeted. She could feel me hemming her in, taking her into places she had avoided for a long time. At last she answered the question. “His drinking put my mother in the poorhouse after my grandfather died. That’s where she died, alone in a consumption ward. They all died within a few years of each other—Charlie…Mama…him.”

I decided to leave her father’s drinking for the moment, but I knew we’d get back to it. “So you were alone in the world at what age?”

“Thirteen.”

“This was in Baltimore?”

“Yes, but when Mama got sick I was sent to live with her brother in Boise, Idaho.”

“How did that work out?”

“It was horrible. He was a common laborer; he made very little money and his wife took in wash to help make ends meet. They already had five children, the last thing they needed was another one. I was resented by all of them; they never said it in so many words, but I knew. They put up with me because I was family, that’s what good people did then. I hated being an obligation, so I ran away after two years and I never saw any of them again. I’m sure they all said good riddance when I was gone.”

Her eyes drifted to the street, as if moving images from that old life had begun to play on my storefront window. “They’d all be dead now, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s hard to say. You’re still here.”

A pregnant pause: I flipped a page. “What happened then?”

“A lot of things you don’t need to know about. Just say I soon learned how to take care of myself and we’ll leave it at that. I went back to Baltimore and married Gallant in 1916. I’ve had an amazing ability to go from bad to worse all my life, and this was just another case of it. That doesn’t matter now, it’s all a very long time ago. Let’s just say Gallant didn’t live up to the promise of his name.”

She made a nervous gesture. “Let’s talk about something else. Those were hard times and I’d rather not think about it. Anyway, Gallant’s got nothing to do with this. I doubt if I ever said the word books the whole time we were married. But I never stopped thinking about them. They were on my mind all through those hard years.”

“Sounds like you had a few of those. Hard years, I mean.”

She made a little laughing sound. “Oh honey, I could tell you stories that would curl your toenails. The twenties weren’t half-bad; we had some good days then and some money too. But Tucker lost his shirt along with everybody else in 1929. Then he…died…and I lived in a cardboard box at a garbage dump all through the winter of 1931. The dump was the only place where the cops would leave me alone. I went to sleep every night with the smell of rotten meat in my nose and the sounds of rats in my ears. All I had was that little silver key to Tucker’s deposit box, where I kept my book. But what does that matter now? I lived through it and I’m still here, fifty-eight years after Tucker Gallant was laid out with two fellas throwing dirt in his face.”

She swallowed hard and looked off into the dark places of the store. “The tough part is when I think how different my life might’ve been if those books hadn’t been lost. Knowing all the time they were meant to be mine.”

“What would you have done with them then, sold them?”

“That would’ve been hard. They were such a part of my life.” She shrugged. “When you get hungry enough you’ll sell anything. They sure weren’t worth then what they’d sell for today, but I bet I’d have gotten myself a fair piece of change even in the thirties. Maybe put myself through college. I always wanted to go to college. Always wanted to study…”

“Study what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. Of course I won’t laugh.”

“It just seems silly now, but I always wanted to study something grand. Like philosophy.”

She rolled her eyes at her own folly. “My gosh, philosophy. Of all the silly things.”

I didn’t laugh: she did.

“Now I ask you, Mr. Janeway, have you ever heard of anything as silly as that?”

Two customers came in, high-rollers from Texas who passed through Denver once a year, and for a while I was busy showing them some high-end modern books. They bought a slug of stuff that I was thrilled to see hit the road, passing over two immaculate Mark Twains to throw about the same amount of money at Larry McMurtry, Hunter S. Thompson, and a few others whose names will be toast when old Clemens is still a household word. Ralston watched them peel off eight crispy bills from a roll of hundreds and saunter up the street with their small bag of books.

“Man, I’m in the wrong business.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not always like that.”

“Doesn’t need to be.”

Almost an hour had passed since I had last spoken to Mrs. Gallant. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide open, staring at nothing. I thought, God, I’d like to crawl inside your head, but if I’d had one wish, I’d liked to have been there when her grandfather died. I had some drippy, cavalier notion that I’d have rescued her life: that, one way or another, I’d have stopped her father from selling her books.

“Mrs. Gallant.” I pulled up my stool. “I know you’re tired, but can we talk about your father for just a minute?”

Suddenly she cupped her hands over her face and wept. I touched her shoulder and we sat like that, and after a while, when she was ready, she told me what had happened. Of course the old bastard had sold her books: to him they were nothing. “He never read a book in his life,” she said. “He couldn’t have cared less. He got thirty dollars for all of them and drank that up in a week.”

“Was there a paper, any kind of legal document?”

“None that I ever saw.”

Of course not—who makes up a paper for a thirty-dollar deal? But if money had changed hands it was legal, and who after eighty years could prove that it was not?

“He was told they weren’t worth anything—they were just junk books. Doesn’t that make it a fraud? And what right did he have to sell them? They weren’t his to sell.”

This was yet another legal mess. What had the law said in 1906, when a woman still couldn’t vote, about a man’s right to his wife’s property? Specifically, what had the law in Maryland said in those days of such enlightenment?

I felt the beginnings of a headache. There were still questions to ask, all leading nowhere, I knew, but I had to ask them. I made some notes and when I looked up, Mrs. Gallant had begun to teeter in the chair. I put my hand on her arm and then Ralston was there, holding her steady. “That’s all for now, Janeway,” he said, and there was no nonsense in his voice: we were finished.

We talked for a moment about what to do. “She’ll come home with me,” Ralston said. “It ain’t the Brown Palace, but she can rest easy till Denise gets home.”

We helped her out to the car. Ralston gave me a paper with his telephone number and told me to call him later. I leaned down and spoke to her through the open window. “One last question, ma’am. Do you have any idea who bought those books?”

“Yes, of course. He was looking for fast money, so he sold them to a bookstore.”

There it was, the only ray of light in what had so far been a damned hopeless story. If a book dealer had bought that entire library for thirty dollars, even allowing for the much cheaper values of the time, it had certainly been one hell of a fraud. But what did that matter now? Like Richard Burton and Charlie Warren, like her mother and father, the garbageman and his horse, Gallant, the Boise relatives, and all the others, that bookseller would have died a long time ago.

Then she said something that hit me like a slap. “When I think of those awful book people—those Treadwells—how can they live with themselves?”

It was the hint of present tense that turned my head around.

“Mrs. Gallant…are you telling me that place is still in business?”

“Of course it is, it’s been there forever. Haven’t you ever heard of Treadwell’s? It’s a den of thieves, passed down in the same rotten family for a hundred years.”

CHAPTER 5

If I had spent more time on the road I might have known about Treadwell’s. A bookman who travels always picks up local scuttlebutt, and one who travels constantly eventually knows everything about everybody. The notorious get reputations, and booksellers do love to talk candidly with a colleague they can trust.

In an hour I had made six calls to dealers I knew around the country, and I had several pages of notes on Treadwell’s Books. I had its address, its phone number, and a good description of its general layout. Its Yellow Pages ad boasted of two million books on three large floors in an old redbrick building on Eastern Avenue just off South Broadway, in an area of downtown Baltimore not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. Over the years I had been in so many bookstores like that, I could almost see it. Dark stairwells, creaky floors, narrow aisles, deep and dusty shelves. Books double- and triple-shelved, books stacked on end, piled on top of the overflowing bookcases, with another overflow on the floor at the end of each section. Books on every conceivable subject and a few on topics nobody could have imagined. It was possible in such a store that some of the titles in the back rows of each section had not been touched in decades.

The store’s history was colorful and long. It stretched back across much of the century and had spawned generations of bookpeople, beginning with old Dedrick Treadwell, the king of knaves in that turn-of-the-century book world. The Treadwells had always had a dubious reputation in the book world. “They’d pay as much as anybody if they were bidding against other dealers and the books were good,” said a bookman in the D.C. area who knew them well. “But if it’s just them and some poor know-nothing who’s just inherited a houseful of books…Well, I’m not one to call another man a crook…let’s just say I’ve heard stories, and let it go at that.”

In his early days, old man Treadwell had operated out of various hole-in-a-wall shops. In the early thirties he had leased the building on Eastern Avenue with an option to buy. He had clearly set his sights on bigger game, and soon he and his son were sucking up books by the tens of thousands, all over the East Coast. They were voracious buyers, insatiable raptors of the book trade. “God knows how many books that we now consider classic and sell for four figures were blown out of there for nickels and dimes then,” one dealer said. They were of the turn-‘em-fast school: buy cheap, sell cheap, get the cash, move on, and buy some more.

I love stores like that: I can spend hours and thousands of dollars in those dusty, half-lit book dungeons. But they are becoming severely endangered as rents go ever higher and downtown space is consumed by high-traffic, high-profit enterprises. Soon they will be like the people of Margaret Mitchell’s Old South, no more than a dream half-remembered.

The first Treadwell must have imagined the trends decades ago. He bought the building and his son had sons and flourished there. They rode out the Depression, the war years were good, and the postwar even better. The second generation died and a third came along. A few of them stayed in the trade; most left to find, they hoped, a brighter future elsewhere. Today the managing partners were brothers of the fourth generation, Dean and Carl Treadwell. I got good descriptions of both from a dealer in Chicago. “Dean is a big, burly fellow with a beard,” my friend said. “Carl is a smaller guy, quieter, but you get the feeling there’s a lot going on with Carl—some anger, maybe even an occasional original thought. Carl gives you the feeling of still water running deep, and Dean would rather come off as a hail-fellow-well-met, salt-of-the-earth type. Dean likes to pretend they’re just rubes, but make no mistake, there are two cunning minds under all that bullshit he puts on. And they do know their books.”

Maybe so, but in the current generation, Treadwell’s had suddenly fallen on hard times. “Carl’s the culprit,” said the guy in Washington. “You didn’t hear it here, but he’s gotten himself into bad company—gamblers, thugs, the Baltimore mob. Gangsters may even own a piece of that store now. I heard Carl lost his pants in a poker game last year.”

“You should get out more,” said my friend in Chicago. “Everybody knows about the Treadwells.”

For another hour I meditated over what I had learned. There have always been a few crooks in the trade. As one old bookman put it, there’s a bad apple in every town. Sometimes he’s an obvious con man dripping with charm. He may be the cold thief who walks casually out of a bookstore with a ten-volume Conan Doyle tucked into every inch of his pants, coat, and shirt, the signed volume crammed desperately into some dank body cavity, and immediately finds another bookseller eager to hold his nose and buy it, fifty cents on the dollar, no questions asked. He is also that rival bookseller who must know a hot book when he sees one. He wears more faces than Lon Chaney in the best of his times. He’s the sweet-faced kid who jacket-clips worthless book club editions and sells them as firsts to the Simon Pure collector. Occasionally he’s a renegade, thriving on intimidation and operating from the trunk of a car. He may be any kind of personality, but that glitch in his character keeps him working the shady side of the street forever. His spots never change.

As I grew into my business I learned how gray it all is. There is such an eye-of-the-beholder mentality in the book trade that it plays perfectly into the hands of the enemy. What must be paid as a rock-bottom minimum to keep it just above the level of fraud? Should it matter if a two-hundred-dollar book is in tiny demand compared with a book that sells easily for the same two hundred? How much may be deducted for condition, and by whose standard must condition be measured? We don’t like to admit it but the flimflam man has a trait that’s all too common to the rest of us. The degree of his crookedness is a wild variant, and our own generosity can vary as much from one of us to the next.

It’s no wonder that the trade is such a warm, fertile place for pond scum; what’s amazing is how little of it you actually find there. Most dealers pay 30 to 40 percent, straight across the board, which is certainly decent, considering the overhead. Many do scale back what they pay because they may have those books for years. Some of them may never sell. And there’s one thing that will always separate us from a cheese-pushing hose artist: we never lie on either end, buying or selling, and he always lies—on either end, both ends, and in the middle.

How different my own life might have been. Only some quirk in my character had kept me from becoming what I now despised. I could be rich now on crooked money. I had seldom seen Vince Marranzino since the old days but that possibility had been rife between us. On another night he had stepped out of a big touring car with a wicked-looking sidekick. I’d opened the door, hiding the apprehension I felt, and Vince embraced me like some godfather out of Mario Puzo. I’d slapped his back. He was still hard and tough, and the scar on his face had deepened where long ago a young hood had gashed him with a broken beer bottle. Thinking of him now, his scars reminded me of Richard Burton.

The muscle had waited on the sidewalk while Vince and I talked. Now he was called Vinnie, but I could still call him Vince. He remembered old debts and I could call him anything I wanted. Only you can call me that old name, Cliffie.

He knew his presence made me uneasy. But he’d had to come: he’d seen the newspaper stories about my fall from grace, and he wanted to help me square things.

He’d looked around him and said, You like this book racket?

Yeah, I do.

You wanna buy some real books?

I dunno, Vince. What would I have to do for ‘em?

Just let me throw a little work your way. I’ve got a job now, you could do it in a week. Make you fifty, seventy-five grand. Buy all the goddamn books you want for that.

Well, I’d said, smiling. That would be a start, anyway.

But I’d said no thanks without hearing what the job was.

Vince had looked disgusted. Hey you, you big bazooka, when are you gonna let me square accounts with you?

We’re square now, Vince. You don’t owe me anything.

But I had once saved his life and he shook his head sadly. To a man like Vince, that account could never be squared with words alone.

He’d gripped my arm. Strong as ever, ain’tcha, Cliff? Bet I can throw your ass.

I’d laughed. I’ll bet you can.

When I looked up again the afternoon had faded. It was five-fifteen and no word from Erin. I faced the fact that she wasn’t coming.

It was two hours later in Baltimore, probably too late to call Treadwell’s—assuming I had some valid excuse, or could think of one, or could say anything that sounded at all real. I was caught up in an old cop’s impulse: I wanted to hear the man’s voice, so I picked up the phone and punched in the number.

It rang, five times…six. Nobody there, just as I thought, and just as well. Then I heard a click on the other end, and a woman’s voice. “Hi, Treadwell’s.”

“Is Treadwell there?”

“Which one?”

“Whoever’s handy.”

She said, “Justa minute, hon,” and I was put on hold. Well, I was into it now: nothing to do but hang up or play it out. There was no elevator music, nothing but that dead-flat line to help me while away the hours. How many times had I done this as a cop, made a cold call with no plan of action and only a hunch to go on? Sometimes it worked out fine, and if there was a compelling reason to pussyfoot around with these guys, I couldn’t see it.

Long minutes later I heard the phone click again, and suddenly there was a faint hum on the line. Almost at once the man spoke: “This’s Dean.”

“Hey, Dean,” I said in my best good-old-boy voice. “I was referred to you as a possible source for some books I want to find.”

“Well, whoever sent you got one thing right—I got books. You buying ‘em by the pound or the ton? Or are you interested in something particular?”

I laughed politely. “The last book I bought by the ton was an Oxford textbook on erectile dysfunction.”

He bellowed into the phone, a raspy laugh followed by a hacking smoker’s cough. “Buddy, if you’ve got that problem, ain’t no book gonna cure it. Might as well slice off the old ginger root and donate it to medical research.”

“Jesus, Dean, don’t jump to that conclusion. That book was for a friend of mine.”

He laughed again. “Yeah, right. So listen, what the hell can I do for you?”

“I heard through the grapevine you might have some books by Richard Burton. I’m talking about real stuff, you know what I mean?”

I thought the pause was long enough to be significant. He coughed again and said, “What grapevine did you hear that through?”

“Oh, you know…here and there. The main question is whether it’s true.”

This time the pause was long enough to be halftime at the Rose Bowl. After a while I said, “Dean? You still with me?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Just trying to think what I might have. We got a lot of books here, pal. I gave up long ago trying to keep track of it all.”

“I don’t think you’d have any trouble keeping track of this stuff. You got a rare book room, I imagine you’d know what’s in it, right? I mean, this isn’t like the two million books you put out on the open shelves.”

“Easy for you to say. You got two million books?”

“Hell no, thank God.”

I waited. I heard the sound of a cigarette being lit. I heard him blow smoke. “Where you calling from?”

“I’m on the road. Trying to decide if it’s worth my time and energy to come all the way out to the coast.”

“And you’re a serious buyer, right?”

“Serious enough to make your day.” I decided to lie a little for the cause. “Maybe your month, if you’ve got what I want.”

“We might still have something, I’m not sure.”

Still? A damned significant word, I thought. He said, “I’ll have to check and call you back. What’s your name?”

Screw it, I thought: let’s see where this goes. “Cliff Janeway.”

“The guy in Denver?”

“I can’t believe how that story got around.”

“Yeah. You’ll have to tell me who the hell your press agent is.”

“His last name’s luck. First name’s dumb.”

“I could use some of that.”

“Maybe you’re having it right now, Dean,” I said with a nice touch of arrogance.

“Yeah, we’ll see. I’m sure you know if I did have something like that, it wouldn’t be at any dealer’s prices. I wouldn’t want you to come all the way here thinking there’d be a lot of margin in a book like that.”

“I’m used to that. I didn’t pay a dealer’s price in Boston, either.”

“Okay, so where are we? You want to call me back?”

“Yeah, sure. You say when.”

“How about tomorrow, about this same time.”

“You got it. Good talking to you, Dean.”

I hung up and sat there quietly, thinking about it.

About ten minutes later the phone rang. When I answered it, nobody was there.

Actually, somebody was there. For a moment I could hear him breathing, then he covered the phone to cough. And there was that faint hum on the line.

Dean.

My new old buddy, Dean Treadwell. The last of the good old boys, checking up on me.

Now he knew I’d been lying. I wasn’t on the road at all, was I?

I heard the click as he hung up the phone. The hum went away and the line went dead.

It was now twilight time, the beginning of my long nightly journey through the dark. For the moment the Treadwell business had played itself out. I didn’t want to leave it there, but there it sat, spreading its discontent. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to call a friend, catch a movie, do a crossword puzzle. I sure as hell didn’t want to sit in a bar full of strangers as an alternative to Erin d’Angelo’s luminous presence. When all else fails I usually work on books, but that night I didn’t want to do that, either.

In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted. I seemed to have reached a major turning point in my life as a bookman. I look back at that time as my true watershed, more significant than even the half-blind leap that had brought me straight into the trade from homicide. Today I believe I was shaped by that entire half year. Even then I sensed that I was moving from my common retail base into something new, yet for most of my waking hours I had doubts that I would ever get anywhere. This must be what a writer goes through when he’s groping his way into a book. I think it was Doctorow who said that about the writing process—it’s like driving a car across country at night and all you can ever see is what’s immediately in your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. Maybe the book trade was like that. I had always been a slow learner, but already there had been wondrous moments when suddenly I understood, after months of plodding, some tiny piece of the enormous world I had come to. A-ha! A hit of knowledge! A leap of faith so striking that it sometimes took my breath away.

This was never greater than in those two weeks of 1987. I had bought the Burton, which I now know was the catalyst. Millie, my gal Friday, was off on vacation and I had been forced into the annoying business of minding the store. Richard Burton had fired me up and old Mrs. Gallant had stirred me up, but on a conscious level all I had was the annoying hunch that I might work till dawn; that, and how I’d explain to Dean why I’d lied to him, when I called him tomorrow.

My working domain was normally the back room, but in my solitude I wanted to be where I could at least see the lights of the street. I brought up my stuff and sat at the counter, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I stared at my reference books and for a long time I just sat there and waited for my mood to change.

The book world was very different then. In 1987 it was real work to research even simple book problems. We were still in the earliest days of the Internet: the vast, sweeping changes that have come over us had barely begun, and none of us knew how crazy it would get. Points and values on unfamiliar books still had to be searched out the old way, in bibliographies and specialists’ catalogs, and with some, you finally had to go on a gut feeling. Knowledge was rewarded by the system: you put out your books, took your chances, and if another bookseller knew more than you did, he scored on your mistake. Today any unwashed nitwit can look into a computer and pull out a price. Whether the price is proper, whether it’s even the same edition—these questions, once of major importance, have begun to pale as bookscouts and flea markets and even junk shops rush onto the Internet to play bookseller. They love to say things like “The Internet has equalized the playing field,” but all they do is cannibalize the other fellow’s off-the-wall prices for books of dubious lineage and worth. They want to play without paying any dues, now or ever. They have no reference books to back up their assertions and they’d never pay more than pocket change for anything. They wheel and deal but they care about nothing but price. The computer may have leveled the playing field in one sense—it’s a great device for revealing what people around the world are asking and paying for certain books—but in this year of grace it will not tell you, reliably, how to identify a true American first of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In those early Internet years I posted an epigram over my desk: A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. That was written two centuries ago by a German wit named Lichtenberg, but I think the same applies today to a computer screen.

I had just ordered my supper from Pizza Hut when I heard the tap on my window. I turned and there she was, the Gibson girl incarnate. Those incredible eyes. That lovely smiling face, so loaded with mischief. I leaped up and toppled my stool. My crazy heart went with it, a mad tumble that had happened with only one other woman. The great adventure of love, more thrilling and perilous than a man with a gun: I had given up the notion of ever knowing it again.

CHAPTER 6

I fumbled with my keys and dropped them. Lurched over to pick them up, missed them in the dark, and almost fell on my ass. Had to go back for them, groping around on the floor. So far my performance was falling far short of the cool image I always project to the opposite sex. She stood outside, striking a pose of vast impatience. Looked at her watch. Tapped her foot while I got the key into the hole and opened the door.

“Sorry, I’m closed,” I said, regaining my cool.

“That’s okay, I’m just the gas girl, here to read your meter.”

I almost laughed at that but recovered in time to make a phony cough of it. “You’ll have to make it fast, I’m expecting someone.”

“No one special, I take it, from the look of you.”

“Just read the meter, miss, and let’s hold the fashion critique. This has been a hard day.”

“Obviously. A white sport coat indeed.”

“I wore it till the pink carnation began gasping for air and turning green around the gills. There came a point when I had to figure that the girl of my dreams just wasn’t going to show.”

“You have no faith. I had you pegged from the start. All pop, no fizz.”

“My faith was like the Prudential rock until an hour ago.”

“That’s not nearly good enough when I expected so much more of you. I take it from your wardrobe that we’re going someplace fancy. Burger King or Taco Bell? Do I get to choose?”

“Actually, I just…urn…kinda…ordered a pizza.”

She laughed out loud at that.

“I’ll bet I can cancel it,” I said. “I just this minute ordered it.”

“A pizzal And I’ll bet it’s a pizza for one.”

“I can have them make another one,” I said in the wimpiest voice I could put on.

She sighed deeply. “I guess you might as well. Oh, chivalry, where art thou? I’ll tell you this much, sir, Sir Richard Burton rests unchallenged in his tomb tonight.”

She browsed my shelves while I made the call.

“No anchovies,” she yelled from New Arrivals.

I appeared suddenly at her side. “How’d your case go?”

“We lost but we knew we would. Anything else would have put us all in the hospital from shock. Now we’ve got something we can appeal, take it out of cowboy heaven.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Maybe sometime. Right now I’m so happy to be out of there I don’t even want to think about it. I drove straight through from Rock Springs. As of this time last night, I’m on vacation…three glorious weeks to write, contemplate, and recover.”

After a moment, she said, “I thought of calling around three o’clock, in case you actually were standing here in some goofy white sport coat. Then I thought no, this would be more fun. Arrive when all hope is lost. See if you’re still here. Razz you a bit. How’s it working so far?”

“I’m getting pretty damned annoyed, if you want to know the truth.”

“Miranda should have told you, I’m a card-carrying member of Lunatics Anonymous. We Loonies see the world as one big insane asylum. Our goal is to laugh at everything. If I don’t find some kind of laughter in all this chaos, I’ve got to cry, and I hate that. So I make fun of the handicapped. Tell racially insensitive jokes. Put down those who are already oppressed.”

A moment later she said, “I’m kidding.”

“I knew that.”

“I figured you did. Right from the start you seemed to be as crazy as I am.”

“I must have compared wonderfully to the stuffed shirt you were driving that night.”

When she said nothing to that, I said, “Did I step on professional toes there?”

“Would it matter?”

“Of course. Mr. Archer may be a jerk on a world scale, but I no longer feel any uncontrollable compulsion to say so.”

“Don’t bite your tongue on my account. Just be aware that an escort who speaks ill of her client soon has no clients to speak of. So I may not participate in the verbal dismemberment.”

“Whatever you say, my lips are sealed.”

“In that case, yes, Archer’s right up there among the most pompous asses that the ill winds of New York have ever blown my way.”

“As much as it grieves me to say it, he’s actually a very good writer. He was one of the modern authors I liked best…”

“Until you met him.”

“That does take away some of his sex appeal. What’re you doing driving authors around?”

“Didn’t Miranda tell you? She told me you asked.”

“Miranda is proving to be an untrustworthy confidante.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I got into the author tours early, for spending money in college. Now I don’t need the spending money so it must be the intellectual stimulation.”

“So if you’re driving the author of The Hungry Man’s Diet Book, or the guy who wrote Six Ways to Profit from the Coming Nuclear War, what kind of stimulation do you get from that?”

“I don’t drive those authors.”

“Must be nice to pick and choose.”

“The woman who owns the agency became one of my best friends. When I see who’s coming through, I can put in a request if it’s someone I like.”

“But this time you got stuck with Archer.”

“No, I asked for him.”

“Couldn’t be his personality. Must be because he’s an old friend of the judge.”

“I don’t remember saying that. You sure jump to a lot of conclusions.”

“I’m trying to get you properly placed in the cosmos and you’re giving me no help at all. Are you saying you knew Archer was a pompous ass and still you asked for him?”

“Life is strange, isn’t it?”

She found a layer of dust, flicked it away, and said, “You need a woman’s touch in here.”

Before I could answer that, she said, “If it wasn’t Archer I wanted to meet that night, who could it be? God knows it couldn’t be you.”

I did a beating heart gesture that made her smile.

She said, “I had already met Mr. Archer on a couple of occasions. I lived with Lee and Miranda for several years when I was growing up, so I already had a pretty good line on Archer. Didn’t Miranda tell you that?”

I made a gesture: I don’t remember.

“Oh, you’re impossible,” she said.

“Depends on what you’ve got in mind.” I cleared my throat. “So what happens if you think you’ll like an author, then he gets here and you can’t stand him?”

“I try to show some class. Sometimes it’s tough but I try to remember who I’m working for, just as you considered Lee and Miranda that night when you were so tempted to call Archer whatever you were tempted to call him. I never put the agency in an embarrassing position.”

“So you get your choice of jobs, and still you drive Archer.”

“Be nice to me and maybe someday I’ll tell you why.”

“Then let’s move on, as you lawyers like to say. You look at my books while I walk up the street and get us a really cheap bottle of wine to go with this grand feast we’re about to have.”

I bought a fine bottle of wine, but the liquor store, which always stocked corkscrews, failed me tonight and I had to settle for a cheap bottle with a screw top. I kept the good stuff to prove my intentions but I knew I was in for some joshing. So far I was batting a thousand.

We ate in the front room with only a distant light, a pair of shadows to anyone passing on the street. The screwball mood had deserted us for the moment, and what we now had was a spell of cautious probing. Was she really writing a novel? Yes, and she was serious about it, she had fifty thousand words as of yesterday. She was a light sleeper and there had been lots of time to work on it in the middle of the bleak Rock Springs nights. The law filled her days and she escorted for a woman named Lisa Beaumont, who usually had others she could call in a rush.

She had always loved books—new, old, it really didn’t matter. Even as a teenager she’d had dreams of doing what I did. “I knew a fellow long ago who showed me the charm of older books. He wanted to be a rare-book seller, just like you.” But what about me? What was it really like in the book trade? It could certainly be boring, but you never knew what might walk in the door the next minute and turn the day into something extraordinary. She cocked her head in bright interest—Like what, for instance?—and the next thing I knew I was telling her about Mrs. Gallant, the whole bloody story beginning with my trip to Boston. “Wow,” she said at the end of it. “So what are you going to do for her?”

“Whatever I can, which won’t be much. Eighty years is a long time.”

“A long time,” she echoed. “But wouldn’t it be great if you could find those books?”

“Oh yeah. It’d be great to win the Nobel Peace Prize while I’m at it.”

“Don’t make light of it. You could actually do this, if the books are still together. Then you could retire in utter glory. What else would you need to do in your career after that?”

“Oh, just the little stuff, like make a living.” “That’s the trouble with the world today: there’s too much emphasis on money.”

“Spoken like one who has money to burn.”

“Don’t harass me, Janeway, I’m composing your mission statement.”

We slipped back into cautious probing. Yes, she said with pointed annoyance, she did have a little money saved up. They paid her well at Waterford, Brownwell, Taylor and Waterford, where her office faced the mountains on the twenty-third floor and she was said to be on the fast track to make partner. They liked her, they were doing everything they could to keep her happy, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. “I wonder how I’d like what you do.”

Who could say? Some of the smartest people never do get it— they have no idea about the intrigue that can hide in the lineage of a book, or the drama that can erupt between two people when a truly rare one comes between them. I quoted Rosenbach—The thrill of knocking a man down in the ring is nothing compared with the thrill of knocking him down over a book—and she smiled. But there are many quieter thrills in the book world. The bottomless nature of it. The certainty of surprise, even for a specialist. The sudden enlightenment, the pockets of history that can open without warning and turn a bookman toward new fields of passionate interest. Wasn’t that what had just happened with me and Richard Burton? “I think I’d love it,” she said. “You want a partner?” “Sure. I figure a fifty percent interest should be worth at least, oh, thirty or forty bucks. But you won’t have an office on the twenty-third floor.”

She asked for the grand tour as if we were serious, and I walked her through the store. I pointed out its attributes and shortcomings, and it took us twenty minutes to see every nook and cranny. We ended up back in the dark corner of the front room, where my best books were.

She looked up at me. “I guess before we seal this partnership we need to know more about each other. I’ll start. How much has Miranda already told you?”

“Nothing.”

“Lying’s not a good way to begin, Janeway. And you don’t do it very well.”

“Actually, I’m a pretty good liar when I need to be.”

“You’re good at stalling too.”

“You must be a killer on cross.”

“I sure am, so stay on the point: what Miranda told you and why.”

“She told me nothing. Nothing, as in no real thing, nada, caput.”

“Why do I get the feeling she told you about my dad?”

“I don’t know, maybe you’re a suspicious creature whose instincts are to trust nobody. All she said was that Lee and your father were partners and you lived with them after he died.”

She leaned into the light. “My father was an embezzler.” Then she was back in the shadows, her voice coming out of the void. “My dad was a crook.”

“Those are mighty unforgiving words, Erin.”

“There can be no forgiveness for what he did. He stole from his client.”

She took a deep breath and said, “When I was little my dad was my hero. He was funny and smart: he could do no wrong. I never wanted to be anything but a lawyer, just like him.”

I told her I was sorry. Sometimes people fall short of what we want them to be.

“I was thirteen when it came out. The worst possible age. In school I heard talk every day. The humiliation was brutal. I wanted to run away and change my name but Lee talked me out of that.”

“Lee’s a smart man.”

“Lee is a great man. He knew what I needed was not to deny my name but to restore it. I don’t know what I’d have done if not for him. Did you know they put me through law school?”

I shook my head. “Miranda did say they couldn’t be prouder of what you’ve done.”

“Well, now I’ve done it. I made all the honor rolls, got a great job, paid them back. My father’s not just dead, he’s really buried, and I don’t need to do it anymore.”

Abruptly she changed the subject. “Your turn. Bet you’re glad you’re not still a cop.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a cop. There are some fine people who are cops.”

“I know that.”

After an awkward pause, she said, “Look, I know what happened to you back then. I read all the stories and if any of it mattered to me, I wouldn’t be here now. I like you. You make me laugh. And just for the record, I like the police too. Most of the time.”

“Then we’re cool.”

She flashed me that lovely smile. “We’re cool, man.”

I wondered how cool we were, but at that moment the phone rang.

It was Ralston, taking a chance I’d still be here. “Can you come up to my house? Mrs. Gallant wants to see you.”

“Sure. How about first thing in the morning?”

I had a dark hunch what he would say, just before he said it.

“You’d better come now. I think she’s dying.”

CHAPTER 7

The address he gave me was in Globeville, a racially mixed North Denver neighborhood, mostly Chicanos and blacks who had escaped the stigma of being poor, if they actually did, by the skin of their teeth. Globeville had none of the fashionably integrated charm of Park Hill, but at least it had avoided the ethnic rage that simmered in Five Points a few years back. The area had its own distinct character: bordered by Interstates 25 and 70, formed by people struggling to get along, defined by a school of architecture best described as modern crackerbox provincial, it was a few dozen square blocks of plain square houses and cyclone fences, crammed tight for maximum efficiency.

Erin knew Globeville well. “I had a client who lived in that house,” she said, gesturing as we turned off North Washington Street. “Classic case of a woman who desperately needed a man gone from her life. But nobody was gonna tell him what to do with his woman.”

“Until you came along,” I said with genuine admiration.

“Me and the Denver Sheriff’s Department. She already had a restraining order, they just didn’t want to bother enforcing it. Because she was black, because she was poor, because, because, because. I just became her instrument to get them off the dime.”

“That doesn’t seem like a case for Waterford, Brownwell.”

“It was pro bono. They were less than thrilled when I took it, but I do that once in a while. It keeps my head on straight, reminds me why I got into law in the first place, and lets them know they can’t send me to places like Rock Springs without consequences.”

She had offered to ride along because she found Mrs. Gallant’s story fascinating, and second, she said, “to see where your idea of a real date finally takes us.” Ralston’s house was on North Pennsylvania, half a block from East Forty-seventh Avenue. By the time we arrived, not a trace of light remained in the western sky. I pulled up behind his car and saw his bearlike silhouette in the doorway. He pushed open a screened door as we came up onto the porch.

I introduced Erin as a friend and her hand disappeared into his. We walked through a small living room with the sparest imaginable furnishings—no television, I noticed—and on into the kitchen. There was a rickety-looking table, four plain chairs, a cupboard, and straight ahead the door to the backyard. Off to the right, a short passageway led to the bathroom and beyond that was apparently the only other room in the house, their bedroom.

“Is she in there?”

He nodded. “Denise is in with her. Sit down, she knows you’re here.”

We sat at the table and Ralston offered coffee. He caught me looking around at his raggedy surroundings. “I told you it wasn’t the Brown.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I was just wondering where you two planned to sleep tonight.”

“We’ll get by. Won’t be the first time we bagged it on the floor.”

I nodded toward the door. “What happened?”

“She just all of a sudden gave out. Her old heart decided it had enough.”

“Did you call a doctor?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t want us to.”

A long moment passed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It seems indecent to let her die when help is just a phone call away. But you’ve got to ask yourself what the hell you’re saving her for—to be sent back to that place, just so she can die next month instead of now? She hated it there, you know.”

“That’s not exactly what I was thinking. In fact, I agree with everything you’re saying. But I used to be a cop and in situations like this, I still think like one.”

“Are you saying we could be prosecuted? Man, that would figure, wouldn’t it?”

“I never had a negligent homicide.” I looked at Erin. “Isn’t that what this would be?”

She nodded. “Criminally negligent homicide would probably be the statute.”

“Jesus.” Ralston looked at Erin and said, “You a lawyer?”

She nodded and I said, “She’s a real lawyer, Mike. Be glad she’s here.”

“It’s a fairly straightforward law,” she said. “If you cause a death by your failure to act, it could conceivably be prosecuted as a class-five felony. That’s very unlikely to happen, but you should be aware of the possibilities.” She shrugged. “An aggressive DA…”

“Jesus,” he said again. “The woman just wants to die a natural death, for God’s sake, without having tubes running out of her nose for three months. What’s the law got to do with that?”

“You’re like me,” I told him: “all fire, no ice. You leap before you look. You do a pretty good job of keeping the fire contained, but it’s always there simmering, isn’t it?”

He walked to the window and looked out into the backyard.

“Sit down and talk to me,” I said. “You make me nervous, pacing around.”

He sat and I made the universal gesture for Go ahead, speak. But when he did, it was not about the old woman’s life, it was about her quest. “Have you asked yourself what she really wants? I mean, what can she hope to gain from this search she’s taken on? Even if she found it all tonight and could legally sell it, what good would it do her?”

“It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking. Maybe she’s got someone to leave it to.”

“But in the end it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s pretty hopeless, what she’s asking you to do.” I sighed. “Yeah, it is.”

I brought him up to speed on my talk with Dean Treadwell, but we both knew that the odds of anything coming from that bookstore were less than the snowball in hell. It was still raw speculation, we were spinning our wheels, but at the moment there was nothing else to do. There was no hint yet that Mrs. Ralston was ready to let me into the bedroom.

“This is great coffee,” Erin said. “What do you do to it?”

Ralston smiled. “That’s my secret, miss. I’m a gourmet cook by trade.”

“I’m learning all kinds of stuff about you tonight, Mike,” I said. “So what’s the story of you two? You and the missus.”

Again he gave me that humorless laugh. “How much time you got?”

The question seemed to beg itself out of easy answers, but then he had one. “The easy answer is, I screwed up everything I ever touched. I drank, gambled, lost everything. Hell, look around you. We are starting from scratch. I’ve got nothing but that woman sittin‘ in there at the old lady’s bedside, but that’s enough. And that’s the story of us. Since you asked.”

I heard a stir and Denise appeared in the doorway. She was at least in her late forties, a good ten years older than Ralston: tall, gangly, black as night, homely as hell yet lovely in an exotic way that had nothing to do with what the world thinks of as beauty. She had a satchel mouth to rival Louis Armstrong’s, and when she smiled, she lit up a room.

“Mr. Janeway. I’m so glad you’re here.”

I got to my feet. “Mrs. Ralston.”

I introduced Erin and they had a warm exchange. She insisted at once on being called Denise. Her hand was warm in mine and I liked her eyes. I liked her face, which reflected a heart that I knew I’d also like. She said, “I think we’d better go right on in,” and her voice managed to ask and tell at the same time, steady as it goes, boys, with just a hint of a French accent. “I don’t think we have much time,” she said.

Erin backed away from the door. “I’ll just sit out here at the table.”

The bedroom was cool, bathed in a soothing orange light from a lamp at the side of the bed. Mrs. Gallant lay with her eyes half-closed, but again that second sense, her instinct, something told her I was there. Her eyelids fluttered. I felt Denise at my side and for a crazy moment I had a sense that I had merged with these remarkable women, all of us standing in some single spirit outside ourselves. Denise touched my arm, moving me to the bedside. Mrs. Gallant said, “Mr. Janeway,” and I sat in the chair beside her.

“Hey, Mrs. G. You’re not feeling so hot, huh?”

“Not so hot. I’ve really messed things up here, haven’t I?”

“You have made life very interesting for all of us. We’re very glad you came to us.”

“I can’t imagine. But somehow I believe you.” She turned her head. “Is Denise here?”

“She’s right behind me.”

“I can’t see that far. Mr. Ralston?”

Ralston loomed out of the shadows. “Yes, ma’am?”

“I want you to promise me something. It’s none of my business but that’s one of the prerogatives of very great age—you get to meddle in other people’s affairs.”

“You meddle all you want, ma’am.”

“Just…take good care of this wonderful girl. She is very special.”

“I do know that, ma’am.”

“Denise?”

She came up and took the old woman’s hand.

“Did you tell Mr. Janeway about the picture?”

“Not yet.”

“There used to be a photograph tucked into my book. A picture that proves what I’m saying. It shows Charlie and Richard together, in Charleston.”

“What happened to it?”

She looked distressed. “I don’t know. It vanished long ago, like everything else. But I remember it. Koko knows.”

“Koko?”

“Yes. Koko can tell you.”

She turned her face up to Denise. “You’re such a grand girl. I wish you were my daughter.”

Denise grinned. “Maybe I am.”

Mrs. Gallant made a sad little laughing sound. “Wouldn’t that have shocked the stuffing out of my proper old Baltimore family?”

A moment passed. The old woman said, “Besides, you’re not old enough.”

Another moment. “Where’s my book?”

“It’s right here.” Denise got it from a table beside the bed.

“Give it to Mr. Janeway.”

I took the book and put it on my lap.

“It’s yours now.”

I started to protest, but Denise squeezed my arm and shook her head. Mrs. Gallant said, “I want you to have it, but it’s not an outright gift. I want you to make an effort to find the others.”

“Okay,” I said cautiously.

“I always had an idea they should be together, in some library in my grandfather’s name. If you do that—exhaust all the possibilities you can think of—you may keep this book. But I want you to share what you get for it with Denise.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“That’s all,” she said.

But it wasn’t all. A huge weight had settled over me, and it wasn’t enough to sit here stupidly and say okay, okay, okay. I had a chance to make a dying woman’s death so much more peaceful, if I had the guts to do it. I mustered my courage and said, “I’ll find those books, Mrs. Gallant, I promise. I will find them.”

She smiled. “I knew you would.”

Suddenly she said, “I’m very tired, Denise.”

She reached for my hand. “It was good knowing you, sonny.”

These were her last words. She slipped into sleep and died three hours later.

CHAPTER 8

There is always red tape when someone dies. First a doctor must be summoned: someone who can certify that the person is in fact dead and has died of natural causes. The coroner must be called, and if all goes well, the body is released to a funeral home. I was impressed with the Ralstons’ personal physician, first that he was reachable and then that he was willing to make a house call at that time of night. He arrived at midnight, a youngish black man radiating competence. He and Ralston were old pals: like Lee Huxley and Hal Archer, they had been kids together, and maybe that explained his willingness to go that extra mile.

Denise showed him into the room while Ralston and Erin and I sat at the table and worked on a second pot of coffee. I asked Erin if she wanted me to call her a cab but she seemed not at all tired and she wanted to stay. When they rejoined us, the doctor and Denise had obviously been talking and the doctor had a good grasp of why the old woman was there and what had happened. There were a few questions for me and I told him about the Burton, which lay on the table in open view through all the talk.

“This is a valuable book?”

“It’s quite valuable,” I said. “My best guess would be somewhere around twenty, twenty-five thousand.”

“And she gave it to you—the two of you to split equally? But there was no paper signed.”

“George,” Denise said in a long-suffering tone, “could you really see me doing that—asking that dying woman for a paper?”

“No,” the doctor said, smiling. “I’m just trying to head off trouble. If there are any questions about why you did what you did…”

“I’m a witness,” Erin said. “I heard everything she said.”

The doctor made some notes and seemed satisfied. Then came the call to the coroner’s twenty-four-hour hot line, and on the doctor’s say-so the body was released. Nobody was going to question the death of a woman in her nineties unless there was something very suspicious about it. The doctor made another call and soon a man arrived in a hearse. I asked if he needed any help and he said, “Oh, I got her, gov.” He took up the old woman in his arms, as fondly as if she’d been a favored great-aunt, and carried her to the hearse.

Next came the paperwork. Who would be responsible for the bills? “I will,” I said. “You’ll probably have to check with the home where she was living; they may have made some kind of arrangement or legally binding contract. But I will guarantee payment.”

We talked about what kind of funeral she would have if Denver turned out to be her final stop. She might have gone to an unmarked plot in a potter’s field with a plywood coffin, but I wanted her to have a plaque and a place of her own. This was strange since I had never cared much about funerals. I don’t care where they put me; in terms of eternity, it doesn’t matter much, but suddenly the tariff had leaped into four figures and I was okay with it. The man took my credit card number, the doctor went home, and for now that was that. Erin and I stood on the street with the Ralstons in the early morning and watched the hearse drive away.

None of us wanted to separate: not quite then, not quite that way. Ralston suggested a simple wake. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful of the departed,” he said, “but I am hungry as hell.”

We all were. The pizza I had shared with Erin seemed like a distant meal indeed, and I suggested we all go down to Colfax, where the all-night eating places were. Denise wouldn’t hear of it. “We will cook something. Michael is a gourmet cook, did you know that?”

“I told them,” Ralston said. “It’s gonna be hard to make anything decent with what we’ve got. We got some eggs and milk; I could make a simple omelet but that’s about all. If y’all don’t mind waiting, I could go out and get some better stuff.“

“I’ll get the stuff,” I said. “You fire up the stove, give me a list of what you need, and I’ll be back in a while.”

He directed me to the nearest all-night Safeway. “You won’t get any gourmet makings there, but do the best you can,”

Forty minutes later we said our farewells to old Mrs. Gallant. We had known her only for a few hours but she had touched something in each of us. Even Erin, who had not known her at all, had been moved by her story.

“I should apologize for eavesdropping at the bedroom door,” she said. “But I had a hunch those questions might come up. It never hurts to have an impartial witness to what was said.”

This got grateful looks from the Ralstons. Then, in the best tradition of a real wake, we ate an incredible omelet.

“Damn, you really are a gourmet cook,” I said. “You oughta do this for a living.”

“I do, when I can find work. I should say, when I can keep it.”

“Michael has a problem with arrogant authority,” Denise said.

“Isn’t that amazing, so do I,” I said. “We seem to be more alike all the time.”

“Except you don’t have to worry about getting fired. That’s what happened to me this week. Been thinking of changing jobs anyway, but I’d rather have done it on my own hook, after some bills have been paid.“

“Well,” I said casually, “now you’ll have the money to pay your bills.”

I motioned to the Burton, still on the table where I had put it hours ago.

“When you sell it, you mean,” Ralston said.

“I may never sell it. But I’m willing to pay you half of what I think its retail value might be. We can do that tonight if you want to. Like I told your friend the doctor, I think it’s a twenty, twenty-five-thousand-dollar piece. Say twelve-five to you.”

“Holy mackerel, Batman,” Ralston said, but Denise gave a tiny head shake.

“I just bought the Pilgrimage at auction for twenty-nine and change. That’s widely considered to be Burton’s greatest book. It’s a very important piece, but so is this. The condition of both is outstanding, and that’s actually a huge understatement. Old bookmen like to call everything the world’s best copy, but I truly can’t imagine better copies of either book anywhere in the world today. The inscription is intriguing, and I think it gains by having the two of them together.”

They looked at each other.

“Listen,” I said, “there’s no pressure on this. You do what’s right for you. Bring in another bookseller, get his opinion, I’ll pay half of whatever he says. If and when I do sell it, if it goes over thirty, we’ll split that difference as well. Whenever that might be.”

“Couldn’t be fairer than that,” Ralston said, looking hopefully at his wife.

Denise was looking at me. “I trust you. That’s not what’s bothering me.”

I knew what was bothering her. The deathbed promise I had made lingered in the air. “Nobody expects you to find those books,” Ralston said.

Denise shook her head. “Oh, honey, that’s where you’re wrong.”

A long quiet moment later, I said, “I didn’t give that promise lightly. If those books are there to be found, I will find them. I’m just thinking how much easier it might be if this book is in my hands alone. We can let it ride, if that’s what you want. But I get the final word on where the hunt goes and how I want to conduct it.”

“He used to be a cop,” Ralston told his wife.

“Really? That surprises me. You seem like such a gentle soul, Mr. Janeway…it’s hard to believe you were ever part of any violent world.”

“I’ve been called lots of things, but a gentle soul isn’t even close to the list. Maybe I’m making some headway.”

“Why did you leave the police?”

“Long story. Goes to my attitude, which isn’t always so gentle. Let’s just say I like the book world better.”

“You should’ve seen him wheeling and dealing those two cats from Texas,” Ralston said. “Two fat cats came into his store and he pulled eight bills out of their pockets slicker than hell.”

“They knew what they wanted,” I said. “They got what they paid for.”

I asked if either of them knew who or what Koko was.

“I can’t imagine,” Denise said. “Probably some childhood friend.”

“Who’s been dead forever,” Ralston said.

Denise touched the book, opened it carefully. “This is all so far from my own life, from any kind of experience I’ve ever had. Until now I couldn’t have imagined such a book.” A moment later, she said, “Would it bother you if I kept it overnight? Maybe for a couple of days? I’d just like to…I don’t know…get a feel of it…if that wouldn’t bother you.”

It bothered me a lot, but what could I say? What I said was, “You’d have to be very careful.”

“I know that.”

“I mean really careful, Denise. A spot on the cover could be five grand.”

“I hear you.”

Now an extended silence fell over us. Denise walked to the window and looked out into the yard. Ralston cocked his head and smiled at me, a quizzical expression that said, You’ll have to wait for her, man, it’s the only way.

But he was the one who squirmed as the minutes dragged on. “That’s a whole bunch of money, doll,” he said to some crack in the floor. “We could get a great new start with that.”

He looked up at me and found another reason to take the money and run. “The answers you want won’t be here in Denver, will they? There’ll be expenses, and they’ll come out of the book’s value, right off the top. That’s only fair.”

Denise took a deep breath, as if the same thought had just occurred to her. I could quickly eat up the entire value of the book traveling, and for what?

Erin was watching me intently. I smiled at her, then at Denise, who had just turned from the window. “It’s your choice,” I said. “You could take your money and be done with it. Speaking just for myself, I’ve got to try.”

“Wherever that leads,” Ralston said. “Whatever it costs.”

Denise looked at me and her face was troubled. She said, “This isn’t easy, is it?” A moment later she said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Janeway…could Michael and I have a few minutes alone?”

Erin and I went out on the porch and stood quietly at the edge of things. “Well, old man,” she said. “You do make for an interesting first date.”

“Next time I’ll take you on a tour of Denver’s best pawnshops.”

“That would be good. I’ve been wondering where I can hock my virtue.”

Half a dozen crazy answers wafted up from my funny bone, but the moment trickled away: the mood was different now. I looked back at the door and said, “I wonder what they’ll do,” and Erin said, “Trust me, they are going with you. If I know anything about people, they’re going all the way. That woman in there’s got more heart and soul than I’ve ever seen in a stranger.”

I tried to look hurt in the moonlight. “Hey, I’ve got heart, I’ve got soul.”

“Yes,” she said, “but you were no stranger. I had heard so much about you from Miranda that I knew you long before we met.” And I thought, wow. Round three to me for heart. Extra points for soul.

“Denise is special,” Erin said. “I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just something I know. Goes way beyond class. She has already decided what needs to be done and now she’s got to break the bad news to him. But he will do whatever she says. He would lie down and die for her.”

“He’s smart.”

“Yes. And they’re both very lucky.”

A moment later I said, “So what’s next now that you’re back from the wilderness?”

“Tomorrow I’m going to disappear for a week into the real wilderness. I have a cabin in the mountains, where I shall write, eat very little, drink lots of liquids, meditate, and commune with nature. It’s a serious hike just to get up there. No roads, no electricity, best of all, no telephones. If I take a bath at all it will be in very cold water.”

“Can I come?”

“That would defeat my purpose, wouldn’t it? And you’ve got plenty enough to do here.”

“I’ll think about nothing all week but you getting eaten by a bear.”

“Oh, I can take care of myself. I do this every year.”

I pretended to sulk and she said, “I’ll call you when I get back.”

“That’s what they all say.”

I walked out into the yard and looked up at the sky. The old lady was still on my mind. She haunted me and I cursed myself for not listening to her better. I believed she had been trying to tell me something important, but I had heard only half of it and now none of it made any sense. How could Burton have had anything to do with our civil war? He had come to the States in 1860, a year before the war began. What could he have said or done that had gone off like a time bomb a year later?

It was crazy, almost impossible to believe.

But what a story if it were true.

I imagined Burton walking up into the yard. I saw him as a young man, just arrived from that other time, straight from the jungles of unknown Africa. How would we like each other? The first minutes would tell that tale, as they must have done with Charlie Warren. Burton formed his opinions quickly, and so did I.

Erin came down and stood beside me. For a long time we watched the sky. It was a night like I hadn’t seen in Denver since my childhood in the late fifties, long before the big buildings came with the big lights, before crowds of people flooded into the state from California and Mexico and the East Coast, leaving crud on the landscape and poison in the air. In those days I could stand in City Park and look deep into the universe. From Lookout Mountain I could see everything the big god saw before she broke it all apart and hurled it into that endless expanse of empty space. I must have had faith then. I certainly had something. How had I lost it? When had I stopped believing the god thing? I didn’t need to worry it to death, I knew when it was: the night I looked down into the bloodless face of the little girl who had been raped and strangled by her father.

I had grown cynical and easy with my disbelief. But in that moment I thought of Mrs. Gallant and, I swear, a meteor streaked across the western sky. I watched it disappear beyond the mountains and I shivered in the warm morning air.

CHAPTER 9

Erin and I parted company at the store, where she picked up her car and headed wearily home. I sat for a while watching the empty street and thinking about restraint. The word had become almost extinct in the sexual sixties, when I was coming of age and everybody groped everybody at first sight. I had done my share of that but time and age had dimmed its appeal. In my younger days I might have made too much out of Erin’s verbal horseplay and groped my way into hot water. I knew something strong was brewing between us and tonight, that was enough.

I got to my house at dawn, only four hours before I had to open for business, and I did what I always do after a sleepless night: put on my sweats and went for a torturous run in the park. I did my three miles in well over twenty minutes, then I jogged out another two miles and walked myself cool. All along the way I thought of Denise and how personally encumbered she had felt by the promise I had given in her home. I knew she’d keep pushing me until there was no margin left in the book for any of us, and I was okay with that.

We had agreed to meet again tonight, to formulate some plan of action. Denise would expect me to have some ideas, but everything I considered was immediately swamped on the rocks of the great time barrier. Eighty years! Jesus, where would I start? I could get on an airplane and fly off half-cocked to Baltimore. I could waltz into Treadwell’s and ask a few stupid questions, and then what? As soon as they figured out how little I knew and what I really wanted, I’d be laughed out of there and jeered down the street into the harbor.

But even a fool must start somewhere. At eleven o’clock, having disposed of a few customers and rung up a few sales, I decided to defy the odds and call the home in Baltimore where Mrs. Gallant had been living. Maybe something she had left there would lead to something else. Neither of the Ralstons knew or remembered the name of the place, and when I called Baltimore Information I was told what I already knew. You don’t just ask for the number of Shady Pines: there are dozens of entries under “Assisted Living Facilities.” This would be a substantial trial-and-error job that could take days to pan out.

I went in another direction that might have been just as futile. From Information I got to Social Services, and from there I bumped my way from one extension to another until I got to the old woman’s caseworker. I had hoped and assumed she’d be in the system, and there she was.

I knew the caseworker wouldn’t blurt a client’s affairs to a voice on the phone, but I had to try. I got a woman named Roberta Brewer and I told her the straight story, beginning with the news of Mrs. Gallant’s death in Denver. No one had called her on that as yet, and she was sorry but grateful for the information. Then I told her what I wanted and why: I explained about the book and why I was searching for the others, and she understood it the first time and seemed to believe it. “Let me call around and check you out,” she said. “Then I’ll call the home where Jo was living and they can call you if they want to.”

This was the best I was going to get, so I thanked her, hung up, and hoped for some luck.

Two hours later I got a collect call from a woman named Gwen Perkins at a place called Perkins Manor in Catonsville, Maryland. Ms. Perkins was defensive, uneasy that Mrs. Gallant had simply walked out of there. Of course they had been worried sick over her, and yes, of course they were distressed at her death. Ms. Perkins was obviously worried about her liability: she assured me that no one was a prisoner at Perkins, people often went out into the care of relatives or friends, and I said I understood and I said this in my caring voice, full of understanding. At last I got to ask a question.

“Did Mrs. Gallant leave any diaries or letters among her possessions?”

“There were no possessions, except for the clothes she had. Usually by the time they get to us they don’t have much left.”

She made it sound like a charity she was running, as if the state wasn’t paying her nearly enough. I asked my next question on a wing and a prayer. “Is there a worker there who took care of her regularly? Somebody she might’ve told about her family?”

“We have volunteers who come in from the community. Some of them form very close friendships with the residents.” She paused awkwardly, as if she had said too much, and finally she finished her thought. “In Josephine’s case, that would be Ms. Bujak.”

“Ah. Would it be possible for me to speak to Ms. Bujak?”

She thought about that. I sensed she didn’t like it but there was no good reason to stop me.

“Wait a second, I’ll get her number for you.”

I waited through some elevator music. It seemed to take a long time and I figured she was calling the volunteer and covering her bases.

“I’m back,” she said suddenly. “Sorry for the wait.”

She read off a phone number. “Her name is Bujak. B-u-j-a-k.”

“You have a first name?”

“Yes, it’s Koko.”

She answered on the first ring, like she’d been sitting over the phone waiting for me to call. She said “Hi,” not “Hello,” and her voice was gentle and soft. She might have been twenty or fifty.

“Is this Koko?”

“And you would be Mr. Janeway.”

“I take it Mrs. Perkins told you what happened.”

“Yeah, she did. Not the best news I’ve had all year. Jo was a good person.”

“I didn’t know her long, but I sure liked her spunk. That was some trip she took on alone. Apparently nobody at Perkins had any idea.”

“They’re all pretty uptight this morning. I think they’re concerned about losing their standing with the state.”

“Over one incident?”

“Oh, there’s always something. All those places are understaffed. That’s why I volunteer. I go out there twice a week. It’s not their fault when something like this happens—at least it’s not all their fault. Actually, I like Mrs. Perkins. She tries, which is more than I can say for some of them.”

“But there’ve been other incidents?”

“Mr. Janeway.” Now there was a slight edge to her voice. “Are you putting together some kind of file for someone, like maybe for a claim? That’s how it’s beginning to sound, and I just want to make sure we both understand why we’re having this conversation.”

“Let’s start over. Forget the questions about the facility; I’m not out to sandbag anyone. What I want to talk to you about is Mrs. Gallant. And her grandfather.”

“Charlie,” she said, and I sat up straight in my chair at the real affection in her voice.

“You sound almost like you knew him. Like she sounded when she talked about him.”

“I do know him.”

“You talk as if he’s still alive.”

“That’s how he seems. I’ve spent a good deal of time digging through her memories of him. I’ve got lots of tape—the two of us, just talking.”

“Tape,” I said densely.

“I’m writing her story,” she said, and I felt my heart turn over.

She said, “I taped everything,” and my battered old heart flipped back again.

Then she said, “We used extensive hypnosis to get at what she knew.”

“Hypnosis,” I said in the same inane tone of voice. “You hypnotized her?”

“Does that bother you?”

“No, it just surprises me a little. Did it work?”

“I guess that would depend on how you define work. If you’re asking whether she could be put under, then yes, it worked wonderfully. Hypnosis is actually an old technique, goes back two hundred years. I’ve used it all my adult life: self-hypnosis, age regression, autosuggestion. I used it to quit smoking years ago. I quit cold, and I was a three-pack-a-day addict. Now I use it to record their stories. The old people.”

“You do this for what, a hobby?”

“If you want to call it that. I retired two years ago and this seems to be worth my time.”

“You don’t sound old enough to retire.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m probably old enough to be your mother.”

“I doubt that. So what did you do? In your career?”

“I was a librarian. In my last ten years I was head librarian in a smallish suburban branch. I moved over here when I retired.”

“Where’s over here?”

“I live in Ellicott City now. It’s just across the river, a few miles from Mrs. Perkins’s house.”

“And you hypnotize the old people and record their stories. That’s fascinating, you know. Can you tell me about it?”

“We could be here all day. I’ll tell you this much: a good subject can be sent back to almost any part of her life. She can relive it and describe everything that went on. People have been known to remember letters in detail, even from their childhood. There’s nothing supernatural about it, it’s all stored right there in the brain. This is all very well documented and I shouldn’t be defensive about it. Take it or leave it.”

“I’m not doubting you, just being educated. So Josephine was a good subject?”

“She was great. She got to where she could go under almost as soon as she sat in my chair.”

“You did these sessions at your place?”

“Oh, sure. It would’ve been impossible to do it there, so once or twice a week I’d go over and pick her up. She loved coming out and she came to love our sessions. Afterward I would play the tapes back for her and she’d laugh and say, ‘My Lord, I’d forgotten that.’ So from that standpoint, it worked very well. Now what I’m trying to do is get hard evidence that what she told me was real.”

“How’s she holding up?”

“Amazingly well. We’ve done the same session a number of times and I haven’t caught her in a discrepancy yet. And we’re not talking about something you could write out and memorize. These were lengthy sessions, an hour or more at a time. You’d expect her to trip up somewhere if she were trying to pull a fast one, wouldn’t you, Mr. Janeway?”

I took in a deep breath. I couldn’t believe my luck.

“Aside from her memories,” she said, “I’ve gone through many pages of records that tell who the people in her family were. How they lived.”

“Ms. Bujak—”

“Call me Koko.”

What a great name, I thought. Koko Bujak. A great and elegant name indeed.

I told her the long version of the story I had given the social worker, beginning with Josephine’s arrival in my bookstore the day before. She said nothing while I flashed back to my own infatuation with Richard Burton, the auction, and how Mrs. Gallant had discovered me. Then she said, “I knew something was going on with her. I wish she had told me about it, I’d have taken her to Colorado myself.”

“Why would she not tell you?”

“Who knows? Maybe she was afraid I’d try to stop her. We had a good working friendship but I think I still represented the state to her.”

“For what it’s worth, I think she’d have died anyway. Whether you had come or not.”

“Yes, she sensed the end coming and so did I. She had lost a lot of ground in the past six months. I was working hard to get her memories transcribed, so she could see what I had.”

“What are you going to do with it now?”

“Finish it, of course. I didn’t get into this just to patronize her.”

“What happens when you do finish it?”

“Depends on what I’ve got and how good it is. If it’s good enough I might try to find her a writer to put it into a book. Otherwise I’ll leave it with the state historical society. They’re always interested in records that tell about local people.”

“How will you decide…you know, whether to turn it over to a writer?”

“The obvious standard would be whether there’s national interest or if it’s strictly local. If what she thought was even partly true, I think it could be a significant book. Don’t you?”

“I sure do. And if I may say so, it sounds like she left it in good hands.”

There was a pause, as if she didn’t quite trust the compliment. Then she said, “I do have a sense about it. It goes way beyond what I’ve done with other life histories. I can’t think of a better use of my time right now. But there are some things I can’t do from here. I may have to go to Charleston to chase down some facts. I’ve been avoiding that, but—”

“Can I ask how much you’ve been able to verify so far?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” she said, and I felt my heart rumble again.

“How much of it really involves Burton?”

“Well, that’s the mystery, isn’t it? How much of what she thought was real really was, and how much can be nailed down at this late date.”

We were at a sensitive point and I knew it. “Your name came up last night, just before she died. She was talking about a photograph of Charlie and Burton that had been taken long ago in Charleston. She said you knew about it.” I suffered through an awkward pause, then said, “I guess I’ve got to ask for your help, Koko. I know it’s asking a lot—you’ve done so much work on her story, and all I can do is promise you that nothing you share with me will get out before you decide how you want to go.”

“In the end, though, I would have to take your word for that.”

“That’s what it would come down to.”

“This couldn’t be done on the telephone; you’ll have to come back here. I want to see your face before we get any deeper into it.”

“That’s fine. I’m happy to do that.”

“Just understand that this is still very much a work in progress. I’ll talk to you but that’s all I’m promising at this point.”

“I’ll take that chance. I might be able to come next week.”

“I’ll be here. I live on Hill Street, fifth house on the right. My name’s on the mailbox.”

Reluctantly, almost painfully, I let her go.

By then it was after six. I was late for my call to Treadwell’s, so I punched in the number and waited. The same spacey-sounding woman answered. This time she asked who was calling. When I told her, she said, “Justa minute, hon,” and I was put on hold.

I decided to play it by ear: I wouldn’t mention my deception if he didn’t and we’d see what happened. I sat listening to the hum on the line.

I heard the click of the phone on the other end. But the voice that answered wasn’t Dean Treadwell’s. It was a deep voice, and flat: the coldest voice I had ever heard.

“Yes?”

“I’m holding for Dean.”

“Dean’s not here.”

“I’ll call him back.”

“Who is this?” he snapped gruffly.

“Who are you?” I said with a smile in my voice. A quiet few seconds passed. I asked, “Is this Carl?” but he had hung up.

A real friendly boy. So far both Treadwells were living up to their advance billing.

That night I ate with the Ralstons and gave them a report. Denise was elated that I had found Koko so quickly and was hopeful that this might be an early break. “Now what?”

“I’ll fly back there next week, see Koko, rattle the Treadwell cage. See where that gets us.”

She put on her pleading face. “But next week seems so far away.”

“The woman who minds my store will be back then. I’ve got a flight out next Monday.”

We talked for a while longer. Denise had brought out the old woman’s book and she returned it to me now with a grand gesture. “You will note that there are no spots on the cover, I did not leave it out in the rain, or earmark any pages, or write my name inside with crayons, much as I wanted to.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said sheepishly. “I had to make the point.”

“Oh, you made it, Cliff. I’d liked to’ve kept it another day, but Michael was a nervous wreck just having it around the house.”

None of us had any brilliant new ideas and I left around eight. I went to bed early, knowing I had made some progress, even if I still didn’t know what I was progressing toward or how far I might have to go to get there.

CHAPTER 10

Just before noon Ralston came into the store and asked if it would bother me if he sat with some of my modern first editions and looked them over. When the morning trade petered out I joined him at the round table.

“You thinking of becoming a bookscout?”

“I’m thinking of getting a job, man. But between things, I don’t know…this might be fun.”

“Can I help you figure it out?”

“Tell me what this first edition stuff means. I see these are all marked ‘first edition,’ with your pencil mark, but the publishers don’t always say that.”

“Some do, some don’t. Most of ‘em are starting to put the chain of numbers on the copyright pages. But even then there are some pitfalls, and in the old days publishers all marched to their own drummers. Usually they were fairly consistent within their own houses, at least for a few years at a time, but with some it could vary from one book to the next.”

I asked if he wanted a rundown and for the next hour I led him publisher by publisher through the grotto. I showed him the vagaries of Harcourt-Brace and its lettering system, how the words first edition were almost always stated with an accompanying row of letters beginning with a B until 1982, when for some screwball reason they began adding an A. “Some significant books, like The Color Purple, came out during that crossover year,” I said. “It still began with a B, and there was a gap, as if there might have been an A in an earlier printing, only there’d never been one. This is important, because even some bookstore owners don’t know it. They assume, they get careless, and you can pick up a three-hundred-dollar book for six bucks.”

I told him about the usual dependability of Doubleday and Little Brown and Knopf, and how Random House stated “first edition” or “first printing” and had a chain of numbers beginning with 2— except for a few notables like Michener’s Bridges at Toko-Ri and Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which had nothing to designate them in any way. We looked at every book in my section and I talked about the eccentricities of each publisher. When we were done he said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it now. I’m goin‘ out and find you some books. Tell me where’s the best places to go.”

I gave him a junk-store itinerary and a warning. “Take it easy, Mike. Remember, there are days when there’s just nothing out there. You can waste a lot of money in this business, and it’ll be a while before you remember all these publishers.”

“Oh, I’ll remember ‘em,” he said with vast confidence.

Five hours later he pulled up to my front door and unloaded two boxes of books. I didn’t expect much for his first try and when I saw Sidney Sheldon and John Jakes on top of the pile, it didn’t look promising. He had bought twenty books. Ten were worthless but eight were decent stock, and two—nice firsts of The Aristos, by John Fowles, and John Irving’s Garp—made the day worthwhile. I paid him $130 and he did the math. He had spent $22.50 plus tax and gas, which netted him a bill for less than a full day’s work.

“And you didn’t make any mistakes with the publishers,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“If I’ve got any kind of gift, it’s a super memory. I can read a recipe and cook it a week later without ever looking back at it.”

“That is a great, great gift for a bookscout.”

It was after five but he wanted to go out again. “If Denise calls, tell her I’ll be home after a while, but don’t tell her what I’m doing.” He fingered my check. “I want to surprise her.”

I gave him a new route, this time across the southern reaches of the city, where a few places I knew stayed open till nine, and he left with a high heart.

Much later I pieced together what happened next.

The hunt was not as good the second time out. For some reason this often happens: a break in the continuity of a good day chases Lady Luck away, leaving the bookscout high and dry until she comes back again. There is no logical reason for this, but I know from my own experience that it happens. A bookscout’s luck runs hot and cold, just like that of a player in a gambling hall, and a savvy player never leaves the game when it’s running good.

He worked his way south on Broadway, then west on Alameda, where a pair of competing thrift stores faced each other across the street. I had once pulled two copies of The Last Picture Show out of those stores just five minutes apart, a coincidence that borders on spooky, but I had not found anything remotely that good in either place ever again. The juice wasn’t working for Ralston that night, and he moved on west.

He drifted all the way out to the edge of Golden, where a few flea markets had sprung up in old supermarket buildings. Soon he would learn for himself that places like that are always slim pickings. Give a bookscout a booth of his own and a little rent to pay and suddenly he starts thinking of himself as a dealer, with prices to match. Ralston poked his way through several of these. He called me at home and asked about one book, a fine copy of Robert Wilder’s Wind from the Carolinas, which would cost him ten dollars, and I told him to pass. He had found just one book since six o’clock, a fine copy of Two Weeks in Another Town. No big deal, but okay for a quarter.

He tried Denise from the pay phone just outside the store, but their line was busy.

By then the streets were dark. He had gone on a long, circular drive and was heading back to Globeville with almost nothing to show for it. There were still a couple of stores on the list I had given him, and he was lured on by his success of the afternoon. He wanted to find one more. Just one good one. The bookscout’s curse.

The stores closed at nine and he picked up Interstate 70 and headed east toward home.

He felt good about the day in spite of the evening. Maybe this could turn into a new line of work, an avocation that would give him the freedom he hungered for above all else. If he got good at it, he might get Denise out of that crappy motel job and not have to kiss the Man’s ass to do it.

He turned off the highway on Washington and a few minutes later rolled into his block. The lights were on, giving him a warm feeling of anticipation. He came through the gate and clumped up onto the porch.

He opened the door and heard Denise’s favorite music on the classical radio station. The phone was off the hook but this was not unusual: she often left it off when she had a headache. But in that moment he felt the dark man cross his path: the same Grim Reaper Mrs. Gallant had seen was still in the room, and he shivered, then he quaked, and had his first vivid sense of the unthinkable.

“Hey, doll,” he said to the empty room, and his voice broke in his throat.

He crossed to the hall quickly now. He looked into the bedroom and felt his life drain away at what he saw.

CHAPTER 11

I was just reaching for the phone to turn it off for the night when it rang under my hand. “Hey, Cliff.”

“Who is this?” I said belligerently.

I knew quite well who it was: I could pick his laid-back voice out of a crowd, but this late at night it could be nothing but trouble. Neal Hennessey had been my partner in homicide. We had been close friends a few years ago, and for a while after my abrupt exit from the Denver cops we had kept up the pretense that nothing had changed between us. Occasionally I bought him a lunch for old times’ sake; sometimes we would go for a beer in a bar we liked on West Colfax near the Rocky Mountain News. But those times had become fewer and farther between. Months had passed since I’d last seen his beefy face, but I was an outsider now and that’s how cops are.

“We got one on the north side,” Hennessey said. “It’s not my case but your name came up and the primary officer remembered what a dynamic duo we used to be. So I got a call on it.”

I still didn’t put it together. Who did I know on the north side? A few years ago it had been a hotbed of local mobsters and I had helped put one of them away, but how could that come back to haunt me after all this time?

Then Hennessey said, “Do you know a fellow named Ralston?” and suddenly I felt sick.

“What happened?”

“His wife’s dead.”

I sat numbly and in a while Hennessey read my silence.

“I take it you actually do know these people?”

“Sure I do. Jesus Christ, this is awful.”

Now came a second reaction, disbelief, and slowly by degrees I felt diminished by what Hennessey had said. He was still a homicide cop; I knew he wouldn’t be calling if her death had been a natural one.

“What happened?” I said again.

“Well, the boys are still trying to figure that out. The husband’s not in any kind of shape to be helpful. Apparently he hasn’t said ten words to anybody.”

“That’s because he’s in shock, Neal. Hell, I’m in shock, I can’t imagine how he feels.”

I heard Hennessey breathing on the other end. After a moment, he said, “You got any ideas who might do this?”

I thought of Denise, her smiling face, and my voice quivered. “No,” I said.

“If you’ve got anything you think might help, they’d like to see you downtown.”

I stared into the dark corners of the room.

“Tonight, if you think of anything. They’ll send a car for you. Otherwise they’d like you to come in tomorrow.”

“Who’s the primary?”

“Randy Whiteside. Your favorite guy.”

Wonderful, I thought. Mr. Personality.

I looked at my clock. “Where’s Mike now?”

“Who’s Mike?”

“Her husband, Neal. Who the hell have we been talking about?”

“Hey, don’t bite my head off. All I’m doing is making a phone call.”

I heard myself say, “Sorry,” and a moment later, “Damn, this hits hard.”

“You knew these people well?”

“No.”

I felt him waiting for some reason.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said at last. “Denise was…” I gave up after a moment and said, “I just met them recently.”

“Well, to answer your question, I don’t know where the husband is. They’re probably still trying to talk to him out at the scene.”

I felt a wave of sudden anger. “Goddammit, Hennessey, I hope you boys aren’t treating this man as a suspect.”

I could feel him bristle. “Of course he’s a suspect. What would you think if you got to a scene and nobody’s there but the husband and he won’t talk?”

“I told you why.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you know that for a fact, but me, I never met the man. Maybe he is overcome with grief, and maybe the grief’s a hundred percent real and he still did it. Come on, Cliff, you’ve seen enough of these things to know that. I could tick ‘em off on my fingers, the number of times the grieving husband did it and you and me brought the bastard in and you got him in the box and ripped the confession out of his lying ass.”

I remembered those times: all the faces of the guilty and the damned came back in one shivery moment, and now I felt my skin crawl at the thought of someone like me, the cop I had once been, tearing at Ralston’s open wounds. I remembered another case: Harold Waters, who had signed a confession for me and had been on the brink of a life behind bars until the real killer made a mistake. Harold Waters had signed everything we put in front of him. Why? He simply didn’t care what happened to him after his wife was murdered.

Hennessey knew how that case had always haunted me. “Do me a favor, Cliff,” he said. “Don’t give me that Harold Waters shit. How many times has that ever happened?”

“It happens, though, doesn’t it?”

“It happened once.”

“All right, I’m interested in Ralston now. And I don’t want him browbeaten.”

I heard him cough softly, turning his head away from the phone.

“I mean it. There’s no way he could’ve done this.”

Hennessey said nothing. Exactly what I’d have done under the circumstances.

“Help me out here,” I said.

This was an offensive thing to say to a cop and Hennessey was properly offended. “You know better than to ask me something like that. I told you it’s not my case, I’ve got nothing to say about how it’s run. I’m making a courtesy call to an old comrade-in-arms and that’s all I’m doing. I should’ve just stayed out of it and let them drag you out of bed at midnight.”

“All right,” I said in a softer voice. “Are you interested in my opinion?” “I’m sure Detective Whiteside will be, at the proper time.” There was a gulf between us now and Hennessey was as bothered by it as I was. I heard him sniff, then he said, “One thing about your opinion, Cliff, you always had one. They were pretty good too, as opinions go. But the man has said nothing to us, just that he walked in and found her sprawled across the bed. The only other word anybody recognized out of him was your name.”

“He was talking to me on the telephone not thirty minutes before he went home. He was way the hell out in Golden at the time. I don’t know when she…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know when she died but he couldn’t have gotten home in less than half an hour.”

“Assuming that’s really where he was when he called you.”

Again the moment stretched. Hennessey was saying what I would have said in his place.

“I’m sorry this wasn’t better news,” he said. “It was bound not to be, wasn’t it? But thanks for the call.” “Sure. We should grab a beer sometime.” But I was thinking of Denise and I barely heard him.

I knew he wouldn’t tell me but I tried anyway. “Any idea of the time of death?”

“That’ll take some time. The boys are still out there and will be for a while.”

“Do they know yet what the cause of death was?”

“Nothing you can take to the bank.”

Then he gave me this for old times’ sake. “It looks like she was smothered.”

CHAPTER 12

Ralston’s block was full of cars, the usual scene when something bad happens. There were two patrol cars and some unmarked vehicles, a green Chevy belonging, I knew, to an assistant coroner named Willie Paxton, and Ralston’s old Ford Fairlane. No obvious sign of news coverage. The TV idiots had taken a pass on this one: no wires or cams or blow-dried hairdos cluttering up the block. A Cherry Hills murder would have brought them out at midnight but this just wasn’t that important. There were two seedy types in jeans, guys I knew from the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, and plenty of plain people milling around. Even at that hour word had spread across the neighborhood: two dozen neighbors watched from the distance and a row of kids sat gawking on the roof of a house across the street.

A young uniform stopped me at the sidewalk. “You can’t go in there, sir.”

“Is Whiteside here?”

“He’s busy right now. You got something to tell him?”

“I might, yeah. My name’s Janeway.”

The cop summoned another cop, a guy I knew. “Go inside and tell Detective Whiteside that Mr. Janeway is here to see him, when he gets a break.”

I waited.

Minutes later the cop came out and motioned to me from the porch. The first cop nodded and held open the gate. On the porch the second cop said, “I know you know the routine, but I’m supposed to tell you anyway—don’t touch anything.” A moment later, to my own amazement, I was in the living room, sitting on a chair well out of the way.

It looked different now—not at all like the place where I had met Mike and Denise Ralston in the beginnings of friendship just a few days ago. Tonight it was cold in the harsh white strobe lights and loud with impersonal voices of the men who probed through its cracks and corners. I saw Whiteside pass the open doorway and he met my eyes before he disappeared in the crowd of people gathered around the bed. I tried to push away my prejudices and hope for the best. Whiteside had always seemed like a good enough cop; hell, his record of clearing cases was at least as good as my own and maybe that was at the root of it, why we had never liked each other much. He had come in five years ago, trading on a big reputation from some department back East, but to me he was a hot dog from day one. In a way he was like Archer. His badge was his Pulitzer and somehow that set him above the sorry race of men. I could still hear my voice and the words I had said to Hennessey years ago: “I’ll bet he sleeps with that shield pinned to his nightshirt.”

After a while he came out of the back room. “Well, goddamn, Janeway, imagine meeting you here.” He loomed over my chair but I knew that technique and I didn’t let it bother me. I looked up at him from the darkest part of his shadow, his face in silhouette, framed by lights behind him and above. “So what’ve you got to tell me?” he said, and I told him what I knew about Ralston’s day hunting books. I told it to him short and direct, wasting none of his time. “He called me at nine o’clock,” I concluded. “He was still out in Golden and he’d just found a book.” I knew what he’d ask next and he did. “What book did he find?” I told him and he said what I knew he’d say: “Then that book might still be in his car.” He called the uniform over and told him to go out to the car and see if there was a book by somebody named Irwin Shaw in it.

I was playing a wild card, a little too sure that the book would be there and would easily be traceable to that store in Golden. If we were lucky there’d be a receipt with a date and maybe even a time printed on it, and there’d be a price sticker on the spine, color-coded to tell approximately when the book had been put out for sale. Each week in stores like that, books were marked down according to the sticker colors. It wouldn’t be conclusive: just another small piece of evidence that the man was telling the truth.

So far I had been playing Whiteside’s game his way. Now I said, “Where is Mr. Ralston?” and Whiteside backed out of the light and looked at my face, keeping his own in shadow. “He’s where I want him to be.” “Okay,” I said pleasantly.

“What’s your connection with Ralston? Other than this hunt for books you sent him on, what’s he to you?” “I’m his friend.”

“I guess that’s good. He’s gonna need a friend.” I felt my anger boiling up but I kept it in check. I heard a movement and the uniform came in carrying the book, suspended from a pencil under its spine like a pair of pants draped over a clothesline. I saw the blue thrift-store sticker on the jacket and the receipt peeking out of the top pages, and I thanked the book gods that it hadn’t dropped out when the cop picked it up that way.

I said nothing for a moment: it would be far better to let White-side discover these things for himself. But when the cop continued holding the book that way, I said, “I imagine that’s the receipt sticking out of it.” Whiteside said, “Bag it,” and the cop dropped the book, receipt and all, into a plastic bag.

“Well, Mr. Janeway, it was swell of you to come in. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.”

I knew I was being dismissed with malice but I nodded, still the soul of reason, and said, “I’d like to see Mr. Ralston, if that’s okay.” Whiteside gave a dismissive little laugh and that’s when I knew it was going to turn ugly.

“Are you charging him with something?”

“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”

“Well, until you decide, you have no right to detain him.”

“I don’t have to charge him with anything in order to question him.”

“You’ve got to inform him of his rights if you intend to detain him. And he doesn’t have to answer anything if you come at him with a hard-on. Come on, Randy, we both know the rules.”

I had never called him Randy in my life. I held up my hands in a peace gesture. “Look, I’m sure he’ll talk to you, I know he will. But the man just lost his wife, for Christ’s sake. Give him some time to get the wind back in his sails. Can I see him?”

“Not till I’ve talked to him first.”

“Then how’s this for a deal? You talk to him in my presence. You be civil and I promise to be quiet.”

“No way. I can’t believe you’d even ask me something like that. How long were you a cop, Janeway?”

Long enough to know a prick with a badge when I see one, I thought. But I said, “Look, I promise you this man didn’t do this. His heart’s just been ripped out and I can’t sit still while you rip it out again.”

“You’ve got jackshit to say about what I do.”

“Maybe not, but I can have a lawyer downtown by the time you get there. Then you can go piss up a rope and talk to nobody.”

“Shit,” he said. But he thought about it a moment.

“You just sit there and keep your fuckin‘ mouth shut. That the deal?”

“Absolutely,” I said with my great stone face.

I moved out to the kitchen table and watched as they wound up their work. The house seemed incredibly small for the number of people bustling about. I looked into the bedroom and felt an almost crushing wave of sadness. I could see Willie Paxton in the other room talking to a woman I knew, Joanne Martinson, also from the coroner’s office. I could see Denise’s arm, flopped over the edge of the bed, and the sight of it filled me with heartbreak. Son of a bitch,

I thought. Some miserable son of a bitch did this, probably a cheap neighborhood spider looking for pocket change. How many times does it happen? Someone returns home, walks in on a thief, and bingo. Suddenly in my mind I was a cop again.

Paxton came out of the bedroom and Martinson was right behind him.

“Hey, Cliff, how ya doin‘?” they said almost in the same voice.

“Ah, you win some, lose some.” I had lost this one big-time, but I left that unsaid. I kept up the bullshit until Whiteside went into the bedroom. Then, in a low voice, I said, “So what’s the story, guys?”

“Smothered with the pillow,” Paxton said. “We’ll know more later, but that’s how it looks.”

“How long?”

“I dunno. My guess is somewhere between five and seven o’clock.”

“No later than seven, though, huh?”

“Not much chance of that. Rigor was already setting in when we got here.”

Joanne looked at Paxton and said, “Look, I know you boys go back a ways and I love you too, Cliff, but Jesus Christ, Willie, this is inappropriate as hell.”

“It’s all gonna be in the report,” Paxton said.

“Then let him read it like everybody else.”

I nodded at them. “Yeah, don’t get your tit in a wringer on my account, Willie. But thanks.”

It had still been light on the street at seven o’clock. People had been coming home from work. That meant there was a chance the perp had been seen, and maybe Whiteside already had a witness under wraps.

Now there was nothing to do but wait. Cops can take hours at a murder scene and these guys were in no hurry. I thought of Ralston, alone on the hot side of Mercury, sealed off in his own private hell. This was the first of many hellish hours, and all I could do for him was try to make it less awful than it had to be.

After a while two men brought a stretcher into the bedroom and they lifted the body off the bed. I didn’t want to watch this part— you never do with a friend—but I stood up and without moving from the spot looked into the room. I didn’t think of her as Denise now: Denise was gone and this shell was what she had left behind. Paxton directed the loading of the body, taking care to leave the dangling arm in the same position as it was when they’d found her. Joanne said something and he looked at the bed, took a long for-cepslike instrument and peeled back the covers. Then he said, “Hey, Whiteside, look what she was lying on,” and still using his forceps, he plucked what looked like a dollar bill from the folds of the rumpled sheet. But my eyes were good and I could see the picture of Franklin clearly from where I stood. It was a C-note.

Whiteside appeared at once with a plastic bag. Paxton reached over to drop it in. Joanne said, “Here’s another one,” and Paxton pulled it gingerly from the covers.

“Here’s some more,” Joanne said.

“I thought these people were supposed to be poor,” Whiteside said. “Looks like she had something going on the side.”

I held myself onto the chair. I hated Whiteside in that moment but I watched quietly while they bagged the other bills. With the body gone there was a general combing of the room. The bed was vacuumed for fibers and hairs, the floor around the bed was examined, and the small throw rug vacuumed as well. At some point Whiteside looked at his watch and said, “I’m going on in, see what the man’s got to say.”

I followed him out into the yard.

“I’ll see you down there,” Whiteside said without enthusiasm. “You know the way?”

“If I get lost I’ll ask somebody.”

“Remember, you’re only there by my permission. You keep your mouth shut, just like you said.”

I had never seen Whiteside work but I didn’t think much of him so far. There was no way I’d have let him sit in if I had been in his shoes and he’d been in mine. I wouldn’t have let him into the crime scene in the first place. I wouldn’t have crumbled under any threat of bringing a lawyer in. They’d have talked to me on my terms or I’d have found out why. It was obvious that Whiteside had something up his sleeve: he was confident he could handle me or maybe even show me up, and the chance to get a quick confession and clear this case in hours was too much to resist. Some cops are like that. I met a reporter once who said it was like that in his business too. The two biggest hot dogs were battling it out in the front-page derby, just like some cops who always wanted to be number one in clearing their cases. I wondered who the other hot dog was now that I was gone.

At the station Whiteside showed us into an office that suggested the atmosphere of an interview rather than an interrogation. I sat off to one side while he and Ralston faced each other across a desk. Whiteside offered coffee but Ralston made no response at all. I thought of the Harold Waters case and the similarities were chilling. Waters, a big black man; his wife by all accounts articulate, the joy of his life. I looked at Whiteside and in that half second he seemed almost predatory.

A stenographer came in and sat just behind Ralston in a corner of the room. “We’re making a tape of this conversation as well as a transcript,” Whiteside said, glancing at me. “The young man who just came in is Jay Holt, and he will take down everything we say. This is routine.”

Ralston’s wet eyes moved around the room and found mine. I nodded what I hoped was encouragement. Ralston said my name, first just “Janeway,” then “Jesus, Janeway,” and his tears began again. Whiteside said, “Speak to me, please, not to Mr. Janeway,” and the interrogation that was supposedly only an interview got under way.

The first questions were routine. State your name and address for the record, please. Where were you today and tonight? When was the last time you heard from Mrs. Ralston? What time did you get home? Had there been any hint of trouble prior to tonight? Had you noticed any strangers who seemed to have a special interest in your home? This went on for a while, and Ralston answered in words of one syllable. Twice he broke down and Whiteside called for a policewoman to bring him some water.

Whiteside asked about their finances. Ralston, in that same breaking voice, told him in a few words. They were dirt poor. They had almost nothing.

Then Whiteside said, “Eleven hundred dollars was found at the scene, Mr. Ralston. Can you explain that?”

“That’s impossible.”

“Uh-huh. Did you know your wife kept a diary?”

Ralston nodded.

“Please answer verbally.”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware what’s in her diary?”

Again Whiteside had to repeat the question. Ralston said no, he had never read it.

“It was there in the open on the dresser,” Whiteside said. “Is that where she usually kept it?”

Ralston nodded, then said, “Yes.”

“It was there in plain view, just a plain little notebook,” Whiteside said. “It wasn’t locked away, there was no lock on the book itself, and yet you were never tempted to look inside.”

Ralston looked somewhat dumbfounded, as if the question made no sense to him.

“You’re saying you never looked at it? Not once in all the time you were together?”