Bookman's promise

She looked a little sick now, recalling it. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was out of the question. There’s just no way we could have done that.”

She shrugged. “Maybe you can.”

CHAPTER 36

We talked some more and retired just before eleven o’clock. By then we all had a good sense of each other and they made a serious pledge to visit us in Colorado. “Maybe we’ll even get lucky and be assigned there,” Luke said. “I always wanted to work in the mountains, at Mesa Verde or Rocky Mountain National Park.” I told them my house would always be their house, and I promised Libby I would keep her informed as the Burton story developed. We called it a night and walked the few feet to the museum, where the three of us would bed down on the floor. Outside, the night was oppressively murky: inky, bleak, black-hole dark, with a stout wind that came at us in gusts off the sea. The sky was cloudy: only a small streak of stars could be seen through a seam across the top of the world, but that did nothing to relieve the blackness of the harbor. Charleston was nowhere to be seen, lost in some distant fog.

I stood at the door and heard Erin say my name.

“Hey, you coming?”

“Yeah, I’ll be along. You two go ahead.”

They went inside and I got out my flashlight and climbed along the edge of the battery toward the gorge wall. I thought I’d heard the sound of a boat again, and I wanted to give things a last look before turning in. I had no real reason to be uneasy or suspicious: Dante would have to be crazy to mount an assault on Fort Sumter with rangers on duty, and guys like Dante don’t stay alive by being fools. But that’s what old Judge Petigru said about the secessionists of olden days, that South Carolina was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum, and look what happened anyway. My uneasiness persisted and grew as I moved around the battery above the black ruins.

Whatever I had heard, it was gone now: nothing but the wind assaulted my ears, that and the sea washing against this ghostly black shoal. I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to stand at the edge of the fort and behold the nothingness, and that meant I had to go down through the old parade ground and pick my way back up to the right flank where the high ground was. From there I had a sweeping view: more pitch-blackness than I could ever remember in my life. I circled the old wall, keeping my light pointed down in front of me, and at last I came to the point where I turned off the light and just stood there. Nothing…

Nothing.

Except for the wind, this must be what death is like.

I walked along the gorge and down the left flank. From there I could see into the tiny room where Libby and Luke were talking, washing dishes, putting things away. It floated in space and a few minutes later she drew a curtain across the front window. Almost at once their light went out.

I turned back toward the channel, feeling rather than seeing it. Morris Island, I thought: Fort Wagner. In that void it was hard to imagine what had happened over there: one of the great epics of warfare, overshadowed by Vicksburg only because that involved greater numbers and grander strategy and bigger names, and because it was coming to its climax at the same time. I stared at the nothing and closed my eyes, which made no difference at all, and when I opened them I seemed to see the flash of a very old rocket against the eastern sky. Just for a moment I imagined that battle and all those black warriors charging up the beach to certain death. I thought of death…Thought of Denise…

And strangest of all in that time and place, I thought of Dean Treadwell and his unshakable faith in everybody’s bastard, Hal Archer.

Dean and Hal…

I thought the unthinkable and I shivered in the wind.

I picked my way back across the ruins to the battery. Erin stood at the museum door, waiting.

“What are you doing? I was just about to come looking for you.”

“Without a light? You’re smarter than that.”

“Never mind the light. What’s going on out there?”

“Nothing. Go to bed.”

She bristled at my abruptness. “Is this how it’s going to be, being your special friend?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got forty days and forty nights to resolve stuff like that.”

“Thirty-eight as of this morning. This doesn’t bode well for us to make it to thirty-seven.”

I felt her come close in the half-light. I saw her in shadow.

“I want to get this thing resolved,” she said. “It’s not in my nature to live like this, worrying about a madman every waking moment.”

“I intend to resolve it.”

“How?”

“How I should’ve done in the first place. A little grit, a little steel, a little help from an old friend.”

“Okay,” she said calmly. “Whatever that means, I want to be in on it all the way.”

“I don’t need an attorney for this kind of work.”

That was a stupid thing to say, I knew it almost before the words were out, and she reacted as if she’d been slapped. She slammed me back against the wall and whirled away down the ramp. “Well, fuck you, Mr. Janeway.”

“Hey, Erin, wait a minute.”

She stopped and looked back.

“That didn’t come out right.”

“It sure didn’t, you barbarian son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry.” I reached out to her.

She gestured wildly with her hands. “Jesus Christ, you are such an idiot sometimes.”

“I am, I am.” I made a helpless shrugging dipshit motion. “I know I am.”

“Goddamn male chauvinist turkey-farmer dickhead. What am I going to do with you?”

“Whatever you want. As long as you don’t—”

“If I don’t what?”

“Leave.”

She seemed to melt and flow back up the ramp. She wrapped her arms around me and I buried my fingers in her thick hair.

“Are we okay now?” I dared ask.

“I don’t like being brushed off. Chisel that on your brain if you can find a tool hard enough. Write Erin hates being patronized, Erin won’t sit still for the little girl treatment.”

“I’m sorry. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I really, really am sorry.”

“Okay, where were we?” she said cheerfully.

“I was about to say something practical. How this is a man’s job and a woman never does anything but screw up a mission.”

“And I said something uncalled for. ‘Fuck you, Janeway,’ or something like that.”

“You’ve really got a nasty streak that I never saw before. Your vocabulary is amazing.”

“Actually, I never swear in real life. Bad language is just bad manners, it’s a symptom of a bankrupt mind. Lee taught me that when I was a kid and I still believe it. But you, you pigheaded medieval-godfather cocksman, you bring out the absolute worst in me.”

“Am I not getting through here? I thought I groveled, whined, and said I was sorry. ‘Medieval-godfather cocksman!’ ‘Turkey-farmer dickhead!’ I thought Koko was tough, but I never got past ‘poopy old picklepuss’ with her.”

“Koko is a lady. I, unfortunately, am not. So who is this hit man we’re going to hire?”

I told her in general terms who, what I wanted him to do, and why he’d do it—not for money but to clear a debt that was decades old. “He’s just gonna be my insurance policy,” I said. “If there is such a thing for this kind of stuff.”

Suddenly she realized I was serious. “Does this guy have a name?”

I almost said I’d take care of it but I thought much better of that and I gave her his name.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my dear. You do have some bad friends.”

“Yeah. He was like my brother long ago. People were sure I’d end up just like him.”

“No way could you have been like that.”

“You might sing a different tune if you had known me when I was fifteen. It was amazing, really, that I lived all that down. Became a cop.”

“And you literally saved his life?”

“As literal as it gets.”

“Tell me again what we’re going to have him do.”

“He’s gonna help us teach a certain bad-ass some manners, like Lee taught you but with different powers of persuasion. And I hope with better results.”

“Generally speaking, I like the sound of that,” she said without much enthusiasm.

“You’ll like this even better. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now and I’ve finally come to a couple of ugly conclusions. We’ve gone too far to slip into some live-and-let-live detente, like two bully nations in a cold war, even if that option suddenly became possible. Maybe I’d be okay with a standoff if he hadn’t torched Koko’s house, but that’s not an option anymore. Now there’s got to be an evening-up of the score. I can’t just walk away from here and make like none of this ever happened. I’ve thought about it; can’t do it.”

“What would satisfy you, she asked in fear and trembling.”

“If Dante were to build Koko a new house, that might square it. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

When she spoke again it seemed like a long time had passed. “You must be mad.”

“I’m damned mad.”

“I meant mad as in crazy.”

“That too.”

“He’ll never do that.”

“He might.” I put an arm over her shoulder. “A guy like Dante only understands one thing. But he really understands that.”

“He didn’t understand it the first time.”

“He understood it, he just didn’t quite believe it. My fault; something about my performance must’ve been lacking. Maybe because, no matter how big a bad-ass I tried to be, at the bottom line it was still just a performance. Those guys have a way of knowing.”

“It’s got to be real.”

“Oh yeah.”

“So now it’s real. You would kill him.”

“In a Hungarian heartbeat. But don’t tell Koko yet; I don’t want her to get her hopes up in case it doesn’t work out that way.”

Suddenly she seemed to change the subject. “Do you remember the night we met?”

“Are you kidding? That was one of my all-time high spots.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“How could I forget? Among other things, you called me a wimp.”

“I never said that. I only wondered innocently how you’d have done in Burton’s shoes.”

“I tried to tell you. All I got for my trouble was ridicule and the rolling-eyes routine.”

“Tell me now.”

“I’d have leaped up from my stretcher and shaken off the fever, found the big lake, made a map that even the Royal Geographic Society couldn’t challenge, left Speke dead in the hot sun, raced home and claimed the glory I should have had all along. So what’s your point?”

“There is no point. Except maybe I love you.” She rose on her toes and kissed me fiercely. “I guess that’s my point.”

“It’s a good one. Maybe now it won’t hurt so much…you know, when we all die together.”

CHAPTER 37

Inside, we planned our next move. Erin and Koko had put their bags near the bottom of the museum ramp. Koko had hung her clothes over the rail and crawled into her bag, and she watched us sleepily from the floor, occasionally piping in with an opinion while the two of us stood there and talked. We all hated to quit Charleston with Burton’s journal still in limbo. Erin wanted another try at Archer on her way out of town, but that struck me as risky with little to be gained. “Something might well be gained,” she said, “if Archer told us what happened to the journal.” At this point I had to doubt if Archer had ever planned to produce Burton’s journal, no matter how much money Lee was able to throw at him—he had come up empty, with new conditions or half-baked reasons to stall, every time. Erin couldn’t believe that. “Lee has done nothing but defend Archer and praise him to the rooftops. What would Archer gain by taunting his oldest friend? What would be the point if he’s not going to sell us the book anyway? Now he’s alienated Lee, they can’t even speak to each other, and what good does that do him?”

Well, Archer was a prick: at least we could all agree on that. “Maybe he’s secretly hated Lee all these years for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I said. There were plenty of precedents both in history and literature for such unholy relationships. One party is undercut and sabotaged for years without ever dreaming that his so-called friend is behind it all. If that were true, the only mystery, aside from the enigmas of a black heart, was why Archer would let his secret out now instead of any other time. Koko said, “Maybe Lee found out what Archer really thinks and Archer no longer had any reason to hide it.” Erin shook her head. “No, I’m sure Lee would’ve told me that.” Since we were into wild ideas, it was also possible that Archer had never had the book at all, or maybe Dante had taken it from him if he had. But if Dante now had it, he’d probably have been on the first flight back to Baltimore. He’d want to dispose of the goods first, get what money there was to get, and settle old scores later. So I thought, with no facts to go on, but at that point I wasn’t sure enough to bet on anything.

Erin hated to give up on Archer. “I’ll do it your way but I don’t want to forget why I was sent here. I would still feel better if I could see him once more, even if he doesn’t do anything but have me thrown out again.” What worried me about this was that the hospital was such an obvious place for someone to set up a watch and catch us coming or going. I had plans for Dante, but I wanted them to unfold on my timetable, not his: I needed to live long enough to put them in motion and see how they went. In the end we were all just talking. Always in the back of my mind was the possibility that Dante knew exactly where we were, and whatever was going to happen would be on his schedule after all.

Our only hard decision was that we were done with Charleston: there was nothing more for us to find here. If things went well and we could get away in the morning without being seen, I had at least some reason for optimism. We’d retrieve my rental car and head north to Florence; from there to Charlotte, and on to Denver. Koko didn’t see why she needed to go to Denver. “We’ve got to stick together for now,” I said, and Denver was my home base. “You can stay with me,” Erin said, “as long as you need to.” “Good,” I said. If we made it that far, I had to feel good about our prospects. Then I could go on offense. We left it at that and I went back up to the entryway where I had stashed my sleeping bag.

The sight of it gave me no craving for sleep. I was in one of those dark moods, bone-tired but still wide awake, and for a long time I sat outside on the edge of the battery with my legs dangling, watching the sky and listening to the air. I thought of Libby and I under-stood how she could come to love this place. Ultimately it would get on my nerves—I am too much a product of my time and this is undoubtedly one of my failings, among many. I can go like Erin on long sabbaticals in the mountains, but at some point cabin fever sets in and I need to hunker down in civilization’s dirty places, go book hunting around the fringes of Denver, talk to someone, mix it up with crazies, go to a party of book lovers at Miranda’s, or just sit in a bar with an old pal. My life went from the nearest pockets of the sublime to the most distant reaches of the ridiculous, and I didn’t know if that was my ideal or if I could even guess what an ideal was. But in any other time, in limited doses, I would love it here.

A rumble of thunder sounded far away in the east, but soon it got quiet again, with only the wind and the sea in my ears. I closed my eyes and at some point I found myself thinking of Vince Mar-ranzino. Vinnie: that told me how long ago our mutual history had been. He didn’t seem like a Vinnie to me. That sounded too much like a gangster’s nickname, and no matter how much I had learned about him via newspapers and our own departmental intelligence, I still thought of him as a kid named Vince, not a Vinnie-hood. I heard his voice out there with the ghosts of Battery Wagner: How do ya really like this book racket of yours, Cliffie? Just a wisp of him there in the harbor, then he was gone. A whisper to the wisp: that’s all it would take and a man would die in Baltimore.

I took out my notebook and wrote a short message: Hey Vince. Go see a man named Dante in Baltimore and we are all squared up in the hereafter. Vince would understand, and I could die knowing that if I had to.

I folded the sheet and wrote his name on the outside. I put in his Osage Street address and put the paper in my shoe. Once the probes and the postmortems were over, the cops would see that he got the message.

If Dante got to me, he’d be killing himself.

“Now it’s real,” I said to nobody.

* * *

I lay in my sleeping bag outside the museum door and stared at that crack in the sky. It was beginning to fuzz over now as the cloud cover fattened and spread. I felt a drop of rain, thought I should move inside, but I only moved deeper into my bag. Sleep was impossible but that didn’t matter. Once we were in the car heading north, Erin could drive and I’d catch up then.

I thought these things and the time was heavy. At some point I fell asleep, but not for long. I am good with time and I opened my eyes knowing it was somewhere near three o’clock. I wiggled out of my bag and sat up straight. Some noise, some fleeting thing out there where the wind blew, had wafted around my head. It had shifted from an easterly blow to southwesterly, and suddenly I felt an alarm go off under my heart. I told myself it was nothing but that hunch; not even the sound I thought I had heard had any true substance or source in this black world. My practical nature said I had been dreaming, that’s all it was, I had come out of the dream thinking of Dante and those guys in the boat, there was no reason to make that connection, it was just a case of nerves. But it wouldn’t go away, and now I got completely out of the bag and stood on my tiptoes looking out toward Morris Island.

Dante. I saw his face swirling through the dark in various shades of clarity. He was certainly insane, and that, combined with his other charms, made him far more dangerous than any thug I had ever faced as a cop. I had humiliated him in front of his men—that was another part of the case against me—and I had done a lot of damage to his face. His bruises would look worse day by day until they began to get better, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore. After a week of staring at his own black-and-blue face in the mirror, who could tell how crazy he’d be? He would have a score to settle and in his mind there could be none bigger, ever, and the longer it went unresolved the angrier and more dangerous he would be. This was strictly a guess: How reckless could he be? What was he going to do, scale the wall and kill everyone on this island just to get me? That would be the act of a real madman, but it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. It depended on the depth of his hate versus the degree of his own survival instinct. I fiddled with a mathematical formula—Dead Janeway equals Perp’s Survival over Perp’s Hate squared. Maybe by now his hate would be at the fourth or fifth power, or the fiftieth power, all but obliterating even his instinct for self-preservation. In that case, anything could happen. Madmen have been known to walk into certain death to get at the object of their loathing. Dante would have covered himself as well as possible, and maybe that would be enough. Who else knew of his connection to us? There would be half a dozen cronies back in Baltimore who’d line up and swear that he had never left town, he had been there among them, having dinner in full view of a dozen witnesses, at the very moment when this strange carnage began, six or seven hundred miles away. I had nothing to do with it, he would say, and the cops would have the job of proving that he had. But they wouldn’t have to prove it to Vinnie Marranzino, and in death I’d have my victory. A damned hollow one, but I was glad, on this side of death, that I had it.

I thought of Luke and Libby. It had never occurred to any of us that we might be putting them in danger. This is how different things can be at three o’clock in the morning.

None of this was at all likely. To be out there in a boat now would mean he had known or anticipated our every move: that he had gotten the boat and made his plans, and all this had been done from the time the Fort Sumter tour boat had arrived back at the marina in the late afternoon without us on it. Not likely, but not impossible either. Thugs like Dante know people like themselves in many towns. He may have lined up some local pal two days ago, and in this town a boat was easy to get.

I looked at the sky and saw nothing. If he was coming at all, it would be now.

I felt the uneasiness filling up my soul. I began to pace along the front of the battery, looking for something I couldn’t see and listening for a sound that wasn’t there.

I stood at the top of the stairs and waited.

At some point I started down. I followed my light around the battery and up to the old wall. There was a wooden barrier at the lowest point; they would have to scale it at the higher wall and come into the fort from there. I was beginning to know the way now, and I moved easily out toward the edge, keeping my light down at my feet and shaded by my hand, so it couldn’t be seen from the water. Fifty yards from the gorge, I stopped and turned off the light.

I saw a soft glow out there, at the base of the wall.

Something moved. Some bump in the night. The squeak of an oar, maybe…

Then I heard a voice. They were out there. They had defied the odds.

I shucked my way out of my coat and got out my gun. Got down on my knees and crawled along a rough surface to the edge.

The rain began. I barely felt it.

I peeped over the edge. They were there on the little beachhead below. Four of them, and Dante had been the first to step out on land. There was no mistaking that overgrown palooka: I had his number even in the dark. He stood outlined against a dim light, then he spoke. “Come on, let’s get that ladder out here, we ain’t got all fuckin‘ day.” No mistaking that nasty baritone: it was packed with authority and gave orders like other men breathe. I heard a brief metallic sound, and by the same dim light I saw an aluminum ladder being slipped hand to hand over the bow of the boat.

I could’ve killed them all then; they were like four fat fish in a barrel just waiting to be shot. I had the gun in my hand, why didn’t I just do it? I could still get all four before any of them could clear their own guns; I had been that fast and my gut told me I still was. I could get them now. I could get them all. Their asses were mine. But at the last second, God knows why, I stayed my hand.

I knew why. I had never shot a man that way. I could kill him, but not that way.

I shrank back from the edge as the ladder bumped against the wall. Who would come over the top first? If Dante came up, my job would be easier. But my hunch told me it would be someone local, a pathfinder who could lead them across the treacherous parade ground to the place where, they thought, we’d all be happily asleep. I heard the ladder shake, saw it move in the dim glow from the boat far below. I slid back on my belly with the gun in my hand, getting very still as a head came over the edge. I had been right, it wasn’t Dante. But I was sure he’d be the next one: it wasn’t in his nature to take up the rear. The pathfinder came head and shoulders over the wall, a little penlight in his teeth, and in that moment I knew how it was going to go. If I was lucky, it would be a replay of Baltimore.

He turned his head and his light went right over my back. He looked down and nodded, then he came over the wall and stood up, waiting.

Again he nodded his head. Coast is clear, boys.

My heart was pumping like a war drum, I could feel my gun hand trembling, I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. The ladder moved: Dante was on the way up. I felt cold one second, giddy the next. I almost laughed out loud, these guys were such schmucks, in their own dumb way as stupid as those kids I had faced down on the street so long ago. I knew what was going to happen ten seconds before each move. The pathfinder would reach down and give the man a respectful hand, leaving them both vulnerable for that moment. I could push them both off the wall: I could easily get close enough to kick them out into space. It probably wouldn’t be a lethal fall unless Dante landed on his ass, but it was high enough to do some real damage and at least they’d be stunned for a moment. Then perhaps they’d come up shooting, and that was my kind of action; I could kill them all then and sleep just fine tomorrow. And in the heat of that moment, I found myself actually craving it, savoring what might come.

I saw Dante clear the wall. A Confederate defender with a Whit-worth rifle could’ve popped his thick head from a bunker a mile away on Morris Island, that’s what a target he made. There was a moment: I hung back, waiting for some defining motion to egg me on. The ladder bumped again. I knew it was the third man, on his way up, and that was something I couldn’t wait around for.

I stepped up beside them, still a foot back in the shadow. Both were looking over the edge: neither had a gun out and that gave me a huge advantage. I cocked my gun and even in the wind it sounded like the clap of doom. I saw them stiffen. “Don’t move,” I said. “I will kill you both right where you stand.”

In almost the same breath the third guy began to clear the wall. He still didn’t know anything had happened and his moment of clarity came slowly. He said, “Hey,” and that was it, his sudden awareness in a nutshell as I kicked him in the head. He tumbled into space, clawing wildly for something to grab. I heard him hit the sand and the ladder crash over on top of him. All this time I kept my light in Dante’s eyes. “You don’t learn very good, do you, stupid?”

The pathfinder started to back up, away from the edge. “Wrong way, fuck-knuckle,” I said, and I lifted my foot and shoved him off. He screamed, going down like I’d just pushed him off a thousand-foot cliff.

Dante and I stared at each other, primal, mortal enemies. He looked at my gun, then at me. I taunted him. I wanted him to try something.

“Come on, fatso, you’re such a tough guy, come take my gun away from me.”

“You’d like that. You need that excuse. You haven’t got the balls to just do it.”

That was his only try at bravado. I leaned into the light and said, “Is that what you think?” and in that moment I became one with the killer: whatever difference I thought had existed between us was gone now. I was going to kill him, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind, and in that second he knew it too. I saw it in his face: the born intimidator who had spent his life watching people cringe had never once faced the possibility of his own death. He saw it now.

The flesh began to sag around his mouth, under his eyes. He tried to recoil but I grabbed him by the shirt and heaved him around. “You lose, asshole,” I said, and I banged him in the mouth with the barrel of the gun. He let out a little cry and tried to back away, he stumbled and fell. Again I shoved the gun into that gaping mouth, bloody now where two teeth had broken off. My hand trembled: any little movement might’ve set it off and I didn’t care.

“Wait,” he said.

I rammed the gun down to his tonsils. “Wait for what?”

He gurgled out something that sounded like, “Just wait.”

I leaned down close to his face. “Wait for what, asshole? Wait for what? You got something to say, say it now.” I jerked the gun out of his face. “Say it now. Say it. What’ve you possibly got to say that I would care about?”

“We could make a deal.”

“Don’t make me laugh. What’ve you got that I want? I’ve got your nuts in my pocket, Dante, what can you give me for that? Give me Burton’s notebook for starters. Maybe then I’ll let you live another five minutes.”

Suddenly he looked like a gored weasel, a rat trapped in a flooding sewer. His eyes had the same dead look as Little Caesar, who couldn’t believe he was dying even in death. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico? Same dead eyes. Same incredulous face. I put the gun to his eyes and he shivered in what he must have expected to be his last minute on this earth.

“Are you scared, Dante?”

Even then he couldn’t say it.

“Are you scared?”

His lower lip trembled. His head scrunched down between his shoulders and he closed his eyes.

“What’s going on in that pea brain of yours? Is it fear? Are you scared?”

Go on, stop talking, I thought. Kill him.

For Christ’s sake, stop playing around and just do it. The hell with history and notebooks, just do it. I took a deep breath. “So long, stupid…”

Then he cracked. It came out of him as a pathetic, whimpering sound. “Please…don’t do this…” “Please? Did you say please?”

I put the gun to his ear, he groaned out a “No…please…” and for the second time I backed away.

I stuck the gun in my belt. He could’ve made a grab for it: he didn’t dare. He had never made a move for his own gun, which I now frisked away from him and threw into the sea.

I gripped his shirt and balled it up in my fist, drawing him close. “You got one last chance to live, Dante. Here’s what’s gonna happen. Later this morning you will get your fat ass on a plane back to Baltimore. There you will wait for further instructions. It might take a week or a month, but at some point a friend of mine will come visit. He will make damn sure you understand me this time. You are going to hurt for a long time after he sees you, but if you resist, or if you surround yourself with bodyguards and armor, it will be much, much worse. You had better listen to what he says because there won’t be any more chances. I’m telling you the truth now and you’d better believe it. He will tell you what to do and he’ll tell you in a way you’ll never forget. You’ll be told what you must do to stay alive. That’s your choice, asshole. Agree or die right now.”

I took out the gun and cocked it and he whimpered out a watery “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“…Whatever…whatever you say.”

“You got that right, Dante. Now get the hell off my fort.”

I rolled him to the edge and pushed him off. He flailed away at the air and I heard him hit the ground with a mighty grunt. He rolled over desperately sucking air, all the wind knocked out of him, maybe some bones broken; I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I sat in the dark, cross-legged and invisible, and after a while I did peer over and I saw them loading Dante onto the boat. He looked hurt bad. They pushed away, the oar squeaking, the boat fading slowly in the early morning. They slipped out into the water and disappeared. A few minutes later I heard the motor start as they turned back toward Charleston.

CHAPTER 38

I was still sitting there when the sun cracked over the sea. The harbor was empty at dawn, a couple of sailboats just heading out from the marina. Erin came out. I was facing the wrong way to see her, but I heard her climbing up to the wall and I knew who it was. She picked up my balled-up coat and sat beside me.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. But I looked in her face and I knew I couldn’t sell that and I’d better not try. “They came for us during the night. Three of them got thrown off the wall. Dante might be hurt pretty bad.”

She sat down beside me. “Well,” she said, and that was all for a moment.

“If this didn’t discourage him…” I shrugged.

“Wish I could’ve helped you.” She put an arm over my shoulder. “I slept like a baby.”

“That’s good.”

“Cliff?”

“Yeah?”

“About us…”

“What about us?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat watching the sun, listening to the waves lap against the fort.

“What now?” she said.

“Now we go into Charleston and get our car.”

“Are we still looking over our shoulders?”

“In the long run, who knows? You can never know with a guy like that.” I shrugged. “I think we’re safe for today at least.”

“What about Archer?”

“Whatever you want. If you want to go by the hospital, fine.”

She leaned against me. “That must’ve been some fight.”

“It could’ve been better. I had the terrain on my side.”

“Like the Confederates.”

“Yeah. This old fort is still a tough place to take.”

Luke came out and put up the flags. Libby watched pensively from the window.

We ate a simple breakfast with the Robinsons. I left my coat off now and I rolled up my sleeves and put the gun in my bedroll. The three of us made a final tour of Sumter, I promised Libby we’d keep in touch, and we took the morning boat back to the city.

We had the cab drop us at Roper Hospital. All of us went up together. I wasn’t surprised to find Dean Treadwell sitting in the visitor’s chair.

“If you’ve come to see Archer, he still can’t talk. He’s doped up and hurting pretty bad.”

“I just came by to say we’re leaving,” Erin said. “See if anything’s changed.”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. He’s gonna give you the book.”

Her first reaction was no reaction at all. As the moment stretched, she finally said, “Really?” but she was unflappable even when news was sensational.

“Some things just ain’t worth the grief, no matter how much money’s involved,” Dean said. “Naturally, we’re hoping the judge’s offer is still on the table.”

“I’m sure it is. I’ll call him and give you something in writing if you want.”

“He doesn’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“Tell him not to worry, then. Lee will do the right thing.”

“Let’s just go get it,” Dean said. “We want to be rid of it.”

It was like Poe’s gold bug, buried in the sand on Sullivan’s Island. Archer had triple-wrapped it in plastic, put it in a metal box, stuffed the box with plastic bags, and buried it in the dry sand under his back steps.

“He had a hunch,” Dean said. “Sooner or later that bozo would come after us.”

I wondered why now.

“It wasn’t the book. They were lookin‘ for you. Archer made a mistake, said the wrong thing. You know how he can be, sometimes he pops off. This time he never got a chance to say I’m sorry. They never even asked about the book.”

“What if they’d killed him? Nobody’d ever know where it was.”

“At that point, what did he care?”

We looked at each other in the hot noonday sun, two bookmen from different worlds, pulled together briefly by the same quest. Dean lit a smoke and I found a clumsy way of apologizing for the razzing I had given him back in town. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“I said a lot. Sometimes I say too much.”

“I’ve been thinking about one particular thing.”

I didn’t have to tell him, he knew what it was. “Hal Archer’s never told me a lie of any kind, not that I’m aware of. How many friends have you had that you can say that about?”

Not many, I thought. Maybe none.

He shuffled uneasily. “If that’s all, let’s get out of here.”

Fifteen minutes later we were across the Cooper River, heading for North Charleston. None of us said a word the whole way across.

My rental was still where I’d parked it. Dean didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. He drove out of the lot and turned back toward Charleston and a moment later we went the other way, north to Florence.

CHAPTER 39

There were towns along every road now. There was sprawl that had never been part of any town at all. There were long fingers of commerce and drugstores and housing developments where only forests and swamps and farmlands had been in that earlier time. Then there had been occasional outposts to comfort a traveler in the wilderness; now there were motels and gas stations, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings, Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie supermarkets and antiques malls. There were X-rated magazine stands and gunsmiths and temples of any god a man wanted to pray to. There were places to stop and get quietly drunk or get a car fixed after a sudden breakdown. No one would ever go hungry or thirsty, get horny or spiritually deprived for more than a few minutes in any direction. What had then been a two-day trek in 1860 was two hours now in air-conditioned ease. But there were still stretches of wilderness where the pines grew thick and the way resembled nothing more than a tunnel with sky. Imagine this on a dirt road at night, I thought: imagine 120 miles of it. As we traveled upcountry I followed the odyssey of Richard Francis Burton and Charles Edward Warren in my head. As I slumped in the backseat reading Burton’s words, I could almost see them coming down from the north, and I could still get some faint, faraway sense of what it had been.

We reached Florence in the early afternoon. From then on our journey was charmed. If anything, it was too easy.

A librarian knew right away what we were looking for. That junction where the roads had intersected was still called Wheeler’s Crossing. It was out of town a stretch and there was nothing there now. A roadside sign would show us where it had been.

The library had a number of Wheeler papers: letters, some of the old man’s ledgers, even a few menus in Marion’s hand. The Wheelers had all been buried in an old graveyard near the crossroad. Marion Wheeler’s mother had been put there before her; her father, who had outlived them both, died in 1881. “Look at this,” Koko said. “She died in childbirth, just like her mother…exactly nine months after Burton and Charlie would’ve been there. Her father made no attempt to cover it up.”

Her son had lived. Her father had honored her deathbed wish, named him Richard, and raised him as his own.

Richard Wheeler. One sketchy account existed of his youth: no more than a few lines in a letter written near the end of the old man’s life. His schooling, three years in a classroom, was probably average for the time. He was fair with numbers but brilliant with language. He had learned Latin on his own, becoming fluent in six months, and had been studying Spanish. He was a good and energetic dancer and girls loved him. In that passage he was described as tall and dark with a keen sense of honor.

A lady killer.

He went to sea at sixteen and that was all that was known of him.

We arrived at the site of Wheeler’s inn late that afternoon. It was a bend in the road now, marked by a simple state highway sign that said wheeler’s crossing. The graveyard was on a dirt road not far away. It was dusk when we found the Wheeler plots: the father and mother side by side, Marion a few feet away. The simple stone said, here lies marion wheeler, beloved daughter, who departed this earth january 30, l86l, aged twenty-four years, eleven months, fourteen days. Koko took notes and in the waning light tried desperately to take pictures.

I had to pry her away.

Now for the first time she asked my opinion of Burton’s journal. It looked real, I said. By then I didn’t need to add the line about my own lack of expertise. Most impressive were the scores of Negro spirituals and slave songs that Burton had written down, word for word, in dialect, as he and Charlie had traveled through the South. He had rilled page after page with them, adding extensive notes on where he had heard them and what he suspected their African roots might be.

There was a full account of Burton’s first meeting with Charlie. It jibed with what we knew and added color to Charlie’s tale. There was a detailed description of the day they went walking in Charleston. Burton had made a sketch of Fort Sumter from the Battery, and had written with fond amusement of Charlie’s outrage at the slave auction. Best of all, he told of having their picture taken outside a dentist’s office on East Bay Street.

We headed west into the night.

At Camden we turned north, picking up Interstate 77. From there it was a straight shot into Charlotte, but we stopped in Rock Hill, taking two rooms in a motel overlooking a river. Erin called Lee in Denver and told him the news. She called my room and suggested that we meet downstairs for a drink.

“Lee is ecstatic,” she said.

“That’s good,” I said flatly.

“What’s wrong with you? In case you hadn’t noticed, we won.”

I made the obvious excuse: I was tired after last night. But there was something else and she sensed it.

“It’s Denise, isn’t it? She’s been forgotten in all this fuss.”

“Not by me.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet. Something.”

“You had your chance at Dante and let him go. Is that what’s bothering you?”

“No. I told you, I’m just tired.”

But it was more than that.

We turned in but I still couldn’t sleep. At midnight I thought of Dean Treadwell, and for the hundredth time about his strange friendship with Archer. Again I thought the unthinkable, pushing it away at once, but it was there now and it kept me awake. I must’ve slept at least a few hours because I opened my eyes suddenly and knew I had been dreaming. I had dreamed of Archer and his mother Betts, and it took me a while to remember that Betts hadn’t been Archer’s mother at all.

In the morning we had a quiet breakfast in the cafe. Lee had already called Erin and they had discussed air passage. “We can get a flight to Atlanta at seven o’clock tonight. It’ll be tight, but we should just make the connecting flight to Denver. Lee wants me to put all three fares on my credit card and he’ll reimburse me.”

“No,” I said. “You cover your own, I’ll take care of Koko and me.”

She insisted. “Cliff, he wants to do this.”

“Well, he can’t.”

We went into Charlotte and found Orrin Wilcox. Libby had been painfully accurate in her description of the ghoulish old bookscout and the incredible clutter of his store. He gave the impression of a guy who didn’t give much of a damn about anything, but he responded eagerly enough to the sight of my money.

“I believe you quoted Mrs. Robinson a thousand dollars,” I said.

“She should’ve taken it then. It’s fifteen hundred now. I got overhead, y’know.”

“Two prints,” I said.

“Two-fifty for the second print. Plus lab expenses.”

We went to a studio not far from his store. I wanted my continuity unbroken; I needed to keep that glass plate in my sight and see the prints being made. The photographer liked the color of my money and I stood at his side in the darkroom and watched Burton and Charlie come to life in the soup. Slowly Burton materialized…first the vague shape of him, then the street and a tree and some kids beyond them. Burton’s scars appeared suddenly like two cuts slashed on the paper. Then came the hat, then the eyes…and there was Charlie beside him, the man I had never seen but had always imagined looking just about like that. The contrasts were stark, the clarity superb. They stood on the street enjoying a day long vanished but now immortalized, the affection between them almost palpable. Burton had a look of amused tolerance, Charlie one of happy friendship. Two black children stood near the palmetto tree on the walk, gawking at the photographer and his strange apparatus, and half a block away a dog was crossing the street. In the distance a horse was pulling a wagon toward us, and people were coming and going, in and out of the Exchange Building. I saw all this but my eyes kept coming back to Burton. His face was as clear as if it had been photographed only yesterday. And in his hand, draped over Charlie’s shoulder, was the notebook I had just been reading.

I put one of the prints in an envelope and addressed it to Libby Robinson at Fort Sumter. A few hours later we dropped off our rental car, I paid the extra tariff, and we caught a plane for Atlanta, hoping to get on a 9:38 flight to Denver.

Denver

CHAPTER 40

The plane was crowded and we felt lucky to squeeze in from standby. Our seating was scattered: I sat three rows behind Erin, mashed against the window by a bad-tempered fat woman who sprawled across all three seats, and Koko was out of sight, somewhere near the front. Once we were in the air Erin spent ten minutes on the airline telephone, talking to Lee again, I learned later. “He wants to see us all tonight if you’re up to it,” she said as we worked our way through the crowded Denver terminal. “It’s nothing urgent, so please don’t think of it as a command performance. He just wants to say thanks and offer us a drink. And maybe convince you to let him pay for the trip.”

“A drink would be good,” I said.

A bumpy three-hour flight had put us into Stapleton Airport at half-past eleven, Mountain Time. We caught a cab and arrived in Park Hill just after midnight. I looked at familiar houses drifting past and at shady familiar streets, and somehow they all seemed different. I rolled down the window and tasted the dry air. Home: it felt like a long time since I’d been here.

I paid the cabbie over Erin’s objections and we walked up the path to the judge’s front door. I could see his silhouette in the doorway. He opened the door as the night-light came on, illuminating the front yard, and he met us at the top step of his porch.

“God, it’s good to see you people.” He hugged Erin and gripped my hand fiercely. I introduced him to Koko and we were shuffled into his library, taking soft chairs in the friendly environment of great books. He moved to the bar and asked our pleasure. Erin took something sweet, Koko asked for water, and I had bourbon on the rocks.

“Miranda’s sorry she had to miss you,” Lee said. “We had an old friend here late last night and she was dead tired. Our timing was lousy but it had been planned for weeks. No rest for me these days: I’m still mired in a case that’s testing all my patience, and I think—I hope—she’ll be happy to have me back again when it’s over. Then we can all get together.”

Erin took Burton’s journal out of her bag and gave it to him.

“Well, you did it,” he said. “I can’t imagine how you persuaded him.”

“It wasn’t us,” I said. “Dante beat him up pretty badly. Didn’t Erin tell you?”

“Yes, of course. I still find it all hard to believe.”

We socialized for a while. Lee and I talked books, while Erin showed Koko the library.

“You’re a good detective, Cliff. I always knew that.”

“I was pretty good,” I said with my usual modesty. “I had good juice, a good feel for the work. Maybe I still have. Maybe I haven’t left it all between the bookshelves.”

“I’m not sure what that means exactly, but if it’s a requirement for—”

“It means you get a hunch. You keep after it even when the facts you’ve gathered won’t quite support your hunch. Even when you don’t like what you’re finding.”

I almost let it go then. I wanted to let it go, but Lee asked one more question and the unthinkable wafted up between us.

“What do you do when that happens?” he said. “How do you just ‘keep after it’ when it doesn’t want to fit?”

“It always fits, Lee. Usually when it doesn’t seem to it’s only because you’re missing something. So you keep asking questions, you become a pain in everybody’s ass. Most of all you think about it, day and night. You keep asking questions till the fat lady screams.”

“That almost sounds like you’re still at it.”

“I am. I can’t help myself. I want to let it go. I want to be done with it. It would be so easy to let it go, but I can’t.”

He looked away.

“Lee?”

“I’m sorry, I just lost my concentration. It’s this case, it’s got me punch-drunk.”

“I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

“You mean now? Tonight?”

“This shouldn’t take long. Otherwise, you see, I won’t be able to sleep, and if there’s one guy in Denver who’s as tired as you, that’s probably me.”

Suddenly the air in the room changed and was charged with conflict. Lee said, “Then by all means go ahead,” but his back had stiffened and the skin around his mouth tightened. I had seen that look many times, when a man says something and means exactly the opposite.

“Archer says the book was his all along,” I said. “He made a pretty convincing case for that to a Baltimore bookseller we met. But the way Erin was negotiating, it’s almost like you all knew he had stolen it.”

“Did Erin tell you that?”

“Erin told me as little as possible.”

“What exactly did she say?”

I found myself losing patience. It was late, I was tired, I was in no mood to be stonewalled. “Are you and Archer somehow related?”

His eyes opened wide. “What on earth does that have to—”

“Just something that occurred to me in the last twenty-four hours. Archer had a grandmother named Betsy Ross. At some point something was mentioned about your own grandma Betts. That would be fairly unusual, two grandmas with such similar names.”

“We’re cousins. This is not exactly a big dark secret.”

“But it’s not something either of you go out of your way to promote.”

“Why should we? What difference does it make?”

“Maybe none at all.” But I pushed ahead. “Betsy Ross married old Archer, but it was her second marriage, is that right? Her first was your grandfather.”

He didn’t confirm or deny: he just looked at me.

“And when the Archer men died young, Grandma Betts got control of the estate. Which included the books.”

Erin had caught the drift of the conversation and now she moved in close. “Is this going somewhere?”

I smiled at her. “That sounds very lawyerly, Counselor. Just calm down. Lee and I are only trying to put this thing to bed.”

“I thought it was to bed.”

“Not as long as there’s an unanswered question.”

“Which would be what?”

“Who killed Denise, and why.”

Lee turned away and went to the bar. “Well, Cliff,” he said, refilling his glass. “I don’t know what more I can tell you. I don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

“I’m looking for a killer, Lee.”

“This is a strange place to be looking for him,” Erin said.

I bypassed her and looked at Lee. “I woke up this morning thinking about Archer and his grandma Betts. Then I remembered that Grandma Betts was actually your grandmother. It took a while but I finally remembered—that first night we met him, Archer told us how you had inherited the books from your grandma Betts. What a dear old gal she was. But the way he said that was anything but dear. He was bitter, almost like he couldn’t stand the thought of her.”

“Hal’s bitter about everything. Nothing new there.”

“Then in South Carolina I found out about his grandmother, Betsy Ross, through a routine check on his background. That was new.”

“So they were cousins,” Erin said. “What are you trying to make of this?”

“Did you know they were cousins?”

She said nothing but I sensed an answer and the answer was no.

“That might put a new light on these books.”

“I don’t see how.”

“I’ve been wondering, Lee: What kind of woman was Betsy Ross?”

“She was…” He gave a little laugh. “Oh God, she was a powerhouse. Nobody pushed Betts around, not the Archers or anybody. And she really loved her daughter.”

“From the first marriage. And I imagine she loved her daughter’s son as well.”

“Yes, she did.” He smiled. “They all said I was the apple of her eye.”

“And your mother?”

“The world’s sweetest woman. There was nobody who didn’t love her. All she lacked was Betsy’s strength.”

“What did Grandma think of her grandson on the other side?”

“Hal was always the odd man out with all of them—most of all with her. It’s not that Betts didn’t love him in her own way, she just couldn’t show it. In her eyes, he never made a right decision. He was shiftless, lazy. She had no idea how hard he really worked at what he wanted to do.”

“Cliff, you must have a point here somewhere,” Erin said. “Can we please get back to here and now?”

“Yeah, let’s do that. Only five of us knew Denise had that book. You said you went up to the mountain the next day and never told anyone. But that’s not true, is it?”

“She discussed it briefly with me,” Lee said.

“So what difference does that make?” Erin said. “I told him in confidence—what are you trying to make of it?”

“Yes, what’s your question?” Lee said.

“Did old Archer hire Treadwell to rook Josephine’s mother out of those Burton books? What happened to all those letters and papers?”

“How would I know that?”

“How would you not know it?”

“That’s a very ugly question,” Erin said.

“Yes, it is. It breaks my heart to ask it.”

A streak of impatience flashed across Lee’s face. “This almost sounds like you’re accusing me of something.”

We were all quiet now: even Koko had come over to listen, and the only sound in the room for half a minute was the ticking of the clock.

“Good God,” Lee said. “Do you think I killed that woman?”

I said nothing.

“Cliff!” he cried. “My God, Cliff! Listen to yourself!”

The moment thickened. I desperately wanted to hear something that would make the question go away. Our eyes met but he turned his head to one side.

“Lee,” I said softly.

He forced himself to look at me.

“When Grandma Betts died, the books were left to you. You alone. The old Archer men were dead: she had outlived them all, she had complete control of the estate. Young Archer was an outcast and she left everything to you: money, books, a yellow brick road to a glorious legal career. But you were always a decent guy, Lee, and I mean that. So you shared those books with Archer, gave him the two best of the lot, all under the table so the family wouldn’t hear. The problem always was, you both knew where they’d come from. It was the big dark family secret that all of you knew and no one ever discussed. You all had this common knowledge that old Archer the first had heard about the books and hired the Treadwells to buy them for next to nothing. You knew there was at least one Warren heir and when they came to you, that could have been your chance to make it right. But you let it pass and kept the books. That’s where it all started.”

I looked at Erin, expecting an objection.

“You and Archer had this conspiracy of silence. You had these wonderful books, but you couldn’t do anything with them—not as long as anyone was alive who might have even a remotely rightful claim to them. The trouble began when Archer ran dry—his bank account and his creativity, all at once. So he sent one of those Burtons to auction, hoping he could sell it and still keep the secret.”

Suddenly the room felt hot. “Now I’ve got to ask you some-thing,” I said. “I want to be very careful here but I can’t. There’s no way I can do this with any tact.”

I felt Erin’s eyes burning into my face but I stared at Lee. He looked away, ostensibly to refill his glass, but I knew that look, I had seen it on too many people too many times. It pushed me to the bottom line, to give voice at last to the unthinkable and cut through all the bullshit.

“You tell me, Lee. Did you kill Denise?”

I heard Erin cry out in protest but my eyes never left Lee’s face, and he couldn’t look at me, and suddenly there was no need to answer the question.

“Oh, Lee,” I said, and my voice broke.

He tried to recover. “I didn’t kill anyone, Cliff. How could you even think that?”

“It’s a question I’ve got to ask. I’d sooner cut out my tongue.”

Lee made a great effort and forced himself to look in my eyes. “Then tell me why in God’s name you’d even think such a thing.”

“Somewhere along the way I began to believe Archer’s story. It’s as simple as that. His story and yours can’t exist side by side. They just can’t work.”

“What is his story, exactly? Help me understand it.”

“Nothing very complicated. He says Burton’s journal is his. He told that to a bookseller he’s known almost forty years. A guy who may be his only friend.”

“You show me the thief who doesn’t believe he owns what he steals. There’s got to be more than that.”

“There is now. Now there’s you. There’s the look on your face and the way you can’t look me in the eye and deny it.”

He did look at me at last. It took a vast effort, but his eyes met mine and he said, “I don’t need to justify myself to you. Goddamn it, do you know who you’re talking to?”

He looked at Erin and said, “For God’s sake, you don’t believe this?”

“Of course not.” But her voice lacked the certainty that should have been there. She was rattled: for the first time that calm, professional demeanor had deserted her.

“Just tell him what he wants to know,” she said. “Tell him and let’s all go to bed and be done with this.” She looked at me coldly and her look said, And I’ll be done with you.

Instead Lee said, “I’d like to ask you something, Cliff, then I’d like you to please get out of my house. Do you really think I would kill someone over a book? Do you think I’m that stupid, that desperate to own any book, when I could just buy the damned thing anyway? Or is it the money that drove me crazy? You tell me, then we’ll both know.”

“I’ll give you my guess. Long ago you and Archer should have been joint heirs to this marvelous library of Burton material. You got it all, but you shared it with Hal on the q.t. You made that unholy alliance with Archer that you would give him a couple of the books, including Richard’s journal, which you knew even then was worth more money than most of the others combined. You and Archer made a pact that they could never be sold until the last real heir was dead, because you both knew where they had come from, and the fraud your family had worked to get them away from the Warren family for nothing.

“The easy thing to do, the right thing, would have been to seek out Mrs. Gallant and pay her. Just a good wholesale price might have made all the difference in her life. But you didn’t do that; you were afraid to admit you had those books because that would put them all at risk. For once in your life you went against your own sense of decency and what’s right. You and Archer decided not to tell anyone. The books were legally yours, you didn’t have to pay the old woman or anyone else. But if you had, if you’d just been as fair to the old woman as you were with Archer, maybe none of this would’ve happened. Instead you decided to keep quiet, take no chances. Just keep quiet and she’d go away, fade into the woodwork, die or whatever.

“You should’ve paid that old woman, Lee. I know that’s what your instinct would have been, pay her and get this blot out of your life. But then time passed and that window of opportunity closed. You became a judge, then a prominent judge. The real point of no return was your interview with Reagan. By then you’d have been glad to get rid of all the books, just give them away. They were like a millstone around your neck when the president began considering you for the Supreme Court. That’s your motive, Lee. You’d do anything for a chance at that appointment, and even a small scandal, even something like this where you were legally right, would be enough to kill that possibility dead in the water.”

I finished off my drink.

“Lee?” It was Erin, and her tone begged him to deny it. “Tell him he’s crazy.”

“He can’t,” I said.

“I didn’t kill her,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill her.”

Then he said, “She just…died.”

“Oh my God.” Erin sank to the sofa. “Oh my God.”

“Erin, Cliff, listen to me,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I went over to see her. I shouldn’t have, I know that. But I was so certain I could get the book away from her. I knew they were poor, you told me that, and people will sell out anyone if you pay them enough. I thought if I paid her enough she could tell you she lost it. My God, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was only there a few minutes. But something went wrong…she felt threatened by something I said…Jesus, it was nothing, just a veiled threat, what might happen if she told anybody I had been there. I had no intention to hurt her or her husband, but she got frightened. I tried to hush her— Please, I said, PLEASE! She started to scream and then everything unraveled. I picked up the pillow—not to smother her, for Christ’s sake, just to shut her up till I could talk sense to her. Christ knows I had no reason to kill her. All I wanted then was to get her quiet and get out of there. You’ve got to believe that!”

“I do believe it, Lee,” I said. “I just wish it had turned out that way.”

“I tried to reason with her. I told her just to forget I was there— she could keep the book, keep the book and the money, she could keep all the money, I didn’t care about it then. I tried to shove money at her…”

“And left some of it tangled in her bedclothes. The cops have those bills, Lee.”

“I wanted to do what was right. That’s all I ever wanted. I argued with Hal from the start. We needed to find that old woman and pay her something, a substantial amount that would erase that blot from our lives. Ask Hal, he’ll tell you what I tried to do.”

I put down my empty glass and went to the door. Somewhere behind me I heard Lee saying, “This was no crime, Cliff. This was an accident. It was an accident, I swear. There was no evil intent. You know I couldn’t do that. I could never kill anyone.”

I touched the door.

“Cliff, please…I’ll make her husband a wealthy man.”

I turned and said, “You took away all he ever wanted.”

“I’ll make it right, I swear.”

“You can’t.”

“I can! No one needs to know about this.”

“Yeah, they do. I’m sorry, Lee. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”

“Erin. You talk to him. Talk to him! This doesn’t have to go anywhere.”

I looked at Erin, who sat numbly with streams of tears on her cheeks.

“Good-bye, Lee,” I said.

I walked out. A moment later I heard Koko running along the sidewalk behind me.

“Under the circumstances, I’d rather stay with you tonight. If you’ve got room for me.”

I put an arm over her shoulder. “I’ll always have room for you, Koke.”

Sometime before dawn that same morning, Lee Huxley locked himself in the garage and sat with his motor running until he died. That’s how it ended.

For two days he was front-page news and a hot topic for talk radio. All the yakkers sounded off, speculation ran wild: Denver was treated to the usual tasteless nonsense from vacuous morons with too much time on their hands. Give an idiot a microphone and he’s just a louder version of the same old idiot.

There were a few high spots. To his colleagues Lee was the best and the brightest, a man who weighed every judgment and always strove mightily to do the right thing. Judge Arlene Weston was interviewed and said good things. He was such a fine man, so cultured and well liked. No one could have imagined that he’d do this to himself. It only proved that even a great poet like John Donne could be wrong. Every man is indeed an island, and deep personal torments can coexist with all the ingredients of a happy life.

A rumor leaked out that the president had been interested in Lee as a possible Supreme Court Justice, and the yakkers ran with disappointment as a possible motive. The White House had no comment. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater confirmed that Lee had had two meetings with Mr. Reagan, but nothing was revealed of what might have been said or how serious Reagan’s interest might have been.

His service was mobbed. The entire legal community turned out: the church overflowed, people stood in the street and then swarmed across the graveyard, and the procession from one to the other tied up traffic for twenty blocks.

I watched it on television with Koko. Lee was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery and instantly became a fading memory.

How quickly even a prominent man is forgotten.

On Saturday after the funeral a car stopped in front of my store. I cringed when Miranda leaped out. Twenty people were in the store but she saw only me. She flung open the door, screaming, “You BASTARD! You fucking bastard, I hate you, I wish I’d never set eyes on you, I hope you die!” She charged across the room and beat at me with her fists until she collapsed.

Apparently Lee had left her a note. I can only imagine what was in it.

A week later I got a vicious letter. If she could kill me she would happily do it. At the end she said, “You will never see that book again. I burned it.”

Who knows if she actually did that? Miranda always had a deep interest in money, she must have had at least some idea of the book’s value, but I have a dark, hollow feeling about it. I think of those books and all that handwritten correspondence, and sometimes I wonder where Lee kept those signed copies and if Miranda might be angry enough to destroy them all. The irony that she may have burned Richard’s journal a hundred years after Isabel burned his papers gives me a headache.

The real story still hasn’t come out. Maybe in his despair that’s what Lee was hoping: that at least I would leave him his good name. From what I could tell, Whiteside wasn’t going anywhere with Denise’s death: it had slipped off his front burner as new murders occurred. I knew Lee must have left some evidence in that room— after all, what did he know about covering up a crime, especially in the heat of the moment?—but a cop doesn’t just ask for random hair samples or fingerprints from a prominent jurist who has no obvious connection to the deceased. If Whiteside had a name, a reason to be suspicious, he could close this case in a few hours. If Denise had been one of Denver’s so-called important people, he might be forced to consider the unthinkable, but that’s not likely to happen now. It remains one of those cases without a probable perp, and Ralston is still the only suspect.

Who knows where a chain of events begins? Some would say that the tragedy of Lee Huxley was set in motion long before he was born, when Richard Burton came to America and met Charlie Warren. Me, I can’t quite make that reach, I’m not that kind of cosmic thinker. To me it began when Lee and Archer made their unholy pact. Everything unfolded from that.

Wherever it began, it ended in Lee’s garage.

There is a postscript. Reagan nominated Anthony M. Kennedy from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Kennedy joined the Court in February 1988.

In the weeks after Lee’s death most of the related events worked themselves out. I got a call from Vinnie Marranzino. He didn’t even say hello, just, “Hey, Cliff, everything’s fine. Let me know if you have any more trouble in that neck of the woods.”

I tried to thank him but he brushed it off. “You don’t thank an old pal, Cliff. We should get together sometime. Break some bread for old times’ sake.”

But he knows we won’t.

Workmen arrived to begin clearing the site of Koko’s house in Ellicott City. Mysteriously the house began to rise from the ashes, and her friend Janet gave her reports on its progress almost every day. The money from the insurance payout may be hers to keep, give back, or throw in the Potomac River: I don’t know what the rules say about that. No bills have yet been submitted to anyone, and I’m betting they won’t be. “Maybe I’ll give some of it to a library, if they let me keep it,” Koko said. “They can have a Charles Warren Room, even if they don’t have his books or know who he was.”

She stayed with me for a month.

I didn’t know where Erin went.

I did drive out to Vegas and found Ralston dealing cards in a casino. I had covered Denise’s funeral and there wasn’t much money to give him, but I fudged it a little on his side of the ledger. “There’s ten grand in the bank, any time you want it, but you’ve gotta come back to Denver to get it. I won’t send it, and I’ll need your word that you won’t piss it away in a gambling house, or on booze.”

“You don’t want much, do you’i”

“Only what Denise would want, Mike.”

I told him what had happened, the whole sad story of Judge Lee Huxley. He hasn’t come yet, but he’s young and he still has time to find himself.

Life does go on. I went back to work, schlepping books on East Coif ax Avenue.

I thought of Lee almost constantly on those warm days and nights. Sometimes I thought of the deathbed promise I had given Josephine Gallant and I knew it would always leave me with a hollow, unfulfilled feeling.

On a night in early autumn I sat in my store watching the lights go on along the street. If there’s a winner in this whole sorry business, I thought, it’s probably me. I had two of Burton’s greatest works in flawless inscribed first editions, books that few other bookmen can imagine owning or handling, but I didn’t seem to care much. Too much of the joy had gone out of having them; maybe I’d sell them after all. I would give them away in a heartbeat if none of this had happened, and I knew Lee would have done that at any of half a dozen places along the way. I still believed in him: at heart he was a decent man, done in not so much by his own hand as by the sins of his grandfather. Once in his life he went against his own good instincts and he paid a terrible price.

I looked out at the street. Tonight was going to be a long one, full of ghosts.

I knew I had to shape up. I had not run in weeks and I had begun drinking much too much. I was avoiding people, I wasn’t eating well, and my outlook was poor. I saw myself in a distant future, a crazy old man like the bookscout in Charlotte, burrowed into my own nutty world, snapping at people, gouging for every dime. Was this a fantasy or prophesy? I didn’t know but it cast a deeper pall on the night.

Outside, the night people came out and walked along the street. Time to call it a day. Then the phone rang, and something about the day made me answer it.

“Hi.”

I knew her voice at once and I told her how sorry I was.

“I know you are,” she said gently. “I’m sorry too.”

“So what are you doing these days?”

“Trying to finish my book. It’s not very good but I guess I’ll finish it anyway.”

“You’re probably not the best judge of that.”

“I’m the only judge.”

There was a long pause at the word judge.

“Even if that’s true,” I finally said, “you’re not exactly finishing it under ideal circumstances.”

“I’m tired of fooling myself. I’m not even going to send it out.”

“Give it time, Erin. Just give it time.”

“Sure.”

Then she said, “A wise man once told me, some of us are not meant to be writers.”

“Even a wise man can’t know everything.”

“Same old Janeway. You’ve got an answer for everything.”

“Here’s another one. Maybe you were meant to be a bookseller.”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“You can always write when the muse comes back.”

“If it does.”

This felt depressingly like the end of the conversation. But after some dead phone time, she said, “Do you happen to know what day this is?”

Of course I knew, that’s why I’d answered the phone. I’d been thinking about it all day long. It was the fortieth day.

I listened to the phone noise for a moment. Then she said, “Stay there, I’m coming over.”

Readers wishing to learn more about Richard Burton are referred to three excellent biographies. Fawn Brodie’s The Devil Drives (Norton, 1967) was the first major “life” to separate Burton from his blackguard reputation, and remains a highly readable account. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, by Edward Rice (Scribner, 1990), admirably captures the details and mysteries of Burton’s life. A Rage to Live (London: Little, Brown, 1998) by Mary S. Lovell is a massive, well-researched dual biography of Richard and Isabel.

A biographical novel by William Harrison, Burton and Speke, was filmed as Mountains of the Moon, 1990, and is recommended viewing.

Norman Penzer’s Annotated Bibliography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: 1923) is still the best source of information on Burton’s vast literary output.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Dunning is the Nero Wolfe Award-winning author of two previous Cliff Janeway novels, Booked to Die and The Bookman’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of 1995. An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin bookstore in Denver for many years. His most recent novel was Two O ‘Clock, Eastern Wartime, which focused on old-time radio. John Dunning lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife, Helen. His website is www.oldalgonquin.com.