Box Nine

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mingo likes this street, tree-lined, middle-class, relatively stable. He rolls the Jaguar at a creeping pace and studies the old houses, all Victorians, many of them painted in bright pastel colors. He finds the architecture amazing, finds it hard to believe there was a time when men would put this much effort and detail into a building. Just for the sake of the way it looks. “They must have been fanatics,” he mutters, without any explanation to his train of thought.

Cortez sits next to him, preoccupied, eyes closed, his thumb and index finger rubbing over the bridge of his nose.

“The first time I came down here, I figured this couldn’t be it. This doesn’t look like a place with stores, you know …” Mingo says.

“Commercially zoned,” Cortez tries, without opening his eyes.

“Exactly. This looks …”

“Residential.”

“There you go. First time out, I figured you’d given me the wrong directions. Then I practically broke my back carrying all those boxes up there.”

“A little suffering is good for the soul, Mingo.”

Mingo raises his eyebrows, picks up a little speed, until Cortez says, “Okay, pull over and wait here.”

He gets out of the Jaguar and stands on the sidewalk looking up at the building. A pastel-yellow Victorian. Turrets, cupola, odd angles and jogs everywhere. There’s a carved wooden sign hanging over the archway that leads up onto a wraparound porch. It reads “Ephraim Beck’s Mystery Bookshop.” Simple, Cortez thinks, tasteful. He walks up onto the porch where a long redwood picnic table holds a row of seven old-fashioned orange crates. The crates are all packed to capacity with paperback books. A small sign, propped on a tiny antique-looking easel, reads “Any three for a dollar.”

He looks back down to the street and sees Mingo behind the driver’s wheel, in a world of his own, talking to himself. He thinks to himself, Everyone I draw around myself is defective in some way, then moves inside the shop.

A bell rings as he pushes open the storm door and steps into the foyer. It’s warm inside. The lighting is soft, but bright enough for long-term browsing. He stands in one spot and does a full scan. He loves what he sees. The place is so different from Hotel Penumbra, evokes a different era. Different concerns, importance placed on different priorities.

In the front room off the foyer, a middle-aged man is sound asleep on a small couch covered with a paisley quilt. He has salt-and-pepper hair, clipped grey mustache, wire-rim glasses pushed up onto the crown of his head. He’s dressed as if he’s playing the part of the kindly, old bookseller at the community theater. A white cotton button-down shirt covered by a brown, unbuttoned cardigan sweater. Suspenders barely visible. Corduroy pants. Penny loafers over heavy argyle socks.

He looks to be in an uncomfortable position, neither sitting nor lying down, but an unusual blend of the two. His head is cocked backward on the back edge of the couch, his face pointed up to the tin-plated ceiling. His mouth is open slightly. His hands are gripping a book spread open in his lap. Cortez would like to read the title without waking the man.

Instead, he takes a step to an elaborate walnut bookcase with a sign resting on top that reads “New Arrivals.” He starts to reach out to pull down Harry Keeler’s The Book with the Orange Leaves, but stops himself and simply looks. He feels uneasy, like the confused kin of a young mother who’s given her infant up for adoption, and now returns to his school yard to simply stare at what was once hers. He turns away from the bookcase, annoyed with himself for the dramatics, ashamed of the conceit of this idea. But he can’t help one last thought—I’m not much more than the fictions I’ve sold.

The entrance bell did nothing to disturb the sleeping man and Cortez is unsure whether to ignore him and begin browsing or to try to wake him gently and announce his presence. Then the thought hits him that it’s possible the man is dead, a heart attack in the middle of the book’s climax, maybe a murder scene or a chase.

Cortez leans forward slightly without taking a step. He wants a sign of breathing. The chest to rise. The eyes to flutter.

But there’s nothing. He has to confirm the worst. He begins to move toward the couch and the man’s mouth opens and says, “You’re a first-timer.”

Cortez stops and instinctively squelches any show of surprise. The man hasn’t moved his head or opened his eyes. Cortez finds this rude. Especially to a potential customer. The guy obviously has no business skill. It’s amazing the place has stayed in operation so long.

“Excuse me?”

Now the head comes up and the body straightens itself into a normal sitting posture.

“Ephraim Beck,” he says, extending a hand that Cortez walks toward and shakes. “I doze sometimes. When it’s slow. I find it very refreshing.”

“I’m sure.”

“What I said was, this is your first visit to the store. Most of the customers here are regulars. That’s the way it is with specialty stores, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“You from out of town?”

“Here on business.”

“Saw the ad in the yellow pages?”

“Actually, I asked the desk clerk at the hotel for some of the better bookstores in the city.”

“I see. Are you a collector?”

“Really, a beginner. An amateur.”

“We’ve got something for everyone. Any author you’re especially interested in? You look like you might be a Chesterton man. Am I right?”

“To be honest, I’m going to be doing a great deal of traveling in the near future. A lot of time on planes. Trains. I’m looking for some tides that will keep my interest. But at the same time I don’t want to load myself down.”

The man squints his eyes a little and makes a noise, sucking air through his clenched teeth. His manner suggests he’s weighing a difficult decision. Finally, he shrugs and says, “I think you’re going to want to go with paperbacks.”

“Paperbacks,” Cortez repeats.

The man nods. “I know, I know. It’s like you can feel the decay in your hands as you’re reading the first line. But you’ve got limited luggage capacity, correct? And if you’re going to be on the road for any length of time … Let’s just say you stuff a first-edition Chesterton down into the Samsonite before you turn it over to the airline people. Come the end of your trip, I don’t want to look. I mean, it’s a question of respect.”

Cortez decides this is the kind of man who could wander off into endless oblique stories with no apparent meaning. He says, “Do you have any Hammett?”

The man takes a breath and smiles indulgently, as if to say, please, think about your questions before you ask them.

“Okay, how about the obvious choice?”

“That’s not so obvious to me.”

Cortez nods. “Sorry. Maltese Falcon. Any paperback edition.”

“I’ve got one by Vintage. Two ninety-five, plus tax. Good-sized print.”

“Sold.”

Mr. Beck smiles and starts to move for a wall of paperbacks toward the rear of the store. He throws his voice back over his shoulder as Cortez follows. “Now we’re moving. What else can we get? You said it would be a long trip.”

“Yes, but now that I think about it, that one tide should do it. There’ll be some books waiting for me at my first stop.”

The clerk stops at a shelf, runs a finger parallel to the books’ spines without touching them, stops, and pulls down a black-covered book with green lettering and a picture of the famous bird sitting like an Egyptian sphinx.

He turns back toward Cortez and presents it. “First published in ’30. Still tremendously popular today.”

“I’ve read it before.”

“I would think so,” the man says, and then seems to regret it.

Cortez lets him off the hook and says, “There’s a part of this book that gets to me. One particular scene. A small bit. You know what I’m talking about?”

The man smiles as if they’d just become conspirators. As if they’d sealed some kind of mutually beneficial agreement.

“You know the scene? With Spade and Bridget O’Shaughnessy? At Spade’s place?”

“The story of Flitcraft,” the man says.

“Exactly,” Cortez says. “I knew you’d know.”

The man’s head slopes to the side a little. His lips stay together.

“I’ve always wondered what other people thought about that.”

When the man realizes that Cortez is waiting for a response, he says simply, “Of course.”

“Why do you think that scene is in there?”

The man lets his head roll slightly. His tongue slides out of his mouth and wets his lips. “It’s a great story,” he says.

They stare at each other for a few seconds, then Cortez reaches into his pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. Without looking, he fans them slightly, lets his fingers run through the fan, in decreasing denomination, until he stops and yanks loose a five. He hands it to Beck and says, “Keep the change.”