17

She finds the shop easily enough from the instructions on the phone. It’s set back in a little Burbank shopping mall, hardly much bigger than a motel-she counts eleven stores in the U-shaped court.

When she emerges from the car it is like opening the door of an oven that someone neglected to turn off two days ago: the heat has accumulated in pavement and walls and cars from which it radiates in lancing slivers of reflected sunlight, as painful against the eyes as steel darts.

Everything is too bright, too raw. She scrutinizes the place with unease and a growing skepticism.

It shows painful evidence of a promoter-builder’s efforts to be quaint. The shops have high wooden false fronts and the walkway is shaded by a veranda roof supported on posts and wooden arches-an imitation wild west movie set. The parking lot is decorated with wagon wheels.

There are a western wear shop, an ice cream bar, the Native American Crafts Shop, a one-hour photo store, a harness and tack outfit that features silver-tooled saddles; she makes a face at the hitching rail in front of that one. Next door a display window holds agate and turquoise jewelry under a wooden sign that hangs on chains and carries the legend The Desert Rockhound. On the corner by the curb is a restaurant where you may eat al fresco at rustic tables under big umbrellas, the dining area surrounded by a split-rail corral fence. Behind it the small windows are filled with colored neon signs advertising several brands of beer. That is-inevitably? — Buffalo Bill’s Saloon.

It looks like bloody Disneyland, she thinks, and makes her dubious way toward the half-hidden corner shop that announces itself with a meekly faded sign as Books of the West.

Inside she finds the soothing relief of air conditioning and another kind of relief that the shop hasn’t been decorated with cheap gimcracks: no framed plastic replicas of old guns.

The bookcases along both walls are filled with volumes most of which don’t seem to be new-many are without dust jackets-and the bins and tables that crowd the center of the room are stacked high with oversized picture books and paperbacks and bargain selections: All Books On This Table $1.59.

The cash register near the front door is a genuine antique-brass keys and pop-up numbers behind glass. But she sees a computer screen on the shelf behind.

There is no one at the counter. Two men are deep in conversation near the back: the older one glances her way and speaks up: “Be right with you, ma’am.”

“Take your time,” she says. “No hurry.” She smiles at his “ma’am.”

He is white-haired: tall with a flowing white gunfighter’s mustache, a bit stooped, dressed in jeans and an outdoorsy red plaid shirt. The customer with him is younger-thirties or early forties, brown mustache, khaki poplin business suit.

She removes her sunglasses and replaces them with the clear-lensed ones and glances along the shelves. Hand-crayoned signs thumbtacked to the bookcases identify their subject matter: American Indians … California History … Colorado River … Gold Rush … Gunmen.…

The man with white hair separates himself from his customer and comes forward through the clutter. She sees that he is younger than he appeared at a distance; his smooth tanned face is interestingly in contrast with the color of his hair, which is abundant and well combed, and with the stoop of his shoulders, which at closer glance seems a symptom of scholarliness rather than age. He’s nearer fifty than seventy. His eyes are a troubled brown behind silver-framed glasses.

“May I help you?” He pronounces it he’p. Texas, she decides.

“I’m Jennifer Hartman-the one who called this morning about your ad? Are you Mr. Stevens?”

“Doyle Stevens.” His handshake is almost reluctant. He goes behind the counter and glances out the window and touches a corner of the cash register. He seems to go slack. His attention flits around the walls and she senses a furtive desperation. He utters an awkward laugh. “I feel tongue-tied,” he says.

Then he punches a button: there is the jingle of the high-pitched bell and the No Sale tab flips up and the drawer slams open with a satisfying crunch of noise. It is a gesture: some kind of punctuation.

He says: “You don’t look like somebody looking to get into this kind of business.”

It startles her because she hasn’t had the feeling he’s scrutinized her at all. “I’m sorry. What should I look like?”

He flaps a hand back and forth, dismissing it. “You want to know how’s business, I expect. I can tell you how it is. Calm as a horse trough on a hot day. Or, to put it another way, and not to put too fine a point on it-business is terrible. You think we’d be putting ads in the papers if we were earning a fortune here?”

He pokes his head forward: suspicious, belligerent. The mustache seems to bristle. “Mostly I get fuzzy-headed inquiries by phone. Investors looking for opportunities-want to know about inventory and volume of business. Traffic in the location, all that jargon and bullroar. I tell them if they need to ask those kinds of questions, this is the wrong place for them. I tell them it’s a terrible investment for a real businessman. You could earn more on your money with a passbook savings account.”

Doyle Stevens prods his finger into the drawer and rattles a few coins around and finally pushes it shut. It makes a racket.

Finally he stares at her face. “I get letters from folks in Nebraska. Retired couples looking to set themselves up in retail. Looking for something genteel to, I guess, keep them busy while they enjoy the winter sunshine. I tell them too-forget it, my friends, it’s hard work and it’s full time and then some. My wife and I work a six-day week. And most of our evenings on the cataloging and the mail order.”

He squints at her. “You don’t do this to make money. And you can’t treat it like some kind of part-time hobby.”

She says: “No. You do it because you adore it.”

But her smile seems to exacerbate his anger.

She says, “You have to love the smell of old books.”

“Don’t romanticize it. I hate sentimentality.”

Sure you do, she thinks. What she says is, “Do you and Mrs. Stevens work here together?”

“Normally. She’s at the accountant’s office this morning. Trying to untangle some of the shambles. Paperwork. Federal government, state, county of Los Angeles, you’d think we were right up there alongside General Motors. A small binness like this, the paperwork alone can-Aagh, doesn’t matter.”

He pulls an old-fashioned pocketwatch out of his shirt pocket and snaps its lid open and consults it. Oddly, she does not have the impulse to laugh at the affectation.

He says, “She’s got a good head for that kind of paperwork. And she’s saintly patient with the bureaucracies and their fools. I expect her back shortly, in time for lunch.”

Then he peers at her. “Ever been in the retail book trade?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you’re a Western buff. Afficionado of frontier feminism or Indian folk medicine-one of these fashionable concerns?”

“I wouldn’t know a frontier feminist from Martha Washington. But I adore books and I’d like to learn.”

Doyle Stevens doesn’t try to conceal his suspicion. “Care to tell me why you called?”

“Will you answer one question first?”

He has the talent to cock one eyebrow inquisitively. For some nonsensical reason she has always admired men who can do that. Ever since her third birthday when Uncle Dave-

She shuts off the thought, slamming a door roughly upon it; she says: “‘Investment opportunity for Western Americana bibliophile’-don’t you think that’s ambiguous? Your ad doesn’t make it clear whether you want someone to invest in your business so you can keep it going-or whether you just want to sell it and get out.”

He turns away momentarily. She guesses he’s looking at the customer in the back of the store. The man is well beyond earshot, putting a book back on its shelf and taking another down to examine it.

Doyle Stevens says, “How many sane people you think I’d find, invest money in this loony operation to keep it going?”

“So you want to sell it and get out.”

He waves a hand around, bringing within its compass everything in the shop.

“My wife and I owe the publishers close to ten thousand dollars in unpaid invoices. Another two, three thousand to the jobbers. Owe the bank sixty-five thousand in business loans, eighty thousand mortgage on our house. So you see the plain fact is, Miss Hartman-”

“Mrs.”

“Beg your pardon.” He takes it without a break in expression. “Mrs. Hartman. Plain fact is I could’ve filed bankruptcy but I’d rather not see a receiver take over this inventory. I kind of doubt we’d be fortunate enough to have it fall into the hands of a banker with a true hankering for Western books.”

He folds his hands, interlacing the fingers, looking down at them as if making a religious obeisance. “I was hoping to sell to somebody who’d have-at least a certain respect for this collection. Here, look here.”

He takes down off the shelf behind him a heavy hardcover with a pale blue dust jacket. It looks quite new. Stevens opens it with reverent care. “Triggernometry. Cunningham. The first edition, Caxton Press. Pret’ near mint condition. You have any idea how rare and precious this book is to a true collector?”

Then he replaces it on its shelf and heaves his thin arm high, pointing toward the very top of the bookcase. “Up there-all those? Firsts. Lippincott. Complete works of General Charles King, starting with The Colonel’s Daughter, eighteen and eighty-one. The first Western novel. The very first Western of all time.”

He possesses a bashful wicked smile like a little boy’s: peeking at you out of the corner of his eye, trying to get away with something when he thinks you’re not looking. “That is if you don’t count the penny dreadfuls and the Prentiss Ingraham dime novels and those God-awful stage melodramas of Buntline’s.”

She watches his face. He isn’t smiling any longer. He says in a different voice, “Who the hell remembers General Charles King now.”

“I’m afraid not I.”

“Why, shoot,” he says with a scoffing theatrical snort, “without Charles King there’d’ve been no John Ford, no John Wayne, no nothing.”

He is glaring at her. “I gather that doesn’t mean a whole hill of beans to you. So tell me, Mrs. Hartman. What are you doing here?”

She smiles to deflect the challenge. Liking him, she says, “What if you found an investor to back you with operating capital?”

He looks as if cold water has been thrown in his face. He catches his breath. “What are you saying to me?”

“I’m asking whether you’d prefer to settle your debts and close up shop and go spend the rest of your days in a trailer park-or whether, given the chance, you’d stay in business here.”

It evokes his ebullient laugh. “What the hell do you think?”

She turns a full circle on her heels, surveying the place.

He says: “It’d be very painful if I thought you were kidding around with me.”

It’s nothing wonderful, really. A self-indulgent novelty-specialty enterprise in a cutesy-poo shopping mall. A couple of walls of books, most of them of no interest to anyone whose interests don’t include such arcane memorabilia.

No one from her past life will ever dream of looking for her in a place like this.

“I’m not kidding around with you.” She faces Doyle Stevens. “How much do you need?”

“Thirty-five thousand for the moment. And no guarantee you’d ever see a penny’s return on it.” He says it quickly and takes a backward step, ready to flinch.

She says, “You’re just a hell of a salesman, aren’t you.”

“I’m glad you’re perceptive enough to recognize that God-given talent in me. Marian doubts I could sell air conditioners in Death Valley. God knows what ever got me into retail trade.”

“Do you regret it, then?”

“I regret I’m not rich, yes ma’am.”

“I doubt that.”

“Do you now.” His smile has warmth in it for the first time.

She asks, “How much does the business lose in the course of a year?”

“Depends on the year. By the time Marian and I take our living expenses out-we can usually figure on breaking even more or less. But the last two years have been poorer than normal. Partly the economy. Partly that our customers keep getting older-the demographics would make a market researcher weep. Half our clients are geriatric cases. Sooner or later their eyesight goes bad or they pass away. Whichever comes first.”

A motorcycle goes by with a roar calculated to offend, and the white-haired man glares toward the window. “Our new generation there doesn’t give a hang about the old West. When was the last time you saw a Western in the movies? You don’t see any horse operas on the tube any more. Was a time twenty years ago there’d be two dozen cowboy series on the television every week.”

He looks grim. “Remember True Grit? When was the last respectable Western book on the bestseller list? It’s a sad thing, you know, but there’s a generation out there all the way up into their twenties who think the American myth has something to do with automobiles. They’ve never heard of Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp or Cochise.”

A man’s voice startles her from behind her shoulder. “Doyle, there’s a bloody story in that.”

It’s the customer in the khaki suit. He has a book in his hand. “This any good?”

Doyle Stevens takes it in his hand. “The Journal of Lieutenant Thomas W. Sweeny. Westernlore.” It brings out of him a reminiscent smile. “An absolute delight. Sweeny founded Fort Yuma, you know. Remarkable stories about the Indians down there. They had paddlewheel steamboats on the Colorado River in his day, did you know that?”

She remembers her brief stroll. “You could hardly float a toothpick on it now.”

The customer sizes her up. “That’s the bloody dam builders. You know a hundred and fifty years ago before it got overgrazed and before they bottomed out the bloody water table with too many deep wells, a good part of what’s now the Arizona desert used to be grassland. Green and lush.”

“It’s a shame,” she says with a polite little smile, wishing he would go away.

Doyle Stevens says, “Mrs. Hartman-Graeme Goldsmith.”

She shakes his hand. His eyes smile at her with more intimacy than she likes. He’s odd looking, especially up close where his astonishingly pale blue eyes take effect. It’s been too long since he’s been to the barber; he has a thatch of brown hair just starting to go thin at the front and she thinks she detects a pasty hint under the camouflaging tan: likely he drinks more than he ought to.

“That’s G-r-a-e-m-e,” he says. “Nobody can spell it. My mother fancied the bloody name.”

Time has faded the accent but he is distinctly Australian.

Doyle Stevens, about to burst, says, “Looks as though Mrs. Hartman’s going to be our new business partner.”

“That so?”

She says, “If Mrs. Stevens approves.”

“Well well. Good-oh. We’ll have to give it a proper write-up in the Trib.

An alarm jangles through her.

Doyle Stevens says, “Graeme’s a reporter on the Valley Tribune.

“Not to mention I’m a stringer for the UPI newswire,” Goldsmith says quickly.

She hatches a smile and hopes it is properly gentle. “I’d rather you didn’t print anything about this. It’s sort of a silent partnership.”

“Any particular reason.”

“I don’t want publicity. A woman living alone-you know how it is. It’s the same reason I have my phone unlisted.”

“Okay, Mrs. Hartman. I can buy that.” But she has seen it when he latched onto the statement that she lives alone.

Doyle Stevens says, “You want to pay for that book or were you just going to walk out with it?”

Graeme Goldsmith still has his blue eyes fixed on her face. “How much?”

She tries to keep her glance friendly when it intersects with the Australian’s but after he pays for the book she is glad to see the back of him.

A reporter, she thinks. That’s just what I need.

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