Booked to Die (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was all
some time ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Strange how?” I asked.

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

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

“I thought you would.”

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

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

I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”

“Something wrong with that?”

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

“Mr. Janeway? Is something wrong?”

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

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

I stared at the ceiling.

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

“What?” I snapped. “Unless what?”

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

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

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

“I’m sure he will,” I said dryly.

“I want to know it all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they came up front.

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

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

She was no dummy, Miss Pride.

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

“Uh-uh. Harkness, remember?”

“Go home, Miss Pride.”

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

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

She shook her head.

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

“How ya doin‘, fuckhead?” he said.

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

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

He was doing all the talking.

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

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

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

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

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

“No smoking in here,” I said calmly.

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

“You got a trash can?”

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

They headed toward the door.

“Come again,” I said.

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

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

“It’s okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You ready?”

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

“Okay with you, Janeway?”

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

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

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

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