Booked to Die (19 page)

The next day
began like every other. How it ended was another matter.

I made my rounds and found nothing of interest. The entire day was colored by my coming meeting with Rita McKinley. I was on edge, nervous and apprehensive and in a very real but strange way, thrilled. I had an early lunch with Hennessey and we talked a little about the Westfall case. Hennessey liked Rita McKinley and was inclined to believe everything she said. The line from the police department now seemed to be that Bobby Westfall had been killed by a petty thief, who was likely to remain unknown until he was caught for another crime and confessed to this as well. “Right, Neal,” I said, and he gave me a look over a ten-pound sandwich and decided to say no more about it.

I had time to kill and I didn’t want to go into the store. I called in instead, and told Miss Pride I was heading west and probably wouldn’t see her till tomorrow. “Well, that’s going to be a problem for Peter,” she said. “He was here a while ago looking for you. He seemed quite put out when you weren’t here. I told him to come back at closing time, you’re always here by then.”

“Well, tonight I won’t be. Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, but he certainly made it sound urgent.”

“When he comes in, try to help him. He mentioned to me yesterday that he might have some pretty good books to sell. If he needs some money, give him some. Give him up to a couple of hundred if that’s what it takes. Write him a check on the bank up the street and tell him I’ll square it with him tomorrow.”

“Well, all right, but I don’t think that’s what it’s about. He didn’t have any books with him and he didn’t say anything about money.”

“All right, if worse comes to worst, have him call me up at Rita McKinley’s place. Now, one more thing. Call your friend Harkness and let him know you’re gonna be alone at closing tonight. Tell Ruby and Neff too.”

“I’ll be fine, Mr. Janeway.”

“Listen to me. Do what I tell you. That’s the most dangerous time of day for businesses run by women alone. Just let the others on the block know that you’ll be closing up alone tonight. That way they can keep an eye on you.”

I heard her sigh with feminist impatience.

“Miss Pride? Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Mr. Janeway.”

“Do it.”

“Yes, Mr. Janeway.”

I decided to scout west Denver, work my way through Golden and Morrison and let my momentum carry me to McKinley’s place by late afternoon. For some reason, west Denver is a bookscout’s ghetto. There are a few thrift stores, but nothing to write home about, and Golden is a complete wash. Morrison is an interesting little mountain town, full of antique stores that will sometimes cough up a garnet in the sea of junk. It was, however, less than a blue-ribbon performance: the sum total of the day’s work was less than a dozen books, none even on the fringe of greatness. Some days are like that.

It was almost dark when I drove up the road to Rita McKinley’s. The clock in my dashboard said 4:53. I was run-ning a little later than I’d planned—a place in Evergreen had caught my eye, and you know how bookscouting is. She had left the gate open and I drove right through. She was working when I arrived: she had a fire going in the yard and huge piles of trash waiting to be fed to it. It was chilly. She wore faded jeans and a red flannel shirt and a heavy coat. The house was perched on top of the mountain, a great stone building with a porch that looked east, toward Denver. You couldn’t see the city from there, but that didn’t hurt the view. Miss McKinley gave a wave as I came into the yard. I parked beside her car, a plain Dodge about four years old.

From a distance she looked very young, an illusion that dissolved as I came closer. She was one of those women who look better with some age. She’d be a knockout at forty, about six years from now. We said our hellos and I apologized for intruding. She waved that off and led me inside. “My books are all over the house,” she said. “It’ll take you a long time to see them all. Maybe we should confine ourselves to the big room today.”

The house smelled musty, the way a place gets when it’s been closed for six months. Her living room was long, with a fireplace and a high ceiling. She had an enormous print of a whale, the picture Rockwell Kent had done for the 1930 edition of
Moby Dick
. There were other whales about—knick-knacks on the shelves, pictures on the walls, paintings, photographs. Over the fireplace she had a blown-up photograph of a lone man standing on the bow of a speedboat. A larger boat was in the background, bearing down. I knew what it was: someone from Greenpeace, putting himself between an unseen whale and a boatload of modern whalers.

There weren’t many books in the living room, and these she said were junk, “just things I’m reading.” The main event was two rooms removed. The whole east wall was made of glass. There were heavy drapes, open now, which she used, probably in the morning, to protect her books against the sun. All the other walls were lined with books.

“Before you get started, there was a call for you about ten minutes ago. It may’ve been your girl at the store. It sounded pretty confused. Here, I got part of it on the tape machine.”

She flipped a small cassette player. The first thing I heard was Peter’s voice. He was in the middle of a sentence, as if he’d been talking over the recording. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice sounded almost panicky. He turned away from the phone and there was a jumble of voices. A woman’s voice said, “Let me talk to him, Peter… Peter, would you give me that phone… give it to me, Peter, right now.” There was a click and a bump and Miss Pride came on. “Mr. Janeway, are you there? Hello?” Then I heard her say, lower, as if she’d turned away. “There’s nobody on the line, Peter, are you sure you dialed it right?” Then Peter screamed—literally screamed—“It’s a fucking tape recorder!” and I heard him shout something but I couldn’t make out the words. They were both talking for about ten seconds; then Miss Pride came back on and said in a low voice, “Look, I’m sorry, someone’s come in…I’ll call you back.”

The line went dead.

“You certainly know some strange people, Mr. Janeway,” Miss McKinley said.

“I can’t imagine what was going on there.”

“I think you’d better call her back.”

She went out of the room while I called. The phone rang and rang. The clock on the wall said five twenty-five: the store had been closed for twenty-five minutes.

I sat for a moment and stared at the machine. Miss McKinlev poked her head in.

“Everything all right?”

“I don’t know. Could I hear the tape again?”

But there was nothing on the tape that hadn’t been there the first time.

I called Seals & Neff. Ruby answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Rube, this’s Janeway. Listen, would you walk up the street and see if everything is okay at my place?”

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“Peter was just in there. I’m afraid he may’ve been giving Miss Pride some grief.”

“Sure… gimme your number where you’re at…I’ll call you right back.”

I hung up and sat down to wait.

“How about some coffee?” Miss McKinley said. “I’ve got some whiskey if you’d like a drink.”

“As a matter of fact, it is almost decent time for a bourbon.”

“How do you like it?”

“Just like it comes.”

She came back with the drink just as Ruby called. She motioned to the phone, that I should answer it, and I did. Ruby said, “Place looks shipshape to me, Dr. J. All locked up tight and the night-light on.”

“Did you try the doors?”

“All both of’em. Walked around, rattled the windows, sang three stanzas of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ through the keyhole. Nobody’s there, Dr. J. Whatever the bug up Pete’s ass was, she must’ve handled it and got him out of there.”

“Okay,” I said in a doubtful voice. “Thanks, Ruby.”

I looked at Miss McKinley. “What a crazy thing.”

“There’s probably a simple explanation.”

“Yeah…but you’d think she’d call back.”

“Maybe it slipped her mind. She did say someone had come in. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Might as well do what you came for.”

Everything julian lambert
had said about her books was true, except that even then you weren’t prepared for them. You just don’t see that many sensational books in one place. It was all literature, published since the mid-1800s, and it was all letter-perfect. You need a bookman’s eye to appreciate what a perfect copy of a fifty-year-old book looks like. It does not look like a new book—it looks so wonderfully like an old book that’s never been touched. Never been touched by human hands—that’s the feeling her books gave you. There were things in that room that I knew hadn’t been seen in that condition in half a century. She had a shelf of Jack Londons in crisp dust jackets from before 1910. She had a little poetry piece that had ushered Ernest Hemingway into the book world. She had Mark Twain’s copy
of Kim
, signed by Kipling when he and Clemens had met, in 1907. There were so many signed books, variants, unique pieces, books with unusual associations, books from authors’ personal libraries, letters, and manuscripts that mere first editions seemed unexciting and trite. She had factory-fresh copies of
Look Homeward, Angel
, and Steinbeck’s first, awful, but extremely scarce novel,
Cup of Gold
. After a while this becomes meaningless: it degenerates into a simple list of the great, the rare, the wonderful. When I came upon Hawthorne’s copy of
Moby Dick
, inscribed by Melville in great friendship and lavishly annotated in Hawthorne’s hand, I heard a long deep sigh fill the room. I realized a moment later that it had been my own voice.

The phone rang, and I thought of Miss Pride. I heard the recorder kick on and Rita McKinley’s voice repeating the message I had heard so often. At the beep, a man said, “Rita, this is Paul… Call me back when you can.” It rang again, almost immediately. The recorder played and beeped and a voice said, “This is George Butler the Third calling from New York. I have decided to buy the four books we discussed yesterday. Would you please ship and bill as soon as possible?” Of course I knew who Butler the Third was. I saw his self-aggrandizing ads in the AB all the time. “Mr. George Butler III announces his acquisition of…” That kind of thing. George Butler was one of the so-called big boys of the book world. You read his ads and you knew he never put on his pants like a mortal man, he just drifted up and floated down into both legs at once. I wondered what four books George Butler had decided he couldn’t live without, and what the tariff would be. Ten thousand? Twenty? Just routine business for Ms. McKinley, who was certainly operating on a high level from her ivory tower in the mountains.

I took a break and called Miss Pride’s home number. She wasn’t home. I looked through some more books. I had done most of one short wall and still had the long wall and another short one left. I felt light-headed, like a drunk just coming back from a three-week bender. It had been too rich, this feast of her books, and I decided to pack it in for the night. I got up, stretched, and moved to the door. There was no sound in the house, other than the grandfather’s clock ticking in the hallway. The clock said it was eight-thirty. I went through the dark hall, drawn by the light at the end. Suddenly I smelled food cooking. When I came into the kitchen, I saw that she had set a table for two.

I didn’t see her at first. She was standing by the glass door, perfectly still, lost in thought, looking away into the night. I cleared my throat. She turned. There was a pensive, lonely, almost sad look on her face. I didn’t know what else to call it but a window to the soul. It disappeared at once and the mask came up. She looked surprised, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“Well, Mr. Janeway. You all finished?”

“Give me another week and I might be just getting started.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I thought I’d buy something,” I said. “I guess I wanted to show off. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know where to begin.”

“It has that effect on people. It can be overwhelming.”

“I hope when you go away for months at a time you have some way of protecting it.”

“I do lock the gate.”

“Don’t you even have a burglar alarm?”

She shook her head. “You think I should?”

“Yes, and an armed guard, and spotlights, a siren, and killer dogs. I’d also put a moat around the house and fill it with crocodiles. That’s for starters.”

“Oh, it’s no fun having something if you’ve got to lock it up… if it makes you paranoid.”

“There’s a difference between paranoia and common sense. You’d hate to come home someday and find all these books gone.”

“Yes, but they’re only books. I’d just go get some more.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

She said, “I love what I do but I’m not very materialistic. If I don’t have them, somebody else will. As long as they’re not destroyed, the world’s no worse off.”

“I don’t believe you said that. I could spend a week in that room without water, food, or air.”

“Speaking of food and water, I’m fixing us something to eat. Hope you don’t mind fruit and veggies. I’m trying to stop eating meat.”

It was an Eastern dish, very tasty, with nuts and shoots and broccoli under a golden baked crust. She had a good bottle of wine and a little chocolate cake for dessert.

We talked over dinner. She was giving up meat for both main reasons, health and politics. She was an environmentalist, but I had already guessed that. I didn’t think the individual could make much difference. She bristled at that and said, “As long as you think that way, you are the enemy. The individual is the only one who can make a difference.” I didn’t believe that but I didn’t want to ruffle her. She was a woman who mattered to me, very suddenly, very keenly, and I wished we could talk without having our conversation sprinkled with land mines. I said, and meant it, that I probably agreed with most of her political views, I just didn’t believe some of them could be won that way.

She looked at me with a blank expression. “I can’t figure you out, Janeway.”

“That makes us even. I can’t figure you out.”

“I don’t know whether you’re a poet or a thug.”

I laughed at that: couldn’t help myself. She shook her head and didn’t seem amused.

“What do you do in the summer?” I asked.

“Travel. What do you do?”

“What I do all the time anymore. I look for books. Do you look for books in the summer, in exotic and faraway places?”

“I don’t have anything to do with books in the summer. I am, for all practical purposes, closed down between May and September. I don’t even read books in the summer.”

“What do you do if you get a call on the first of May from some guy in New Mexico, who says he’s got ten thousand perfect books and he’s selling them all cheap?”

“I tell him he’ll have to call someone else. I might refer him to you, if I like you.”

“You give me the impression that none of this matters.”

“It matters. This collection was put together with tender loving care, so it does matter. It’s just not the most important thing.”

“What is?”

“I don’t think I’ll answer that question yet. Maybe I will, if I ever get to know you better. For now, it’s none of your business.”

We ate in silence for a moment. Then she said, “Tact is not one of my strong points. If you were still a policeman, I guess I’d have to tell you, wouldn’t I? You can find out if you want: your friend Mr. Hennessey knows.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Good. And really, it’s no big deal. I’m just very… very… private. I value my privacy more than anything but my freedom.”

“Hey.” I held up both hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

The phone rang: the recorder kicked on. It was another dealer, in San Francisco, asking if she still had the first edition
Phantom of the Opera
. I knew she had it: I had seen it on my tour of the short wall.

“You’ve got your phone amplified all over the house?” I said.

She nodded. “That way I can weed out the pests. The answering machine puts a buffer between me and the world; the amplifier lets me know if it’s someone I want to talk to now. But I never get calls that can’t wait.”

“Not even George Butler the Third,” I said with false awe.

“George is a very large pain. I don’t know why I fool with him.”

“You know what I’d like to have?” I said suddenly. “Your Steinbeck, with the penis doodle.”

She laughed, the first time I’d seen her do that. “ ‘Tom Joad on the road.’ It’s one of my favorite books. Very expensive for that title.”

I felt my throat tighten. “How expensive?”

“If you’ve got to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Seriously, you don’t have to buy anything. I don’t charge admission up here.”

I took out my checkbook and tapped it lightly on the table.

Her eyes narrowed and got hard. “Fifteen hundred,” she said.

The knot in my throat swelled, but I began to write the check.

“Make it twelve,” she said. “I usually don’t give or ask for discounts, but I will this time. Make it payable to Greenpeace.”

I blinked at her. “Greenpeace?”

“Do you want me to spell it for you?”

“Greenpeace,” I said dumbly.

“Greenpeace gives me a reason to get up in the morning.”

I handed her the check. “Oh, I’ll bet you have at least a thousand very good reasons for getting up in the morning, Miss McKinley.”

She blushed when I said that. She really did. I felt a flush in my own cheeks. It had been a long time since I’d tried playing the gallant.

“So,” she said, going for more coffee, “you’ve just bought your first really nice book and paid retail for it. What are you going to do with it?”

“Gonna sell it.”

“Good for you. You think there’s any margin?”

“For something like this, there’s always margin.”

“You know, Mr. Janeway, I really do think you’re going to turn out to be a good bookman. You already know what sometimes takes people years to learn.”

“Which is…?”

“When you buy something unique, and pay twice what it’s worth, it’s a great bargain. It took me a long time to learn that. Some people never learn it. George Butler never has. Now it’s the only way I operate.”

“That’s fine if your pockets are deep enough.”

“That does help. It’s hard making it from scratch in the book business.”

“Tell me about it.”

Please tell me about it, I thought. We were going nowhere fast, on an endless merry-go-round of polite tea talk. I needed a breakthrough, something to batter down the walls she had built around herself. I had a hunch that if I walked out of there without finding that key, she’d never let me come back. There was something at work between us, and it was good but it wasn’t all good. I couldn’t get a handle on any of it. I knew she was curious about me but she’d never ask: by refusing to talk about herself, she had given up that right. I could see that if there was any opening up to do, I’d be the one to do it. Slowly I turned the talk to my childhood. She listened intently and I was encouraged to go on. It became very personal. Suddenly I was telling her things I had never told anyone.

In the first place, my birth was an accident. My father is a lawyer whose name heads a five-pronged Denver partnership on 17th Street. He makes half a million in a good year and can’t remember when his last bad year was. There’s no way I’ll inherit any of that—my old man and I haven’t spoken to each other in fifteen years, and we weren’t close even before that. Larry Janeway isn’t a man people get close to. He is, however, dignified. He’s famous in court for his dignity and composure. Once, as the song went, that composure sorta slipped, and a dalliance with a truly gorgeous woman thirty-seven years ago produced… me. Here I sit, brokenhearted. I look at my parents and on one hand I see chilly arrogance and deceit; on the other, frivolous insanity. All the Libertys were crazy, and Jeannie, my mother, was probably certifiable. It was Jeannie, I think, who caused me to distrust beautiful women. I’ll take brains, heart, and wit over beauty every time out. What’s amazing is how well I survived their best efforts to tear me apart, how, in spite of them, I turned out so well adjusted and sane. So completely goddamned normal.

“Well, sort of goddamned normal,” she said without a smile.

“Oh yeah? How goddamned normal do you think you are?”

“Pretty goddamned normal.”

Suddenly she laughed, a schoolgirl giggle that lit her up and made her young again. “Now there’s my intelligent conversation of the week,” she said, and we both laughed. I wondered if that was the break I was looking for, but it didn’t seem to be. She would listen, interested, to anything I wanted to tell her, but still she wouldn’t ask. I’ve never been brilliant at monologue, but I did my best. I told her about life at North High, about growing up in a pool of sharks. “If there’s a thug in me, I guess that’s where it comes from.” Where the poet came from, if there was such a thing, was anybody’s guess.

“It’s getting late,” she said.

Was that strike three? Her tone gave away nothing.

A bold frontal attack, then, seemed to be the last weapon in the old Janeway arsenal.

“Look, give me a break. Why don’t you open that door, just a little, and see what’s on the other side?”

“I know what’s on the other side. I haven’t exactly led a monastic life.”

“C’mon, let’s cut to the chase, Rita. Dinner Friday night and a tour of Denver’s hottest hot spots.”

“Nope. Not my cup of tea, Mr. Janeway.”

“Then I’ll rent a tux and we’ll go to the Normandy. I don’t care.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, take the full thirty seconds and think it over.”

She shook her head.

“I know a great restaurant that serves nothing but broccoli. I’ll take you there for breakfast. Broccoli pancakes, the best in town. We’ll take a ride on the Platte River bus. Race stick-boats down the stream. Walk down Seventeenth Street and stick our tongues out at my old man’s law office. Forget about books and crime and everything else for a few hours. Come on, what do you say?”

“No,” she said firmly.

“I knew you’d see it my way.”

She gave me the long cool stare. “You’re pushing, Mr. Janeway. I don’t want to be blunt.”