Booked to Die (30 page)

The road snaked
away to the left, a narrow blacktop five miles south of Longmont. Houses were sprinkled on both sides. The pavement ended with a bump and the houses fell away and we clattered along a dusty washboard road. Trees appeared on the rolling edge of the prairie.

There was a rutted side road, just where Ruby’s map showed it: then the house, peeping through the seams of a wooded arroyo. I turned in and stopped. My odometer showed that we had come twenty-six miles from downtown Denver.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” Rita said.

“We’ll see.”

I left her there with the motor running and walked the hundred yards to the house. It was an old country house, American gothic. The windows were dark and in the mid-morning light it looked deserted. A rambling front porch flitted in and out of view through a blowing hedge. The wind was strong, whipping down the front range. Some of the windows had been boarded up: the front railing was down in places and the steps looked rickety and dangerous. On the east end some scaffolding had been erected and there was evidence of recent work. There were no cars in the yard. I watched for a while but saw nothing that mattered.

I moved to the edge of the house, then around to the front. The place was like a crypt: not even a bird to break the monotony, only that steady beating wind. I eased up the steps to the porch, flattened myself beside the door and listened.

Nothing.

How many times have I done this, I thought: how many times when I was a cop did I jack up my courage and walk into trouble with this same gun pointing the way? It never loses its charm: the prospect of sudden death, maybe your own, always comes with a clutching at the throat and a rush of adrenaline. I tried the door. It creaked open and I looked in at a picture of frontier America. Broken old furniture. Antique pictures. Farm relics from another time. A kerosene lamp stood on a table, its glass charred black. An old wooden yoke had been thrown in a corner.

I took one step inside. The floor creaked and in the silence it sounded like a gunshot. I flattened against the door and caught my breath. I waited, listening. I waited so long a mouse scurried across the room.

It didn’t look promising. The dust in the parlor was half an inch deep. No one had been through here in at least six months.

Doesn’t seem to be Janeway’s year for hunches.

If it didn’t pan out I was back to zero. Square one. Lookin‘ for a turtle-faced man and a whole new gambit.

I left deep black prints in the dust. I crossed the scurry marks left by the mouse. It’s going to be a wash, I thought, another dead end. I had reached a long dark hallway and still nothing had happened. A thick ribbon of dust, undisturbed since time began, stretched out toward the back of the house.

I lowered the gun. My forces were still on alert, but the condition was downgraded from red to yellow.

There were two rooms on each side of the hall. At the end was another hall that went into the east wing. There was a door, which was closed.

But it opened without creaking when I tried it.

On the other side was a different world. I world of paint and glass and fresh-hung wallboard. A bright world where music played and people lived.

I went back on red alert, following my gun to whatever lav-ahead.

A skeleton key was stuck in the door. The radio was playing so softly it could barely be heard a room away. The floor was shiny and new. I saw a kitchen off to the left: well lit, papered yellow, with shiny new appliances. There was a half-finished den and, across from that, a bedroom. A radio sent soft tones down the hall from the kitchen: elevator music from KOSI. The scaffold’s shadow leaped across the room.

I peeped into the bedroom.

He was on the bed, fully dressed, lying on top of a bright blue bedspread. He seemed to be sleeping, but his face was to the wall so I couldn’t be sure. I had a vision of him lying there, eyes wide, waiting. I went in cautiously and he didn’t stir. His breathing was deep and rhythmic, as if he’d been asleep for some time. I eased my way to the side of the bed. I still couldn’t see his face. He lay with one arm under him, his hand out of sight. I didn’t like that, but I was as ready as a guy ever gets. I leaned over and shook him lightly.

“Get up, Neff,” I said, “and bring that hand out very slowly.”

He was awake at once: too quickly, I thought, but a man standing over your bed with a gun will bring you up fast. He drew himself up till he was sitting. It was when he tried to look surprised that I knew I had him. He wasn’t enough of an actor to pull it off.

“Stand up real easy,” I said. “Just like that. Good boy. Now. I want you to go to that wall and put your hands against it, just like you see on TV.”

I patted him down. He didn’t have anything.

“Sit down over there,” I said. “Not there…over in the plain wooden chair. Just sit there and face me.”

He sat and watched while I did what a good cop always does: checked the obvious, easy places for weapons and found none.

He moved.

“Sit still,” 1 said.

“I was gonna scratch my leg.”

“Don’t scratch anything. Don’t even look at me funny. This gun of mine gets nervous.”

“You wouldn’t shoot me.”

“I sure as hell would.”

“So what’s going on?”

That was his total and token attempt at denial. He knew he couldn’t act and now I knew it too. Ruby had said he had been a magician and maybe that was true, but he’d never win an Oscar for bluffing his way out of a tight one. I had known a few others like that, guys who could lie as long as you didn’t suspect them. Look them in the eye, though, and accuse, and they’d fall apart.

Neff was trying to avoid my eyes. He looked at the ceiling, at the window—anywhere but at me. “You like my place, Mr. Janeway? My uncle left it to me; I’ve been working on it a year. Sealed off this part and I just do a little at a time. Eventually I’ll do it all. This isn’t really my thing… carpentry… painting… but I do like the way it’s coming together. I just do a little here and there. I don’t like to sweat much.”

“That’s what Ruby tells me.”

He gave a little laugh: wry, affectionate, almost tender.

“Ruby,” he said. “What a swell guy. Do anything for anybody. Great guy.”

“Would you like to tell me where you put the books?”

He shrugged. Jerked his head to one side. Couldn’t seem to find the words.

He looked through the window. He had a clear view of the road from here. “I saw you coming. I knew the way you were coming, cautiously like that… well, I just knew. 1 could’ve shot you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Gun’s in the barn. You’d‘ve seen me run for it. And I wasn’t sure how much you really knew. I thought maybe I could… talk you out of it. Shoulda known better. How’d you find out? What’d I do wrong?”

You were born, I thought.

“Tell me,” he said. “I need to know.”

“Maybe I’ll make you a deal. I might tell you if you tell me where the books are.”

“Sure… I’ll tell you… What’ve I got to lose?”

I thought about it, and wavered. The evidence was slippery, fragmentary. I feared for its life in a court of law. I had proceeded without regard for its welfare and now I had a strange, almost chilly reaction, talking about it calmly with the killer. Neff gave a little smile and the chill settled in. I didn’t need him, I thought: I’d find the books anyway, sooner or later.

But I was a bookman, not a cop, and I wanted to see them now. I had the fever, the bookseller’s madness, and I wanted to see what had driven an otherwise sane man to murder.

How do you figure it out? You think about it all the time. How does a sculptor carve an elephant out of a block of wood? Takes a block of wood and carves away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. When you’re sleeping your mind’s working on it. When you drive through a snowstorm, dead people whisper in your ear. You even think about it when you’re making love and it’s then, in fact, that the first glimmer comes working through the haze. Writers and sculptors work that way, why can’t cops? Books have been written about the creative process: tens of thousands of words from dusty academics about the writer’s vision. The funny thing is, I’ve always worked that way as a cop, but nobody writes books about that.

You get a vision—not necessarily what is, but what might be.

I was making love with Rita and suddenly I heard Ruby’s voice.
It’s the most hypnotic business
, he said, and just like that I had broken Neff’s alibi. Try to use that in a courtroom. You couldn’t, but baby, I saw the vision. At last I put it into words. “I just kept digging, kept after it. It’s a process of elimination as much as anything. Judith didn’t do it. Ballard didn’t do it. There wasn’t any turtle-faced man, Neff: it was just a cover you made up on the spot. Once I saw that it might’ve happened that way, I started remembering things. They all added up to you.

“Here’s what happened. Stop me if I go wrong. You walked in a minute or two before five. You threw a bunch of cream puffs down in front of Ruby, knowing he’d go into an instant trance. Then you went back to the crapper, only you didn’t stop there. You went on out into the back yard, around the building, and up the street. Your timing had to be perfect. Any little thing could’ve messed you up: any glitch between one place and the other. A customer who lingered past closing time… somebody who saw you go into my store just after five… any one of a dozen things, and all of them broke your way. You must’ve been desperate, Neff, to’ve tried something like that, and it damn near worked.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know what desperation is…”

“But it all worked. It was already dark: there was nobody on the street; luck was riding on your wagon all the way. It took you what… thirty seconds to cover the ground from your back door to my place. You forced Miss Pride to lock the door, then you herded them into the back room and shot them. You were back in your own place in no time, surely less than five minutes. You came through the back and stashed the gun—it was probably still there, somewhere behind the shelves, when I talked to you the next day—and when you came up front, Ruby was right where you’d left him, thinking no time at all had passed. You couldn’t‘ve done a better job on him if you’d hypnotized him. In a way it was better than hypnosis.

“The flu was also a fake, a cover for the shakes you had after killing three people. Once I realized that, I started seeing other pieces everywhere. I remembered Ruby once telling me how you protect your privacy. I remembered him talking about the farm you’d inherited. Longmont’s just thirty miles from Denver: the truck Bobby used had seventy-four miles on the odometer when he brought it back. I thought how strange it was that you gave your phone number to no one. Even your partner didn’t have it. Ruby had laughed about that one night when we were working late in my store—how you didn’t want to be called at home no matter what. There was something wrong with that, Neff; it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I remembered. Hell,
I
had seen your phone number: I’d seen it written down somewhere. Then I remembered where. It was in Bobby Westfall’s little address book.“

He laughed sadly and shook his head. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.

“It’s there in his book,” I said. “We can dig it out of the evidence room and I can show it to you. I’m surprised it took me so long to remember it. So why would you give your number to a bookscout, Neff? There is no bigger pest on this earth than a hungry bookscout, yet you give him your private number when even your partner can’t get it. That doesn’t make sense… unless you and Bobby have something going together. Then it makes all the sense in the world. And that’s what happened. You had something going with Bobby. Something more important than your partner or your business or anything else in your life.

“Then there was the matter of the driver’s license. Bobby didn’t have one but you didn’t know that. Ruby knew it, but not you. You still didn’t know it, even after you killed Bobby. You never understood how Peter Bonnema got involved in it, because you always assumed that you and Bobby were in it alone. The one thing I never could figure was how you found out about old man Ballard and his books.”

“I’ve known about them for years. Known about… thought about them…”

“How’d you know?”

“I had a little bookstore on Eighth Avenue. This was long ago, before Ruby and I even knew each other. It was on Eighth near Ogden. That’s not far, you know, from where Mr. Ballard lived. One day he came in. We got to talking. He said he had a lot of books. One thing led to another, and I said I’d like to come see them. He was very cordial. So I went to his house…I went to his house. The man was… simply incredible. He had the best eye for books…I can’t imagine how he so consistently managed to pick up these things and save them… things that appreciated—I don’t know how else to say it—beyond belief. And he’d been doing this for forty years. In some cases he had two or three copies of a single title, untouched copies pushed back behind the ones you could see on the shelf. They were all first editions, every one… the most immaculate collection I have ever seen, and, Mr. Jane-way, I have looked at a lot of books. And the damndest thing… the rarest thing…he didn’t care about them at all for that purpose. It was like he had no idea or interest in how much they might be worth. Here was the big score everybody dreams about, and there was no way I could buy them, I could just never get the money together. But the old man… God, he was so naive. I thought maybe if I threw some money at him—not too much but enough, I could get them away from him. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t check any further and for a few grand I’d pull off the heist of a lifetime. I was actually… trembling…as I tried to assess it. Started to throw out a figure and called it back. Didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t make it too high or low. You know how it is—go too low and he figures, hell, he might as well keep them; go too high and he begins to suspect what they’re really worth. You know how it goes—you play people in this business as much as books. I looked around. He didn’t live in luxury, didn’t look rich. Five thousand dollars, I thought: that’d really make a difference to this old man. So that’s what I said, and he smiled like a gentleman and said that was most generous but he wasn’t interested in selling them at that point. Maybe someday, he said. That was ten, twelve years ago, and I want to tell you something, there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about that stuff. I’ve dreamed about it…it comes to me a dozen times a day, when I look out the window or see the shit the scouts bring in…when I realize how hopelessly I’ve mired myself in the workaday crap.”