The Sign of the Book (23 page)

Many would disappear for years, till the collector died and his widow liquidated his estate. Then they would pass, again largely unnoticed, into some other collector's hands. If they had been good enough to pass muster once, why not again?

A forger is like any other con man: he counts on the greed of his customer. The buyer wants it to be real, and if it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck and has webbed feet and a duck face, well, damn, it's probably a duck. If the price is way down near wholesale, why wouldn't he buy it? Why wouldn't the next generation of collectors buy it as well?

Provenance? Forget it, we weren't talking about Hemingways or signed Salingers here. Who asks at this level?

The more I read the more I believed that the Preacher was following my own game plan almost to the letter. Five hundred books sounds like a bunch, but I could sell these like hotcakes.

Marshall was a good forger. None of the signatures I had seen looked in any way suspicious. The Robert Frost I had bought looked real enough to fool me, until a question arose and I looked closer. Even then a specialist had to tell us for sure. It was a damned good fake.

Either Marshall himself had been that good or he'd had access to a good forger.

I stood at the file, trying to imagine who that might be.

I was still standing there when the horn blew.

Everything I did in the next few minutes was driven by instinct. First I lifted one of Marshall's letters, a one-pager that did nothing but confirm a meeting. I folded it carefully along the original folds and slipped it into my pocket.

Insignificant…small enough, I hoped, that they wouldn't miss it.

Almost in the same motion I pushed the file back into the cabinet. I slammed the drawer shut and shoved in the long steel rod that was supposed to lock it.

The lock wouldn't catch.

I shoved it again and banged it with my palm. Finally had to leave it that way.

I faced the open window. I heard a bump.

Another bump, closer now. I was out of time.

I heard the squeak of a loose board on the porch and a soft breath from the breathless room next door. Footsteps came in through the kitchen. There was a pause, then the unmistakable ratcheting noise of a shell being jacked into the chamber of a gun.

“I knew it.” The Preacher's voice had a soft, steely edge that I hadn't heard from him before. “He's been in here.”

Wally grunted. “Everything looks the same to me.”

“How would you know?”

“I got eyes, Preacher. Maybe I'm not as dumb as you think I am.”

The footsteps came closer. I flattened myself against the wall.

“I think you're just lettin' him spook you,” Wally said.

“A lot you know. Every time I turn around, he's there. I can't even take a leak without running into that guy in the same stall.”

“You got him on the brain is all.”

“Don't tell me what I've got. Go look back in your room. I'll stand here where I can see both doors.”

I heard Wally move down the short hallway. They'd be in here next. I stepped back into the bathroom and eased my way around the toilet.

The floor creaked under my foot.

“What was that?”

“Jesus, Preacher, it's just me. That guy's gonna give you a nervous breakdown.”

I stepped into the shower stall and carefully, noiselessly, pulled the scummy curtain tight. A moment later I heard Wally say, “Well, he ain't back there.”

“Never mind the sarcasm. You go look around outside. I'll check in my room and we can bring over the truck and load this stuff up and get out of here. The sooner we clear this town, the better I'll feel.”

I heard his footsteps coming close. In the distance a door closed as Wally went out. The Preacher started across the bedroom and stopped. I heard the filing cabinet open and close.

“Wally! Get in here! He's been here! He's broken into my filing cabinet.”

“Maybe you just left it that way.”

“Shut up, Jesus, shut up. Just get out there and find him. I need to look through these files and see if anything's missing.”

“You think he might still be out there?”

“How do I know where he is, he's like some phantom, he turns up everywhere.”

“Look, Preacher—”

“Just shut up and get him.”

“Yeah? What am I supposed to do if I do see him?”

The Preacher said something in a low voice. Wally said, “Yeah, right,” but he clumped out anyway. I heard him a minute later, walking through the weeds outside the bathroom window. In the other room the Preacher had begun talking to himself.

“God
damn
it.”

A moment later, barely audible: “Oh, that fucking bastard.”

I heard the rustle of papers, a quick shuffle through the mound of files. This went on for some time, until Wally came in again.

“Anything missing?”

“Doesn't seem to be.”

“There you go, then.”

“There you go
what
? For God's sake, just go! Go
find
him!”

I heard him slam the cabinet drawer.

Footsteps, coming my way. Very close now…he was in the bathroom, a few feet away. The toilet seat banged up. The Preacher broke wind loudly as he peed.

He stood back, breathing hard. I could see his shape in the light coming in from the window. I thought he had turned and was facing the shower but couldn't be sure. I put my hand on my gun and waited. I heard him breathe. I lifted my gun to my side.

Suddenly his shadow filled the shower curtain like the image of that old-woman figure in
Psycho.
He jerked it back, we stood looking at each other with guns ready, and in that second all the worst consequences of my breaking and entering were there in my face. This was why I had been spooked, that half-formed hunch that I would not help Laura but would ruin her case. He could have shot me then and been legally justified: he had the law on his side and if I shot him, I'd be up the creek. I thought he must know that. If I thought anything in that wild, crazy instant, that would probably be it, but who can tell whether instinct in the heat of a moment is the same as thought?

He must know that. He knows it, but he's no killer.

He can't kill me. It takes a certain kind of man to do that and he's no killer.

He didn't move for what seemed like a long time. In fact it was all part of the same few seconds. The sun coming through the window broke over his shoulder and fell on my face. I felt his eyes burning out of the shadows. Neither of us spoke: there was no outrage or fear or anything else. But what I did then may have saved one or both of us. I grinned at him…and I winked.

I heard a little cry come up from his throat. He shook his head and closed his eyes as if he could blink me away, then he took a step back and lost his balance. He almost fell, almost lost the gun as he grabbed frantically for something to hold. The gun went off and blew a hole in the roof. He kept flailing and finally grabbed the shower curtain and it ripped halfway off its rod, then the whole rod came loose and he fell back against the sink, tangled in the scummy plastic. I heard him cry out as he struggled like a live fish in Saran Wrap. “Ah!” he yelled. “Ah!…Ah!”…and he rolled over and fell again, this time through the open doorway and flat on his back in the middle of the bedroom. He scrambled up and crawled out into the hall. I couldn't see him now but I could hear him, running through the house and out onto the porch.

I heard the car start as I went cautiously into the bedroom. His tires sent gravel flying into the air, and from the doorway I saw Wally, running along the road, yelling for him to stop.

I looked back just once. The filing cabinet was still wide open with the files in plain sight, and in that last crazy instant I was tempted to go at them again. Common sense said,
What are you, out of your mind?
I had pushed luck far past its limit, and Prudence, that cautious old whore, wanted me to get the hell gone. I hustled out the back way and across the yard, around the garage, and into the trees, on through the thick underbrush in the general direction of town. The day felt suddenly warm in the wake of my near disaster, and again I thought,
Damn, I've gotta change my ways,
even as I knew I probably wouldn't. If I had ever listened to Prudence, I wouldn't be here now, shooting my own case full of holes. I'd still be a career cop. Laura Marshall would sink or swim without my help. I wouldn't have become a bookseller or made these discoveries, wouldn't have met Erin in the first place.

I turned back up toward the warehouse. It never crossed my mind that Todd might be gone: it was the kind of day when no one does what he's supposed to and nothing quite happens according to Hoyle. I got in the car beside him and he drove us away without a word. It was clear enough what had happened here: the Preacher had come roaring up and he and Willie had taken the truck and vanished in about two minutes. I didn't need a crazy man's Baedeker to figure that out, and Todd didn't want to talk about it. We drove past the open ramp door and I glanced into the room. I could see books scattered across the floor, out onto the loading dock, and down the ramp. A few had fallen into the tall grass across the yard and their pages billowed at us in the wind. I had a sudden hollow feeling and a strong premonition that I would never see the Preacher again.

So is this where it ends? Does it just fizzle away with disappearing perps and me with no good answers?

This was the damnedest case. We had a crazy judge and a crazier deputy, at least two hundred grand of worthless books, and none of our suspects or their motives made any sense at all. I thought of Lennie and the Preacher, linked only by their arrogance and in the similar ways I had backed them down, and I wanted to laugh.

We passed Wally, trudging along and muttering under his breath. He glared at us as we sped by but I looked straight ahead as if he didn't exist. An hour later we were in the air, banking north-northeast toward Denver. It was a quiet ride, almost stilted. Todd asked me no questions and I told him no lies. He was a smart guy, Todd, and he understood that the less he knew the better. Better for himself, better for Laura Marshall's prospects, better for Erin, and most of all for me. I had nothing to say to any of them. Soon enough I'd reflect on what it all might mean, but for the moment I was happy just to be alive. Moses had been right, and one day over a deep highball I would tell him so. But I wouldn't take any pride in my sudden enlightenment or how I got that way.

Erin made plans to move over to Paradise in early December and we prepared for the hearing on our motion to suppress. Now I was wary of my involvement in the case and warier yet of telling Erin why. I would have to, of course, but not now and not by telephone. She sounded unusually optimistic as November winnowed down: “Apparently Lennie never heard of the Constitution,” she said. “Their investigation sucks. All their evidence is tainted.” I thought of my own potentially tainted evidence, if we should ever get that preacher on the stand as an alternate suspect. “The DA has no idea how badly his witness may have screwed things up,” she said.
And you, sweetheart, have no idea how I have screwed up,
I thought. In my mind, Lennie and I faced each other in a titanic battle of morons.
Gunfight at the Dipshit Corral.

I tried to redeem myself in legitimate work. The books were in limbo in the sheriff's evidence room and I had spent three days examining them. I was certainly no handwriting expert, but I was reasonably certain that the majority and perhaps all were forgeries. Too many seemed signed with the same kind of pen, the same ballpoint ink. Erin was thinking of hiring an outside handwriting expert and was still mulling it over as December approached.

She considered the usual battalion of expert witnesses, who would testify if needed about things they hadn't seen based on textbook science and likelihoods and their own professional experience. I have never quite trusted professional witnesses: I understand the need for them in this day and age, but in the end they are hired guns lined up to discredit the same witnesses for the other side. An expert is impressive as hell until suddenly the opposite truth comes out. They are trained to know things, yet we have seen even the best of them make mistakes. I remembered the handwriting experts with impeccable credentials who got hoodwinked by that ingenious murderous forger, Mark Hofmann. The experts knew everything about paper and inks, they knew all the tricks, while Hofmann was nothing but a self-taught madman. And he fooled them.

Our witnesses would talk about everything from the condition of the house to the condition of our defendant's mind. Our psychologist, an expert on coercion and mental stress, had interviewed Laura twice and could buttress her story of why she had initially lied. He was a solid guy Erin had used before, a young dynamo who had testified in dozens of cases and presented an unshakable demeanor, she said, in court. In Denver, Erin had spent a lot of time with Jerry and his guardian ad litem, trying to communicate with the kid and figure out what he might have seen, whether he could somehow give testimony in writing and what this testimony might reveal. She had found an expert on juvenile witnesses, but at this point none of us knew what Jerry had actually seen or done, or what we might want him to testify to. He was a risky wild card at best, and Laura was still trying to insist that he be left out of it.

At the end of this parade Erin had her book expert, me. The DA had contacted his own rare-book authority, a dealer named Roger Lester, who had recently moved to Denver from New York. Lester had opened a shop downtown, on Seventeenth Street, and had taken out one of those splashy quarter-page phone-book ads, putting my own modest one-inch ad to shame.
International book searches,
it said. I didn't do that.
Expert appraisals,
it offered. I did do that, at least well enough to know that one man's expert is another man's idiot.
Highest prices paid for good books,
it blared. Yeah, well, people could say whatever they wanted in the yellow pages, and in fact Lester might be very good. I fought back my drift toward reverse snobbery and prepared to like the guy.

He would arrive in Paradise the second week in December to do his appraisal for the state. “They still don't know that our own assessment of the books has changed,” I told Erin on the telephone. “They have no idea yet that any of them are forgeries, and unless he figures that out on his own, they're going to assign the values as if they're real.” I sensed Erin's amusement and read between the lines. Gill was going on the old sucker's assumption that one out-of-town expert was worth ten local guys, and Lester after all was from New
York
!—Jesus, he must know
lots
of good stuff. Let him come, I thought. Let him make his appraisal and we'd see then how good he was.

All these witnesses and more, at $100 per hour and up, travel time extra. The DA would try to show that our experts were simple mercenaries, bought and paid for.

 

After that I was crushingly restless in the little town. I had begun a search for the Preacher and the Keeler boys, in case something turned up suddenly that focused new attention their way. I had called the president of the ABAA as well as the officers of several regional booksellers groups from Texas to Minnesota; I had described the Preacher and what kind of scam he had tried to pull in Colorado. If everybody called just five book friends and had them look for new booksellers in their towns that fit the description, maybe we'd hear something, maybe we wouldn't. In the case of the ABAA alone, the night had more than eight hundred eyes, and the Preacher would be an easy man to spot.

I bird-dogged Lennie's movements the day of the murder, but all he had done was play checkers with Freeman until the call came in at 3:09. I had still not interviewed the photographer who had taken that first-day picture of Laura being booked. His mother had had a heart attack somewhere in Florida and he had gone out of town.

I left a note on his door and checked it every day.

But there was a feeling as winter settled in that the town was deader than Bobby Marshall's moldering carcass; that whatever might have been here was long gone. Paradise was a spent force, a crime scene sucked dry. If the Preacher had been a compulsive record-keeper, Bobby had been his polar opposite. “Bobby burned everything,” Laura told us. “He was secretive, I told you that, he didn't want old letters around to tell people what he had done in life.” The Preacher had left no visible tracks in Paradise, I could find no one who remembered him, and this in itself was troubling. If he had passed any time here with Bobby, even if their meetings had been few and far between, someone should have seen him. People in small towns talk and they notice and remember a stranger, especially one as unusual as the Preacher. But in the days I spent talking to people, I picked up nothing.

The one line in the Preacher's files that troubled me more as time went on might in fact have been meaningless.
We'll meet downtown,
Marshall had written, but now I had to figure that this might not mean in Paradise at all, it might mean Gunnison or Denver. I drove over to Gunnison to poke around, ask about the Preacher and show pictures of Bobby Marshall. It was a futile, frustrating morning. I went on to Alamosa and Monte Vista; I checked the garages and found no evidence that the truck had been towed in or repaired. I checked the Preacher's house and found it empty with a
FOR RENT
sign up in the yard. I wasn't surprised, but again I knew I couldn't have stopped him. There was no criminal charge outstanding against this man, Parley said: “All we've got is your suspicion.”

Erin took this news calmly, as if she had expected it. Never discussed in those critical days was what I knew and how I had come to know it. That's the trouble with burglary as an investigative tool: you can't testify without being willing to say where your facts come from, and an attorney can't put on testimony that she knows to be false. I could imagine what she might've heard from Todd, but I didn't ask that either and she didn't say. “I've got some things to tell you when you get here,” I said.

We were all touching base daily by telephone. I gave her full reports on what I was doing, but it amounted to little more than wheel-spinning. Again I spoke with everyone I saw—on the streets, in the bars, in the stores—and all I picked up was what I already knew. Laura and Bobby Marshall had been rich topics of gossip for years. Occasionally they had been seen in the town, but always apart. She shopped alone and he drank and schmoozed occasionally with locals at the High Country Tavern. After her early stint on the town preservation committee, Laura had kept to herself, a trait that always encourages talk in a small town. Bobby had been more outgoing, which had become their saving grace as a couple. He bought drinks and laughed; he told good stories. But none of his drinking acquaintances was more than that: none could remotely be elevated to the status of pal, and no one knew any reasons why anyone would kill Bobby.

“I've been thinking about how we'll work together if it does go to trial,” Erin told Parley one night. “I'd like you to carry the brunt of this case. I'll be the second chair, at least as far as the world can see.”

“Uh-huh. And the reason for that would be…?”

“Obvious. My relationship with the defendant and the appearance here that I'm a carpetbagger. The judge knows you. And there's a third reason. I think you're a real solid lawyer.”

“You'll still be calling the shots, I hope.”

“We'll call 'em together.”

On December 3, Hugh Gilstrap, the newspaper photographer, returned to town and left a message. My hunch about him suddenly grew stronger: again I sensed a fellow who had been in a position to know something and was maybe just waiting out there to be asked. I made arrangements to see him late that morning.