by John Dunning
“How would you not know it?”
“That’s a very ugly question,” Erin said.
“Yes, it is. It breaks my heart to ask it.”
A streak of impatience flashed across Lee’s face. “This almost sounds like you’re accusing me of something.”
We were all quiet now: even Koko had come over to listen, and the only sound in the room for half a minute was the ticking of the clock.
“Good God,” Lee said. “Do you think I killed that woman?”
I said nothing.
“Cliff!” he cried. “My God, Cliff! Listen to yourself!”
The moment thickened. I desperately wanted to hear something that would make the question go away. Our eyes met but he turned his head to one side.
“Lee,” I said softly.
He forced himself to look at me.
“When Grandma Betts died, the books were left to you. You alone. The old Archer men were dead: she had outlived them all, she had complete control of the estate. Young Archer was an outcast and she left everything to you: money, books, a yellow brick road to a glorious legal career. But you were always a decent guy, Lee, and I mean that. So you shared those books with Archer, gave him the two best of the lot, all under the table so the family wouldn’t hear. The problem always was, you both knew where they’d come from. It was the big dark family secret that all of you knew and no one ever discussed. You all had this common knowledge that old Archer the first had heard about the books and hired the Treadwells to buy them for next to nothing. You knew there was at least one Warren heir and when they came to you, that could have been your chance to make it right. But you let it pass and kept the books. That’s where it all started.”
I looked at Erin, expecting an objection.
“You and Archer had this conspiracy of silence. You had these wonderful books, but you couldn’t do anything with them—not as long as anyone was alive who might have even a remotely rightful claim to them. The trouble began when Archer ran dry—his bank account and his creativity, all at once. So he sent one of those Burtons to auction, hoping he could sell it and still keep the secret.”
Suddenly the room felt hot. “Now I’ve got to ask you some-thing,” I said. “I want to be very careful here but I can’t. There’s no way I can do this with any tact.”
I felt Erin’s eyes burning into my face but I stared at Lee. He looked away, ostensibly to refill his glass, but I knew that look, I had seen it on too many people too many times. It pushed me to the bottom line, to give voice at last to the unthinkable and cut through all the bullshit.
“You tell me, Lee. Did you kill Denise?”
I heard Erin cry out in protest but my eyes never left Lee’s face, and he couldn’t look at me, and suddenly there was no need to answer the question.
“Oh, Lee,” I said, and my voice broke.
He tried to recover. “I didn’t kill anyone, Cliff. How could you even think that?”
“It’s a question I’ve got to ask. I’d sooner cut out my tongue.”
Lee made a great effort and forced himself to look in my eyes. “Then tell me why in God’s name you’d even think such a thing.”
“Somewhere along the way I began to believe Archer’s story. It’s as simple as that. His story and yours can’t exist side by side. They just can’t work.”
“What is his story, exactly? Help me understand it.”
“Nothing very complicated. He says Burton’s journal is his. He told that to a bookseller he’s known almost forty years. A guy who may be his only friend.”
“You show me the thief who doesn’t believe he owns what he steals. There’s got to be more than that.”
“There is now. Now there’s you. There’s the look on your face and the way you can’t look me in the eye and deny it.”
He did look at me at last. It took a vast effort, but his eyes met mine and he said, “I don’t need to justify myself to you. Goddamn it, do you know who you’re talking to?”
He looked at Erin and said, “For God’s sake, you don’t believe this?”
“Of course not.” But her voice lacked the certainty that should have been there. She was rattled: for the first time that calm, professional demeanor had deserted her.
“Just tell him what he wants to know,” she said. “Tell him and let’s all go to bed and be done with this.” She looked at me coldly and her look said, And I’ll be done with you.
Instead Lee said, “I’d like to ask you something, Cliff, then I’d like you to please get out of my house. Do you really think I would kill someone over a book? Do you think I’m that stupid, that desperate to own any book, when I could just buy the damned thing anyway? Or is it the money that drove me crazy? You tell me, then we’ll both know.”
“I’ll give you my guess. Long ago you and Archer should have been joint heirs to this marvelous library of Burton material. You got it all, but you shared it with Hal on the q.t. You made that unholy alliance with Archer that you would give him a couple of the books, including Richard’s journal, which you knew even then was worth more money than most of the others combined. You and Archer made a pact that they could never be sold until the last real heir was dead, because you both knew where they had come from, and the fraud your family had worked to get them away from the Warren family for nothing.
“The easy thing to do, the right thing, would have been to seek out Mrs. Gallant and pay her. Just a good wholesale price might have made all the difference in her life. But you didn’t do that; you were afraid to admit you had those books because that would put them all at risk. For once in your life you went against your own sense of decency and what’s right. You and Archer decided not to tell anyone. The books were legally yours, you didn’t have to pay the old woman or anyone else. But if you had, if you’d just been as fair to the old woman as you were with Archer, maybe none of this would’ve happened. Instead you decided to keep quiet, take no chances. Just keep quiet and she’d go away, fade into the woodwork, die or whatever.
“You should’ve paid that old woman, Lee. I know that’s what your instinct would have been, pay her and get this blot out of your life. But then time passed and that window of opportunity closed. You became a judge, then a prominent judge. The real point of no return was your interview with Reagan. By then you’d have been glad to get rid of all the books, just give them away. They were like a millstone around your neck when the president began considering you for the Supreme Court. That’s your motive, Lee. You’d do anything for a chance at that appointment, and even a small scandal, even something like this where you were legally right, would be enough to kill that possibility dead in the water.”
I finished off my drink.
“Lee?” It was Erin, and her tone begged him to deny it. “Tell him he’s crazy.”
“He can’t,” I said.
“I didn’t kill her,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill her.”
Then he said, “She just…died.”
“Oh my God.” Erin sank to the sofa. “Oh my God.”
“Erin, Cliff, listen to me,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I went over to see her. I shouldn’t have, I know that. But I was so certain I could get the book away from her. I knew they were poor, you told me that, and people will sell out anyone if you pay them enough. I thought if I paid her enough she could tell you she lost it. My God, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was only there a few minutes. But something went wrong…she felt threatened by something I said…Jesus, it was nothing, just a veiled threat, what might happen if she told anybody I had been there. I had no intention to hurt her or her husband, but she got frightened. I tried to hush her— Please, I said, PLEASE! She started to scream and then everything unraveled. I picked up the pillow—not to smother her, for Christ’s sake, just to shut her up till I could talk sense to her. Christ knows I had no reason to kill her. All I wanted then was to get her quiet and get out of there. You’ve got to believe that!”
“I do believe it, Lee,” I said. “I just wish it had turned
out that way.”
“I tried to reason with her. I told her just to forget I was there— she could keep the book, keep the book and the money, she could keep all the money, I didn’t care about it then. I tried to shove money at her…”
“And left some of it tangled in her bedclothes. The cops have those bills, Lee.”
“I wanted to do what was right. That’s all I ever wanted. I argued with Hal from the start. We needed to find that old woman and pay her something, a substantial amount that would erase that blot from our lives. Ask Hal, he’ll tell you what I tried to do.”
I put down my empty glass and went to the door. Somewhere behind me I heard Lee saying, “This was no crime, Cliff. This was an accident. It was an accident, I swear. There was no evil intent. You know I couldn’t do that. I could never kill anyone.”
I touched the door.
“Cliff, please…I’ll make her husband a wealthy man.”
I turned and said, “You took away all he ever wanted.”
“I’ll make it right, I swear.”
“You can’t.”
“I can! No one needs to know about this.”
“Yeah, they do. I’m sorry, Lee. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”
“Erin. You talk to him. Talk to him! This doesn’t have to go anywhere.”
I looked at Erin, who sat numbly with streams of tears on her cheeks.
“Good-bye, Lee,” I said.
I walked out. A moment later I heard Koko running along the sidewalk behind me.
“Under the circumstances, I’d rather stay with you tonight. If you’ve got room for me.”
I put an arm over her shoulder. “I’ll always have room for you, Koke.”
Sometime before dawn that same morning, Lee Huxley locked himself in the garage and sat with his motor running until he died. That’s how it ended.
For two days he was front-page news and a hot topic for talk radio. All the yakkers sounded off, speculation ran wild: Denver was treated to the usual tasteless nonsense from vacuous morons with too much time on their hands. Give an idiot a microphone and he’s just a louder version of the same old idiot.
There were a few high spots. To his colleagues Lee was the best and the brightest, a man who weighed every judgment and always strove mightily to do the right thing. Judge Arlene Weston was interviewed and said good things. He was such a fine man, so cultured and well liked. No one could have imagined that he’d do this to himself. It only proved that even a great poet like John Donne could be wrong. Every man is indeed an island, and deep personal torments can coexist with all the ingredients of a happy life.
A rumor leaked out that the president had been interested in Lee as a possible Supreme Court Justice, and the yakkers ran with disappointment as a possible motive. The White House had no comment. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater confirmed that Lee had had two meetings with Mr. Reagan, but nothing was revealed of what might have been said or how serious Reagan’s interest might have been.
His service was mobbed. The entire legal community turned out: the church overflowed, people stood in the street and then swarmed across the graveyard, and the procession from one to the other tied up traffic for twenty blocks.
I watched it on television with Koko. Lee was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery and instantly became a fading memory.
How quickly even a prominent man is forgotten.
On Saturday after the funeral a car stopped in front of my store. I cringed when Miranda leaped out. Twenty people were in the store but she saw only me. She flung open the door, screaming, “You BASTARD! You fucking bastard, I hate you, I wish I’d never set eyes on you, I hope you die!” She charged across the room and beat at me with her fists until she collapsed.
Apparently Lee had left her a note. I can only imagine what was in it.
A week later I got a vicious letter. If she could kill me she would happily do it. At the end she said, “You will never see that book again. I burned it.”
Who knows if she actually did that? Miranda always had a deep interest in money, she must have had at least some idea of the book’s value, but I have a dark, hollow feeling about it. I think of those books and all that handwritten correspondence, and sometimes I wonder where Lee kept those signed copies and if Miranda might be angry enough to destroy them all. The irony that she may have burned Richard’s journal a hundred years after Isabel burned his papers gives me a headache.
The real story still hasn’t come out. Maybe in his despair that’s what Lee was hoping: that at least I would leave him his good name. From what I could tell, Whiteside wasn’t going anywhere with Denise’s death: it had slipped off his front burner as new murders occurred. I knew Lee must have left some evidence in that room— after all, what did he know about covering up a crime, especially in the heat of the moment?—but a cop doesn’t just ask for random hair samples or fingerprints from a prominent jurist who has no obvious connection to the deceased. If Whiteside had a name, a reason to be suspicious, he could close this case in a few hours. If Denise had been one of Denver’s so-called important people, he might be forced to consider the unthinkable, but that’s not likely to happen now. It remains one of those cases without a probable perp, and Ralston is still the only suspect.
Who knows where a chain of events begins? Some would say that the tragedy of Lee Huxley was set in motion long before he was born, when Richard Burton came to America and met Charlie Warren. Me, I can’t quite make that reach, I’m not that kind of cosmic thinker. To me it began when Lee and Archer made their unholy pact. Everything unfolded from that.
Wherever it began, it ended in Lee’s garage.
There is a postscript. Reagan nominated Anthony M. Kennedy from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Kennedy joined the Court in February 1988.
In the weeks after Lee’s death most of the related events worked themselves out. I got a call from Vinnie Marranzino. He didn’t even say hello, just, “Hey, Cliff, everything’s fine. Let me know if you have any more trouble in that neck of the woods.”
I tried to thank him but he brushed it off. “You don’t thank an old pal, Cliff. We should get together sometime. Break some bread for old times’ sake.”
But he knows we won’t.
Workmen arrived to begin clearing the site of Koko’s house in Ellicott City. Mysteriously the house began to rise from the ashes, and her friend Janet gave her reports on its progress almost every day. The money from the insurance payout may be hers to keep, give back, or throw in the Potomac River: I don’t know what the rules say about that. No bills have yet been submitted to anyone, and I’m betting they won’t be. “Maybe I’ll give some of it to a library, if they let me keep it,” Koko said. “They can have a Charles Warren Room, even if they don’t have his books or know who he was.”
She stayed with me for a month.
I didn’t know where Erin went.
I did drive out to Vegas and found Ralston dealing cards in a casino. I had covered Denise’s funeral and there wasn’t much money to give him, but I fudged it a little on his side of the ledger. “There’s ten grand in the bank, any time you want it, but you’ve gotta come back to Denver to get it. I won’t send it, and I’ll need your word that you won’t piss it away in a gambling house, or on booze.”
“You don’t want much, do you’i”
“Only what Denise would want, Mike.”
I told him what had happened, the whole sad story of Judge Lee Huxley. He hasn’t come yet, but he’s young and he still has time to find himself.
Life does go on. I went back to work, schlepping books on East Coif ax Avenue.
I thought of Lee almost constantly on those warm days and nights. Sometimes I thought of the deathbed promise I had given Josephine Gallant and I knew it would always leave me with a hollow, unfulfilled feeling.
On a night in early autumn I sat in my store watching the lights go on along the street. If there’s a winner in this whole sorry business, I thought, it’s probably me. I had two of
Burton’s greatest works in flawless inscribed first editions, books that few other bookmen can imagine owning or handling, but I didn’t seem to care much. Too much of the joy had gone out of having them; maybe I’d sell them after all. I would give them away in a heartbeat if none of this had happened, and I knew Lee would have done that at any of half a dozen places along the way. I still believed in him: at heart he was a decent man, done in not so much by his own hand as by the sins of his grandfather. Once in his life he went against his own good instincts and he paid a terrible price.
I looked out at the street. Tonight was going to be a long one, full of ghosts.
I knew I had to shape up. I had not run in weeks and I had begun drinking much too much. I was avoiding people, I wasn’t eating well, and my outlook was poor. I saw myself in a distant future, a crazy old man like the bookscout in Charlotte, burrowed into my own nutty world, snapping at people, gouging for every dime. Was this a fantasy or prophesy? I didn’t know but it cast a deeper pall on the night.
Outside, the night people came out and walked along the street. Time to call it a day. Then the phone rang, and something about the day made me answer it.
“Hi.”
I knew her voice at once and I told her how sorry I was.
“I know you are,” she said gently. “I’m sorry too.”
“So what are you doing these days?”
“Trying to finish my book. It’s not very good but I guess I’ll finish it anyway.”
“You’re probably not the best judge of that.”
“I’m the only judge.”
There was a long pause at the word judge.
“Even if that’s true,” I finally said, “you’re not exactly finishing it under ideal circumstances.”
“I’m tired of fooling myself. I’m not even going to send it out.”
“Give it time, Erin. Just give it time.”
“Sure.”
Then she said, “A wise man once told me, some of us are not meant to be writers.”
“Even a wise man can’t know everything.”
“Same old Janeway. You’ve got an answer for everything.”
