The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  I talked to her twice en route—first from the L.A. airport and again from Salt Lake.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said again.

  She said it had gone around the room like that.

  “I’m not leavin’ either,” Louie said.

  “I’m not going,” Billy said.

  “Well, I ain’t goin’ if you ain’t,” Rosemary said.

  And so it went. Even Bob and Martha had decided to ride it out, whatever happened. At some point Erin had told them all that they had more than the horses to worry about. Charlie was a book freak. If he got desperate enough and angry enough he might torch the houses to get at the books. If he believed he was lost, they had to be prepared for anything.

  They didn’t want to take that seriously but I thought it was a real possibility. I knew a bit about bibliomania, and in the most extreme cases a biblioperp is like unhinged freaks everywhere: irrational, driven, superfocused on his goal, whatever that is.

  We arranged a signal so they’d know it was me coming up on them: I’d hold my headlights steady on the front window and quickly flash my brights three times.

  All was calm in Idaho. The world seemed peaceful on the brink of the new day, and that was all I knew for sure as I drove out to the farm.

  The voice on the radio said today was December 10: only two weeks left till Christmas. The date rang a bell that had nothing to do with shopping or St. Nick, but I couldn’t remember in my tired state what it was. This will all be history in a little while, I told myself: and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. What a depressing thought: that I had leaped blindly into the friendly skies and the killer was still somewhere in California.

  Or somewhere else.

  The morning was black and clear with a bit of snow on the ground. Traffic was sparse.

  I got to the farm at four forty-five.

  I stopped at the fork in the road. Nothing doing back at the main house.

  I pushed on to Sharon’s. It was just as dark there but I expected that. I flashed my lights and all was well. The door opened and Louie stood framed there with his shotgun.

  I parked out of sight behind the house and went inside.

  Hugs and handshakes all around. Louie watched the road; Billy watched the back; and the rest of us sat at a roaring fireplace while the sun came up and pushed our demons away.

  Now came the moments of self-doubt. “What if he doesn’t come?” Sharon said.

  “Then I’ll have to find out where he is.”

  “What if it turns out he’s still in California?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “Would you go out there again?”

  “If I have to. We’ll see.”

  “I’m going outside,” she said. “I’ve got chores.”

  “Give it another half hour. Let it get good and light, then I’ll send Louie out with you.”

  The cops called. Just checking in, they said.

  Sharon and Louie went out and did the chores. I couldn’t go, couldn’t take a chance he might see me before I saw him, but I sat at the window watching, just beyond the curtain, my gun on the cushion beside me. Erin and Rosemary got our breakfast casseroles ready. The timing was perfect: The food came out of the oven just as we got washed up and ready to eat it.

  The day dragged. The cops called at ten and again at two. I talked to them at two.

  “They don’t think he’s coming,” Sharon said.

  “Doesn’t sound like it from the tone of the one guy. But they’re good cops, they don’t want to take any chances.”

  I talked to Bob. He was still taking a doubtful approach, but I could see the tension in his face. “Something’s gonna happen, isn’t it?” he said, and I told him yeah, maybe. “I think so,” I said. I talked to Martha and told her again that she had done fine back at the racetrack. She shook her head and said, “I let him off the hook.” She didn’t believe me when I told her Bax hadn’t done it. “Somehow he’s pulled the wool over your eyes,” she said. “He’s good at that, he’s like a magician.” I talked to Louie and told him I was glad he was there, and I said the same to Billy later. “Just be careful with that gun, Billy,” I said, and immediately regretted the preachy tone.

  At some point Erin and I found time to talk. She sat beside me in the window well and said, “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll watch.”

  “I was dead tired a few hours ago. Now I’m wide awake.”

  “Just close your eyes. Lean on my shoulder. Sleep will come.”

  I did and sleep did come, but only for twenty minutes. I awoke with a jerk at three-thirty.

  “It’s okay,” Erin said, putting a hand on my arm, but I was suddenly nervous in the pale afternoon.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this again,” she said. “Not after the last time.”

  I had nothing to say to that. After a while she said, “You know sooner or later your luck will run out.”

  “Is that what you think it is, luck?”

  “Oh, don’t get your maleness all upset, I know how good you are. But do you think you’re always going to be stronger, faster, smarter than the other guy?”

  “I always have been.”

  “How many times did you get shot?” She sighed, knowing the answer. “Your back looks like a piece of the moon.”

  “I promise I won’t get shot again. Not more than once or twice, anyway.”

  “All it takes is one. One who’s better, luckier, or more devious. What’s that old cowboy saying? Never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, never was a man who couldn’t be throwed.”

  “So what do you want me to do, walk out and leave them all here?”

  “No, of course not. I’m just talking to hear my own voice, but that doesn’t help, does it?”

  “It does if you’re trying to be annoying.”

  Eventually she got to her point. “I said I’d never do this; now here I am. Second-guessing you. Acting like a schoolgirl.”

  “That’ll happen when you almost die trying.”

  Again I was impatient with her. What’s your point, I wanted to say, but then she told me. “I don’t want to do this anymore, Cliff. I want us to be normal.”

  “I’ve never been normal.”

  “I know you think you’re playing that for laughs but it’s not funny.”

  “What’s funny is that you’d think I think that.”

  I wanted to say, What are the odds? What are the chances that we’d ever get another case like this? But what were the odds of a second one? If you play the odds often enough, you lose. It would be hard for her to believe at this moment, but not all or even a few bibliomaniacs become psychopaths. “So what do you want to do, bag it?” I said. “Call it a day, you and me?”

  “Oh no. Oh God, no! It hurts me that you would even say that.”

  Then she said, after a long pause, “Is that what you want?”

  “I want to be a cop again.”

  There it was, the one thing she couldn’t tolerate.

  “I love the book trade. But I still want to be a cop.”

  There it was, out in the open at last.

  The phone rang. Sharon answered in the kitchen.

  “It’s your friend Carroll Shaw from the Blakely Library,” she said. “I forgot I’ve got an appointment with him. Made it weeks ago.”

  Suddenly the date crystallized and I remembered. “What’d you tell him?”

  “This is not a good time. But he came all this way, what could I do?”

  “When’s he coming out?”

  “He’s downtown now. I told him to come on. Sooner the better, right?”

  I rubbed my aching head. “You know this could take days. I’d love to meet him after all these years, it would be great to compare notes over your books, but this could take a long time. Damn, he should’ve called to confirm.”

  “I’ll let him have a quick look and then tell him he’ll have to come back. I’ll fly him back
at my expense.”

  “A quick look could take three days. He’s a bibliographer, Sharon; he’ll want to take extensive notes and shoot pictures. But give him a very quick look, for now. That’s more than fair under the circumstances. We don’t want him in the way when Charlie gets here.”

  I was fidgety as I waited for Carroll to arrive. I thought I had handled this case badly from the start. As a backstretch schmuck I had been much too tentative. Erin was right: I was suffocating under other people’s rules and procedures. I had been too afraid of violating some kind of racetrack rule and getting kicked out, so I hadn’t asked the right questions soon enough. I’d certainly have tumbled to Charlie much quicker, and once you have a guy in your sights you can always pry out the truth. Well, I knew the truth now, didn’t I? Now to prove it, get us all out of here alive, and wing it with Erin back to Denver.

  But things are never that simple.

  Carroll arrived just before dusk. I saw him pull into the yard, his rental sporting a custom library plate, BLAKELY4, under his windshield. He was wearing a snazzy gray suit and a snap-brim gray hat. I was surprised at his dandylike appearance: Somehow I had always pictured him as a kind of roughneck like myself. Maybe that’s why it had always been so easy to deal with him by phone: We talked the same language without the expensive shell of the Blakely Library separating us. Now he was here and he walked quickly to the door, disappearing under the overhang. A few seconds later I heard him knock.

  Sharon opened the door. I tucked my gun under the window cushions and started down to the front to finally meet him. I heard him come into the hall, his voice a room away. Then I saw him from a distance and I stopped in my tracks. There was something disturbingly familiar about him, and a fleeting impossible thought ran through my head. I stood still, looking through that hall into the front room.

  “It’s good to meet you at last,” he said.

  I knew that voice so well. So what was wrong with him?

  Then he took off his hat and I could see his face.

  Charlie’s face.

  I heard Erin come in. “Hi, Mr. Shaw,” she said.

  “Erin, what a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  It was Charlie, talking clearly now in Carroll Shaw’s voice. Charlie, stripped of his weirdness, stripped all the way down to the weirdest part of him. Charlie the killer.

  “I’m afraid I have some disappointing news for you,” Sharon was saying. “Something else has just come up. I would normally never do this, but in this case it can’t be helped.”

  “That is disappointing. I hope whatever it is, it’s not serious.”

  “I’d call this fairly serious.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “I doubt it, but thanks for asking.”

  “This is totally my fault,” Charlie said. “I really should have called earlier. Do I at least get a little peek, or do you not have even that much time?”

  Carroll, the soul of etiquette. Charlie, the considerate killer.

  “I can give you a look,” Sharon said. “How much can you do in one early evening?”

  “Not nearly enough, if what Cliff tells me is true. But I’ll take what I can get.”

  I didn’t move—didn’t want to attract his attention by even a breath or a bump.

  “Well, then,” Sharon said. “Do you want to go down now?”

  They were coming my way. I stepped back against the wall. Only a shadow here to hide in: no nooks or crannies, no convenient wall of books. I stepped back, knowing it was neither deep enough nor dark enough; it was just what I had. I held myself still as death, knowing that could never be still enough, and then they came through the narrow passage and he was just a few feet away. He saw me first as a bad vision, a dream perhaps that had dogged him across the country and was now here to rise up and bugger him. If I had yelled boo at the top of my voice I think he might have passed out from fright. Unfortunately I didn’t do that: I waited for him to make the connection himself. This took only a few seconds on the long end.

  “Janeway,” he said in a watery little-boy voice. “Jesus, what are you doing here?”

  Sharon had stopped and waited for him at the end of the hall. He wavered. His eyes rolled back in his head. Softly, I said, “What do you think, Charlie? I hope we can…”

  I never got to tell him what I was hoping. He screamed a long, mindless curse and brought out a small pearl-handled .32 and waved it in my face. But there was Billy, stepping out of the back room, forcing Charlie to retreat half a dozen steps away. Billy, forcing himself between us with my gun in his hand: Billy, in a textbook police stance, holding the gun out with both hands, yelling, “Freeze, motherfucker!” at the top of his lungs. But Charlie raised the gun and Billy shot him. He spun crazily and fell; his gun flew up and clattered violently off the ceiling, and Billy moved through the room, picked it up with a piece of cloth, and directed everybody to stay where they were. “I’d do what he says,” I told Rosemary. “Right now he’s in charge.”

  I looked in Billy’s eyes and said, “Right now he’s the man.”

  Then, when he was ready to give it up, I took my gun from his trembling fingers, hugged him tight, and told him I would always owe him for saving my ass.

  36

  The bullet had shattered his shoulder and blown a fist-sized chunk out of his back. For a while it was touch and go, but for an even longer time I knew only what the Idaho Falls cops released to the press.

  The motive apparently was greed. Long ago, when he had access to the house, Cameron had begun lifting the books and selling them to Charlie. This all escalated to murder when Cameron wanted more money and threatened him. But as theories went, this had some holes in it. Erin and I groped our way through it on the flight back to get my car in L.A., and we were still talking it over with mixed results on the long drive to Colorado.

  I tried to keep up with the case from Denver. Sharon sent me all the newspaper accounts and I did some research on my own. One of the arcane nicknames for Carroll, I discovered, is Charlie, and soon I was able to follow Candice’s logic to Lewis Carroll, creator of the Mad Hatter.

  I began writing a journal of the case, which I would deliver to Sharon when I had all my facts in order. Some of it was still speculation. I did know Barbara had helped him get into the Blakely and had shepherded his rapid advance. She had used her money and her position on the board in hopes he’d find real books a sane alternative to the crazy stuff he had hoarded for years.

  Charlie had thrived in the Blakely and had soon become its rising star. This much had come out in the press. He had rare and wonderful books to donate, and a few of them still had the enigmatic Candice bookplate. He saw the library’s collection as his. I can see him now, walking at night through that dark mausoleum of treasure, holding the key, glorying in his new acquisitions, gloating over what he had.

  At the same time he went crazily on, hoarding thousands of junk books as Charlie, sucking them up by the tens of thousands, stashing them in houses, then in warehouses, until Barbara was driven almost crazy by his obsession. She thought she knew what he was up to, but storage lockers and duffel bags are still being found, stuffed with Charlie’s books. The count will run into millions.

  An ironic postscript: One day Sharon called me. “Junior wants me to ask you if you’ll still do the appraisal on HR’s books?”

  I laughed out loud. “I’d rather have lung cancer than go back to work for Junior.”

  “Still, the estate’s got to be settled. The appraisal’s got to be done by someone we trust. This time I can make them pay you well.”

  “I don’t think so, Sharon. I’ll send him some names.”

  More than two months after he was shot, Charlie spoke his first words. Once they began the words gushed out of him.

  “He wants to see you,” said the man on the telephone.

  I had to go, I still had a job unfinished. The Blakely was eager to cooperate: They offered to pick up my tab, however long
it took to put things straight, but Sharon said no. “You work for me.”

  This wasn’t the library’s fault, she said. They were victims too.

  Yeah, I thought. Victims like any library that’s blinded by treasure and too willing to acquire it without getting all the provenance, all the proof of where it had been.

  I left Denver in March, prepared to stay a month: more if I had to.

  First I had to see Charlie. He held the answers to Sharon’s books and until I talked to him I would never really know this case. By then I had read all the classic texts on bibliomania: If there are experts on such a bizarre topic, I suppose I was becoming one.

  Still I had no real handle on extreme cases like Charlie. Maybe nobody does. Some people believe there is a mysterious current at work between a bibliomaniac and his stash of books, as if having them gives him an almost mystical connection to all the knowledge they contain. This empowers him: he absorbs it through his pores and into his heart and bones. He believes this without conscious thought, but the feeling builds as his books grow in number and depth. It feeds his spirit and makes him connect with untold thousands of scholars and writers he will never read.

  They had Charlie in California by then, so I drove up to the hospital where he was being held. They showed me into a room where he sat in plain white clothes behind a wire screen. He sat up straight when I came in.

  “Cliff!” he boomed.

  As if we were old buddies. As if nothing had happened.

  We stood looking at each other a room apart, and I knew this was a man who would kill me in a heartbeat. I greeted him coolly. “Charlie,” I said. He recoiled from the name as if I had slapped him. “Carroll’s my name,” he said. “You of all people should know that.”

  I pulled up a chair near the cage and we sat talking.

  “Barbara’s leaving me,” he said.

  Why did that not surprise me?

  “Whatever happens, I’ll have to go it alone.”

  What did he want from me? But I knew even then.

  “Turns out she’s just like all of them,” he said. “In the end she’s a taker.”