by John Dunning
I have come to the conclusion that the people who buy these books don’t care much about books at all. You will seldom see a King guy or a Koontz guy browsing in a bookstore. I’ve been in Ruby’s store and watched the action myself. A guy opens the door. He doesn’t even come inside. He stands on the street with his head sticking in and asks his three questions. Got any King? Got any Koontz? Got any Barker? If the answer’s no, he’s gone. Ruby points him up the street, to Jerry Harkness, and later learns that the guy dropped two grand with Jerry. Unbelievable! What else can you say but absolute around-the-bend insanity? “All a guy needs to make it in this business,” Ruby says, “is an unlimited amount of Stephen King.”
Jerry Harkness had started in the book business as a teenager. He had worked for Harley Bishop and had learned the ropes, but had gone on to do things his own way. He knew his market and his people. His shop contained many items of general interest, but it was his horror, fantasy, and sword and sorcery sections that drew people from all over the country. Harkness had the only copy I’ve ever seen of the signed, very limited edition of King’s Firestarter, a $3,000 piece.
Twenty years have passed since Harkness worked for old Harley Bishop. He must have been young then, full of dreams of this—his own business. I looked in the window and wondered, not for the first time, how the reality matched the dream. I might like it myself, if I wasn’t a cop, if I hadn’t been born a cop. Where’s the truth in that, I wondered: was I really born to wade through guts and mop up blood every Saturday night? Suddenly I had the strangest feeling of my life, almost what they call déjà vu in the superspook trade. I have been here before. I have walked these paths and done these things. I’ve missed my calling, I thought for the second time in ten hours. I’ve been a book dealer before, I’m a book dealer now, I already know more about books than ninety percent of the bozos in the trade. I’ve always thought I might be a book dealer someday, maybe when I retire. I had begun to put some things in storage for that distant day. Maybe it ain’t so distant, I thought for the first time ever: maybe I’ll just chuck all this crap and do it. I had already made one incredible buy, an act of good judgment that I’d be hard-pressed to duplicate. Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across John Nichols’s Milagro Beanfield War on a B. Dalton’s remainder table for ninety-nine cents. I read the book in a weekend and loved it, and I went all over town, to every Dalton’s I could find, buying them up. They were all unmarked first editions. At the end of that week I had seventy-five copies. I was twenty-two years old when I did that. I’ve run into Nichols a few times over the years and he’s always been happy to sign books. I had gotten about half of them signed. The book now goes for $150, probably $200 with a signature. I had at least $12,000 worth of books sitting in storage for my $75 investment. Maybe the time had come to do something with it.
Jerry Harkness was long and lean and still fighting the good fight against middle age. He perched on a stool behind his counter and watched me all the way past his front window and through the front door. He had been reading a Clive Barker paperback when I came along, and he put it aside for the customary greeting as I came in. I went straight to the counter and got to the point.
“When was the last time you saw Bobby Westfall?”
“You mean the bookscout? I don’t see him, unless he’s got something for me. He knows I don’t buy stock from scouts. They want too much for the run-of-the-mill stuff. He comes in if he’s got a King or a Burroughs, or maybe an early Gene Wolfe. He knows I’ll pay him more than anybody if it’s something good in my field.”
“So you see him what… once a month?”
“If that. I did see him about two weeks ago. I think he was up the street trying to sell Ruby Seals some books. I don’t know, he didn’t bother showing ’em to me.”
“Did he seem any different than he usually did?”
“I don’t know how he usually seemed. These bookscouts are almost nonentities after you’ve seen ’em around awhile. I don’t think about things like how they usually are. But since you asked me, I guess he seemed the same as ever.”
“Which was what?”
“Quiet. Almost mousy. He just walked around looking at my stuff. That’s how they learn, you know… look at the books on the shelves and see how they’re priced. None of ’em ever have any reference books, they can’t afford that, so they have to keep it all up here.” He tapped himself on the head. “What’s the matter? Bobby get himself in trouble?”
“Bobby got himself dead.”
Harkness opened his mouth and it hung there for a moment.
“Did you ever talk to him?” I said.
“As a matter of fact, we passed a few words that day in the store.”
“About what?”
“Usual run of stuff. How bad business is, on both his end and mine. This is the slow time of the year. I’m used to it. In the early summer, right after tax time, you’ll go whole days without seeing more than ten people. Then a dealer will come through and drop five hundred, and in the end the figures balance out okay. But bookscouts have it tough. Books have been drying up. Even Goodwill is putting horrendous prices on their books lately. God, I wonder who’d kill Bobby.”
I looked at him strangely. He got my drift and shrugged. “You’re a homicide cop; I put two and two together and assumed he’d been murdered.”
I nodded.
“I don’t know what I can tell you. Bobby was singing the blues about those stupid asses at Goodwill. People are just plain greedy: they don’t want to leave anything for anybody else, they don’t want the next guy to make even a dime. Goodwill’s trying to play bookstore again. They’re a thrift store, for God’s sake, and they put everything out at bookstore prices. They’ve got some clerk there who can’t find her ass with both hands, and she’s gonna figure out what a book’s really worth. Right. Of course they get it all wrong. They go on weight and glitz. They’ll put out some useless novel about two lesbians fighting for control of their dead aunt’s cosmetics company for five dollars. Then they’ll let a King first go for fifty cents.”
“How does that hurt the bookscout?”
“It’s the stock he makes his bread and butter on. You don’t find Kings every day. What the bookscouts used to be able to do is grab up a handful of these glitzy titles for a buck apiece and double or triple their money in one of the big general bookstores. They can’t do that anymore. Goodwill goes through this silliness once every three or four years. Somebody in the front office gets a wild hair up his ass and they start marking everything through the roof. After a while they learn they can’t sell the damn things and they go back to the old prices. But while they’re at it, guys like Bobby really hurt.”
“So this is the gist of what Bobby was complaining about?”
“That’s what he said to me.”
“Did he give you any indication that he might’ve made a recent score?”
“Are you kidding? The way he was talking, he didn’t have bus fare back downtown.”
“Maybe he found something and hadn’t had a chance to sell it yet.”
“I doubt that. I don’t think he had a prayer of seeing any money in the immediate future. He was just too down, too pissed off at the world.”
“Who else did he do business with?”
“Almost everybody. You’re gonna have to go to every bookstore in Denver if you want to touch all of Bobby’s bases.”
“But they have their favorite guys they sell to, isn’t that right?”
“Sure. They all do that. They’ll find a dealer who pays ’em well and they’ll stick with that guy for a while. Then something happens—either they get pissed off or the dealer does—and they go somewhere else. But it’s never perfect and eventually they come back. It’s a vicious circle. When a book doesn’t sell to anybody reputable, they wind up giving it away for pennies to jerks like the one two doors down.”
“You mean Clyde Fix?”
“What an idiot. I wish we could get that junkman off the block.�
�
“Can you think of anybody else Bobby might’ve sold to regularly?”
“I think he was in with Roland Goddard. Don’t tell Goddard I sent you, though. He used to be my partner.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah. But don’t bring it up. We don’t get along now.”
“How come?”
“You don’t really want to get into that. It’s ancient history.”
“Humor me a little.”
“When we were kids we both worked for Harley Bishop. Then we moved on to the Book Emporium, you remember, that big place that used to be on Fifteenth, across from Public Service? They closed it up and Goddard and I bought out the stock and used it to start our first store together. It didn’t work out, that’s all. We’ve got different aims in life, different tastes. At the bottom of it, we just didn’t like each other. Sometimes you’ve got to go into business with somebody to find out how little you like each other. So we flipped a coin to see who would buy the other out. Goddard won. Or lost, depending on how you look at it.”
“That’s a pretty classy shop he’s got.”
“Yeah, but so what? Everything in life has a trade-off. He’s got a great shop and a super location in Cherry Creek, probably makes two hundred grand a year. But the overhead’s got to be unreal. Me, I was out of the business for a couple of years after the big coin flip, but I’m back again. I’ve got what I want.”
“Can you think of anybody else I should see?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. Go talk to Rita McKinley.”
“Who’s that?”
He raised his eyebrow. “You’re a bookman in this town and you’ve never heard of Rita McKinley?”
“I guess I never did.”
“Well, Officer Janeway, you’ve got a treat in store for you.”
“Who’s Rita McKinley?”
“She’s got a closed shop in Evergreen. Appointment only, that kind of place. Operates out of her house.”
“What’s she got to do with Bobby?”
“I don’t know, except when he was here he dropped a piece of paper with her name on it.”
“You still got it?”
“Sure. I’ve been waiting for him to come in again so I could give it back to him.” He reached into the cash drawer and took out a small sheet of notepaper. In pencil, someone had written the name and a phone number.
I looked at Harkness. “You ever met the lady?”
“She was in here once, a year or two ago. A real looker, young and pretty and sharp as a new brass tack. She knows books, brother. She knows as much as I do, and I’m talking about books in my field. You know what she did? Bought two copies of Interview with the Vampire out of here for fifty bucks apiece. That’s what the son of a bitch was going for then. Now it’s three hundred, and it’s gonna go to five, I’ll betcha. I’d love to have one of those babies back; hell, I’d pay her four times what she paid me. It’s not often that somebody teaches me a lesson in my own field, but Rita McKinley did it. A real cool customer. And I got the feeling talking to her that she knows every field like that. And she can’t be much over thirty.”
“How long has she been up there?”
“A few years, I guess. I’ve never seen her place. She’s goddamned intimidating if you want to know the truth. You don’t just call her up because you’re out for a drive some Sunday and you want to scout her shelves. At least I don’t.”
“How does she sell her books?”
“She’s got clients who come in from out of town. Does mail order. And deals in very expensive stuff.”
I wrote her name down.
“It doesn’t sound logical, does it?” I said. “Her and Bobby?”
Harkness shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you.”
I believed him for the moment, and left.
• • •
There were two more dealers on Book Row. One was a specialist in collectible paperbacks, who kept odd hours. His store was closed. Near the end of the block was a junk shop called A-1 Books, owned by Clyde Fix. I had never dealt with Fix, for two reasons: I have never seen a book in his store that I wanted, and his hatred for cops was well known and documented. He and Jackie Newton might make a great pair that way, but that was the only way. While Jackie was carving out land deals, Clyde Fix was struggling to stay alive. Where Jackie had brains, Clyde Fix had only animal cunning. It was a safe bet that Clyde Fix had never heard of a Lamborghini: he clattered around town in a red ’62 Ford that always seemed two miles from the scrap heap. He was in his forties, with thinning hair and a gaunt, consumptive profile. He had owned bookstores all over Denver in the last fifteen years, all of them dumps like this one. Ruby had known him for years. Before he had discovered books, Ruby said, Clyde Fix had been a seller of graveyard plots; before that, he had sold shoes. With books, he had found a way of keeping body and soul together without having to punch a time clock. There are lots of customers for cheap books, and a junkman in almost any kind of junk will usually make a living.
He had a deceptive manner: he could ooze charm and in the same moment turn on you like a snake. People who had never seen his bad side thought of him as a nice man; the rest of us knew better. Fix had been busted half a dozen times for disturbing the peace, and Traffic had pulled him in a few times for speeding. He always argued with the cop. He was his own worst enemy. Once, I knew, he had talked himself from a simple taillight violation to creating a disturbance and ultimately resisting arrest. Cops have a lot of discretion in things like that.
My interview was a short one. Fix was hostile, as I knew he would be, and he wouldn’t give me much. He didn’t seem to know or care that Bobby Westfall was dead. “Why should I worry over that fool? That’s just one less fool out there working my territory.”
“Where’s your territory?” I asked.
“Wherever the hell I say it is.”
I knew that mentality well. Beat me to a book and you’re my enemy for life. Turn over all your best books to me. Sell that to me for ten cents on the dollar, and don’t give me any damn guff about it either. Fix would intimidate if he could, cheat if he could do that. He’d buy a $1,000 book for a quarter, then laugh all year at the sucker who’d sold it to him.
It occurred to me suddenly that there was a lot of latent anger in the Denver book world. I could easily see Clyde Fix bashing Bobby’s head in. But with Fix it wouldn’t be calculated: more likely it would be a spur-of-the-moment thing, in broad daylight with fifteen witnesses looking on. They had had one run-in last year: the story had gone through the trade like a shot and quickly taken on the characteristics of an urban legend. I remembered it now and could almost see it: Bobby and Fix at the Goodwill store, both spotting a treasure nestled among the junk. James Crumley’s One to Count Cadence, a $100 book then, two or three times that now. The mutual lunge, the struggle, the tumble into a counter of glassware, Fix coming up with the book, whirling and knocking a little old lady flat. The cops arrived, but Fix and Bobby were gone. So was the book.
I hassled him for a while: it was good for my constitution. Where were you last night, Fix? Anybody there with you? Can you prove where you were between ten o’clock and midnight? You didn’t like Bobby much… did you kill him?
Pleasantries like that help get me through a dull day. If only I had something to do with my hands.
• • •
I moseyed back up the street. It was a quiet day on Book Row. At Seals & Neff a few customers had come and gone and the day was quickly settling into its inevitable, uneventful course. There was a young woman in the store, who had brought in a bag of books. Bookscouts, like dealers, come in all sizes, colors, and sexes. This one was a cut above the others I had seen, at least in the category of looks, but it was clear from what was being said that she had more than a smattering of ignorance when it came to books.
Neff was explaining to her why her as-new copy of Faulkner’s The Reivers wasn’t a first edition. “But it says first edition,” she protested. �
��Right here on the copyright page… look. First edition. How much clearer can it be than that? Random House always states first edition, right? You told me that yourself the last time I was in here. Now I’ve got a first edition and you’re telling me it isn’t a first edition. I don’t know what to believe.”
“Believe this, honey,” Neff said. “I don’t need the grief. If you think I’m trying to steal your book…”
“I didn’t say that. I’m not accusing you, I just want to know.”
“It’s a Book-of-the-Month Club first,” Neff said, enunciating each word with chilly distinction. “It’s printed from the same plates as the first, or maybe the same sheets are even used; that’s why it says first edition. But the binding is different, there’s no price on the jacket, and the book has a blind stamp on the back board.”
“What’s a blind stamp?”
“A little dent, pressed right into the cloth. Look, I’ll show you. You see that little stamp? That means it’s a book club book. Whenever you see that, it came from a book club, even if it’s written ‘I’m a first edition’ in Christ’s own blood inside. Okay?”
