by John Dunning
“Start showing him you mean what you say.”
She shivered, drawing my coat tight around her neck. “A week ago I’d never heard of the goddamn man. Now he’s got control of my life.”
“Take it back.”
“You keep saying that. I’m sick of it. It’s easy for you to say.”
“I didn’t say it was easy. But it may be your only choice.”
“Then tell me, please, what exactly do you want me to do?”
“Show some guts, Barbara. Maybe it’ll get you killed, but how do you know this won’t?”
I got her some more coffee. She had gulped the cup and it seemed to be doing her some good. Her shivers had subsided and in another minute she let my coat hang loose on her shoulders.
“For starters,” I said, “if he ever touches you again, get the cops involved. Don’t just hang up because I’m not there. I’m a homicide cop; you don’t need me here unless he kills you. There are other cops who handle this kind of stuff. I’ll give you some names; I’ll grease the skids downtown so you’ll get priority treatment. In other words, I’ll do what I can.”
She shook her head.
“Look, you had a start on him this morning, then you let him get away. He raped you. What you should’ve done right then was go to the hospital. Swear out a warrant. Let him cool his heels in jail for a few hours. Take him to Denver District Court. Take him all the way. If you get one of those lemon-suckers on the bench, he gets off. But at least he knows you’re ready to play hardball.”
“Which means I go to the morgue next time.”
“Or maybe there won’t be a next time. I’ve got a theory about our friend Jackie. If you show a white flag, he’ll tear you to pieces. Jackie takes no prisoners: he loves to take on people who won’t fight back. If you do fight, he’ll give you a hard look before he comes back again.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think he takes it very personally when you fight. I think he’s going to kill you for what you did to him today.”
“I’m not gonna argue with you. I didn’t become a cop because of my grades in psych. You asked me what to do and I told you. Rack his ass if he blinks at you twice. Get yourself a restraining order and then the cops can bust him if he doesn’t leave you alone. That’s the first step.”
“And the last. Oh, Christ, you can’t protect me.”
“We can try. We can do the best we can do.”
“Then what? You can’t take me by the hand and walk me to work. You can’t sleep with me….”
We looked at each other. She said, “What if you do the best you can do and it still isn’t good enough? What do I do then, challenge him to a duel? Quit my job and leave my friends and start over in another state?”
“I got no guarantees, ma’am. All I can do is tell you this—I’m on your side and so is the police department. We got a guy out there who thinks he’s one tough cowboy. Our job is to show him he isn’t. There are many ways of doing this, and some of them you don’t need to know about.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s really bad between you two, isn’t it?”
I gave her my sour little smile in return.
I told her I’d be back in a minute. I had looked out the window and seen that Jackie Newton was now hard at work on his flat tire. I didn’t want him to leave without saying good-bye.
I went down and sat on the coping and watched him work.
Jackie was into his silent act. It was supposed to be intimidating, and I guess it was. He knew I was there: I could tell by the way he breathed. He had scraped his hand and blood had oozed out between his knuckles.
I started a running line of chatter, thinking it would annoy him.
“I sure wouldn’t leave a car like that on the street,” I said pleasantly. “You never know when you’ll come back and find a door kicked in.”
He grunted over his lugs. I heard them squeak as he jerked on the lug wrench.
“There’re gangs around who do stuff like that,” I said. “Just bash up expensive automobiles.”
His lugs squeaked.
“Scumbags,” I said. “Everywhere you go.”
Squeak.
“It’s getting so you can’t do anything without running into some scumbucket who wants to take away a piece of your life.”
Squeak.
“Take the lady who lives here,” I said. “There’s a certain asshole I know who won’t leave her alone. Tries to screw around with her head, make her wish she’d never been born. What do you think of a man who’d do something like that?”
Squeak-squeak.
“Some man, huh?”
Squeak.
“Tighten those things too tight and you’ll have a helluva time getting them off again.”
There was a sharp clang as he threw the lug wrench down on the street.
“Never know when you’ll have another flat.”
He came around and let the car’s weight jiggle down off the jack. Then he stood up tall and gave me a look. His face was a mess: blood had dripped onto his fine white shirt and his hair for once was tousled. He threw the tire and jack into the car and made ready to go.
“When this guy comes back again, he’s gonna pay a heavy price,” I said. “A real heavy price.”
He pulled up the door and stood there for a minute. I thought he might say something then but he didn’t. He ducked his head and got in his car, and I stood up and backed away under the shadows of the front porch. You never knew when a guy might have a piece hidden in the car, and if something serious started I wanted some cover.
But he drove away. Calmly. Like a man of reason. He didn’t even peel rubber.
A real scary guy, Jackie. A bad son of a bitch.
• • •
I knew an old man once who swore he saw a sailor beat the hell out of Gene Tunney in a barroom brawl. Tunney was at his peak then, the heavyweight champion of the world. Titles don’t mean much when you’re getting your lunch eaten.
The meanest son of a bitch in the world can only be the meanest while he’s at his absolute peak and the other guy hasn’t quite come up to his. Say a month on the long end, a few minutes on the short.
I know guys who could make Jackie Newton wish his mamma had never set eyes on his daddy. I grew up with one of them. Vincent Marranzino wrote the book on tough guys. I haven’t seen Vince in a long time: his life and mine have taken different paths and we both understand that. But Vince still owes me one—a certain fight with knives in a north Denver backlot when we were sixteen. I had taken his side against a pack of wolves and the two of us had kicked ass against great odds. Guys like Vince never forget something like that: they have a streak of loyalty that goes to bedrock.
A simple phone call was all it would take. Before morning, Jackie Newton’s anatomy would be rearranged.
Tempting, isn’t it?
A nice hole card, if the system couldn’t be made to work.
This was what I had meant when I told Barbara that there were things in life she’d be better off not knowing. The genie was out of the bottle, just a phone call away.
But of course I wouldn’t do it. Like Brutus, I am an honorable man.
9
I spent another futile hour with Barbara Crowell. There’s no way to talk common sense to someone who’s that scared, so there wasn’t much else to do but wait for the locksmith to come fix her door. While I waited, I made some calls on the Bobby Westfall case. I called Bobby’s apartment and talked to Hennessey. Our boys had been there for an hour and weren’t finding much. They had lifted some prints, probably the victim’s, and had arranged for the pound to come pick up the cats. They had sent Ruby Seals back to his bookstore in a police car. It didn’t look like the apartment was going to give us much. There were still piles of books to go through, but that would take a bookman’s eye—my job, and I’d be at it far into the night.
I tried Rita McKinley: same answering machine, same message.
I sat with the telephone book opened to “Book Dealers
, Used and Rare,” and I went through the stores in my mind. Some eliminated themselves from my priority list—junk shops, paperback exchanges, dealers in comic books: these I’d get to, eventually, if something didn’t pan out higher up. I called Roland Goddard in Cherry Creek and told him I wanted to see him tomorrow about the murder of Bobby Westfall. There was no use pussyfooting around anymore. The book world is amazingly tight, and even now the word of Bobby’s death would be racing from one store to another. By tomorrow it would be all over town.
I called three or four other dealers who might have bought books from Bobby. All of them had. I told them I’d want to see them, and would try to stop in in the next couple of days.
This was going to be a long haul.
I tried calling Carol, to tell her I’d be late tonight. She was out on the streets and I didn’t want to leave a message. The only world tighter than the world of books is the world of cops.
The locksmith had fixed Barbara’s back door and was installing a deadbolt in the front. Nobody was coming through that door once that baby was put in, the locksmith said. I wasn’t too sure of that, but I didn’t say anything.
I went back to Bobby’s place. The boys were gone, all but Hennessey. We sat and talked the case out, as it stood to now. It didn’t stand anywhere. We had nothing: we were shooting in the dark. We might be dealing with something totally outside Bobby’s book-dealing activity, and in that case it might never be solved.
Hennessey had talked to the coroner, and the guesswork of last night had been confirmed. Bobby was killed somewhere else, then dumped in the alley. Time of death was sometime between eleven o’clock and midnight. This told us nothing, as we had been going on that assumption anyway. “Let’s forget about it till morning,” Hennessey said. “Come on home with me, we’re having a big pot roast tonight.” I took a rain check: I wanted to get started on Bobby’s things, and I knew that I wouldn’t stop till the last scrap of paper had been sifted to the watermark. This is just the way I work. It made Hennessey feel guilty, but that’s life. “I should stay here and help you, Cliff,” he said. “I’d probably just get in your way. I don’t know from Shinola about this stuff.” I agreed and told him to go home. It was getting dark outside. I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours, so I asked Marty Zimmers to call Domino’s and have a deep pan pizza and a bucket of swill sent over. Then I got to work.
It was a long, thankless job. You wouldn’t believe the crap that accumulates in a bookscout’s den. Book after book came down from the pile and went into another pile that I had labeled “Junk” in my mind. I thumbed each piece carefully, I went page by page to make sure a $50,000 pamphlet wasn’t hidden inside a $2 book. It wasn’t. There were some real heartbreakers—a fine little Faulkner poem, original 1932 issue, paper wraps, a $250 piece that Bobby could’ve sold to me on the spot except that someone had lost his supper on the title page… an early Steinbeck, nice, except that somebody had ripped out the title page… Robert Frost’s first book, inscribed by Frost on the half title, very quaint except that a kid had been at the book with crayons. There were so many books eaten by mold that I had to wash my hands after handling them. My pizza came and I washed my hands again. I went munching and sorting my way into the early night. At nine-thirty I seemed to be about half through. I went downstairs and called Carol, told her I’d be another two or three hours, and said she’d better not wait up.
I chugged my swill, burped, and went back to it.
I was resigned by then to coming up zero. I took a break at ten-thirty and let my eyes skim over the books as a lot. If there was anything worthwhile in that mess, I sure couldn’t see it. I started on the books in the toilet. Nothing. I was mucking it out pretty good now. There were a few papers in the closet and some books in the kitchenette. No great secrets were hidden there that I could see. Nothing the Russians would kill for: nothing anybody would kill for. Slowly the one natural motive—that Bobby had found something valuable—was dwindling before my eyes. Of course, the killer might’ve taken it away with him: I was going on the slim, bare hope that he had killed Bobby and had failed to find what he had killed for. But I was beginning to believe it was something as simple, and insane, as an old grudge, or a sudden fight between rivals.
Then I found the good books.
There were two stacks of them in the cupboard in the kitchenette. They stood like sentinels, acting as bookends for the Cheerios and the Rice Chex. The first thing I noticed was the quality. There were some very good pieces, some real honeys. I took them into the living room and sat with them, browsing. There were fifteen titles, and I made a list, adding my own idea of what they were worth.
Gardner, Erle Stanley. Case of Dangerous Dowager. $200.
Finney, Jack. Time & Again. $150.
Uris, Leon. Battle Cry. $150.
Kennedy, William. The Ink Truck. $200–250.
McMurtry, Larry. Last Picture Show. $200.
Heinlein, Robert A. Glory Road. $250.
Cain, James M. Postman. A biggie—maybe a grand.
Bellow, Saul. Augie March. Buck and a quarter.
Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. $150.
Bradbury, Ray. Illustrated Man. $200.
Miller, Henry. Books in My Life. $100.
Isherwood, Christopher. Berlin Stories, signed by C. I. $150.
Irving, John. 150-Pound Marriage. $200.
Bloch, Robert. Psycho. $200.
Rawlings, Marjorie. The Yearling. $150.
I did a quick tally. Call it three grand retail and put me down as momentarily confused. When we last saw Bobby Westfall, through the eyes of Jerry Harkness, Ruby Seals, et cetera, he was broke, pissed off, and without hope. Books had been drying up: Harkness doubted that Bobby even had bus fare back downtown. That was two weeks ago, and now I had discovered a stash of books, extremely wholesalable at a thousand dollars. There was simply no way for this stack to have been scouted in two weeks, probably not in two years. I looked at it again. No way, I thought. Even a titan of bookscouts couldn’t’ve done it piecemeal. So where did they come from and what did it mean? Here were the possibilities that initially occurred to me.
Bobby had come upon them as a lot, sometime within the past ten days, and had stolen them from some ignorant soul for pennies.
He had literally stolen them.
He had been hoarding them for a long time.
It was possible, I guessed, though not likely, that he had been hoarding books. There are people like that, guys who pigeonhole things for a specific reason and then have the willpower—no matter how bad the times are—never to touch the stash. Say Bobby had been building this pile for three or four years. When he found a book he particularly liked, it went into the Good Pile marked NFS, not for sale. Sometimes he had to sell books that he’d like to’ve put there, but once a book actually went in the cupboard he never, ever took it out again.
That made sense, didn’t it?
I looked at the books again, singly and as a group. Hoarding was possible, but thievery was likely. Bobby had shafted someone; then that someone had found out what the books were really worth and had come after Bobby with a crescent wrench. Maybe, maybe. I stared at the books and let my mind play with them. Common denominators, I thought. For one thing, they were all modern lit. They were all easily disposable—any bookstore worth the name would buy any or all at forty percent. I revised my estimate of condition upward. These were uniformly pristine. There wasn’t a tear anywhere: even on the Cain and Gardner and Rawlings, the three oldest, the jackets were fresh and bright and had minimal sun fading to the spines. Three grand might actually be very low retail for stuff this nice: books don’t come along every day in this condition. So Bobby had a standard, if I wanted to go back to the hoarding theory, and that was another common denominator. Nothing went in here unless it was damn near perfect. One hundred retail seemed to be the cutoff point on the low end. There was a healthy mix of mainstream and genre fiction, but you had to keep going back to one sure thing: the books wer
e all desirable, all eminently salable.
Now I began to examine them page by page. Tucked into a back page of The Last Picture Show, I found the sheath of notes.
They were figures, chicken scratches, columns of multiplication like a kid might have to do for homework. There were lots of figures on four separate sheets. The sheets were small, the kind you might tear off of a memo pad. At the top of each was a printed name: Rita McKinley. She had signed each with scribbled initials. One had some writing at the bottom. It said: “These are the good ones. Not much gold, I’m afraid, for all the mining. R. M.” I took the papers, handling them carefully, and dropped them into an envelope. Then I put the books back in the cupboard, closed the door on them, and turned off the kitchen light. I felt an almost physical pain leaving them there.
Good thing I’m an honest cop.
I drank the last of my swill, and that pretty well threw a wrap on it.
I picked up Bobby’s little address book and put it in my pocket along with the Rita McKinley notes. I turned off the light in the bathroom and felt the first wave of weariness wash over my aging bones.
Then I heard a noise, a creaking sound, like a man trying to be quiet.
I waited. It came again, then died and went away.
I listened.
Rats, maybe?
Rats with two legs.
I took out my gun and eased up to the door. I put my head against it and in a minute I heard it again. Someone had come up the steps and was standing just outside in the hallway.
I leveled the gun and ripped open the door.
He let out a yell and cringed back against the stairwell.
“Jesus Christ, Dr. J! God Almighty, don’t shoot me!”
I sighed and put the gun away. “Ruby, what the hell are you doing here?”
He held up his hand and with the other hand clutched his heart. “Jesus, you scared me out of ten years’ growth. You better let me come in and take a leak before I lose it right here in the hall.”
“Not in here you don’t. What the hell are you doing here?”
