Booked to Die

by John Dunning

  “I came up to see if I could help.”

  I looked at him.

  “Swear to God, Dr. J. I was over to some friends, shootin’ the shit and listenin’ to some old Dylan records. We just broke up. I drove by and saw the light on and I figured it was you. Thought you might be able to use a hand, you know, from somebody who’s been around the Cape and knows his books.”

  “You know better than that. Look, I appreciate the thought, but you can’t come in here. I thought I made that clear this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, but the cops’ve already gone through the place. What do I know about po-lice procedure? I just thought a question might pop up that you couldn’t pin down for yourself. The last thing I want to do is get in the way. I want you to catch the prick that did this, that’s all I want.”

  “All right, Ruby. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “Took ten years off my goddamn life is all.”

  “Just stay away from here. Don’t even think of stopping here again. If I need any help, I’ll come to you.”

  “That’s all I want, just to help out. You know how tricky this stuff can be, trying to figure out what’s what in books. I know you’re pretty good, Dr. J, but a real bookman could maybe help you knock some time off the clock.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “You think it’d be okay if I took a leak? I got a sudden urgent need, Dr. J, and that’s no lie.”

  “I’ll have to watch you.”

  “Hey, I ain’t proud.”

  I walked him through to the bathroom. I lifted the lid on the toilet and stood back in the doorway while he did his business. His eyes ran down the book titles on the back of the toilet, a natural bookseller’s habit.

  “Some crap,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He zipped up his pants and flushed the toilet. “Thanks, Dr. J.”

  We walked back to the door. Suddenly, I said, “What do you know about Rita McKinley?”

  “The ice lady?”

  “Is that what you call her?”

  “That’s what everybody calls her. Once every year or so she makes a sweep through all the Denver stores. Drops a ton of dough. Buys anything unusual but cherry-picks like hell. She’s got the best eye I’ve ever seen. Won’t touch a book with a bumped corner, no matter how much it’s got going for it. She won’t take anything that’s got even a little problem, but doesn’t mind paying top money for those perfect pieces.”

  “And that, I guess, is why she’s called the ice lady.”

  “That’s part of it. The other part is that people in the trade think she’s got a cold shoulder. She don’t stand over the counter engaging in mindless bullshit. She don’t seem to be interested in shoptalk at all.”

  “How do you like her?”

  “Man, I love her. I wish she’d come twice a week; maybe then I could get out of the poorhouse. She’s not bad-looking, either. Brightens up the joint while she’s in there.”

  “How come I never heard of her before today?”

  “Beats me. Maybe ’cause she don’t do retail.”

  “How long’s she been here?”

  “In Denver? I don’t know, a few years I guess.”

  “Where’d she come from?”

  “Back east, I think. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t exactly ask her this stuff when she comes in.”

  “When was she in last?”

  “It’s been a while… maybe a year? Longer than usual. I remember that last time because we had some great stuff for her. She dropped six grand in our place alone. Man, what I could do with six grand now.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “Not a damn thing, really. Is she mixed up in this?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “It don’t make much sense to me. I mean, Bobby Westfall and Rita McKinley? It just don’t play in Peoria.”

  I had said the same thing a few hours before. But the human comedy makes some strange whistle-stops on the way to Peoria.

  I kept looking at him, encouraging him.

  “Look, Dr. J… almost anything you hear about Rita McKinley is gonna be rumors. Nobody knows her well enough to talk about her. That doesn’t stop ’em from talking anyway, though. Sure, I hear some shit. You can’t help but pick up stuff in this business, but I hate to spread trash about people when I really don’t know. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Ruby, I’ve got a dead man and no suspects. You see what I’m saying?”

  He sighed. “Some people think she’s a gold digger.”

  “What people?”

  “Who the hell knows where something like that starts? One day you just start hearing it. If you hear it enough, you might even start believing it.”

  I looked at him.

  He shuffled and said, “For one thing, she didn’t always have money. Didn’t always have books. She’s got a lot of both now. I know plenty of rich book dealers, but very few who started with no money. It’s hard to work your way up in this business without a bankroll to start with. There are damn few ways, inside the law, to get that much money and that many good books in that short a time… divine intervention excluded.”

  “Where do people think she got ’em?”

  “Oh, everybody knows where she got ’em. There wasn’t any mystery about that—it was all wrapped up in a big AB spread a few years ago. What nobody knows is the circumstances of that deal. That’s what the mystery is. What I remember about it is this. She had been dating a book collector. She moved in with him. He died, and when he went he left her everything… books, estate, money… the whole works.”

  “Was this man old?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know anything about when and where he died?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t remember. You could write to the AB, I’m sure they’d send you the article. There was another piece about Rita McKinley when she moved her stuff here and opened her business. I remember reading it. It wasn’t much of a piece, just a little one-column job saying she had come here and was open for business… about three, four years ago. The guy’s name escapes me just now… I ought to remember it; he was a good enough collector that the AB devoted two pages to his death.”

  “Did the article say how he died?”

  “Sure. That’s the part that keeps the tongues wagging. He killed himself.”

  10

  Ruby’s visit to Bobby Westfall’s apartment bothered me, and on second thought I decided to take the good books along with me when I left. Carol was sitting by the bed reading Faulkner when I came in. I put Bobby’s books on the floor and pushed the bag containing her birthday present behind the stack.

  “Hi,” she said. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Just some stuff for the evidence room. I didn’t want to leave it in that empty apartment.”

  She came over and looked. “These are valuable?”

  “Yeah, but this is all of it. The rest is like total junk.” I looked at my watch: it was one-fifteen. “What’re you still doing up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. What’s your excuse?”

  “Liftin’ that barge. Totin’ that bale… payin’ my debt to the company store.”

  “So how was your day?”

  “Ducky.”

  “Did I ever tell you, Clifford, that the thing I love best about you is your communications skill? Did you go out to see Newton?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. “And?”

  “He’s gonna be my date at the policeman’s ball.”

  “Wonderful. You girls will look great together.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I’d really rather talk about the cockroach problem some other time. Right now I’m gonna grab a shower and mount a major assault with heavy artillery on your body.”

  Later, in bed, she lay in the crook of my arm. She was a great lover, good for what ailed me after a twenty-four-hour shift. Now, I
thought, I could sleep. But again I found myself thinking about us, our situation, permanence, and me. I was in the middle of a vast sea change. I wondered what she would think of me if I suddenly wasn’t a cop anymore. She had been a tomboy: being a cop was all she’d ever wanted. She had never mentioned children: we had simply never talked of it. In my mind I could hear her saying, I’ve got to tell you, Cliff, I don’t want kids—I’m just not cut out for the motherhood bit. I could see her staring in disbelief when I told her I’d rather be a bookman, I think, than a cop, and not thirty years from now. Maybe she wouldn’t do any of those things. She had been in the department long enough now—almost eight years—to be building up her own case of burnout. Maybe she was getting ready to hear what I was thinking but was still not inclined to talk about it.

  “What’re you thinking?” she said.

  “Think I’m gonna turn in my badge and become a book dealer,” I said.

  But I said this in a safe, singsong voice, the same tone you use when you say you’re going to the policeman’s ball with Jackie Newton. She couldn’t do much with it but laugh.

  Only she didn’t laugh. She just lay there in my arm and we didn’t speak again for a long time.

  It was the telephone that finally broke the spell.

  “God Almighty,” I said wearily. “If that’s Hennessey I’ll kill the bastard.”

  “I’ll get it,” she said, reaching over me. “I’ll tell him you’ve died and the funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

  She picked up the phone. I heard her say hello and then there was a long silence. Without saying another word, she hung up.

  “What’s that all about?”

  “A guy trying to sell me a water softener.”

  “At two o’clock in the morning?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I seem to’ve got myself a heavy breather. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. It started about eight o’clock and he’s been calling back every hour or two.”

  “Does he say anything?”

  “He whispered once.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “The usual stuff. Cunt, bitch, whore. Some other stuff.”

  “Did he say anything personal… anything to indicate that he might know who you are?”

  “Why would he know who I am? Those kinds of calls are mostly random, you know that.”

  “I don’t think this one is.”

  She sat up and turned on the light.

  “What happened out there today?”

  I told her about my day with Jackie. I could see it wasn’t convincing her that Jackie had taken up telephone harassment for revenge.

  “I’m taking the phone off,” she said. “If you don’t get some sleep you’ll be a zombie tomorrow.”

  The phone rang.

  “Let it go,” she said. “He’ll get tired of it and hang up.”

  But I picked it up. Didn’t say anything, just listened. He was there, listening too. This went on for almost a minute. Then I said, “You having fun, Newton?”

  He hung up.

  “It’s Newton,” I said. “He hung up when I called him by name.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “All right, then, I can smell the son of a bitch, okay?”

  “Okay, Cliff. I’m sure not going to argue about it at two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Listen,” I said sometime later. “Jackie and me, we shifted gears out there today. There never was any love lost between us, you know that. But it’s different now, it’s on a whole new plain.”

  She had propped herself up on one arm, a silhouette against the window.

  “He’ll do whatever he can to get at me. I don’t think it matters to him that I’m a cop, or that you are. I don’t think anything matters. It’s him and me.”

  “Hatfields and McCoys.”

  “Yeah. It’s gotten that deep. I may’ve given Barbara Crowell some very bad advice today.”

  “Cliff, you need a vacation.”

  “I need to get something on that weasel. That’s the only vacation I need. To get him good and make it stick.”

  “You’re a classic type A, you’ll die before you’re forty. You need to go and lie on a beach and listen to tropical breezes blowing through luscious palm trees.”

  “And go crazy with boredom. That’s not what I need.”

  “I’d go along too… try to keep you from getting too bored.”

  More long minutes passed.

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” Carol said.

  “As a matter of fact, there is something you can do.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Oh, Cliff, that’s not going to help anything.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since I gave Jackie the thirty-eight-caliber lollipop. Newton doesn’t know who you are. All he knows is, he called my place and a woman answered. Nobody knows about us. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to keep what’s ours private.”

  She took a deep, long-suffering breath.

  “Well? Will you do it?”

  “Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “But God damn it, don’t ask me to like it.”

  I patted her rump. “Good girl.”

  “You sexist bastard.”

  We laughed. At that moment I came as close to asking her the big question as I ever would.

  It was a long time before we got to sleep. When I did sleep, I slept soundly, untroubled by dreams. In the morning we got her things together and I carried them down the back way and put them in her car. I watched the street for ten minutes before I let her come down and drive away.

  She rolled down her window. “I’m not afraid, you know.”

  “I know you’re not,” I said. “But I am.”

  11

  I called Rita McKinley and got the same recording. This time I left a message, telling her who I was and that I needed to speak with her on official business regarding a homicide investigation. I left both numbers, home and office.

  I called the AB in New Jersey. Also known as Bookman’s Weekly, the AB is the trade journal of the antiquarian book world. Each week it lists hundreds of books, sought and for sale by dealers everywhere. Thus can a total recluse operate effectively in the book business without ever seeing another human being: he buys and sells through the AB. In addition to the listings, which take up most of the magazine, there are a few articles each week on doings in the trade—obits, career profiles, book fair reports. Sometime during the past few years, I explained to the editor, a piece or pieces were run on Rita McKinley. He was a wise gentleman who knew his business, and he knew right away who McKinley was and about when the stories had run. He promised copies in the next mail.

  I went to see Roland Goddard, in Cherry Creek. This is a neighborhood of high-class and expensive shops in east Denver. Nestled in the center of things was Roland Goddard’s Acushnet Rare Book Emporium. Goddard had a cool, austere manner, almost like Emery Neff only somehow different. You could break through with Neff, if you were patient enough and gave a damn: with Goddard, you never could. He had an icy, slightly superior attitude about books and his knowledge of them, and he could intimidate a customer or a bookscout before the first word was said. If he had friends, they were not in the book business: no one I had ever spoken to knew Goddard personally.

  It would be hard to imagine two guys less alike than Goddard and Harkness. At least with Ruby Seals and Emery Neff, their differences seemed to complement each other: Harkness and Goddard were ill-suited for partnership in almost every way. It’s hard sometimes to look back over twenty years and know why the boys we were then did things so much at odds with the attitudes and philosophies of the men we had become. Goddard was fastidious: Harkness tended to be sloppy. Goddard disdained everything about the book business that Harkness found interesting. Oh, he’d sell you a Stephen King—whatever else you could say about Roland Goddard, he was
a helluva bookman and he knew where the money came from—but you might leave his store feeling faintly like a moron.

  Goddard dealt primarily in Truly Important Books—incunabula, sixteenth-century poetry, illuminated manuscripts, fine leather stuff. He had some great things. Even the name of his store simmered in tradition. Acushnet was the whaler Melville served on in the 1840s. I liked his store and I loved his stock, though I never did much business there. When I marry one of the Rockefellers, Goddard will have a big payday, most of it from me.

  Acushnet was one of only three bookstores in Denver that could afford full-time help. The man who worked there was Julian Lambert, a good bookman in his own right. Lambert bought and sold as freely as his boss did: Ruby, in fact, had told me once that bookscouts preferred dealing with Goddard because he paid them more. Goddard wasn’t in when I arrived, but I busied myself looking through the stock until I saw him come in through a back entrance. The morning rush had waned: he and Lambert sat behind the counter cataloging. I knew that Goddard issued catalogs a few times a year, though no one in Denver ever saw one. He had the best reference library in the state, but played it close to the vest when it came to sharing information.

  Goddard and Lambert were surprised when I introduced myself. I knew they had seen me around—we had spoken a few times in passing—but until this moment they had not put my face together with the Detective Janeway who had called on the phone and asked to see them. I got right down to cases. When was the last time they had seen Bobby Westfall? The same questions, the same answers, with Goddard doing most of the talking. It had been almost two weeks since Bobby had been in. He had come in one day just about the time he was last seen on Book Row. “He had a couple of books he was trying to sell me,” Goddard said, “but they weren’t the kind of things I use.” I told him I had heard through the grapevine that he had been dealing with Bobby rather heavily. He frowned and said, “That must be Jerry Harkness talking, and as usual he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Westfall made one very lucky find about a year ago and I bought all the books he had on that particular day. I wouldn’t make any more out of it than that. He had some books and I bought them.”