Booked to Die

by John Dunning

  I did the mental arithmetic. “You must’ve cost them just about what the guy had originally submitted as a total bill.”

  “Two thousand, forty dollars. And people say there’s no justice in the world.”

  “So what about Ballard?”

  “I went through the whole routine with him. Asked him why he wanted the appraisal done, so I could be sure it was a good use of his money. That’s what it’s all about. If you’ve got any ethics, this is the first thing you’ve got to find out.”

  “What difference does it make, if you find out and you still do the appraisal?”

  She recoiled from the question as if a snake were wrapped around it. Her eyes narrowed in anger. “Don’t sit there and judge me, sir. It makes a hell of a difference.”

  “What difference?”

  “Are you trying to needle me, or do you really want to know?”

  “Like I told you before, it’s none of my business anymore.”

  “Fine. Then I’m wasting my time.”

  I thought she was going to leave then, but she didn’t. She did the store, looking more carefully now at items that had caught her eye earlier. I went back to my bookkeeping and let her browse. It took more than half an hour for her to work her way around the room.

  “Look, I’ll tell you something and then I’ve got to go,” she said. “I don’t care what you think of me or why, but here’s what happened. The man told me he’d been in the clubs for fifty years. In all that time, he had bought only the fiction. I told him my bill would be higher than the whole library was worth. He said he didn’t care about the money, he just wanted a record left for his heirs so everything would be easy after he was gone. I took it from what he said that the heirs don’t get along.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year.”

  “Well, there you are. He didn’t care about the money, he just wanted them to have one less thing to fight about after he’d gone. God damn it, that is a good use of his money, if that’s how he decides to use it. As long as they know what they’re getting into, who am I to tell them they can’t do it? I still didn’t want to do it. This isn’t the kind of work I usually do, and there are plenty of people in Denver who’d be glad for the job and do it well and for a lot less money. If you want to know the truth, I just can’t get excited about looking at five million book club books, even if I’m getting paid for it; I don’t need the money and I don’t do anything anymore unless it excites me. But this old gentleman wanted me. He wanted a document that wouldn’t be questioned. It may sound arrogant, Mr. Janeway, but he made it sound like a man’s last request.”

  “It doesn’t sound arrogant, it’s probably true. He died this summer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He was a grand old man and I liked him.”

  “Everybody says that.”

  She seemed to thaw a little. “He was like… my grandfather… only his taste in reading was better. There were some fantastic titles in there, but they just won’t sell in those cheap editions. What more can I say?”

  “You did the appraisal?”

  “Yeah; three weeks later I drove down and did it. It didn’t take long and I didn’t charge him much—just enough to keep it on a professional level.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “What do you mean, how did I do it? I looked at the books and wrote them up. There wasn’t anything in there that needed to be itemized individually. They needed to be counted and we did that: rather, he did it before I got there. I told him to do that. There’s no sense paying an appraiser for something you can do yourself. All I had to do was look at them. There wasn’t a single book that needed to be researched. It took me about four hours to go through it and I was really moving.”

  “Was there a chance you might have missed something going that fast?”

  “There’s always a chance with a library that large. All I can tell you is, I looked at every book on those bookshelves. It was just what the man said it was, book club fiction top to bottom. Not worth the paper it was printed on.”

  “What did your written appraisal say?”

  “Just that. No value, except as salvage books. Maybe a decorator might want them, to fill shelves in model homes.”

  This was her statement and it was now finished. What she had told me so far was harmless: it was what she would tell Hennessey tomorrow or the next day. This was where the questioning began, for a cop. I wasn’t a cop anymore and I had to be careful of what I said to her. You don’t tell someone what questions the cops are likely to be asking: it sets her on edge, gives her an advantage.

  But I couldn’t resist this. “Would it surprise you to know that someone bought that library, Miss McKinley? Thought he was getting a helluva deal.”

  I saw the anger again, but this time she kept it in. “Nothing surprises me,” she said. “There’s always someone who’ll buy something, and there’s always someone who’ll pay too much. You’ll find that out when you’ve been in it a while.”

  I gave a little shrug. “This guy knew books,” I said, and my alarm went off and that was the last thing I was going to say to Rita McKinley about the Ballard books until she had given her statement to Hennessey.

  Her anger simmered to the surface. “Maybe he didn’t know them as well as you think. Maybe he lost his mind, Mr. Janeway. Maybe I was in cahoots with someone. What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you think I lowballed the appraisal just so somebody could buy it cheap? Is that what this is all about?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not the police anymore.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said again. “Show me a couple of things in your glass case first.”

  I took the books out and she looked at them carefully. “Let me see those too, please.” She was all business now. I tried to be too. I showed her the books and eventually she put most of them back. What she finally bought were Saul Bellow’s two rare novels, perfect copies I had bought from Peter less than a month ago. Ruby had priced them, high retail I had thought at the time: Dangling Man at $400; The Victim at $250.

  She didn’t ask for a discount: money seemed to mean nothing to her. I gave her the usual twenty percent and she wrote a check for $520.

  And I fell into the pit of aimless chatter. Suddenly the night looked very long and dark, and I hated to see her go.

  “I’m surprised you bought those: an old bookman I know said I’d probably die with them. Bellow’s supposed to be like Mailer and Roth and Henry Miller. Nobody cares enough to collect them.”

  “I guess your friend was wrong. At least about these Bellows.”

  She was heading for the door. I wanted to grab her by the sleeve and show her something. It didn’t matter what, as long as it was interesting and she hadn’t seen it before.

  How would you like to see how a cop really interrogates, Miss McKinley?

  What I said, though, was “Look, I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  She turned at the door and gave me a look. I gave up the fight and made my betrayal of the Denver Police Department complete.

  “I knew the books weren’t worth anything,” I said. “We saw the statements from the club. He kept them all, a complete record, all the way back to the beginning. I could’ve done that appraisal, just from the records he’d kept.”

  “Well, then,” she said crisply. “I guess I won’t go to the electric chair after all.”

  She had the door open. Now or never, I thought.

  “How about dinner some night?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said in the same heartbeat. “Thank you for asking, but no.”

  The door pulled shut in her wake. I stood again in an empty room on an empty world. A faint trace of her cologne lingered. Her memory lingered a good deal longer.

  25

  I dreamed about her. We swam together through a sea of books, in my dream. This was wonderful stuff. I hadn’t had much to do with love, quote-unquote, in a very long t
ime. Perhaps a bachelor heading into senility doesn’t believe in the quote-unquote; maybe it’s the one thing he’s truly afraid of. But Rita McKinley had lit a fire under me and I knew it. I had gone up like an ember doused with gasoline. This may be normal for an adolescent, but for a man in his thirties who deals in “relationships” rather than “love,” the feeling was heady and strange. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but with it came the unease of knowing that it would probably turn out to be.

  In the morning I called Hennessey to square things away. I was still enough of a cop to do that. I told him about McKinley’s after-hours visit, what we’d said, and how much I’d given away. He didn’t seem to care much. The mayor wasn’t exactly demanding that cops be called in on overtime to solve Bobby Westfall. He would be happy to talk to McKinley, when they made connections, but he wasn’t hopeful that anything would come of it.

  Two hours later, he called back and said McKinley was coming in around eleven o’clock. After that she was fair game.

  Fair but elusive.

  I called her number around two. She had the recording on, but she called back less than an hour later.

  Her voice was cool and distant. “Well, Mr. Janeway, have you figured it out yet?”

  “Figured what out, the murder or the book business?”

  “If you ever get the book business figured out, let me know how you did it. What can I do for you?”

  “Help me figure it out.”

  “I told you last night, and I told your Mr. Hennessey again this morning, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I was talking about the book business. I’d like to come up and see your books.”

  I felt completely transparent, stripped before the world. I braced for another rebuff and got it.

  “There’s no margin for you up here,” she said. “Everything I’ve got is very high retail.”

  “I bet I’ll find something.”

  “I don’t think so. You couldn’t possibly make any money, and look, I’m very busy now. I just got home, I’m still tired, and I’ve got a million things to catch up on. Add to that the fact that I’m just not feeling very hospitable. I don’t feel like having company.”

  “Well, that’s plain enough.”

  “I’m sorry. Good-bye.”

  Strike two on Janeway: bottom of the ninth, two out, and the fans begin to head for the turnstiles. I left the store in Miss Pride’s care and made my rounds. I reached the DAV on Montview just as books were being put out. It looked like crap. I looked at it through Rita McKinley’s eyes, and all I could see was crap: small-time books eagerly coveted by eternal small-timers. Book club mysteries. Book club science fiction. Dildo books: the Cosmo Book of Good Sex, How to Make Love to a Man, screwing seven ways from Sunday, blah blah blah. I hope these aren’t the books we’re judged by, by archaeologists of the future.

  I’d been staring, thinking of Rita McKinley, when my eyes focused on the title JR and the name Gaddis. I reached out and plucked it just in time. A shadow loomed over my right shoulder.

  “Hiya, Dr. J.”

  I turned. “Hi, Peter. How’s tricks?”

  “Could be better. Y’ almost missed that one. What’s it worth?”

  I opened the book, took off the jacket, sniffed for mold. It was a nice enough first: the flyleaf had been creased and some bozo had written his name in it.

  “Oh, for this copy, thirty, forty bucks.”

  Miss McKinley probably wouldn’t pick it up, even at $2. But to a guy like Peter, it was a little shot of life.

  “Damn,” he said. “Another minute and I’da had it.”

  “You can have it anyway,” I said, and I gave it to him.

  “Jesus, Dr. J…”

  “Merry Christmas, two months early.”

  “Jesus.”

  We walked out together. In the parking lot we stood and chatted for a moment. I asked if he was finding any books. He said yeah, he had some nice stuff to show me. One or two real honeys. Maybe he’d come in later in the week.

  Then he seemed to go stiff. I looked at his face and thought he might be having a heart attack. He tottered and would’ve fallen if I hadn’t grabbed his arm.

  “Hey, Pete, you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He didn’t look okay. He looked like a gaffed fish.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No… no ride. Here comes the bus.”

  He broke away and ran across the street. A car swerved and almost hit him. He spun around and without breaking stride ran full-tilt to the bus stop. He had dropped the copy of JR at my feet.

  I picked it up and watched the bus roll away. What the hell was that all about? I wondered.

  It was about fear. Peter had been so scared of something that his mind had stopped working. Something had scared the hell out of Pete.

  I stood where I was and looked around. A busy but harmless intersection: cars raced through on four lanes and people hustled along the sidewalk. Two convenience stores faced each other across the street. On the third corner was a little shopette and a Mexican café. The thrift store took up the fourth corner. I tried to remember what Peter had been doing, where he’d been looking, when it had happened, but I couldn’t be sure. I walked across the street and went into one of the convenience stores. I bought some gum. Then I shrugged it off and went back to work.

  26

  “Rita McKinley called,” Miss Pride said when I came in. “About fifteen minutes ago.”

  I played it cool. Checked the day’s receipts. Verified my suspicion that it had been a lousy day. We had barely broken a hundred: cleared expenses was all.

  I walked up the street and visited Ruby. He was getting ready to pack it in. Neff had gone home for the day. The firm of Seals & Neff had taken in less than fifty dollars.

  It had been a lousy day on Book Row all around.

  I didn’t go down as far as Jerry Harkness. I could see a light coming from his window, so I knew he was there. I could see a light in Clyde Fix’s place as well.

  Night had come with a vengeance. I felt alone in the world and I had a hunch that, whatever Rita McKinley had to say to me, it wouldn’t make that feeling go away.

  But it did. When I called her, she was full of apologies.

  “I’m not usually rude to people, Mr. Janeway. Put it down to jet lag.”

  “I didn’t notice at all,” I lied.

  She spoke into the sudden yawning silence. “If you still want to come up, of course you’re welcome.”

  “Just say when.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon would be as good a time as any. Make it late afternoon and that’ll give me time to wind down from the trip.”

  I felt light-headed, almost giddy. Janeway’s still at bat, folks: as incredible as it is to believe, he’s been standing at the plate popping fouls into the bleachers for more than twenty-four hours, and the game’s still hanging in the balance.

  Miss Pride was watering her plant, which had been repotted twice and was growing into a small tree. I had never seen anything grow like that in just three months.

  “What kind of thing is that?” I said.

  “I have no idea. Just something I dug up myself.”

  “If it grows teeth, kill it.”

  We began to go through the nightly ritual, preparing to close.

  “So you didn’t tell me,” I said. “How was Harkness?”

  “A dear. A perfect gentleman.”

  I sighed.

  “I know you’d love an excuse to go up there and tear his head off, but I’m afraid I can’t give you one. He was just fine. His manners were beyond reproach.”

  “Just watch your flank, Miss Pride, just watch the water fore and aft, port and starboard. Now what do you say we lock this baby up and call it a bad day?”

  “It was pretty dreary. I’ll get the lights and put the recording on.”

  She disappeared into the back room. I locked the front door an
d began counting the money. I had just got started when I felt my hackles go up. I turned and looked through the glass. Jackie Newton was sitting in a car at the curb, watching me. It was a long black car, not one of his. The gunsel was behind the wheel.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Miss Pride, coming from the back room, said, “Did you say something to me?”

  “I said we’ve got company.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t even look at ’em; don’t let ’em faze you at all. Just go on about your business and get ready to leave.”

  I turned the sign around, in case they had any notions of coming in. Miss Pride bustled about gathering her things.

  “Are we ready to go?” I said.

  “I am.”

  “Good. I’m driving you home tonight, by way of west Denver. Don’t argue with me, let’s just go. We’ll walk right past the sons of bitches and get in my car and drive away. Got that?”

  “I got it.”

  I flipped the front room lights. The telephone rang.

  I heard the machine kick on and then begin recording. I don’t like machines that answer telephones, but Miss Pride had talked me into it, so we wouldn’t miss anyone with a big library to sell. As usual, she was right: the damned machine had made its cost back, three times over.

  “I’m gonna see who that is,” I said. “You wait here. Don’t look at those guys and don’t look worried. I’ll be right back.”

  By the time I got into the office, the recorder had cut off. It was probably Rita McKinley, I thought, cancelling tomorrow. I rewound the tape and played the message.

  It was Peter. His voice was tense, strained. “I need to talk to you, right now,” he said.

  I waited. I knew the line was still open, but he didn’t say anything. He was like a man whose attention has suddenly been captured—like the poor scared fool he’d been in the thrift store parking lot.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and hung up.

  I ran the tape back and replayed it. It didn’t make any more sense than anything else he had done that day. I had no idea where he lived or how to reach him. Maybe Ruby knew.