by John Dunning
She gave a little smile. “Actually, you’re a champion of the underdog. The strong never abuse the weak in your presence.”
“Now I’m a regular Robin Hood. You’ll have to make up your mind.”
“You’ve got quite a name as a fighter. People don’t mess with you much.”
“Some have.”
“But they didn’t come back for seconds.”
“Not since I killed that blind crippled boy last summer.”
She laughed. “You’re an American original, aren’t you? Listen to me, Janeway. I mean you no harm. I come in friendship and peace.”
“That’s what Custer said to the Indians.”
“You and I are probably a lot alike.”
“That’s what Sitting Bull said back to Custer.”
“And like the Indians and the cavalry, we’d probably end up killing each other. But I’ll tell you this, it’ll all be up front. I never break my word.” She leaned forward and looked me straight in the eyes. Our faces were closer than strangers ought to be. “Who is Slater?”
I looked at her hard and gave her nothing.
“Maybe it would make a difference if I told you what else I know.”
“What’s that?”
“That Darryl and Richard Grayson were murdered.”
Her sense of timing couldn’t have been better: I felt the tingle of her words all the way to my toes. Without taking her eyes from mine, she reached into her bag and took out a card. “Both my numbers are here if you decide you’d like to talk. Anytime, all off the record. If not, have a nice flight to Taos.”
She got up and walked out.
12
Who was Slater? The question lingered through the night.
Why was I here?
In my mind I saw him working his scam, dancing his way into my life with that cock-and-bull story about him and me and our brilliant future together. I watched again as he spread open that paper, where someone had written the particulars of Grayson’s Raven so long ago that it was beginning to fall apart. It wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about a bounty fee on a skip, it might not even be about Eleanor except in an incidental way. The real stuff had happened long ago, probably before she was born.
But it didn’t matter now, did it? I was under a court order, and I had to play according to Hoyle.
I sat up late reading a bad novel. I watched some bad TV. At three o’clock in the morning I sat at my window and looked down into the rainy Seattle street.
But I couldn’t forget Trish Aandahl, or that parting shot she had given me.
I called the first travel agency that opened at seven-thirty and told them to get me to Taos with a fellow traveler ASAP. It was a heavy travel day. United had two flights that would put us in Albuquerque early and late that afternoon. From there I could rent a car or hook up with a local airline that would jump us into Taos. But both flights were packed. The agent could squeeze us in, but our seats would be separated by the length of the plane. The next viable flight was a red-eye special, leaving Sea-Tac at 11:18 p.m., arriving in Albuquerque at 2:51 a.m., mountain time. I took the red-eye, told the agent to deliver the tickets to the Hilton, and put the tariff on my charge card. The tickets were $800 each, typical airline piracy for last-minute bookings. I sucked it up and hoped to God I could get some of it back from the good people of New Mexico.
Then I called Slater and got my first surprise of a long and surprising day.
“Mr. Slater’s not available,” said his woman in Denver.
“When will he be available?”
“I’m not sure. He will be calling in. Who is this, please?”
“My name’s Janeway. I’ve been working a case for him. Something’s come up and I need to talk to him.”
I heard her shuffling through some papers. “I’m afraid I don’t know you.”
“Then I must not exist. I’ll bet if you tell him I’m here, though, he’ll talk to me anyway.”
I heard a spinning sound, like a roulette wheel in Vegas. “Everyone who works for us is in this Rolodex. Your name’s not here.”
“Then it’s Slater’s loss. Give him a message, tell him I tried.”
“Wait a minute.”
I heard her talking to someone, but her hand had covered the phone and I couldn’t make out the words.
“I could maybe have him call you back.”
“Won’t work. I’m heading out in about five minutes.”
“Hold, please.” She punched the hold button: elevator music filled my ear.
There was a click. Another woman said, “Mr. Janeway?…I’m sorry for the hassle. It’s just that we don’t know you and Mr. Slater’s out of town.”
“How could he be out of town? He hired me because he didn’t have time to go out of town. Where’s he gone?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. I guess I’ll have to take a message.”
“Tell him Janeway called, I’ve got the girl and I’m taking her on to Taos myself.”
“Is that what he wanted you to do?”
“It doesn’t matter what he wanted me to do. Tell him I’m not working for him anymore.”
I sat on my bed feeling the first faint gnawing of a mighty hunch.
I placed another call to Denver.
“U.S. West.”
“Howard Farrell, please.”
I listened to the click of a connection, then a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Farrell’s office.”
“Mr. Farrell, please.”
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Cliff Janeway.”
Another click, followed by the familiar resonance of an old and confidential source.
“Hey, Cliff! Where the hell’ve you been?”
“Cruising down the river, you old son of a bitch.”
“Jesus, I haven’t heard your voice for what?…seems like a year now.”
“More like two. So how’re things at the good old phone company?”
“Same old shit.”
“Howard, you need to start breaking in a new act. But then what would guys like me do when they need a favor out of old Ma Bell?”
“Uh-oh. You’re not official anymore, are you?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Damn right it is. Just for old-time’s sake, what do you want?”
“Clydell Slater.”
“My favorite cop. He still playing smashmouth with Denver’s finest?”
“He does it on his own now.”
“What an asshole. Look, Cliff…this isn’t likely to cause Mr. Slater any grief, is it?”
“It might pinch his balls a little.”
“Then I’ll do it. Same ground rules as always. Give me a number, I’ll call you right back.”
Five minutes later Farrell called and, for my ears only, gave me Slater’s home number.
I placed the call.
It was answered by a recording, a woman’s voice. “Hi, this’s Tina. Me’n‘ Clyde are out now. We’ll call ya back.”
I hung up on the beep.
I lingered over breakfast in a downtown cafe. Read the high points in last night’s Times . Looked for her byline but it wasn’t there. Drank my third cup of coffee over the local homicide page.
Went back to the hotel. Took a shower and went upstairs to the lobby. My tickets had arrived. I slipped them into my inside jacket pocket with my court papers and went to the jail to see Eleanor.
It was still early, well before ten. They led her in and we sat with glass between us, talking through a bitch box.
“How’re you doing?” I said.
“Just wonderful.”
“I wanted to see you and say a few things.”
“You don’t have to.”
“What are you now, a mind reader?”
“I know what you’re gonna say, I can see it in your eyes. I know you’re bothered by all this. Don’t be…you don’t owe me a thing.”
“In a cold-blooded dog-eat-dog world, that would be one way to look at it.”
>
“Well, isn’t that what it is?”
“Only sometimes.”
“I’ll bet this was your big failing as a cop. People can look in your face and see what’s in your heart.”
“Would you believe nobody’s ever said that to me?…Not once. In some circles I’m known as a helluva poker player, impossible to read.”
“Amazing.”
We looked at each other.
“If you’re waiting for absolution, you already have it,” she said. “You were doing a job. You’ve got a strange way of doing it, but I’ve got no kick coming. If it makes you feel better, you’ve got my unqualified permission to deliver me up and get on with your life, forget I ever existed.”
“That’s not going to happen, Eleanor. That’s one promise I’m making you.”
“What can you do, tell me that…what can you do?”
“I don’t know. Did you do the burglary?”
“Yes, I did. So there you are.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Personal reasons.”
“Did you take a gun into the house?”
“Does it matter?”
“Does it matter? Hell, yes, it matters. It can be the difference between a first-time offender asking for probation and a gun moll doing heavy time.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You said something back in the restaurant when we were talking about your stalker. The subject of a gun came up. Do you remember what you said?”
She looked at me through the glass. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
“Did the cops do a gunshot residue test?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“So I’ll ask you again. Did you take a gun into that house?”
“No. Believe it or not.”
“Okay, I believe it. Did you get a gun while you were in the house, maybe from the guy’s gun rack. Was it you that did the shooting?”
“I never shot at anyone. I was the one shot at. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“If we can prove that, you’ve got a fighting chance. You were still wrong to be there. You broke in, they had every right to shoot at you. But almost any judge would wonder why they’d lie about it.”
“I guess they want me to go to jail.”
“For a long time, apparently.” I leaned closer to the glass. “I’d still like to know why you broke in, what you were looking for.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. But not today; I don’t think I know you well enough to get into the wired-up hell of my life with you. When do we leave?”
“Late tonight. I’ll come for you around seven-thirty.”
“Lots of dead time for you to fill. What’ll you do, hit the bookstores?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the only part of this that really surprises me. I never had a hint you were a book dealer. You played that card very well.”
I tried to smile at her. “I’d better go.” But something powerful held me there. Then, so quickly that I didn’t know how it happened, I stepped off the straight and narrow for the first time that day. I stepped all the way off and said something that could never be unsaid.
“How’d you like to get out of here?…go with me?…be my guide through the Seattle book jungle?”
She looked like a person half-drowned who had suddenly been brought back to life. “Can you do that?”
“Probably not. The jailer will look at my tickets and wonder what the hell I’m doing taking you out ten hours early. The judge’ll schedule a new hearing, I’ll get drawn and quartered, and you’ll end up riding back to Taos handcuffed to a deputy.”
I shrugged. “We could try.”
She reached out as if to touch my face. Her fingertips flattened against the glass.
“You’ve got to promise to behave.” I felt a sudden desperation, as if I’d taken a long step into the dark. “I’m taking a big chance, Eleanor. It’s my responsibility now. I’ll take the chance because I like you. I owe you one for the big lie. And it just occurs to me that you’d probably rather spend the day in bookstores than chained by your neck to the wall of some crummy jail cell. But you’ve got to behave.”
“Absolutely. Who wouldn’t love a deal like that?”
The jailer gave our tickets a cursory glance. He looked at my papers, read the judge’s order, and at half past ten Eleanor Rigby and I walked out into a drippy Seattle day.
13
It was a day of magic. The two of us were charmed: Seattle was our oyster and every stop coughed up a pearl. She took me to a place called Gregor Books on Southwest California Avenue. The books were crisp and fine and there were lots of high-end goodies. You don’t steal books out of a store like that—the owner is far too savvy ever to get caught sleeping on a live one, but Rita McKinley’s words echoed in my ear. You can double the price on anything if it’s fine enough . Gregor had the finest copy of Smoky I had ever seen. Signed Will James material is becoming scarce, and James had not only signed it but had drawn an original sketch on the half title. Gregor was asking $600, $480 after my dealer’s discount. I took it, figuring I could push it to $800 or more on the sketch and the world’s-best-copy assertion. I figured James was a hotter property in the real West, Colorado, than here in Seattle, and when the day came for me to go in the ground, I could rest just fine if they threw this book in the hole with me. Speaking of dying, Gregor had a dandy copy of If I Die in a Combat Zone , Tim O’Brien’s 1973 novel of the Vietnam War. He had marked it $450, but I was making his day and he bumped my discount to 25 percent for both items. I took it: the O’Brien is so damn scarce that I thought it was overdue for another price jump, and I left the store poorer but happier. Eleanor directed me downtown. We stopped at the Seattle Book Center, a lovely store on Second Avenue with half a dozen rooms on two floors. I bought a Zane Grey Thundering Herd in an immaculate 1919 dust jacket for $160.1 was flying high now. There were books everywhere we looked, and even if the Seattle boys weren’t giving them away, I saw decent margin in almost everything I touched. “This is one of those days, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “I’ll bet if you went back there and flushed the toilet, books would come pouring out.” We went to a mystery specialist called Spade and Archer. It was in a bank building downtown, in a fifth-floor office that old Sam Spade himself might have occupied in the thirties. The owner was a young blond woman whose credo seemed to be “keep ‘em moving.” She had two of the three Edgar Box mysteries at a hundred apiece, cost to me, and I took them, figuring they’d be good $200 items in the catalog I was planning. As mysteries they’re just fair. But Gore Vidal had written them, hiding behind the Edgar Box moniker when he was starting out in the early fifties, and there’s always somebody for a curiosity like that.
In another store I fingered a sharp copy of White Fang , amazed that the asking price was just $75. Eleanor warned me off with a look. In the car she said, “It was a second state, that’s why it was so cheap.” I felt like amateur night in Harlem, but I asked her anyway, what was the point of it, and this kid, this child, gave me another lesson in fly-by-your pants bookscouting.
“There was a mistake on the title page. Macmillan just sliced it out and glued a new one on the cancel stub…You look perplexed, Mr. Jane way, like a man who’s never heard the terminology. You don’t know what a cancel stub is?…How long have you been in the business?”
“Long enough to know a lot about a few things and damn little about most of it.”
“Well, this kind of thing happened a lot in the old days. The publisher would make a mistake in a line or word, but by the time they noticed it, ten thousand copies had been printed and maybe five thousand had been distributed. If it was an important author, like Jack London, they didn’t want to release any more with the mistake, but they didn’t want to redo all those books either. So Macmillan printed a new title page, in the case of White Fang , then they sliced out the old ones on all those flawed copies and just glued the new one right onto the stub.”
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br /> “They just tipped it in.”
“Sure. Labor was cheap then, and even those factory grunts could do a decent job of it. The average book collector won’t even see it, but a bookman can’t miss it unless it’s done with real finesse. Just look down in the gutter and there it is, like a man who had an arm cut off and sewn back on again. Doran did the same thing with one of Winston Churchill’s early books, My African Journey . They bought the remainder from the British publisher and just slashed out the title page and put in their own on the cancel stub. That’s why the first American edition comes in a British casing, with Hodder and Stoughton on the spine and a tipped-in Doran title page. It was one of Doran’s first books, and he was lowballing to save money.”
“Oh,” I said lamely.
We stopped for lunch. I wanted to talk about her case but she wouldn’t get into it: it would only screw up an otherwise pleasant day, she said. We drifted back toward the Kingdome. Her car was gone: her father had picked it up for her and had it towed to a gas station a few blocks away. We drove past and saw it there in the lot. We were in the neighborhood anyway, so we stopped in the big Goodwill store on Dearborn. I don’t do thrift stores much anymore— usually they are run by idiots who think they are book dealers, without a lick of experience or a grain of knowledge to back them up. In Denver the Goodwills have become laughingstocks among dealers and scouts. They have their silly little antique rooms where they put everything that looks old—every ratty, worn-out never-was that ever came out of the publishing industry. They mark their prices in ink, destroying any value the thing might have, and when you try to tell them that, they stare at you with dull eyes and say they’ve got to do it that way. The store in Seattle didn’t ink its books to death, but it didn’t matter—they had the same mentality when it came to pricing. The shelves were clogged with common, crummy books, some still available on Walden remainder tables for two dollars, marked six and seven in this so-called thrift store. Naturally, they missed the one good book. Eleanor found it as she browsed one side while I worked the other. She peeked around the corner with that sad-little-girl-oh-so-lost look on her face. “Scuse me, sir, could you loan me a dollar?…My family’s destitute, my daddy broke his leg, my little brother’s got muscular dystrophy, and my mamma’s about to sell her virtue on First Avenue.” I made a convulsive grab at my wallet. “Damn, you are good!” I said with forced admiration. “You’re breaking my damn heart.” She grinned with all her teeth and held up a fine first of Robert Traver’s wonderful Anatomy of a Murder . It was a nice scarce little piece, worth at least $100 I guessed: a good sleeper because the Book of the Month edition is exactly the same size and shape and so prolific that even real bookpeople won’t bother to pick it up and look. Goodwill wanted $4 for it. She paid with my dollar and her nickels and dimes, then haggled with me in the parking lot: “Gregor would give me at least forty for this, and I’m waiting breathlessly to see if you’re inclined to do the honorable thing.” I gave her forty-five, but made a point of getting my dollar back, and we both enjoyed my good-natured grumbling for the next half hour.
