by John Dunning
“Well, damn.”
“Oh, let’s not agonize over it. If you don’t wanna tell me where the man is, it’s no skin off my nose.”
She was breathing in my ear. “Is it…”
I waited.
“…is it a lot of money?”
I couldn’t help laughing: I had played her just right. “Let’s say there’s a good reason he wanted it in cash.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll give ya a number.”
I could hear her fumbling around. “Call him at area code two oh six. It’s six two four, oh five hundred. Ask for seventeen twelve.”
I sat staring at the phone. Slowly I straightened up and looked at the far wall.
Slater was in the room next door.
And I knew I might as well have him in my lap.
Eleanor came out of the bathroom in a swirl of steam. She sat at the mirror sipping her drink and combing out her incredible hair. I thought she was lovely, alive with the sparkle of youth in spite of her trouble. She wanted to talk. Our short mutual history was the topic of the moment, to which was added her general assessment that we were a damned exceptional book-hunting team. “Today was special,” she said, “a real toot.” I looked at the far wall, where Slater was, and told her the pleasure was all mine. To her way of thinking, it was the perfect day, one she’d remember: “This is how I’d live my life, every day of the year, if I had my way. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, some good books…”
She looked at me with open affection in the glass. “And you.”
She tugged at a place where her hair had knotted up. “We wouldn’t even need much money,” she said. “Money just takes the edge off. You need to be a little hungry to get that rush that comes with finding a really good one.”
Again she amazed me, this kid barely out of her teens.
“It’s not-having money that keeps you on your toes,” she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
I told her we were probably the most on-our-toes pair since Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and she laughed. “Why couldn’t I’ve found you a year ago,” she mused. “Why-o-why-o-why?”
“It wouldn’t‘ve done much good,” I said absently, “since we’ve already got it well established that I’m old enough to be your father.”
She scoffed at this. “Yeah, if you’d started hiking up skirts when you were thirteen, maybe.” She looked at me in the mirror and said, blushing fiercely, “You’re probably not up to a little seduction right now, I’ll bet.”
I thought long and hard about how to respond, the words to use. The ones I picked were clumsy and inadequate. “Under the circumstances, you know, this is not the best idea you’ve had all day.”
“Well, it was just a thought.”
I told her it was a lovely thought, I was flattered. In another time, maybe…in another place…
“In another life,” she said, closing the book on it.
I decided to hang out here until just before our flight left. The certainty of Slater’s listening in on us I accepted as the lesser of two evils: here I could keep my back to the wall until the last possible moment. I looked at the wall but it told me nothing. I knew what I needed to know. Detectives today can punch a hole the size of a pin through a concrete wall, run a wire into bed with a cheating housewife, record her ecstasy with the other guy in eight-track stereo, and add a Michael Jackson sound track for the entertainment of the office staff. I told Eleanor none of this: no sense waving a red flag just yet. I called out and ordered a pizza delivered. She kept up a running chatter while we ate—her way, I guessed, of relieving her own building tension. She talked about all the great books she had found that had been screwed up by one anal-obsessive chucklehead or another. I laughed as only a fellow traveler can: I too knew that peculiar heartache. You find a grand copy of an old Ross Macdonald and open it to see that some fool has written all over it, destroying half its value and all of its factory-fresh desirability. Why is a book the only gift that the giver feels free and often compelled to deface before giving? Who would give a shirt or a blouse and write, in ink, Happy birthday from Bozo all over the front of it? Even worse than the scribblers, Eleanor said, were the name embossers. “When I become the queen of hell, I’m going to parade all those embosser freaks past me in a long naked line. I’ll have an embosser with the word IDIOT on it, smothered in hot coals, and I’ll emboss them , sir, in the tenderest place that you can imagine.” That punishment sounded pretty sexist to me, which was exactly her point. “Have you ever seen an embossermark with a woman’s name on it…ever?” I had, but only once and it probably didn’t count—a sadistic dominatrix whose murder I had investigated long ago. “Women write in the spirit of giving,” Eleanor said. “Men emboss like they’re branding cattle, to possess.” For the books, we sadly agreed, the result was the same.
I hoped Slater was getting an earful. I looked at the clock: the plane took off in three hours, I was almost home free. The day was ending on a wave of nickel-and-dime bookstuff. I asked her to define anal-obsessive chucklehead, please, and tell me how that particular characteristic expresses itself. She laughed and slapped my hand and said, “Get out of here, you damn fool,” and the night wound down. We drank a toast to the defilers of good books—scribblers, embossers, and the remainder goons at the Viking Press—may their conversion to the cause be swift and permanent. At eight-thirty she asked if she could mail a letter. She sat at the table and scratched out a few lines on hotel stationery: then she turned away, shielding the letter with her body so I couldn’t see it. I knew she had taken something out of her purse and dropped it in the envelope with the letter. I was riddled with second thoughts, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it: I could either be her jailer or her friend. She licked the envelope, sealed it, and called for a bellhop to mail it. And I sat mute, her friend, and watched it disappear.
I was a bit curt with her after that. She asked when we should leave and I told her not to worry about it, I’d let her know. I had decided to linger here until exactly seventy minutes before takeoff, then haul ass for Sea-Tac in a cloud of smoke. I hoped the TV would cover our sudden retreat. I’d let Slater listen to the Tonight Show until reality began to dawn: if I was lucky, we’d be halfway to the airport before he knew it. Out on the street I’d have only Pruitt to deal with.
Duck soup, I thought, an even-money standoff.
I always bet on me with odds like that. I had forgotten that line from Burns about the best-laid schemes of mice and men. I should read more poetry.
15
At 9:35 the telephone rang. We looked at each other and neither of us moved. I let it ring and after a while it stopped. Now we’d see, I thought: if it had been a test, somebody would be over to see if we were still here.
At 9:43 it rang again. By then I had rethought the strategy of silence, and I picked it up.
“It’s me.” Slater’s voice sounded puffy, distant.
“So it is,” I said flatly, with a faint W. C. Fields undertone.
“We need to talk.”
“Send me a telegram.”
“Don’t get cute, Janeway, your time’s running out.”
I gave a doubtful grunt.
“We need to talk now. I’m doing you a favor if you’ve got the sense to listen.”
I listened.
“Come out in the hall.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m in the room next door.” His voice was raspy, urgent. “I need you to come out in the hall so we can talk.”
Then I got a break I couldn’t have bought. Eleanor got up and went to the bathroom.
“You must think I was born yesterday,” I said as soon as she closed the door.
“This is on the level. I know you’re on the eleven-eighteen. I’m giving you fair warning, you’re never gonna make it.”
“Try and stop me and you’re a dead man, Slater. That’s fair warning for both of you.”
“It’s not me that’s gonna stop you, stupid. Goddammit, are you coming ou
t or not?”
I thought about it for five seconds. “Yeah.” I hung up.
I opened my bag and got out my gun. Strapped it on under my coat and waited till Eleanor came out of the bathroom.
“Just a little problem with my bill, no big deal,” I told her. “I’ve got to go upstairs and straighten it out. You sit right there, we’ll leave as soon as I get back.”
She didn’t say anything but I could see she wasn’t buying it. She sat where I told her and clasped her hands primly in her lap, her face a mask of sudden tension.
I opened the door and eased my way out into the hall. I had my thumb hooked over my belt, two inches from the gun.
Slater was down at the end of the hall, looking at the wall. I pulled the door shut and he turned. I think I was ready for anything but what I saw. His face had been beaten into watermelon. His left eye was battered shut, his nose pounded flat against his face. His right eye was open wide, a grotesque effect like something from an old Lon Chaney film.
“What happened to you?”
I had flattened against the wall so I could see both ways. Slater came toward me, shuffling in pain. His leg was stiff and he held his arm in a frozen crook, suspended as if by an invisible sling.
“Pruitt,” he rasped, livid. “Fucking bastard Pruitt.”
I just looked at him, unable to imagine what might have gone down between them. He came closer and I saw what had caused that pufnness in his voice. His dentures were gone—smashed, I guessed, along with the rest of him—and he talked like a toothless old man.
“Goddammit, I’ll rip that fucker’s guts out.”
“What happened?” I said again.
“Bastard son of a bitch sapped me, damn near took my head off. I went down and he did the rest of it with his feet.”
He did it well, I thought.
“He’ll pay, though, he’ll pay for this in ways I haven’t even thought up yet. Even if he doesn’t know it was me, I’ll know, and that’ll be enough.” He took a little step to the side and held on to the wall for support. “And it starts today. I’m gonna tell you something, Janeway, and then it’s your baby. Pruitt will kill you if he has to.”
“He should play the lottery, his odds are better.”
“Don’t you underestimate that fucker, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“I’m reading that. Now why don’t you tell me what he wants.”
“The book, stupid, haven’t you figured that out yet? He’s been after it for years.”
“Tell me something real. Grayson couldn’t make a book worth this much trouble if he used uncut sheets of thousand-dollar bills for endpapers.”
“That’s what you think. Forget what you thought you knew and maybe you’ll learn something. Your little friend in there’s got the answer, and Pruitt’s gonna take her away from you and get it out of her if he’s got to tear out her fingernails.”
“Say something that makes sense. Pruitt had her and you two handed her to me. Now he’s ready to kill me to get her back?”
He started to say something but a click in the hall brought him up short. We both tensed. I gripped the gun under my coat.
The door swung in and Eleanor peeped into the hall.
She didn’t say anything. She was looking past me, at Slater, and he was looking at her. Her face was ashen, her eyes wide with fright.
“Eleanor,” I said, “go back in the room and sit down.”
She backed away and closed the door.
“She knows you,” I said to Slater. “She recognized you just then.”
He tried to move past me. I stepped out and blocked his way.
“What do you want from me, Janeway? I’m doing you a favor here, maybe you should remember that. I didn’t have to tell you anything.”
“You haven’t told me anything yet. Pick up where you left off. Make it make sense.”
“Goddammit, I’m hurting, I need to lie down.”
“Talk to me. Give me the short version, then you can lie down.”
He grimaced and held his side. But I wasn’t going to let him pass until he told me what I wanted to know.
“Me and Pruitt grew up together. Southside Chicago, early fifties. You want my life story?”
“The short version, Slater. We haven’t got all night here, I’ve got a plane to catch.”
They were kids together, birds of a feather. Nobody could stand either of them, I thought, so they hung together.
“He called me for a few favors when I was a cop. We’d have a beer or two whenever he passed through Denver. Four years ago, on one of his trips through, he told me about this book.”
He coughed. “He’d been chasing it for a long time even then. He was trying to track down a woman he was sure had taken it, but he never could find her. He’d run every lead up a blind alley.”
“What’s the big attraction?”
“Pruitt knows where he can sell it. For more money than any of us ever saw.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Then fuck you. Do you want to hear this or not?…I can’t stand up in this hall forever. I’ll tell you this, he convinced the hell out of me. That night I wrote out the stuff he told me on that paper you read, but nothing ever came of it…until last month. Then I get a call from Seattle and it’s Pruitt. It’s all hitting the fan over this book he’s after. There’s a woman named Rigby in the Taos jail and Pruitt thinks she’s got it.”
“Why didn’t he go down himself?”
“Later on he did: he had some Seattle angles to work out first. He thought the girl’s parents might know about it, might even know where she’d hidden it; maybe she’d even mailed it to ‘em. So he sent me to Taos to nose around, see what was what. I’d barely got there when she came up for bail. Pruitt came in the next day.”
“And did what?”
“Made her wish she’d never been born. That was just the beginning of what he had up his sleeve for her. The book’s been like a monkey on his back, I could see it driving him closer to the edge every day. I started thinking he might even kill her for it. But she wouldn’t give it up.”
“Probably because she didn’t have it.”
“But she went back to get it, didn’t she?”
“She went back for something. Weren’t you boys on her tail?”
“You’re not gonna believe this, Janeway. She slipped us.”
I just stared at him.
“She’s cute, all right, a little too cute for her own damn good. The next thing we knew she’d skipped the state. Pruitt went nuclear.”
“This must be when you got the bright idea of dragging me into it.”
“Our time was running out. She could be picked up by the cops anywhere and we’d be up the creek. Pruitt thought she’d head for Seattle: he put out some people he knew to watch her haunts. And it didn’t take long to spot her: she turned up in North Bend a few days later. I didn’t know what to do. I sure didn’t want to let it go. Pruitt had promised me a piece of it, if I helped him reel it in. I’m talking about more money than you’ll believe, so don’t even ask.”
“I thought money didn’t matter to you, Clydell. What about the radio job? What about Denver magazine?“
“All bullshit. I owe more federal income tax than I’ve got coming in. I do a weekend gig on radio, not enough to pay my water bill. The magazine piece’ll be lining birdcages before the ink’s even dry. Business sucks; I’m almost broke. What more do you need to know? And besides all that, I really was afraid of what he’d do to that kid.”
He took a long, painful breath. “So if you’re looking for a good guy in this, it’s probably me. That same night I told Pruitt about you. I thought I could tempt you with the bail money, it was easy to get the papers from the bondsman; hell, he doesn’t care who brings her in. But the bail was just bait. I knew you’d never bust Rigby for that bail money, not once you had that book in your mind.”
He touched his face. “I really thought you might get the book from her. You might have
, too, if the cops hadn’t busted her and messed everything up. I sold you to Pruitt as a bookhunter. He didn’t like it but I talked hard and late that night he decided to try it.”
“And that’s what finally got your face kicked in. Pruitt didn’t like the way it turned out.”
“I had to try something. She knows us both on sight, and Pruitt’s her worst nightmare. She’s right to be scared of him: he’s over the edge now. He’s your problem, you and that poor kid in there. Me, I’m out of it, I’ve had enough. I’m goin‘ back to Denver.”
He pushed his way past. Stopped at his door; looked back at me. “I’ll give you two free pieces of advice. Pruitt didn’t get to be called the invisible man for nothing. He can fade into a crowd and you can’t see him even when you know he’s there. He’s great with makeup—wigs, beards, glasses—he can make himself over while you’re scratching your ass wonder-ing where he went. And he’s always got people around him, scumbags who owe him favors. One of’em’s a fat man, but there may be others. Don’t trust anybody. Don’t let ‘em get close and sucker punch you.”
He opened his door. “You didn’t hear any of this from me, okay? I’ll figure out my own ways of paying Pruitt back, and I don’t want him sticking a knife in my ass before I’ve got it worked out. So here’s your second hot tip. Pruitt fucked up your car. If you’re counting on that to get you to the airport, think again.”
He looked at his watch. “You cut it pretty short, old buddy. You got one hour to get her there. Stay clear of old ladies and fat men, Janeway. If you ever get back to Denver, call me, we’ll have lunch. Maybe I’ll have a job for you.”
16
My brain kicked up in the cop mode. From then on I was running on overdrive.
My goals had narrowed to one. Nothing else mattered—not money or pain, not even the books I had foolishly taken from Otto Murdock.
We were going on the run. That meant travel light, travel fast: leave the books, leave the clothes, call the Rigbys from New Mexico, hope Crystal could come pick up my stuff. Not a perfect answer, but when you’ve got a woman to guard, eight grand worth of books in a cardboard box, and a man on your tail who might be seriously unhinged, perfection is a little too much to ask for.
