by John Dunning
I gave a dry little laugh. Even after my long police career, the stupidity of some criminals amazes me. This is why the jails are full.
“It was a screwdriver,” Scofield said. “One of those extra blades that comes on a utility knife, you know, a six-tools-in-one instrument. He had used it to break open the bookshelf locks. This was easy: once he’d gotten into the house, then into the library, breaking open the cabinets themselves was relatively simple— he just wedged his screwdriver into the metal lock and pried it open. But it left a scrape mark, which was identical to the sample police made later with the same tool. He also left a partial heelprint in the garden outside the house. His heel fit it perfectly. We had just fertilized that flowerbed, and a chemical residue was found in the nail holes of his heels. I was getting that fertilizer from Germany, it wasn’t yet widely available in the United States, so the odds of finding that precise mix of ingredients in any other garden would have been quite long. We didn’t even have the analysis back from the crime lab yet, but Mr. Larson—and more to the point, Mr. Pruitt—must have known what it would show. Larson was a two-time loser who was looking at a long trip up the river. His incentive to deal was getting better by the hour.”
“To give them Pruitt’s head on a platter.”
“You could put it that way.”
“I can almost guess the rest.”
He nodded. “Suddenly my attorney got a call from Larson’s lawyer…Larson’s new lawyer. We were told that full restitution might be made if the case could be discreetly dropped.”
“I’ll bet the cops loved you for that.”
“The detective who had made this case was not thrilled, to say the least. He fumed and yelled and said this was not my call to make.”
“But he soon learned better, didn’t he? Grease runs the world in L.A. too.”
“You’ve got to understand something. This was never said, but there was a strong implication that if I didn’t agree right then, on the spot, my books might end up in the Pacific Ocean. What was I supposed to do? I agreed to have the case dropped, and on Monday morning a note was delivered to my office. If I showed up at a certain corner at a certain time, a taxi would arrive and the driver would have my books in two big boxes. And that’s what I did. I never saw Pruitt again until just this morning. End of story.”
“Not quite, Mr. Scofield. You left the woman in red hanging from a cliff.”
“I flew back to Seattle that same night. There wasn’t time to have the book examined by Brenner or anyone else. I went on my gut, as they say, not the first time I’ve done that in my life. I was still weak from my illness, and the stress of having lost the book for the better part of a week had also taken its toll. I went against my doctor’s orders, had to be helped to my chair in the restaurant. She was already there when I arrived. She seemed quite nervous, unsure. But even then I had no idea anything was wrong. We chatted for perhaps three minutes. I had the money all ready for her, in a small valise, just as I brought it to Pruitt this morning. The book and the valise were there on the table between us. I felt so sure…and then…”
“What?”
“I remember I had a coughing attack…a bad one. And it was almost as if that was what finally made her balk and call the deal off. She reached out and picked up the book, not the money, and for a minute I still didn’t realize what it meant. Then she apologized and said she just couldn’t sell it after all. I tried to persuade her…if it was more money she needed…but no, it was more like…”
I waited, my eyes on his.
“I don’t know how to put it exactly…an act of conscience maybe. I guess that’s it, she was overcome by conscience and guilt. She reached in her purse and brought out the money I’d given her. I made her keep it. I thought maybe it would give me a claim on the book if the day ever came when she’d change her mind again.”
He looked around from face to face. “Then she walked out. We never heard from her again.”
No one said anything for a long moment.
“Just like Dillinger,” I said.
None of them seemed to know what I was talking about.
“You and John Dillinger,” I said. “Both laid low by a woman in red.”
49
I left them there, Kenney and Scofield to their work and Amy watching them from a chair near the door. I drove into North Bend alone. I had fish to fry. This is where it all happens, I thought: it doesn’t have anything to do with Baltimore or Phoenix or even Seattle except that those cases all spun out of here. I was thinking of Grayson, doing the work he loved without having to compete with his own fame and glory. We do get older: sometimes we even get wiser. Fame and glory don’t mean as much when we’re fifty, when they’re finally within reach, as they did when we could only dream about them at twenty.
The gate was locked at the Rigby place so I went on past to Snoqualmie. Fingers of sunlight led the way, beaming down through pockets of mist that wafted across both towns. The area bustled with commerce in the middle of the afternoon. Tourists drifted along the avenue, going or coming to or from the waterfall. A mailman moved along the block, stopping in each store. Near a corner a team of glaziers was busy replacing a broken storefront.
I drove past Smoky Joe’s Tavern and turned a corner, pulling up at the curb. Archie Moon’s print-shop was dark and locked. I got out and went to the door, cupped my hands, and peeped through the glass. Somewhere back in the shop a faint light shone, but I rapped on the glass and no one came.
“I think she’s gone for the day,” a voice said.
I turned and said hello to the mailman.
“If you’re looking for Carrie, she usually takes half a day off on Tuesdays,” he said.
“Actually, I’m looking for Archie.”
“Carrie can tell you where he’s at: she rides herd on him like a mother hen. But you’ll have to catch her tomorrow.”
I thanked him and got back in the car. I watched him sort some mail and drop it through the frontdoor slot. Then he moved on down the street and I drove out of town, on to Selena Harper’s house.
Things were soon looking up. Trish was sitting on the front porch steps when I turned into the yard.
“I figured you’d turn up here,” she said. “The only hard part was finding this place. And psyching myself up for a long wait.”
I wanted to hear all about the other theaters of war, about Pruitt and the cops and all that had happened since I’d seen her five hours ago. But her mood was cool, almost hostile as she watched me come toward her.
“Sorry I had to run out on you like that. Things got kinda hectic.”
“Didn’t they though,” she said, unforgiving. “You’re quite an act, Janeway. But I can’t say I wasn’t warned.”
She cocked her head to one side, showing a long bruise under her left eye. “Pretty, huh?”
“What happened to you?”
“Think about it a minute. You’re a bright boy, you’ll figure it out.”
I thought about it and came up with nothing.
“You were trying to turn Pruitt into next week’s dog food. I grabbed you around the neck. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back in the mud.”
“Wait a minute, hold it. Play that back again.”
“You slugged me, you son of a bitch.”
I was, for once in my life, speechless.
“Wanna hear it again?”
“No…I really don’t think I do.”
“Do you know what I did to the last man who tried to raise a hand to me?”
“I’ve got a feeling I’m about to find out.”
“Think of a hot-oil enema and maybe you can relate to it.”
“Ayee.” Beyond that I didn’t dare laugh. I tried to reach out to her, but she looked at my hand the way you’d look at a spittoon.
“Come on, Trish.”
She stared off at the graying sky.
“Come on.”
She didn’t move.
“Come on. Please.”
�
��Please what?”
“Get up, tell me it’s okay, and let’s get on with it.”
“Is that the full and complete text of your apology? Now I know why you’re so successful with women.”
“I am sorry. I really am.”
She didn’t respond, so I said it again. “I’m sorry.”
“How sorry are you?”
“I don’t know. How sorry do you want me to be?”
“I want you to do something for me.”
I didn’t say anything. I seemed to know what she wanted.
She gripped my wrist and I pulled her up. She smoothed her skirt with her free hand and said, “I want you to go in and talk to Quintana.”
I moved on past her to the top of the porch.
“I’m serious about that,” she said, losing no ground behind me.
I turned and she was right there, so close we bumped together.
“He’s gonna treat you right. But you’ve got to do it now.”
I unlocked the front door and stood aside so she could go in first. The house smelled musty and looked golden and gray. A light rain had begun, with the sun still shining off to the west, the dark places broken by splashes of streaky sunlight. She came in reluctantly, like an infidel desecrating a holy place, and I followed her on through the front room toward the kitchen. She stopped for a moment, seemed to be listening for something, then turned and looked at me across a shaft of watery yellow haze. “Am I imagining this,” she said, “or is something happening between us?” The question was sudden and improbable, infusing the air with erotic tension. I thought of the midnight supper we had had and how easily she had done the impossible, taken Rita’s place at the other end of the table. “It does seem to be,” I said. But I didn’t yet know the shape it might take or where it might go from here. She lived in Seattle and I lived in Denver, and neither of us had had time to give it much thought.
She looked away, into the clutter of the kitchen. I came up behind her, close enough to touch. But she was not a woman you did that to until you were very sure.
She sensed me there behind her, took a half-step back, and pressed herself lightly against me.
I put an arm around her, then the other. She leaned her head back and I hugged her a little tighter.
“Something’s certainly happening,” she said. “I know that s not my imagination.”
“In Rome they had a term for it.”
“ Lustus profundus ,” she said, stealing it.
“The next best thing to a chariot race.”
She laughed and pulled herself away, moving across the room. “God, I don’t know what to do with you. I wish I knew.”
“Whatever you want. It’s not that complicated. I don’t come with a Japanese instructional booklet.”
She took a long breath. “I’ve been celibate almost two years.”
“I can’t imagine why. It can only be by choice.”
“I got hurt. I mean really burned. I swore off men. And meant it, too, until…”
She blushed. Her skin looked hot.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said.
“But, see, you don’t have to know. You can figure it out in your own good time. Nobody’s pushing you.”
“Now that I’m over here,” she said, and we both laughed.
She asked where the Grayson stuff was and I led her back to the stairs and up to the loft. I crawled up into the room and reached back for her. We clasped hands and I helped her up. It was all as I’d left it, the two remaining rows separated by a three-foot gap and draped by a sheet of clear polyethylene. I walked out on the plastic and held up my hands like Moses going through the Red Sea.
Behind me, she said, “Who the hell am I kidding?”
When I turned, she had pulled her blouse out of her skirt and had taken loose the top buttons.
“So what do you think?” she said brightly. “Is that plastic cold?”
50
I’ve always hated plastic, the symbol of everything phony in the world.
Not anymore.
It was hot and quick, intense. We were both long overdue.
I buried my face in her hair, loving her, and she clawed the plastic down and sealed us inside it. We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.
Then we lay on top and cooled off, and in a while, when she was ready, she told me about Pruitt. They had parked him in the Pierce County Jail on a hold order from Seattle. Quintana would be sending someone down, maybe as early as tonight, to pick him up. Trish was vague on the possible charges. What Quintana wanted now was to talk to him and see how his story compared with the version they had gotten out of the kid, Bobby John Dalton. “I had a long talk with Quintana on the telephone. He actually talked to me. I must be living right.“
“Cops tend to do that when they think you know more than they do.”
“He seemed almost human. I got some great background out of him, off the record.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Off the record. That means you tell no one without my permission, under penalty of death.”
Sure, I said: I could play her reporter game.
“Bobby’s version of that night remained constant through two days of questioning. You broke his jaw, by the way—the cops had to take his statement through clenched teeth. He’s eating through a straw, which is hard work for a meat eater.”
“I’ll send him a get-well card.”
“Bobby and Carmichael took the Rigby girl to Carmichael’s house. That’s just off Aurora Avenue, not far from downtown. By the time Pruitt got there Rigby had been trussed up, gagged, and stashed in a room off the kitchen. There was an argument over what to do with her. Carmichael was worried about Pruitt—he had this sudden fear that Pruitt might go too far and hurt her if she didn’t come up with the book. I take it Pruitt doesn’t always know when to stop once he gets started.”
I thought of Slater’s battered face and told her Carmichael had good reason to worry. “Where was Bobby in all of this?”
“By then he was hurting so bad he wasn’t worrying about anybody but himself. Carmichael was the one sweating it. If Rigby was going to come to any real harm, Carmichael didn’t want to know about it—and he sure didn’t want it happening there in his house. But he couldn’t stand up to Pruitt. At one point Pruitt lost his temper and knocked Carmichael back into the kitchen table and broke off one of the legs. Pruitt yelled at him and said he was worse than Slater. If it hadn’t been for Slater, he’d have taken the girl last week and they’d have the book by now.”
“Which is probably true.”
“Pruitt went into the room with Rigby alone. There wasn’t a sound, to hear Bobby tell it. He said it was spooky, the two of them standing in the dead silence looking at each other and not knowing what was happening in the other room. Then Pruitt came out and said he was going to get the book.”
“He scared it out of her. He was her bogeyman, Slater said. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe why’s not important. It was in the bus station, in a locker. She had put it there the first day she got to town.”
I gave a little laugh and shook my head.
“That’s about it. Pruitt told Carmichael to take Rigby on up to his house, he’d be along himself as soon as he could get downtown and get the book. Then he’d settle up with them and they could both go to hell. Bobby took off for the nearest emergency room, and that’s the last he saw or heard of them till he read about Carmichael in the newspaper.”
“We can finish the story ourselves from there. Carmichael took Eleanor on to Pruitt’s alone. Olga was already dead in the house and the killer was still inside waiting. The only thing about it that I can’t believe is that Quintana would tell it all to you.”
“He wants you to come in.”
“He’s moved on in his thinking. He’s past Pruitt now, same as I am. He knows it’s not Pruitt and he knows it’s not me. He told you this stuff to send me a message. Thi
s goddamn man is one pretty good cop.”
“Go see him, Cliff. Do this for me, please, do it now, before it gets any worse. Who knows when the moon will turn and Quintana will start drinking blood again.”
“I’ll make you a deal. If I don’t wrap this mother up by tomorrow, Quintana can have me. Solemn word of honor.”
She lay there weighing it, clearly unhappy.
“I’ve got to follow this one out, Trish. If I’m wrong, Quintana can have everything I’ve got and you can come visit me every third Tuesday of the month in the crowbar hotel.”
“You’re chasing a ghost.”
“I’m betting all those deaths were set off by something in those books. Something that humiliated him beyond any imaginable reason. It attacked him in his guts, in his heart, where he lived: it made his life unbearable to imagine them out there for someone else to see. It threatened to destroy the one thing that made life worth living. The Grayson mystique.”
“But you’re hanging all this on the blind woman.”
“It’s not just the blind woman, it’s far more than that now. We’ve got the chronology, with the homicides following the Grayson lettering schemes to the point of making no geographic sense. We’ve got the ashes at Hockman’s and Pruitt’s, and what do you want to bet there weren’t ashes at all the others too? The house in New Orleans caught fire, there were lots of ashes there. We know he didn’t go there to burn old newspapers, we know exactly why he was there and what he’d come to burn. Why do I have to work so hard convincing you of this?—it’s even in your book, that scene when he wanted to burn those 1949 Ravens because of the misspelled word. Now the injury was ten times worse. This was to’ve been his masterpiece, the book to put that old one to rest at long last. And somehow he messed it up again, and the masterpiece turned to dust. And that offended him so deeply that he couldn’t even wait to get those books outside the murder scenes to destroy them. Who else would do that but Grayson himself?”
“He would kill people, you’re saying, because of the mistake he’d made.”
