by John Dunning
And again. “Mr. Moon, this is Jewell Bledsoe. I’ve been thinking about that job we discussed. Let’s do go ahead. And, yes, I would like to have dinner sometime. Very much. So call me. Tomorrow.”
Moon gave a little laugh laced with triumph. “Ah, Jewell,” he cried out to the empty room. “Ah, yeah !”
He was a busy man with a heavy social docket. He was much like his pal Darryl Grayson that way. In great demand by the ladies.
There was another message on the tape. She didn’t identify herself, didn’t need to. It was a voice he had heard every day for twenty years.
“Oh, Archie, where are you! Everything’s gone crazy, I feel like I’m losing my mind. Call me, please…for God’s sake, call me!”
He picked up the telephone and punched in a number. Hung up, tried again, hung up, replayed the message.
“Goddammit, honey,” he said to the far wall. “How the hell am I supposed to call you if you’re over there blabbin‘ on the goddamn phone?”
He tried again and hung up.
I heard him move. I stepped back to one side, leaning against the receptionist’s desk with my left hand flat on some papers. I rolled my eyes around and looked out to the deserted street. My eyes made the full circle and ended up staring down at the desk where my hand was.
At the stack of mail he had thrown there.
At the letter Eleanor had mailed from the Hilton.
I touched the paper, felt the lump of something solid inside. A federal crime to take it: not much time to decide.
“Janeway.” He was standing right there, three feet away. “Where’d you come from? You look like you been rode hard and put away wet.”
“You got the wet part right.” I leaned back from the desk, trying not to be too obvious. “And, yeah, I been rode pretty hard, too.”
“How’d you get in here? I didn’t hear the door.”
“Just walked right in. Saw the light, came in, heard you back there on the phone…thought I’d sit on the desk and wait till you’re done.”
“Half-blind and now I can’t hear either. What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve been thinking some about that cabin of yours.”
“I guess I told you I’d give you a tour of God’s country, didn’t I? Can’t say I expected you tonight, though.”
“Just thought I’d come by and see if the offer’s still good.”
“Yeah, sure it is. Why wouldn’t it be? If you’re still around in a few days…”
“You get up there much?”
“Not anymore, not like I used to. It’s too hard to make a living these days; I gotta work Saturdays and sometimes Sundays and I’m gettin‘ too damn old and too slow. Two or three times a year is all.”
He held his hand up to his eyes. “Let’s step on back in the shop. That bright light’s playing hell with me.”
I followed him around and leaned against the doorjamb, keeping my hands in my pockets and letting my eyes work the room. It was a busy printer’s printshop, cluttered with half-finished jobs and the residue of last week’s newspaper. Long scraps of newsprint had been ripped out and thrown on the floor. Paper was piled in rolls in the corner, and in stacks on hand trucks and dollies. A fireman’s nightmare, you’d have to think. He had a Chandler and Price like Rigby’s, a Linotype, and an offset press that took a continuous feed of newsprint from a two-foot roll.
He stood in the shadows a few feet away. “Crystal said you’re still trying to find Ellie. Havin‘ any luck?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m having a helluva time just getting people to talk to me.”
“Maybe you’re asking the wrong people.”
“I don’t know, Archie, you’d think the people who’re supposed to love her would be knocking me down to help. But everybody seems more interested in pandering to the vanity of a dead man than finding that girl.”
This bristled him good. I thought it might.
“Who’s everybody? Who the hell are you talking about?”
“Crystal…and Rigby.”
“Hell, that’s easy enough to understand.”
“Then make me understand it.”
“Why do I smell an attitude here? It oughta be obvious what their problem is, if you came at them the way you just came at me.”
“Rigby’s relationship with Grayson, you mean.”
“Yeah, sure. You don’t walk in that house and say anything against Darryl…not if you want to come out with your head in one piece. And the same is true over here, by the way, so let’s back off on the rhetoric and we’ll all be a lot happier.”
“And I still don’t get my questions answered.”
“You got questions, ask ‘em. Let the sons of bitches rip.”
“Let’s start with this one. Do you think Nola Jean Ryder set the fire?”
He rocked back in his tracks. But he kept on moving, trying to cover his surprise by making the sudden movement seem intentional. He climbed up on a high steel chair at the table where the answering machine blinked its red light and looked at me from there, leaning in and out of the shadow.
I wasn’t going to ask him again. Let him stew his way through it. Finally the silence got to him and he said, “The fire was an accident.”
“Some people don’t think so.”
“Some people think the world is flat. What do you want me to do about that?”
Who’s got an attitude now? I thought. But I said, “Give it a guess.”
“Darryl died, that was the end of it. That’s my guess. There wasn’t any reason for Nola Jean to be here anymore. I doubt she ever stayed in one place more than six months in her life till she came here. Why would she stick around after Darryl died? Everybody here hated her.”
“Did you hate her?”
“I never gave her that much thought.”
I grunted, the kind of sound that carries a full load of doubt without the bite.
“Look,” he said, annoyed that I’d caught him lying. “She was Darry’s woman. That made her off-limits to me, no matter what I might’ve thought from time to time or how willing she might’ve been to play around.”
“Did she come on to you?”
“That woman would come on to a green banana. Look, I’m having a hard time understanding how any of this old shit’s gonna help you find Ellie.”
“This sounds like the stone wall going up again, Arch.”
“Well, fuck, what do you expect? This stuff hurts to talk about.”
“Who does it hurt? Grayson’s dead, right? Can’t hurt him.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Who does it hurt?…You?…Rigby?…Crystal?”
“Hurts us all. When you lose somebody like that, it hurts.”
“But real people get over it. At least they move on past that raw hurt and get on with life. I’m not saying you forget the guy: maybe you love him till you die. But you don’t carry that raw pain on your sleeve for twenty years.”
He rocked back, his face in darkness.
“So what’s the real story here? Why does Rigby get the shakes every time Grayson’s name comes up? Why does Crystal go all protective and clam up like Big Brother’s listening? You’d think the man just died yesterday.”
“Gaston…”
I waited.
“Gaston thought Darryl walked on water. Damn near literally. Haven’t you ever had somebody in your life like that, Janeway?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got enough trouble with the concept of a real god. Don’t ask me to deal with men being gods.”
“Then how can you expect to understand it?”
I reached into my jacket where I’d tucked the envelope under my arm. Took out the glossy photograph and held it up in the light so he could see it. “Can you identify the people in this picture?”
He made a show of it. Took the picture and grunted at it. Leaned way back in his steel chair. Put on his glasses, squinted, and finally said, “Well, that’s Nola Jean Ryder there in the front with her arm around that fella.
”
“Are you telling me you don’t know the others?”
“I don’t seem to recall ‘em.”
“That’s strange, Archie, it really is. Because here’s another shot of all of you together. I believe that’s you over there in the corner, talking to this fella you say you can’t remember.”
“I can’t remember everybody I ever talked to. This has been a long time ago.”
“Try the name Charlie Jeffords. Does it ring a bell now?”
“That’s the fella down in New Mexico…”
“Whose house Eleanor burgled. Now you’ve got it. Maybe you see why it bothers me so much, the fact that all of you know exactly who Jeffords was right from the start. The minute she got arrested and the name Jeffords came up, you knew why she went down there and what she was trying to find out. You could’ve shared that information with me when it might’ve meant something, last week in court. But for reasons of your own, you all hung pat and let that kid take the fall.”
The room simmered with rage. “I’ll tell you, Janeway, you might be thirty years younger than me, but if you keep throwing shit like that around, you and me are gonna tear up this printshop.“
“Who was Charlie Jeffords?”
He was still rocking slightly. The steel chair made a faint squeaking noise as he moved back and forth on it.
“Charlie Jeffords,” I said.
“Leave it alone.”
“Who’s the other woman in this picture with Jeffords?—the one standing back there glaring at them from the trees?”
He shrugged.
“I seem to be doing all the work here. Maybe I can figure it out by myself; you can sit there and tell me if I go wrong.” I gave the picture a long look. “The first time I saw this, something struck me about these two women. They look too much alike not to be related. They’ve got the same hairline. They’ve both got Eleanor’s high cheekbones.”
He leaned forward and looked at the picture as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “That damn Ryder blood must be some strong shit.”
“Keep trying, Archie, maybe you can find somebody you can sell that to. Me, I’m not buying any more. When you’ve worked in the sausage factory, you try to be careful what brands you buy.”
“What do you want?”
“The only thing that’s left. Everything.”
“I don’t think I can help you with that.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Charlie Jeffords was Darryl Grayson’s binder.”
He took in a lungful of air through his nose.
“Grayson never wanted that known, did he? That’s why you’re all so tight about it, you’re still protecting the legend, pushing the myth that every book was created from dust by one man only, start to finish. The mystique feeds on that. Even Huggins can’t understand how Grayson could turn them out so fast and so perfect and with so many variants. Well, he had help. That’s not a capital crime, the man was human after all. Most of us would be proud of that, being human. But not Grayson.“
“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”
“I’m not guessing here, you know. A friend of mine went to Taos to see Jeffords. What do you think she found there? A garage full of binding equipment. Very fine leathers, a bookpress or two…do I need to go on? Charlie Jeffords was a bookbinder by trade, right up till last year when he got sick. Jeffords did the binding on every Grayson book that came out of here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what is?”
“Darryl did a lot of it…a helluva lot. I did some. Gaston did. Richard did, before he started making so much money with his own books. But Charlie was the best…him and Gaston. Those two could bind a book you’d want to take home and eat.” He leaned forward, slapped his knee, and said, “Ah, shit,” with a sigh.
He shook his head, hating it. “You can’t take anything away from Darryl just because he turned some of it over to other people at the end. He did all the conceptual stuff. The design, the lettering, the layout—that’s where the real genius is. And he told all of us how he wanted ‘em bound and we did ’em that way to the letter. And he looked ‘em over with an eagle eye and tossed back any that weren’t right. I’m not saying the binding’s not important, it’s damn vital, it’s the first thing you see when you look at it. But it’s a craft, it can be learned. What Darryl did came from some goddamn other place, who knows where. Ain’t that what genius is?”
“I guess.”
“You know damn well.”
“Well, we’ll leave it at that. You wanna tell me now who the other woman was?”
“Jonelle.”
“And she was…”
“Nola Jean’s sister.”
He got off the bench and I tensed. But he sat back down again, pushed back and forth by restless energy.
“Richard played around with both of ‘em at one time or another. Then he brought ’em over here and the trouble started. I guess it appealed to his sense of humor. Two screwed-up sisters and two screwed-up brothers. I remember him saying that one time. Nola thought it was funny as hell.”
“Did anybody ever ask Jonelle what became of her sister?”
“She didn’t know either. That’s what she told the people that investigated the fire. Me, I didn’t give a damn. Good riddance, we all thought. Then Jonelle moved away too.”
“And she and Jeffords landed in Taos.”
“Apparently so.”
“And ended up together.”
“I guess that proves some damn thing. Fairy tales come true or something. Jonelle always had this crazy lust for Charlie Jeffords. But Nola Jean always took Jonelle’s men away from her. It came as natural as breathing. She tortured Charlie Jeffords and drove that poor bastard nuts. Diddled and teased him and never even gave him a good look at it.”
The telephone rang. He didn’t want to answer it. But we both knew who it was, and he picked it up just as the recording started to kick in.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he’s here now.”
Then Crystal told him something that made his mouth hang open.
He held the phone away from him, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got to take this.”
“Sure.”
“Shut that door but don’t go away. We’re not done yet.”
I stepped back into the front room and closed the door. I couldn’t hear anything. Crystal seemed to be doing all the talking.
I looked down at the desk, at Eleanor’s letter. Picked it up and put it in my pocket.
What’s a little federal crime at this stage of the game, I thought, and I walked out.
I crossed the street and stood in the dark place between buildings. I watched his storefront and I waited. He seemed to be back there a long time. When he did come out, he came slowly. He came to the front door and out onto the sidewalk.
“Janeway,” he called up the empty block.
I didn’t move.
“Janeway!”
He jumped in his truck and drove away, leaving his door wide open. I let him get well ahead. I wasn’t worried. I knew where he was going.
53
Archie, she wrote. I’ve done it again. Took one of the books thinking I’d put it back in a day or so. Then got busted and the book’s still in my car, wrapped in a towel under the
front seat. I know, you’ve warned me about it, but he never seems to miss them and it brightens my life when I’ve got one with me. I love them so much. I wish I could love people that way but I can’t. The books never disappoint me. They are eternally lovely and true, they’ve been at the core of my life for as long as I can remember. Even when I’m far away, just knowing they’re there can lift me out of the gutter and make me fly again. Just the possibility that he might destroy them fills me with despair. I think I would die if that happened, especially if the cause was some stupid act of my own. So please get the book and put it back in the room, so he won’t notice it’s gone. Here are my keys so you can get in. Think good thoughts and smile for me. Lo
ve ya. Ellie.
There were three keys in the envelope—one for a car, two for more substantial locks. I put them in my pocket, got out of the car, and started across country through the woods.
It was easy going. The ground was damp but hard: the underbrush sparse. I followed my flashlight till the trees began to thin out and a clear beam of moonlight appeared to light the way. I saw the Rigby house in the distance as I approached from the east, moving along the edge of the silver glade. Dark clouds drifted across the moon in wisps, and the meadow seemed to flutter and undulate in the stillness around it. The light from the kitchen window stood out like a beacon, the darkened printshop squatting like a bunker behind it. I stayed at the edge of the trees, skirting the dark wall to blend in with the night. As I walked, the printshop seemed to drift until it slowly covered the light from the window like an eclipse. When the blackout was full, I turned and walked straight across the meadow.
I came up to the back of the shop and eased along the outer wall. The clouds had covered the moon and again the night was full. The glow from the kitchen was a muted sheen at the comer of the shop, a suggestion of radiance from some black hole. I turned the other way, circled the building from the south, and came to the front door at the corner where there was plenty of dark cover.
I was looking into the front yard and, beyond it, down the side of the house. Rigby’s truck was gone but Moon’s was there at the front steps. The only light anywhere was the one cast out of the kitchen. I slipped along the front of the shop, keeping in shadow as much as I could. A clock had begun ticking in my head, a sense of urgency that drove me on.
I reached the door with the keys in my hand. Fished out the car key and dropped it in my other pocket. The heavy brass key slipped in easily on the first try and the lock snapped free. I put that key away too and stepped inside the shop. The smell of the leadpot, faint but unmistakable, was the evidence that Rigby had been here plying his trade. I flipped up the switch one notch on the flashlight, so it could be flicked on and off at a touch. I flicked it once, satisfied myself that nothing stood between me and the back room: then I locked the front door, crossed the room, and went into Grayson’s workshop.
Funny to think of it that way, as Grayson’s, though that had been my thought the first time I’d seen it. I knew the back-room lights could not be seen from the house, but it was not a chance I wanted to take. I flicked my light, three quick flashes around the room. Saw the high steel chair where Rigby had been sitting three hours ago and the open space where Crystal and I had squared off as if in battle. Across the room was the door I had noticed with the half-frivolous thought perhaps it’s in there, the answer to everything .
