by John Dunning
“All she wanted was to find her mother.”
“So they get back up here and Pruitt starts in on Crystal again. Stalking, calling. There were some death threats. He’d call her at night and play that song, just a snatch of it, just enough of it, just enough of it. But loud, menacing. Then he started on Rigby too, and that was his big mistake. He was messing with the wrong dude. Rigby wound up at Pruitt’s house and you know what happened after that. He ransacked the joint and found the photocopies of Grayson’s Raven —that what you found burned in the wastebasket. I figure Pruitt made that copy when he stole Scofield’s book, years ago.
“There wasn’t even a misspelled word in that one.”
“I’ll bet he didn’t even look.”
He punched the tape. Crystal’s voice filled the room.
“We stood around in shock,” she said, faltering.
Quintana leaned back in his chair. “She’s talking about the morning after the fire.”
“We were over at Archie’s shop, in Snoqualmie,” she said. “We were like three dead people. Gaston and Archie were beside themselves. Gaston was inconsolable. It was the worst day of our lives…until this one. I don’t think we said a word to each other the whole time. What could be said? Then we heard the door open…someone had come into the shop. And I remember Archie yelling out that he was closed… go away, just…go away. But the footsteps came on, and then she was there. Nola. I kept waiting for her to say something…maybe to cry. But she looked at Gaston across the room…she looked straight at him and said, mean as hell, ‘Cry if you want to, suckers. I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead.’“
Crystal sniffed and dabbed her eyes. “I knew she didn’t mean that, it was just spite. She’d had that awful fight with Darryl the day before…and she’d always hated Gaston because she could never move him the way she always got at other men. When she said it, I felt sick. I turned away from her, I couldn’t look at her…and then…then there was this thump, or a kind of…crushing sound…and when I turned around, she was lying there with her brains…and Gaston stood over her with the bloody hammer and Archie…Archie’d kinda shrunk back to the wall and we all just…just…”
Her face was pale. She looked faint.
Quintana’s voice came in. “Take your time, Mrs. Rigby. Would you like some water?”
“No.”
But she took the glass he handed her and gulped it.
“Then what happened?”
“Archie said…something like…it’s a good thing you did that or I woulda. But that was just talk, it was Gaston who’d done it. And he’d sat down and there was no concern or…anything…on his face…and somebody mentioned the police. And I said no…can’t call them, they’ll lock him up and what would I do without him? He was my life, how would I live? So we rolled her in a rug and that night Archie and I took her off in the truck and we buried her.”
Off camera, Quintana said, “What about the other people he killed?”
“I don’t know.” She began to cry again.
“Should we believe that, Mrs. Rigby?”
“I don’t care what you believe. My life is over.”
Quintana snapped off the machine and rewound the tape. Neither of us spoke until it clicked.
“Did she know Rigby had taken Eleanor?”
“I don’t think so. She says no. I believe her.” He put the cassette away and pushed himself back from the desk. “I found out a few more things while you were out playing the Lone Ranger. It was Rigby who made that call at four o’clock in the morning. He called the cops on his own kid. I think he was afraid of himself, what he might do if it turned out that Eleanor really had that flawed book. Hell, he was right to be afraid, he’d killed everybody else who ever had one. He tried to hide his voice, but I’ve got the tape and it was him. He was on long enough for the number to get logged, so we know the call came from that phone. I think he turned on the record at Pruitt’s for the same reason. There was a part of him that wanted us to catch him.”
I thought of Crystal and Archie and asked what he thought would happen to them now.
“Whatever it is, it won’t be anything compared to what they’ve already been through. We’ll see if the facts bear out her story. I doubt if they’ll do any jail time; the only charge would be rendering criminal assistance, and the statute’s probably run on that. They don’t seem to care right now. They waived their rights to a lawyer, gave us statements of their own free will, and the statements jibed and I believe ‘em.”
He turned up his palms. “You might as well be in on the payoff if I can swing it. There’s just one thing. You’ve got to teach me this bookscouting stuff. Call it one you owe me.”
“I’ll give you the two-day crash course, teach you all I know.”
“I’m a quick read. One day will do it.”
In the morning he came to get me. Trish had a restless night but was upgraded to fair. She was asking for me but her doctors told her not yet, maybe tomorrow.
Quintana and I ate breakfast together and then did a couple of bookstores. I watched him buy without comment, and afterward we sat in a coffee shop and I told him what he’d done wrong.
Never buy a bad copy of a good book. The better the book, the more the flaws magnify.
Condition, condition, condition…
We drove to the jail and picked up Moon. He looked old in his jail clothes, and he looked strangely small sitting between the two deputies in the backseat.
We arrived at Rigby’s in brilliant sunshine. Moon walked between us as we crossed the meadow. We went along the path I had followed up from the house, dipped into the trees, and stopped a hundred yards into the woods.
An hour later, the deputies dug up the rug containing the bones of Nola Jean Ryder.
In the spring they flew into Denver for Quintana’s long-postponed book odyssey. Trish was looking good and I was thrilled at the sight of her. We ate that night in a Mexican place on a hill near Mile High Stadium, and in the morning we lit out for Nebraska, Iowa, and points east. The trouble with Denver is it’s a light-year from everywhere, a hard day’s ride to any other city with bookstores. The landscape is bleak, though there are those who love the brown plains and the dry vistas and the endless rolling roads. We filled the day with shoptalk, of books and crime and the people who do them. We laughed our way across Nebraska, drawn by the Platte and bonded by the good companionship that makes book-hunting so special and rich. We prowled in little towns where thrift-store people are uncorrupted by the greedy paranoia of the big-city stores. It was in such a place that Quintana made the first good strike of the trip, a sweet copy of Alan Le May’s The Searchers . It wasn’t Shane , but it was a solid C-note, which is not bad for thirty-five cents.
We scouted Lincoln and found some gems at Blue-stem, an oasis of books just off downtown; then we moved on to Omaha. The weather was grand all the way, and we laughed about it and Trish swore it had not rained a drop in Seattle since I’d been there last October. Quintana made a dubious cough but had to agree that the winter had been unusually dry. We swung north into Minneapolis and spent a day tramping around with Larry Dingman of Dinkytown Books. I still had the picture of Eleanor that Slater had given me long ago, and in every stop I showed it to bookpeople in the hope that someone had seen her.
In Chicago I saw a guy brazenly doctor a Stephen King book, just the way Richard Grayson had done The Raven . He sat at his front counter and tipped a first-edition title page—sliced out of a badly damaged and worthless book—into a second printing. The book was The Shining , an easy deception because the second printings are so much like the firsts in binding, jackets, and stock. The only notable difference is on the title page verso, the magic words first edition are at the bottom of a real one and missing from the others. The entire operation took less than five minutes, and when it was done, even a King guy would have a hard time telling. The guy marked it $200. Quintana leaned over his counter and called him a crook and a few other things before Trish managed to p
ull him away and we headed for Indianapolis.
I had a dream that night about the first Grayson Raven . In the dream Richard fixed that one too: changed two letters of type after Grayson had quit work and gone to the pub for the evening. It would’ve been easy then, in 1949, when it was just the two brothers working alone and a mistake was easy to miss. No glue, no tip-ins to tell a tale years later: just switch the letters and it would always be assumed, even by Grayson, they’d been set that way. At breakfast in the morning I told Trish and Quintana and none of us laughed. For a long time we couldn’t shake the notion that the whole Grayson tragedy had been for nothing.
We were out ten days, in all a great trip. They stayed with me another three days in Denver, and the house felt empty when I put them on the plane and watched them fly away.
A year has come and gone. It’s winter in Denver, late on a snow-swept Saturday night as I sit at my front counter writing in the little diary that I’ve begun keeping of my life in books. Far up the street a shrouded figure comes out of the snow, battling a wicked wind that howls in from the east, and I think of Eleanor Rigby. I still have a delusion that one of these days she’s going to walk into my bookstore and help me write a fitting end to the Grayson case. Grayson was my turning point as a bookman. I came home with enough of Scofield’s money that, for now, I can buy just about any collection of books that walks in my door. I still have Grayson’s notebook: Amy gave it to me. Kenney calls once a month and asks if I’m ready to sell it. I should probably do that: the money they’re throwing around is just too good to keep turning it down. But Kenney understands when I laugh and tell him how it would diminish the old man’s life if suddenly he had that roadmap to everything.
Among the fallout from the Grayson papers were letters indicating the real identity of Amy Harper’s father. The name Paul Ricketts had been one of the pseudonyms used by Richard Grayson in his early writings, and the letters revealed an affair of many years’ duration between Richard and Selena Harper. “So we’re first cousins,” Amy wrote of herself and Eleanor. “Imagine that.” The news from the Northwest gradually tapered off. I had to return the Ayn Rand books to Murdock’s estate as his last two relatives could never agree on anything. The best guess, the one that seemed most likely to me, was that these were the last of Murdock’s really good books, gathered for a wholesale run so he could get some money together to make Amy an offer. The cops found a big batch of real Gray sons‘—all the lettered copies of everything but the 1969 Ravens —in the rafters above Rigby’s shop. He couldn’t resist taking them, holy books made by the hand of God, as he traveled through St. Louis, Phoenix, Baltimore, Boise, and New Orleans. As for his own, they are called the Rigby Ravens now and are widely admired by people who have seen them. Scofield wants them but his woman in red doesn’t seem to care so much about money anymore. The books will belong to Eleanor, wherever she is.
The New Mexico case is still open. Charlie Jeffords died not long ago and it remains to be seen who fired the gun, if and when the cops find Eleanor. I’ve just about decided that it’s too easy for people to disappear into that street-level book subculture. I keep showing her picture around when I’m on the road. There’s a lot of money waiting for her and Scofield’s not getting any younger.
It’s ten o’clock—time to get the hell out of here and go home. The figure in the street has reached my door, and in this moment, in less than an instant, I think, hey!…maybe … maybe . At the edge of her hood I see the facial features of a young woman. She turns her head, our eyes meet through the plate glass and she smiles faintly. It’s the neighborhood’s newest hooker, heading on up to the Safeway after a hard day’s night. I give her a friendly wave and turn off the lights fast. In the yard behind the store I look at the black sky and wonder what books tomorrow will bring.
John Dunning is the national and New York Times bestselling author of Booked to Die , which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe award, The Bookman’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of 1995), the Edgar Award-nominated Deadline, The Holland Suggestions , and Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime . An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. He is also an expert on American radio history, authoring On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio . His latest Cliff Janeway novel, The Bookman’s Promise , is forthcoming in hardcover from Scribner. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
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