The Dirty Book Murder

by Thomas Shawver

  His black Lincoln Continental sat in a no-parking zone near the front door. He opened the trunk with an electric key and watched in silence as we put the books in place. Then, showing a two-inch smile that promised to drain my liver sometime soon, he got into the car and sped away, the tires spraying gravel against our kneecaps.

  I barely had time to jot down the personalized license plate.

  It read 2 L 8.

  Chapter Four

  After the auction, I headed for Riverrun Books, my shop located in the heart of Brookside.

  It’s a middle-class urban neighborhood where people glide away summer afternoons on porch swings, nodding friendly greetings to strollers on shaded sidewalks under the canopies of hardwood trees four and five stories high. Although well tended, the lawns are not particularly wide or deep so that the houses lie close to the street, expressing their owners’ trust in the outside world and pride in their handsome oak doors and exterior walls of native stone.

  The soft, fresh air after the heat of the River Market warehouse lightened my mood. I counted my blessings, such as they were, while I drove to what many considered the best used bookstore in town.

  After all, I’d narrowly escaped owing Colonel Bender’s client an amount I couldn’t possibly have raised in the foreseeable future; my health was excellent after years of trying to destroy it; and the used-book trade, like movie theaters and liquor sales, was proving to be recession-proof, picked up by ever-increasing sales on the Internet. Even last week’s shock of learning that my twenty-year-old daughter was having an affair with a notorious celebrity nearly three times her age had retreated to the back of my consciousness, hovering like a faintly disagreeable odor.

  At least she was coming home for a while.

  Riverrun Books anchors the middle of a quaint shopping center built in 1924. It is bordered by a tailor shop to its south and a bakery to the north. An inside open door connects the bakery with the bookstore so that the smell of baking bread and brewing coffee permeates the place.

  As I approached Fifty-fifth Street in my jeep, I saw customers sitting outside my shop at green bistro tables under a broad awning drinking caffe lattes and reading The New York Times. A dog, lazing at the feet of a young couple, chewed on a leather bone while a little boy sat on crossed legs contentedly reading a picture book.

  I pulled into my regular space in a church lot across the street, turned off the engine, and set the automatic lock before exiting it. Three paces from the car I realized I’d left the keys in the ignition. Returning to the jeep, hoping against hope that I hadn’t really locked myself out, I reached for the door latch hesitantly, preferring empty uncertainty to the confirmation of a locked door.

  I jiggled the handle.

  Locked.

  I jiggled the handle again.

  Same result.

  I cursed under my breath and looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had noticed my predicament. Only the boy with the picture book seemed concerned.

  I gazed at the asphalt and, finding no answers there, decided to swallow my pride and seek help in the shop. But first I had to do the manly thing and slam my fist against the offending door.

  The car alarm went off, scattering pigeons and causing Father Patrick Doogan’s cup of hot chocolate, propelled by his startled knees under the café table, to spill onto the virginal laps of Sister Mary Catherine Browne and her cousin, Mary Margaret Scanlon.

  While I scuttled across the street to the bookstore, apologizing to what seemed like half of St. Peter’s parish, Weston Preston, towel in hand, leaped from behind his coffee cart and darted outside.

  “You’d best turn that noise off, boss,” he said unnecessarily in his southern Missouri drawl as he sponged the steaming mess off the nun’s habit.

  “I locked myself out,” I said, equally unnecessarily.

  “Well now, that would be a problem, if …”

  Leaving the cousins to clean themselves with paper towels, Weston set up the table that had fallen over and began wiping off the top, lost in mid-sentence as if the whooping and clanging of the alarm had rendered him catatonic.

  “If what, for God’s sake?” I said. “Why aren’t you looking for a wire coat hanger or something?”

  “If,” Weston said, looking up at me with the slightest hint of superiority, “you didn’t have an extra key in a magnet box stuck under the left front wheelbase; the one you had me put there a year ago after another one of these episodes.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You was drunk.”

  “Oh.”

  He went back to wiping the table while I ran across the street to bring peace and quiet once again to the neighborhood.

  A round of applause and laughter led by the priest greeted my return to the shop. It being Saturday, the store was crowded. Inside, some of the regulars sat at tables arranged in a semicircle in front of the coffee cart.

  Brian Canady, Scottish Dan Muldoon, and Kiki Bates had been strangers to one another until developing common bonds through my bookstore. Their tendency to stay long and spend little had aggravated me in the beginning, but I soon came to appreciate the kindnesses, large and small, that the trio showered upon me and my other customers.

  They were soon referring to themselves as the Riverrun Irregulars and if their debates over religion, politics, and the merits of certain authors sometimes became too heated, they rarely failed to entertain. A used bookstore, like any small retail business, can get pretty lonely in the slow seasons, but I could always count on one or two of the Irregulars to brighten up the place, whether on a bone-chilling January morning or a humid August afternoon.

  Opposite the cart, separated by the front door and a library table stacked with newly arrived books, was a long sales counter where Violet Trenche sat perched before a computer screen.

  She wore a silk blouse and a light cashmere jacket. Her long dark hair, streaked with gray, was gathered in the back into a braided bun. A loosely tied silk Lacroix scarf barely concealed the wattles that draped her throat. Her dark linen skirt was long and tailored in such a way as to make allowance for a rather thick waist and full hips.

  She was a woman who had probably always fought her weight, never quite to her satisfaction. Nonetheless, she could be attractive in the manner that a once-glowing debutante forty years later can be when not rushed to put on makeup. The glow may have departed, the flesh loosened, but the good high cheekbones remained, as did the Lady Diana Cooper nose.

  Only the mouth failed inspection. Thin lips, permanently pursed, reflected the soul of an intelligent but grasping woman sliding toward sixty who was haunted by a lifetime of high expectations followed by inevitable disappointments.

  She looked up, brushed back a wisp of hair that had escaped the bun, and said in a voice as hard as a park bench: “We’ve been busy. You’re late again.”

  “I was at an auction.”

  “They’re a waste of time,” she said, going back to the monitor.

  I noticed two boxes of books stacked on the floor behind the counter.

  “Who brought these in?”

  “Look at the note,” she said without looking away from the screen.

  “Okay,” I said, resisting the urge to fire her on the spot. Just as quickly the reasons why I shouldn’t came to mind.

  Prior to her bookstore being lost in a fire ten years earlier, Violet had been the doyenne of Kansas City’s antiquarian book trade. She had little patience for botanical works, but her knowledge of other rare books, particularly travel/adventure, nineteenth-century children’s illustrated, and collectible contemporary fiction, was vast. She needed a paycheck, meager as it was, and I felt sorry for her. It was hard for her to forgive me for that.

  I looked at the three-by-five card stuck to one of the cartons and, forgetting for the moment my lost opportunity at the auction, felt the anticipatory thrill that comes with the secondhand book business three or four times a year if one is lucky.

  Greetings, fro
m Charles Walsh, it said in a neat script penned with India ink. Perhaps you can find a home for these old friends. Let me know what you want to pay.

  Charles was the retired curator for incunabula—hand-printed books published prior to 1501—at the Linda Hall Library, one of the top reference libraries in the world, and a man of refined and varied tastes. When we first met, he hadn’t let on what he knew about books, but after we became friends the octogenarian felt compelled to hone my expertise.

  Violet rose from her chair, brushing baguette crumbs from her lap, to join me as I pulled a box onto the counter for inspection. The first book was a leather-bound beauty written by James Boswell, best known for his remarkable biography of Samuel Johnson. I slowly opened it, careful not to crack the spine.

  The title page declared a delicious boast: An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to that Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. London, 1769. My mind filled instantly with images of a dry, mountainous land, dotted with fig trees and donkeys ambling up a rocky corniche.

  Being a third edition, the volume wasn’t rare by antiquarian standards. The engraved frontispiece portrait was browned and it had offset onto the title page as well. However, for its age it was in good shape and a noteworthy book by an important author.

  “We’ll finally have a decent travel and exploration section,” I said while unfolding a beautiful map affixed to page 80.

  Violet answered with a saccharine smile. “My old shop had Cook’s Voyages, including the charts, of course.”

  When I didn’t respond, she shrugged and nodded indifferently toward the boxes. “You’ll like the rest of them as well.”

  I brought out a fine limited edition of Merchantmen-at-Arms by David W. Bone. Printed in London, it was one of only 160 numbered copies and contained illustrations by his brother, Muirhead, including a signed drypoint etching.

  Violet gathered it lovingly in her hands and sighed. Turning the pages as if they were butterfly wings, she felt the texture of the white linen sheets, mouthing a particular phrase as she read them, then traced with her fingertips the lines of the engravings.

  “So beautiful,” she said mostly to herself. “Yes, I think we have the beginning of something here. I never had one of these in my shop. Could never find one for the right price. Although once in Edinburgh …”

  She caught herself before the nostalgia made her seem all too human. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Would have lost it in that damned fire anyhow.”

  There were thirty more such books in the two boxes, all related to travel, adventure, or sporting activities such as hunting and fishing. I didn’t expect to find any incunabula, but these beautifully bound editions covered a period from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth that was in a price zone I could afford.

  If Charles accepted my offer, I’d no longer feel presumptuous advertising that Riverrun sold rare books as well as the secondhand variety.

  “I’d better get my application to the Antiquarian Book Association ready, Violet.”

  “Are you sure you can afford them?”

  “That’s not the way to look at it,” I said as if money were a mere inconvenience and I hadn’t been staring at the modern equivalent of debtors’ prison a few hours earlier. “Choose a book as you would a friend and you’ll never regret the cost.”

  “Some friends,” she shot back, but let the rest pass, it being too nice a day even for Violet’s highly developed cynicism.

  “I hope Charles didn’t try to lug these in by himself,” I said.

  “His wife did the heavy lifting. As always.”

  “How were they? I haven’t seen them for a while.”

  “Agnes was her plump, annoyingly cheery self and Charles obscene as ever. He recited that same disgusting limerick.”

  “ ‘There was a young lady from Aberystwyth’?”

  “Yes, Michael, that one,” she said with the tight, knowing frown of a nun who might have strayed once or twice. “He insists on aggravating me with those naughty stories.”

  “Care to name others, Violet?”

  “Please, let us not be coarse. As Cicero once said, ‘Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.’ ”

  Just then, Josie Majansik interrupted her jogging to tap on the window.

  I hoped she would come in and stay awhile. Josie’s looks had appealed to me the first day we met three months earlier when she popped in for coffee before going to work. I was impressed when she told me she was a reporter for the Brush Creek Gumbo, the alternative newspaper with a reputation for taking on the local establishment. It meant that she was not only a writer, but feisty as well.

  One weekend morning I found her at a table outside the shop busily jotting down answers to questions she had posed to a handsome man in his early thirties. His thinning black hair was combed straight back and he sported a blue and white polka-dot bow tie. A chalk-striped custom-tailored shirt with French cuffs beautifully matched his earnest, glistening expression. He seemed far more interested in Josie than in the questions being asked.

  Although he wasn’t a regular customer, I had no trouble recognizing him. If Edward Worth IV wasn’t the richest man in town, he was in the top four—his father, uncle, and an older cousin possibly edging him out. The aptly named family owned the largest brokerage firm in the Midwest and Eddie was majority shareholder of the region’s Coca-Cola distribution and bottling plant. His portfolio also included ten thousand acres of grazing land in the Flint Hills that supplied McDonald’s franchises in four states with hamburger meat.

  Eddie’s reputation wasn’t limited to his aristocratic good looks, Jermyn Street tailor, and business acumen, however. In his younger days he was considered East Coast society’s randiest bachelor.

  Having sown the wildest of oats at Choate, at Yale, and with friends from the New York Athletic Club, at the age of twenty-five he returned to the family firm in Kansas City determined to prove himself worthy, not only in boardrooms but through philanthropic leadership as well. A decade later, he had become a paragon of noblesse oblige and every society matron’s dream of a son-in-law.

  Because I didn’t usually get to the shop until after ten A.M., I rarely saw Josie during the week. Lately, however, she had started dropping by on Saturday afternoons to buy The New York Times and browse the contemporary fiction section. She favored women authors, especially A. S. Byatt and Virginia Woolf, but knew her way around Barry Unsworth and Peter Carey, too.

  She seemed just shy of thirty, wore her silky dark hair cut short, laughed with sparkling green eyes, and walked in the bouncy, flirtatious manner one associates with the women of Paris. Her wide smile also endeared her to me, not the least because she wore a retainer to correct slightly crooked front teeth, suggesting she was not to the manor born.

  Her high cheekbones and slightly tilted eyebrows indicated an Eastern European background, so I wasn’t surprised when she told me her paternal grandparents came from Budapest. Josie certainly had the exotic looks of a gypsy. The blood of Attila probably coursed through her veins as well. I felt a presumptuous surge of jealousy at the thought that she and Eddie Worth might be having an affair.

  I set aside the box containing Boswell’s book and motioned for her to come in. But Josie just waved and then did something that stirred me more than I thought possible. It was a purely innocent sign of affection, nothing more than a quick farewell, but it seemed at the time to be a life-changing experience.

  She blew me a kiss.

  Pleasantly flustered, I touched my cheek in response. I’m not sure she saw the gesture before she walked away, but my hand was still at my face when I heard a commotion coming from the art section near the back entrance.

  Bob Langston and my daughter had arrived.

  Chapter Five

  Kansas Citians tend not to stare at special people, whether they have a physical affliction, drive exotic cars, or play professional football. Just isn’t polite, you know. But this was the Long Bob Langston of action movie fame, and suddenl
y my bookstore erupted in a frenzy of Hollywood mania.

  Any presumption that he was a decrepit roué knocking on death’s door was immediately shattered when he bounded into the place and yelled, “Hello, K.C., MO! Your dreams have been answered!”

  A shaggy mop of dishwater blond hair topped an overly large head that sat above a chest as solid as a Nevada dam, and when he flashed his famous gap-toothed grin the customers swarmed around him. Not one to seek refuge in a corner, he wrapped a proprietary arm around Anne’s shoulder and cheerfully answered questions while I stood behind the counter attempting to make eye contact with her.

  I couldn’t help noticing how thin and tired my daughter looked in contrast to Langston’s vitality.

  She was stunningly beautiful, but the coltish charm I once associated with her seemed to have faded since our last encounter in Boulder. Even though she smiled at the raucous banter between the customers and Langston, I knew she wasn’t as amused as she pretended to be. My daughter looked like a strung-out supermodel forced to appear at the grand opening of a Kmart.

  Langston, however, seemed to be sincerely enjoying the attention. Despite skin that appeared tired from surgical stretching, he exuded charisma. I doubted that he could jump from boxcar to boxcar as he had done in Hell Train, his first major motion picture, but his manner was that of a man who still did his own stunts.

  “What’s it like filming a love scene with Rhonda Ashworth?” a matronly woman asked.

  “Do you really want to know?” Bob said with a conspiratorial smile that drew the crowd closer to him. His craggy face with its deep-set eyes, long crooked nose, surprisingly sensuous lips, and anvil jaw beamed with emotional involvement and good humor.

  “If you think it’s all right.”

  “She has bad breath.”

  “No!” the lady shrieked. “Really?”

  “Really. I’d rather kiss Rin Tin Tin.”

  That brought plenty of laughs and calls for more Hollywood insights.