by John Dunning
My apartment, as always, was the great healer. I stripped off my sweats, turned on a light, and sat surrounded by treas-ures. I looked for a while at an old AB: my fascination in the life of the bookman was almost as acute as my interest in books, and I had been a faithful subscriber to the bookseller’s trade journal for almost five years. I thumbed through Wyeth’s Helga pictures, lingering on that lovely scene in the barn. Carol Pfeiffer, of course, had long gone: she had been gone when I had come in earlier and changed for my run. I took a cold shower and dressed slowly, planning my day. Barbara Crowell’s statement seemed to alibi Jackie Newton nicely, which meant I had to start from scratch. It never occurred to me to call Hennessey, or to check downtown and see if we’d been assigned to the case. Hennessey would just be turning over for his second forty winks, and downtown they’d know we were on it. They knew all about my work habits.
I drove out Sixth to Colorado Boulevard, went north to Colfax, then east to the bookstores. This was my turf: I was as much at home along Book Row as I was in the world of hookers and pimps that surrounded it. Colfax is a strange street. It used to be known as the longest street in the world: people with more imagination than I have used to say, in the days before interstate highways, that it ran from Kansas City to the Great Salt Lake. Its actual length is about twenty miles, beginning on the plains east of Denver and dwindling away in the mountains to the west. Just about every foot of it is commercial space. About twenty years ago, urban renewal came in and ripped out old Larimer Street, and the whores and bums who lived there landed on Broadway south and Colfax east. Lots of whoring goes on on East Colfax Avenue. It starts at the statehouse, where they know how to do it without ever getting in a bed, and works its way through the porno shops between Broadway and Colorado Boulevard. From Colorado east, for about thirty or forty blocks, the street goes respectable in a chain of mom-and-pop businesses of every imaginable type. Here you’ll find produce stands, garages, video rentals, fortune-tellers, antique dealers, 7-Elevens, liquor stores, and, of course, Book Row.
More than ten years ago, an old-time book dealer and his wife hung their shingle on an East Colfax hole-in-the-wall. Those people are gone now—the old man died and the wife lives in another state. Their store has passed along to a succession of younger bookmen: it has spawned other bookstores until, today, the area has become known as Book Row. This is the honey-draws-flies concept of bookselling: put two bookstores in one block, the theory goes, and business doubles for everybody. It seems to work: the stores have all stabilized where business was lean for one before. As a book collector, I did Book Row at least twice a month. A couple of the dealers knew me well enough to call me at home if something came in with my name on it; the others knew me too, though some of them were a little shy about calling a cop. Book dealers are like everyone else: they come in all sizes and shapes and have the same hangups that you see in a squad room or on an assembly line. If you picture a wizened academic with thick spectacles, forget it. Once they get in the business, they have little time to read. They are usually a cut or two smarter than the average Joe. I’ve never met a stupid book dealer who was able to make it pay. Some of them, though, are definitely crazy. There are a few horse’s asses, a few sow’s ears, but today’s bookseller is just as likely to be an ex-hippie ex-boozer ex-junkie streetfighter like Ruby Seals.
I liked Ruby: I admired the old bastard for his savvy and grit. He had pulled himself out of the gutter the hard way, cold turkey and alone. He was a bottle-a-day drunk and he’d kicked that; he had been on cocaine and later heroin and had kicked that. He had been busted for possession, beginning in the days when, in Colorado, you could get two years for having a leaf of grass in your car. Ruby had served a year on that bust, another year for speed, and two years of a seven-year rap for heroin. By then the laws had been liberalized or he might still be languishing at Canon City. I had known him all this time because I was into books, and Ruby, when he was straight, was one of the keenest book dealers in town. A lot of what I knew I had learned watching Ruby work. “I’ll tell you something, Dr. J,” he had said to me long ago. “Learn books and you’ll never go hungry. You can walk into any town with more than two bookstores and in two hours you’re in business.”
You did it the same way the scouts did, only on a higher level. While the scouts looked for $2 books that could be turned for $10, you looked for the $100 piece that would fetch a McKinley. You bought from guys who didn’t know and sold to guys who did. If nobody in town knew, you wholesaled to people on the coast. You worked the AB when you could afford the price of it; you put a little bankroll together and before you knew it, you had three or four thousand books. Ruby had done this more times than he could remember.
Seals & Neff was the last store on the block, but I went there first. It was in their store, about a month ago, that I had last seen Bobby Westfall. I vaguely remembered it now: Bobby had come in to sell something, and there had been a dispute over how much and in what manner Ruby would pay for it. I hadn’t paid much attention then: I was wavering on the price of a nice little Steinbeck item. There wasn’t much to the argument anyway, as I remembered it: Bobby didn’t want to take a check and Ruby didn’t have the cash, so Bobby had left with the book. But that was the last time I had seen him and it seemed like a good starting place.
Ruby and his partner, Emery Neff, were sorting books from a new buy when I came in: they were hunkered over with their asses facing the door and didn’t see me for a moment. The stuff looked pretty good: lots of fine modern firsts, some detective novels, a Faulkner or two. My eye caught the dark blue jacket of Intruder in the Dust. Carol’s birthday was coming up: maybe I’d buy it for her, see how she liked it when she actually owned a book like that. A $100 bill flitted through my mind. That’s what the book was worth, though I expected a good deal of preamble before we got to that point. I didn’t like haggling. I wasn’t one of those cheapskates always trying to pry a book away from a dealer for half its value, but I didn’t want to pay twice retail either. I knew how Seals & Neff operated. They tended to go high with stuff they’d just bought. That sometimes worked with pigeons and sucker books. But then the rent would come due or the sheriff would call for the sales tax, many months delinquent, and they’d scramble around, wholesaling their best books for pennies on the dollar in a mad effort to keep from being thrown out or padlocked.
Ruby was dressed in his usual country club attire: jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. He wore a heavy black beard that was streaked with gray. His partner was neater. Emery Neff had blond hair and a mustache. Taken together, they were a strange pair of boys. Ruby was gritty, down-to-earth, real; Neff put on airs, oozed arrogance, and, until you passed muster, seemed aloof and cold. Ruby could sell birth control to a nun; Neff seemed reluctant to sell you a book, even at high retail. Neff wasn’t quite a horse’s ass, but he was close: I guess it was his deep well of knowledge that saved him. He really was a remarkable bookman, and I seemed to like him in spite of himself.
They still hadn’t seen me: they were engrossed in the hypnotic, totally absorbing business of the bookman—sorting and pricing. I had seen the ritual before and had always found it interesting. Ruby would pick up a book and fondle it lovingly, then they’d bat the price back and forth and finally they’d settle on something, which Neff would write in light pencil on the flyleaf. They were just getting to the Faulkner when I leaned over their backs.
“Buck and a half,” Neff said.
“Too high,” Ruby said.
“It’s a perfect copy, Ruby. I mean, look at the goddamn thing, it’s like it was published yesterday, for Christ’s sake.”
“You never see this for more than a bill.”
“You never see a copy like this either.”
“Go ahead, if you want the son of a bitch to grow mold over there on the shelf.”
“Buck and a quarter, then. That’s rock-friggin‘-bottom.”
Neff penciled in the price. I cleared my throat and got their attention.
>
“Well, Dr. Janeway, I do believe,” Ruby said, brightening. “We just got in some stuff for you.”
“So I see. The masters of overcharge are already at work.”
Neff gave me a pained look, as if the mere discussion of money was a blow to one’s dignity.
“Always a deal for you, Dr. J,” Ruby said, and Neff’s pained look drifted his way.
I put the Faulkner out of my mind for the moment. I never could split my concentration effectively.
“I want to ask you boys a few questions.”
“Jesus, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said seriously. “This sounds official. Let me guess what it is. Somebody knocked off the sheriff and right away you thought of us.”
I gave him a mirthless little smile. “When was the last time you saw Bobby Westfall?”
“Jeez, I don’t know,” Ruby said. “He ain’t been coming around much.”
“What’s he done, rob a bank?” Neff said.
“See if you can pin it down for me,” I said.
“Well,” Ruby said, “he come in here maybe two weeks ago. Ain’t that right, Em? About two weeks ago.”
“About that,” Neff said. “What’s it about?”
“I told you, I’m trying to pin him down,” I said. “Did he have something to sell when he came in?”
“Just a few turds,” Ruby said. “Nuthin‘ I wanted.”
“Bob was on a losing streak,” Neff said. “He hadn’t found much all month long.”
“He was bitchin‘ up a storm about it,” Ruby said. “Bobby never bitches much, but I guess he needed the money and for once in his life he couldn’t find any books.”
“You have any idea what he needed the money for?”
“Hell, Dr. J, I just buy books from these bastards, I don’t go home and sleep with ‘em.”
“They always need money,” Neff said.
“Who doesn’t?” Ruby said. “But bookscouts… yeah, Em’s right. Those guys’re always scraping like hell just to get two nickels to rub against each other. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.“
“When was the last time Bobby had a big strike?”
“Oh, Jeez,” Ruby said, shaking his head.
“What do you call big?” Neff said.
“I don’t know, Neff,” I said. “What do you call big?”
“Big to him might be this Faulkner you’re looking at. We’d give him thirty, forty bucks for that. Nothing to sneeze at if you got it for a quarter.”
“Bigger than that,” I said.
Ruby’s eyes went into mock astonishment. “You mean like maybe he found Tamerlane in the Goodwill? Something like that, Dr. J?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re kidding.”
They had stopped grinning now and were hanging on my next words. I let them wait, and finally Neff stepped into the breach.
“That’s been done. Remember the guy who found Tamerlane in a bookstore for fifteen dollars a few years ago? Do you know what the odds are of that happening, anywhere in the world, twice in a lifetime?”
“I’m not talking about Tamerlane,” I said. “Just maybe something like it.”
They both looked at me.
“What’s going on, Dr. J?”
“Somebody beat Bobby’s brains out last night.”
“Holy Christ,” Ruby said.
“Killed him, you mean,” Neff said numbly.
I nodded.
“Now who the hell would do that?” Ruby said.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Let’s go back to what I asked you. When was the last time Bobby had a big strike?”
“Oh, hell, I can’t remember,” Ruby said. “Jesus, Dr. J, this’s terrible.”
“You’re asking us when Bob might’ve had something somebody would kill him for,” Neff said.
“Let’s make like I’m asking you that.”
“Hell, never,” Ruby said.
Neff nodded immediately. “Even that big score he made a few years back, when he found all four of those big books in one weekend…I mean, that’s the biggest score any of them ever make, and all four of those books don’t add up to more than two grand. Who’d kill a guy for that?”
“Some people, maybe,” I said.
“Nobody I know,” Ruby said. “Goddamn, this’s terrible. I can’t get over it.”
“Let’s say he had something worth two or three thousand,” I said. “That’s a lot of money to guys on the street.”
“It’s a lot of money to me,” Ruby said.
“But to a guy who lives like they live, it’s more money than you’ll ever see again in one place.”
“You think that’s what happened… Bobby found something and some other bookscout took it away from him?”
“I don’t think anything,” I said. “I’m trying to find out something and put it together with what I know. It’s unlikely Bobby found anything worth a real fortune. You said so yourself. Pieces like Tamerlane don’t just drop off trees into somebody’s lap. The reason they’re worth a quarter of a million dollars is because there are no copies out there to be found. A guy would have a better chance of winning the Irish Sweepstakes, right?”
“I’d give him a better chance,” Ruby said.
“And yet it happens.”
“In movies it happens.”
“Once in a while it really happens.”
“I’d sure hate to chase that down,” Ruby said. “Talk about a needle in a goddamn haystack.”
“On the other hand, if Bobby found something worth a few thousand, you’d have to ask yourself a different set of questions. Anybody might kill for a quarter of a million, but who’d kill for three grand?”
“Three grand wouldn’t begin to solve my problems,” Ruby said. “Hell, I owe the sheriff more than that.”
“But it’s a lot of money to a bookscout,” I said.
“I see what you’re saying.”
“So,” I said, “who did Bobby go around with?”
“Well, there’s Peter. I’ve seen the two of ‘em walking together, that’s all. Doesn’t mean they were fast and tight. Other than that, old Bob ran alone. I’ve never seen him with anybody else.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“I can’t remember his last name. You remember it, Em?”
Neff shook his head.
“Just called him Peter the Bookscout, just like Bobby. Hell, half those boys never had a name, or don’t want you to know it if they do.”
“Does Peter come by often?”
“He was in here yesterday,” Neff said.
“Comes in three or four times a month,” Ruby said.
“When did you see Bobby and Peter together?”
“Oh, maybe a year ago,” Ruby said. “They were going up to Boulder together, to a book sale. Bobby didn’t drive, so he was hitching a ride with Peter.”
“What do you mean Bobby didn’t drive?” Neff said. “I’ve seen him drive. Don’t you remember that old car he had?”
“That was a long time ago, pardner,” Ruby said. “The cops busted him for no valid license, no insurance. He cracked up the car and ain’t had one since. I know damn well he didn’t have a license.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” Neff said.
“There was no driver’s license found on the body,” I said.
Neff shrugged. “Then I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” Ruby said.
“Why would one bookscout drive another one up to a sale?” I said. “It sounds like cutting your own throat to me.”
“That’s what makes me think maybe they were friends,” Ruby said. “At least as much as those guys get to be friends.”
I made a note in my book. “Any idea where I can find this Peter?”
“The only time I see him is when he comes by,” Ruby said.
“If he comes by again, tell him I want to see him.”
“Sure, Dr. J. You bet.”
I looked through
my notes. There are many reasons why people get murdered, but ninety-nine percent fall into four broad motive categories: love, hate, greed, insanity. I had looked at two of these.
“Did Bobby have any girlfriends?” I said.
“Not that I ever saw,” Ruby said.
“He ever talk about women he knew, or might have known in the past?”
They shook their heads.
“Anybody you boys can think of who’d want to see Bobby dead?”
“Oh no,” Neff said.
“He was the easiest of ‘em all to deal with,” Ruby said.
“Who’d he sell most of his books to?”
“Us, as much as anybody,” Neff said.
“Not so much anymore, though,” Ruby said.
“Why not?”
Neff gave a little shrug. “We’ve been going through some lean times, Mr. Janeway. We’ve had a few setbacks.”
“Oh, let’s call a spade a bloody fucking shovel,” Ruby said. “We bounced a few checks on him. That’s no big deal, people do it all the time. We always made it good. But these book-scouts hate to take a check anyway. They go all the way down to the bank and the check’s no good. I know where they’re coming from. I understand why they get pissed off.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“You mean write a hot check? You know that, Dr. J, I know you do. It’s book fever. You’ve got it just like I have. You see a book you want, you do what you have to do to get it. My intentions are honorable, it’s my performance that lags a little.”
“Where else did he go to sell his stuff?”
“Might be any one of a dozen places. You know the scene, Dr. J: hell, there’s thirty bookstores in Denver. Probably half of ‘em pay well enough for bookscouts to be able to deal with ’em. Not many places will pay forty percent across the board, but some do. You could narrow it down that way, I guess. Start with the boys up the street, see if they know anything.”
