by John Dunning
She showed me the receipts. They had bought John Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, a very nice 1843 first edition in the original boards, and the expensive Louise Saun-ders-Maxfield Parrish Knave of Hearts, which I had bought from a catalog only last month. The tariff for the two items came to almost $1,200.
“Just an average day if it wasn’t for them,” I said.
“They are definitely strange ducks, Mr. Janeway,” she said, keeping her voice down. “But when they spend this kind of money, who’s going to quarrel?”
“Strange how?” I asked.
“Well, they came in here about three-thirty. The one did all the talking. He asked for you right off. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked when you’d be back. I said probably before five. He asked to see the best books in the house. I showed him the Stephens and the Parrish. He said, I’ll take these, just like that. Paid with hundred-dollar bills.” She cocked the cash drawer open slightly, so I could see the wad of money. “Then he wouldn’t take any change. He gave me twelve hundred-dollar bills and said keep the change. I told him it was against policy, we didn’t accept tips, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. I thought he was going to leave but he didn’t. He walked all around the store. Like I said, he’s in the back room now.”
I shrugged. “No accounting for people, Miss Pride. I’ll take his money.”
“I thought you would.”
I sat where she had been sitting and started looking through the other sales. “You can take off now if you want.”
“Oh, I’ll hang around a bit. Mr. Harkness is coming by in a few minutes to take me to dinner.”
I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”
“Something wrong with that?”
I went back to my bookkeeping. Far be it from me to tell her who she could see. But yes, dammit, now that she mentioned it, there was something a little wrong. She was a sweet young girl and Jerry Harkness was a relatively old man. Honey draws flies, remember? And yeah, I was a little ruffled and I didn’t like it much. Hell, I was too old for her, and Harkness had me by a good eight years. I had gone around the horn to keep my relationship with Pinky Pride on a purely professional level, and she was going out with Jerry Harkness.
“Mr. Janeway? Is something wrong?”
“It’s your business, Miss Pride. He just seems to be a bit old, that’s all I was thinking.”
“Funny I never thought of him that way. But you’re right, he’s got to be almost as old as you are.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“I’m kidding, Mr. Janeway, where’s your sense of humor? Of course he’s too old for me, I’m not going to marry the man… unless…”
“What?” I snapped. “Unless what?”
“I might consider it if he’d be willing to do one of those convenience things that would let me stay in the country per-manently. I might consider anyone who’d do that for me. But Mr. Harkness isn’t going to do that. He wants to buy me a supper and I said yes: nothing more to it than that. If you’ve got something for me to do, though…”
I shook my head. “Just don’t get in any dark corners.”
“I never do, sir, unless they’re of my own making. I hope he’ll tell me some of the finer points of his specialty.”
“I’m sure he will,” I said dryly.
“I want to know it all.”
“Someday you will,” I said, and meant it.
She was learning fast. It’ll be a national tragedy if we have to send her back to Scotland, I thought. The enormity of the book business—the fact that most of the books that even a very old dealer sees in a year are books that he’s never seen before—simply did not faze her. She was fearless and confident at the edge of the bottomless pit. A genius, confining himself to the narrowest possible specialty, could not begin to know it all. This was the task Pinky Pride had set for herself.
She had learned so much in three months that I had her added to my book fund as a co-signer. She bought from book-scouts and signed away my money as freely as I did. She made mistakes but so did I: she also made at least one sensational buy a week. I knew that someday, in the not-too-distant future, she’d be gone, if not back to Scotland then away to a place of her own. For now, for this short and special time we shared, my job was to keep her happy.
“By the way, I’m giving you a raise,” I said.
She considered it for a moment, as if she might turn it down. But she said, “I guess I deserve it.”
I heard a laugh from the back room. It had a familiar ring, like something from an old dream. I heard the two guys talking in low voices, and again one of them laughed.
Then they came up front.
It was Jackie Newton, with some gunsel straight out of old Chicago. Jackie wasn’t carrying anything, but the enforcer was packing a big gun. You learn to spot things like that. My own gun was on my belt, in the small of my back. I couldn’t get it easily, but I’d get it quick enough if something started— probably a lot faster than Jackie would believe.
The gunsel was a bodyguard, a bonecrusher, a cheap hood. They circled the store together and pretended to look at books. I fought down the urge to say something cute (“No coloring books in here, boys” would be a nice touch) and let them do their thing. Miss Pride inched close to the counter and I saw her pluck the scissors out of our supply box.
She was no dummy, Miss Pride.
I looked in her eyes and said, “Why don’t you go home now?”
“Uh-uh. Harkness, remember?”
“Go home, Miss Pride.”
She didn’t move. Jackie turned and looked at her and she stared back at him.
“Wanna go for a ride in a big car?” he said.
She shook her head.
He started coming toward her, looking at me all the time.
“How ya doin‘, fuckhead?” he said.
It was the opposite of our little meeting the day I had flattened his tire. Now I was playing it mute and Jackie was doing the talking. “I sure wouldn’t want to have a place like this…all these valuable books… such a rough part of town. I hear there’re gangs who don’t do anything but go around smashing up places like this.”
When he was three feet away, he stopped and said, “There’s always a scumbag waiting to tear off a piece of your life.”
He was doing all the talking.
“Broken window… somebody throws a gallon of gas in at midnight. Poof!”
Then he opened his bag and took out the two books he had bought. I knew what was coming and couldn’t stop it. He had paid for the books: he had a receipt; the books were his.
He opened the Stephens, ripped out the 140-year-old map and blew his nose in it.
He ripped out two pages of the second volume and did it again.
He tore a page out of the $800 Maxfield Parrish, set it on fire, and lit the cigar the gunsel had been chewing.
“No smoking in here,” I said calmly.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see your sign,” Jackie Newton said. He dropped the flickering page on the floor and stepped on it. Then he opened the Parrish and held it out, and the gunsel dropped his soggy cigar inside it. Jackie rolled the book up in his hands and passed it to me over the counter.
“You got a trash can?”
I took the book with two fingers and dropped it into the can.
They headed toward the door.
“Come again,” I said.
Jackie laughed as they went out. Miss Pride let out her breath. The scissors slipped out of her fingers and clattered on the floor.
“I recognized him too late,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was until I remembered his picture just now.”
“It’s okay.”
“Pretty expensive way to show his contempt, wouldn’t you say?”
“Depends on your perspective. He can afford it.”
“What a terrible way to use your money, though.”
I saw Jerry Harkness come to the window. Go away, I thought, I’m not in
the mood for this.
But of course he wasn’t going away. He opened the door and came in. He had slicked his hair and put on a tie and he wore an electric blue blazer. He looked like the well-dressed man of Greenwich Village, Mr. Cool of 1968.
“You ready?”
Miss Pride got her coat and wrapped her neck in a scarf. Harkness shifted his weight back and forth. His eyes met mine and the cool image melted and flushed. He looked uneasy.
“Okay with you, Janeway?”
“Hey, I’m not her guardian. Just watch your step.”
We looked at each other again. What passed between us didn’t need words: it was sharp and unmistakable. We were both years away from puberty: we had those years and that experience and a male viewpoint in common. I knew what he wanted and he knew I knew, and I was saying Don’t try it, pal, don’t even think about it, and my voice was as clear as a slap. Only Miss Pride didn’t hear it.
I faced a bleak evening alone. Happy Halloween, Janeway. A light snow had begun falling. Tomorrow, I thought, I’d mosey up the block and have a little visit with Mr. Harkness. I shelved that plan at once. Mind your own business, I thought: make her mad and she may just quit and go to work for him. But the night was dark and so was I. Newton had put me on the defensive, Miss Pride had put me on edge, and I didn’t know where to go to get a shot of instant light. I didn’t want to read, work, go home, or stay where I was. I was at one of those depressed times when nothing seems to help.
It was then that the door popped open and Rita McKinley walked into my life.
24
I knew it was her. I had this vision of her in my head, and she seemed to fit it. Weeks ago I had received a package of photostats from the AB, but they contained straight news articles with no pictures; I had read the material through once and passed it on to Hennessey. It wasn’t my job anymore, and yet, at odd times of the day or night I’d find myself thinking about her. Somehow she was at the crux of what had happened to Bobby Westfall. We had damn few hard facts, but my gut told me that. Almost everything about her fit the picture I’d had: she was damn good-looking, with dark hair and hazel eyes. I had been told that much by those who knew her, but my mind had filled in the blanks with amazing accuracy until the vision formed that now stood there in the flesh. The only thing I hadn’t got right was the wardrobe: I had seen her in furs and jewels and she wore neither. What I could see of her dress under the old and rather plain coat looked common and conservative. She wore a little hat, tilted back on her head. It couldn’t‘ve been much protection against the wind. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold. In her hand she carried a cloth bag (I had pictured her with leather) that opened and closed by a frayed cord that looped through it. She was everything, and nothing, that I had imagined her to be.
“Are you Mr. Janeway?”
I said I was.
“I’m Rita McKinley.”
I felt at once what others had felt in her presence—small and insignificant in the bookseller’s cosmos. I’d like to know how she does that, I thought: I’ll bet it’s a helluvan advantage in certain situations. Then I did know. She projected an aura that was totallv real. You could look in her face and see it: not an ounce of bullshit anywhere. She came to the counter and said, “That was a blunt message you left on my machine a while back.”
“I tend to get blunt when I don’t seem to be having any effect. Don’t you ever return calls?”
“I’m very good about returning calls. This time there was a mix-up. I’ve been out of town.”
“You’ve been out of town a long time.”
“I’ve been out of touch almost six months. I’m supposed to be able to get my messages when I call in, but it didn’t work.”
“What’d you do, take a world cruise?”
I didn’t expect an answer to that, and I didn’t get one. She went right to the point. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing, now.”
“The phone said something about a murder.”
“I thought you didn’t get the message.”
“My machine recorded it, I just didn’t get it when I called in. Now what’s this about a murder?”
“I’m not in the murder business anymore.”
“So I see.”
She looked around at the store, and again I felt small and insignificant. I felt irritated too, for reasons I only half understood.
“Don’t pay any attention to this place,” I said. “This is just something to while away my golden years.”
“You’ve done a nice job.”
I looked at her for traces of sarcasm, but I couldn’t see any. She browsed her way around the room, glancing into the back as she passed the open doors. “You seem to know what you’re doing,” she said.
“Does that surprise you?”
“Sure. It’s not something I’d expect a policeman to know.”
“Don’t worry, I know how to beat up people too. There’s a good deal more to me than pure intellect.”
My sense of humor was lost on her. “This is very nice stuff,” she said without a hint of a smile.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You must’ve been putting it away for a long time.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You have very good taste.”
“For a cop,” I said. I grinned to blunt the mockery and turned my palms up.
“I guess it proves that a good bookman can come from anywhere. Even a librarian has a chance.”
“You don’t like librarians?”
“I used to be one. They’re the world’s worst enemies of good books. Other than that, they’re fine people.”
She fingered a book, opened it, and read something. But her eyes drifted, came up and met mine over the top edge. She had the deadliest eyes. I’d hate to have to lie to this lady with my life at stake, I thought.
“If you don’t know it yet, there’s an endless war going on between libraries and book dealers,” she said. “At best it’s an uneasy truce.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes; we really hate each other.”
“Why is that?”
“For obvious reasons. We’re all after the same thing: in some cases, things that are unique. They see us as mercenaries, motivated by greed and excessive profits.”
“That’s a laugh.”
“Sure it is. Try to convince them of that.”
“And how do we see them?”
“I know how I see them, having worked with them. I can show you libraries that would make you cry. Priceless, wonderful books given to the library, then put in some moldy basement to rot. Old-timers die and think they’re doing the world a favor when they leave their books to the library. They might as well take them out and burn them. Public libraries particularly. They just don’t have the staff or knowledge to handle it. And after all, the public’s got to have its Judith Krantz and its Janet Dailey. So the library buys fifty copies of that junk and then cries that it has no budget.”
“Where’d you work?”
“I started in a library back in Kansas, a good case in point. That library was given a gorgeous collection thirty years ago. It’s still right where they put it then, in a basement room. Part of the ceiling came down five years ago and the books are buried under two thousand pounds of plaster. I’d give a lot of money to get that stuff out of there.”
“Why don’t you try that? Most people respond favorably to money.”
“Forget it. There are all kinds of complications when you get into deals like this. Sometimes you win and save some fabulous things. More often you lose. But that’s another story. What did you want to ask me?”
“I think you better talk to the man who’s handling that case.” I wrote Hennessey’s name on the back of a bookmark and gave it to her.
“What’s it about?”
“I think I should let Hennessey tell you that.”
“You said something on the phone about a man named Westfall?”
I nodded. This
was tricky water we were navigating. I knew I shouldn’t be discussing it with her, but I had been curious for a long time.
“Am I supposed to know him?” she asked.
“Are you telling me you don’t know him?”
“Never heard of him before this day.”
“What about Stanley Ballard?”
“Him I know. I did an appraisal for him. Nice old man.”
“You looked at all his books?”
“Every bloody one. A colossal waste of time.”
“You found nothing there?”
“He was in two book clubs, and that’s where ninety-nine percent of it came from. You know as well as I do what that stuffs worth.”
“The history can be okay.”
“But Mr. Ballard wasn’t a historian, was he? He was literati, and it was all book club fiction.”
Junk, I thought.
She said, “When he called for the appraisal, I told him it wouldn’t be a good use of his money unless the books were worthwhile. I don’t work cheap, Mr. Janeway. My expertise is every bit as specialized as a lawyer’s and just as hard to come by. When I get a call like that, cold, I tend to ask some questions before I jump in the car and go racing down the hill.”
“What questions?”
“The same ones you’d ask if you were me. Why they want the appraisal done, for starters. This eliminates most of them right out of the gate. Most of the time they say they just want to know what they’re worth. They’re just fooling around, wasting their time and mine. When I tell them that the fee for an appraisal starts at sixty dollars an hour, they back off fast. Once in a while you get a real one. He wants to get his books insured and he needs an appraisal before a policy can be written. Maybe he’s had a loss, a flood in a basement, and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay off. I do a lot of work like that. I don’t like insurance companies—they all try to lowball: some of them even claim that the books were never worth what they were insured for. That’s where I come in. I’m not shy about telling you, there’s nobody better at sticking it to a shyster insurance company. But I’m sure you know all this.”
