Booked to die cj-1

by John Dunning

  “You haven’t said anything yet.”

  “It’s very simple. I hate violence, but all my life I’ve been attracted to violent men.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I said, struggling past a pear-sized obstruction in my throat.

  “So the reason I didn’t want you to come up here today is the same reason I finally did ask you up. The same reason I didn’t cancel when I read the paper. The same reason I wouldn’t go out with you. Does that make any sense?”

  “No, but keep going. I like the sound of it.”

  “You wear your violence on your sleeve. It goes where you go. You carry it around like other men carry briefcases. It’s like a third person in the room. I can’t help being appalled by that.”

  I listened to her breathe. My pear had grown into a grapefruit.

  “And yet, I’m always a sucker for a man who can make me believe he’ll do anything, if the stakes are big enough.”

  I gave a wicked laugh.

  Gotcha, I thought.

  “I don’t want to see you again,” she said. “I just wanted you to know why.”

  “I’ve got a hunch we’ll see each other.”

  “I’m engaged, Mr. Janeway. I’m getting married next month.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I came along when I did.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, and hung up.

  God damn it, I thought.

  Whoopie! I thought. Yaahoo!

  Elation and despair were sisters after all.

  I called her back: got the recording. When the beep came, I pictured her sitting in the kitchen listening to my voice. Insanity, the third sister, took over. I got real close and crooned into the phone. “Oh, Rüüü-ta! This is the mystery voice calling! Guess my name and win a truckload of Judith Krantz first editions. Ooooh, I’m sorry, I’m not George Butler the Third! But that was a fine guess, and wait’ll you hear about the grand consolation prize we have in store for you! Two truckloads of Judith Krantz first editions! Your home will certainly be a bright one with all those colorful best-sellers lying around. Your friends will gaze in awe—” The tape beeped again, and a good thing, else I might’ve gone on till dawn. I replaced the phone in the cradle and stared at it for a long moment. Ring, you sonofabitch, I thought, but the bastard just sat there.

  Convulsed with laughter, I was sure.

  Too weak to call.

  Savoring my wit in her solitude.

  Damn her.

  I worked it off. In a bookstore there’s always something to do. I had a small stack of low-end first editions that needed to be priced, so I did that. I watered Miss Pride’s plant again, and studied the AB. I read for an hour. Sometime after two o’clock I fell asleep in the big deep chair near the front counter.

  I opened my eyes to a feeling more desolate than despair. This was not the aching loneliness of new love, it was something far more desperate and immediate. The street was still dark: the world outside was hollow and empty and nothing moved anywhere. The store was like a tomb: still, silent, eerie.

  Maybe I’d been dreaming. I hadn’t had the Jackie Newton dream in months. Maybe that had come back and I just couldn’t remember.

  Then it came to me.

  It was that sourness I had noticed when I’d first opened the door. It was stronger now, ripe and distinct, almost sweet in a sickening kind of way. When you’ve been in Homicide as long as I was, that’s one thing you never forget.

  The smell of death.

  I got up and went toward the back. The smell got stronger.

  Oh boy, I thought.

  I opened the door to the office. I turned on the light. Nothing looked wrong. It was just as Ruby had said: everything shipshape.

  But the smell was stronger.

  There was one place Ruby couldn’t have seen—the bathroom across the hall. That room had no windows, nothing but a skylight, no way for anyone to look in.

  I opened the door. Miss Pride stared up at me with glassy eyes. Peter sprawled across her, facedown.

  Each had been shot once through the head.

  30

  The killer had come in just after closing time. Miss Pride had not yet locked the front door.

  He had come for a single purpose. No money was missing. No books were missing. He had come to kill. By the time I tried returning Miss Pride’s call, at five-twenty-five, she and Peter had probably been dead ten minutes.

  He had come through the front door. We keep the back door locked. He had forced Miss Pride to lock up—her keys were still clutched tight in her fingers—and afterward he had used the back door to escape. Unlike the front door, which must be locked with a key, the back door had a latch lock that could be slam-locked from the outside.

  The weapon was probably a .38. Ballistics would tell us more.

  Miss Pride had been shot first. The shot had hit her in the front of the head, exactly between the eyes: she had fallen over on her back, her head twisted grotesquely against the wall.

  Peter had been a more difficult target. In his panic he had done a great deal of scrambling. One slug had missed and gone through the wall. The second one got him.

  The killer, of course, had taken the gun away with him.

  He had probably worn gloves. There were no fingerprints on the back door latch or on the door itself. There were many prints on the front door, from customers who had come and gone all day long. Most of these would never be identified.

  He had come, done his job, and left. The whole thing had probably taken no more than two minutes.

  Everything else was speculation. My guess was that Peter had known who killed Bobby Westfall. He had come to the store to tell me about it but the killer got there first. Miss

  Pride had simply been unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  As always, there were more questions than answers. If this tied back into the Westfall case, why had Peter waited all these months to tell me about it? How had the killer suddenly learned that Peter was a threat? Why had it happened now, and what had caused it to suddenly come on? Had there been something in the Ballard library so valuable that someone would kill for it, then kill twice more? Was it the Ballard library at all, and if so, how could Rita have overlooked it? Something small—so small that no one could see it, yet Bobby Westfall had had to take the entire library to be sure of getting it. Look at the little things, Dr. J. I heard Ruby’s voice telling me that. It’s the one lesson that even a good bookman finds hardest to learn. Look at the little stuff—pamphlets, broadsides, tiny books with no lettering on their spines—and remember that one little weatherworn piece could bring more money than an entire library done up in glamour leather.

  Something small. Something you know is there but you’re not sure where. If you’re Bobby Westfall, you have to take every book: tear them apart if necessary, go page by page if necessary, slit the cloth and strip away the bindings if necessary, rip the hinges asunder and shred the pieces through a sieve if necessary. Kill or be killed if necessary. Something small and hidden, it had to be, had to, because if it were small and unhidden it would be too easy to steal. Rita McKinley could easily drop it down her dress while old man Ballard went for coffee; Bobby Westfall could’ve dropped it in his pocket, the Lord be damned, while he wandered among the stacks and ostensibly tried to make up his mind.

  It all came back to money. That’s what fueled Bobby and Peter and all the guys like them. Money was the one thing they never had enough of: it was the driving force in their lives. Bobby wanted to be respected as a book dealer, not joked about as a bookscout. It took money to do that. It took other things—knowledge, taste, a keen eye, good juice, a gam-bler’s blood, and a hustler’s imagination—but without money you just couldn’t get started.

  The scene at my place was like a hundred murder scenes I’d been to. Cops. Photographers. Sketchmen. The coroner.

  It was the same, only different. This was me on the receiving end. That dead girl was one of mine.

  From the moment I found her, I
was a cop again.

  A cop without a badge.

  Hennessey had arrived with his new partner before dawn. Teaming Neal with Lester Cameron had been the final ironic fallout of the Jackie Newton affair, but Boone Steed worked in mysterious ways. Cameron and I had never liked each other: he was too trigger-happy and hot-collared for my taste, though I’d heard it said more than once that Cameron in action reminded people of me. I didn’t like that much, though I did respect Cameron in a professional way. I thought he was a good cop, I just didn’t like him as a man. He had a head on his shoulders and a block of ice where his heart was supposed to be. He had a take-charge demeanor that was a turnoff, but his record with DPI) was a good one. He and I had been in the same class at the police academy, long ago. We had never been bosom buddies, even then. For most of an hour, Hennessey, Cameron, and I sat in the front room talking. We were three old pros: I knew what they needed and gave them what I could. Cameron sat on one of my stools like a grand high inquisitor and fired off the inevitable questions, and I answered them like clockwork. I knew the questions before they were asked. I told him about Miss Pride, where she’d come from, when and why. I told him about Peter, and his friendship with Bobby Westfall, who had also been murdered. Hennessey stood apart as I related this. He looked out into the dark street, and even when he looked at me, he avoided my eyes. I guess he knew what I was thinking, that you can’t ever drag your feet on a murder case, can’t ever assume that the victim isn’t important enough to warrant the balls-out effort. You never know when a killer might come back for an encore.

  We talked about Miss Pride. She had no enemies on this earth, I said, unless she had a dark side that I simply couldn’t imagine. I told them what I thought: that it tied into Westfall, and Miss Pride was the innocent victim. I told them how skittish Peter had been the last two days, how frantic he’d been when he tried to reach me at Rita McKinley’s. I told them about Rita, too, all the facts, all the rumors. As an afterthought, I told them that Jackie Newton had been hanging around.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This doesn’t smell like Jackie.”

  “You sure thought it was before,” Hennessey said, looking out the window.

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “What’s so different?” Cameron said. “You boys kiss and make up?”

  “It doesn’t fit Jackie. The first one did: go look up the M.O. yourself if you want to see what I’m talking about. There’s a random nature to all of Jackie’s old business. This wasn’t random. Jackie doesn’t come advertising before he kills somebody. That’s my opinion.”

  “Opinions are like assholes,” Cameron said. “Everybody’s got one.”

  “That’s cute, Lester,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  By then it was daylight: it was seven-thirty and word of the tragedy had spread up and down the block. People were gathering on the walk and peering in the windows.

  “What’s the name of the guy who was dating her?” Cameron said.

  “You mean Jerry Harkness?”

  “If that’s the guy who was dating her, that’s who I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t say he was dating her. He took her to dinner a couple of nights ago.”

  “We need to see him. And we need to go up in the hills and see this McKinley woman. See if she’s still got that tape, for one thing. Maybe the lab can separate those voices and we can hear what they were saying when they were talking over each other. That should be the first priority. How do I get there?”

  “You don’t unless you call first. That’s the way the lady operates.”

  “Well, here’s the way I operate. You give me her address and let me worry about getting in.”

  “You could save yourself some grief if you call her. I don’t think she did this, do you?”

  “I don’t know who the hell did it.”

  “Lester, she was with me at the time.”

  “Wrong, sport. She was with you when she played you a tape that she said had just been made. Besides, you don’t have to pull the trigger to be involved in something.”

  I nodded slowly. “It’s a calculated risk. If she’s still got the tape, a phone call might make sure she keeps it.”

  “Or burns it.”

  “Or uses it over,” Hennessey said. “That’s the most likely thing. She’ll slip it back in the machine and just use it again. Shucks, even by calling her, we might be erasing it.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said, remembering. “I think I may’ve already done that.”

  “What’d you do?” Cameron said meanly.

  “I got back here about midnight. She called me almost as soon as I came in the door. We talked for a few minutes, then I called her back. God damn it, she had the recording on. I talked on it for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Just stupid bullshit. Dumb, stupid stuff.”

  “Love talk?” Cameron asked.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t think that question requires a translation. Are you involved with this woman, Janeway?”

  “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “I believe I am.”

  “Shit,” Cameron said.

  “Next time I decide to have an affair with a woman, Lester, I’ll be sure and come ask your permission first.”

  “We’ve got to go get that tape now,” Hennessey said, “before she uses it anymore.”

  “You can’t get in there without a warrant,” I said.

  “You still can’t stop playing cop, can you, Janeway?” Cameron said. “I think maybe it’s time you remembered who the police are.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something that might do you some good if you’ll just shut up and listen. You don’t just walk up to this lady’s house and knock on the door. She’s got a ten-foot fence and a gate that locks. If you go over that fence without a warrant, anything that comes from that tape is out the window, even if the killer confesses in verse and leaves you his telephone number.”

  “That’s only true if she’s involved,” Hennessey. “We couldn’t make a case against her with the tape, but we sure as hell could if the killer’s somebody else.”

  “Why not cover your ass?” I said.

  “You’ve always been good at that, haven’t you, Janeway?” Cameron said. “Except once.”

  31

  They carried the bodies out in rubber bags strapped to stretchers. The crowd gave a soft collective sigh and moved back from the door. It all seemed to take forever, as if people were trapped in some slow-motion twilight zone. The lab men combed the place, and this is not a hurry-up process. I waited them out. I sat by the door and tried not to think, and when I could see that it was winding down I started working on a new sign for the window. I wrote it on chipboard with a heavy black marking pen. It said, closed until further notice.

  I began to see familiar faces in the crowd. Clyde Fix. A couple of bookscouts I knew. I saw Ruby standing alone, and Neff a few feet away, also alone. I’d seen it before, how death both repels and attracts, leaving even best friends alone with their darkest fascinations, fears. Jerry Harkness peeked in and asked what had happened. When I told him, he looked sick. He drifted down the street without another word.

  Any violent death is bad, but this one was worse than bad. I felt like I’d just been mauled by a tiger.

  Then, suddenly, they were all gone. The lab boys rolled up their tents and packed away their gear and the crowd outside began to dissolve. Fifteen minutes later the place was empty. A wave of loneliness washed over me, deep and cutting, almost unbearable. How little we know about people, I thought. Can you ever really know anyone? Already I saw Pinky Pride as a one-dimensional figure. I liked her but I knew in years to come I’d have trouble remembering her face. How little time I had actually spent with her. Never mind, Pinky, I’ll spend the time now. I’ll spend it now.

  I went from room to room turning off the
lights. The bathroom was the worst. The blood was still there and the room was puffed with fingerprint dust and there was still the smell of death, but fading now. I’m not much of a crier: I hate to admit that these days, when macho is a dirty word and people use it to trap and unmask insensitive bastards like myself, but I did shed a few quiet, private tears for Pinky Pride. Then I dropped my new sign into the front window, locked the front door, and started on the trail of her killer.

  32

  “I can’t believe this,” Ruby said. “God damn, that poor kid. That poor sweet kid.”

  Neff looked truly shaken. He sat in his usual spot behind the counter, but his usually busy hands were idle.

  “What were you boys doing last night?” I asked.

  “We were right here, Dr. J. You called me here, you know where we were.”

  “Did you see anything, hear anything, or see anybody unusual?”

  I was looking at Neff, who had gone pale. His hands had begun to tremble. “I…I think I…may’ve seen him,” he said.

  “We been sittin‘ here waiting for the cops to come down, but they never did,” Ruby said. “We didn’t know what to do.”

  “They had to chase down something urgent, but they’ll be back,” I said. “What did you see, Neff?”

  But Neff couldn’t speak. He put his hand over his face and sat there shivering.

  “Give ‘im a minute,” Ruby said. “This’s been one helluva shock.”

  “For all of us, Ruby,” I said. “What were you doing between five and six?”

  “Lookin‘ at books.”

  “What books?”

  “We’d just gotten in some wonderful stuff. I was humped over here at the door, lookin‘ at the books. I didn’t see a thing.”

  “That’s what you were doing when I called?”

  “Yeah. Em was here with me, sittin‘ right where he is now. He didn’t feel good…”

  “I’ve had a touch of stomach flu,” Neff said. “Had the runs all day long. I thought maybe if I got out a while, if I went on a buy, I’d stop thinking about how lousy I felt. I shoulda gone home and went to bed. But I went out and bought these books instead. I’d just gotten back. I had to hit the can so bad I thought I’d bust. You know how we’re set up back there, real cramped, with the toilet right on the alley. I sat down and did my duty, then opened the back door to air the place out. There was a guy… coming up from your way… Christ, I looked right in his face.”