by John Dunning
“What’d he look like?”
“Like a man 1 wouldn’t want to run into, in a dark alley at night.”
“Give me some color, Neff. Give me a size, a shape. How old was this dude?”
“I don’t know. Forty… maybe older. I wasn’t paying that much attention then. I know he was white, and big.”
“How big? Two hundred? Six feet? You tell me, Neff, I’m a lousy mind reader.”
“Yeah… big. Two hundred… at least that. Six feet… I don’t know. But heavy through here. God, he saw me watching him.”
“What did he do when he saw you watching him?”
“Turned his head away… like this… then went on by.”
“Did that strike you as suspicious?”
“Why should it? I didn’t know anybody’d been killed. I’m used to seeing weird characters around here; why should I think anything about it. Jesus, the guy looked straight at me. What am I gonna do?”
“Tell the cops what happened, just like you’re telling me.”
“Well, where the hell are they? And what if that guy comes back before they do?”
“I’m not telling you not to worry about it: somebody’s killed three book people in this town and maybe we all better worry a little. If I were you I’d leave the store closed today. Stay together. Go downtown and wait for Hennessey, then tell him what you told me. Could you describe this guy for a police artist?”
“Maybe… I’m not sure. I didn’t stare at him. When he looked away, so did I.”
“How was he dressed?”
“Black. Black slacks, black sport coat open at the neck, pale gray shirt…no tie. Jesus, he might’ve had the gun right there under his coat. He could’ve shot me.”
“Or he could’ve been some neighborhood bum who had nothing to do with it. I take it you’ve never seen him around here.”
“Never seen him anywhere. He didn’t look like a bum to me.”
“Did you watch him at all after he went on by?”
“No. I came… right back up front.”
I let out a long breath. “Okay, let me get a feel for the time frame. You say you went out on a buy and got back here when… about quarter to five?”
“It wasn’t much later than that. I didn’t look at the clock, but I’m sure I was here by five.”
“It was right at closing time, Dr. J,” Ruby said. “I remember I was thinking I’d be closing up in a minute, then Em came back.”
“Then it was closer to five than quarter to,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Neff said. “I thought it was earlier than that, but you may be right.”
“It was a few minutes before five,” Ruby said.
“What’d you drive?” I asked.
“My car, same’s I always drive. Same one’s out back.”
“And you came up Colfax, right past all the stores?”
“Yeah.”
“When you passed my place, did you happen to look in?”
“I gave it a glance, I always do. I like to see if there’s any business on the block. I look in all the stores when I come by.”
“Was the store open or closed?”
“I don’t remember, I didn’t look at the sign. There was nobody in the front, though, I do know that.”
“Did you look in at Harkness and Fix?”
“Yeah, sure. Fix was sitting in that chair by his window like he always does. Harkness was gone somewhere—he had that clock on the door that said, you know, be back at such-and-such a time. I didn’t notice what time it said. I need some water. This shit’s got me shook.”
I waited for him to come back. Then I started in again. “So you drove past the stores and pulled up here and unloaded the books. How long did that take?”
“No more’n a minute,” Ruby said. “There wasn’t all that much, quantity-wise. Just three boxes. Didn’t take but a second to bring it all in.”
I kept looking at Neff. “Then what did you do?”
“Like I told you, headed straight for the can. I thought I’d bust before I got back there.”
“How long were you on the pot?”
“No more than a minute. You know how it is when you’ve got the runs, it’s all water.”
“Then you opened the back door and saw the guy.”
He took a shivery breath, nodded, and let it out.
“So you were back there what… two minutes? And this would all have taken place by a few minutes after five? And you didn’t see the guy get in any car and drive away, either of you?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Ruby said.
Neff looked ill. We were all silent for a moment.
“I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Janeway, this thing’s made a mess of my nerves. I’m not gonna sleep till they catch this bastard.”
I gave him an encouraging little nod. “Tell me anything else that comes to you. Hair… scars…”
“I didn’t notice any scars. He had thick black hair with deep recesses. It went way back, made the front of his head look like a big letter M, but the hair was still real thick where it did grow. He had a face like a…turtle… just a flat line for a mouth. I can’t tell you about his eyes: he turned away before I got a look, and I probably wouldn’t remember anyway.”
“And he didn’t say anything?”
“Hell no. The whole thing didn’t take more than a few seconds. But that was enough.”
“All right,” I said. “Stay away from here today. Get downtown and tell Hennessey what you’ve told me. Get the artist involved. Do the best you can.”
“Sure… you bet.”
“A couple more questions, then I’ve got to go,” I said. “I talked to Miss Pride in the middle of the day. Told her to call and tell you she’d be there alone at closing…” I looked searchingly at both faces.
Ruby shook his head. “She never called me.”
“No,” Neff said.
Damn you, Pinky, I thought. Next time do what I tell you.
I felt the shivers in my own spine, and hoped I wasn’t coming down with Neff’s flu.
“What about Peter?” I said. “I asked you before if you knew where he lived.”
“Didn’t know then, don’t know now,” Ruby said.
“What was Peter’s last name?”
“Uh, wait a minute… yeah, I know it, I just can’t call it. Hell, Em, help me out, you know what it is.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on, we’ve written enough hot checks to the old fart. I don’t mean that the way it sounds, Dr. J… don’t want to speak ill of the dead…I’m just… tryin‘ to…call the damn thing up for you and I can’t get a handle on it. Haven’t you ever written him a check?”
“I always paid him cash,” I said.
“Must be nice. It’s on the tip of my tongue, that’s how close it is. It’s Peter, uh… uh… God damn it! Peter, uh… I know the damn thing as well as I know my own.”
“Think about something else for a minute,” I said. I looked at three boxes of books stacked against the glass case. “Is this the stuff you bought yesterday?”
“Yeah. Damn lovely stuff it is, too. Go ahead, take a look.”
I peeked over the edge and saw a fine copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Under it was A Clockwork Orange, a beaut. Under that was a nice double stack, about fifteen books. The three boxes would hold forty, maybe fifty pieces.
“It was a hurry-up deal,” Ruby said. “Woman was going out of town, she calls us and needs the cash right now. I tell you, Samson, we had to scrounge to get it up. Fifteen hundred we had to pool, and two hours to do it. But we did it.”
I didn’t go through the box. For once I didn’t feel like looking at books.
I started to leave, stopped at the door and said:
“Hey, Rube! What’s Peter’s name?”
“Bonnema,” he said. “Two n‘s, and one m. Peter Bonnema. By God, Dr. J, that’s a good trick. That’s a damn good trick.”
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn’t,” I said, and left.
33
Harkness too had been out on a major buy late yesterday. His place reeked of fresh Stephen King. There were King books scattered across the counter and stacked on the floor. He had gotten the call two days ago and had closed early yesterday to go look at the stuff. The buy was in Boulder, thirty miles away. He had closed the store around one-thirty. He had walked up to my place and had stood talking with Miss Pride for about ten minutes. She had mentioned in passing that she would be closing alone—Mr. Janeway had made her tell him that, she explained with a frown—but he had told her he’d be gone at closing time so she should call Seals & Neff and let them know. She had rolled her eyes and said, “You men!” and that was the last time he had seen her. He looked to be on the verge of tears.
I asked what time he had come in last night. “It was almost eight,” he said. “By the time I got to Boulder it was quarter to three. The buy didn’t take long. King stuff never does. You know what it goes for and so do they: the only question is, can you get it from them for any kind of a decent price, or do they want to make all the money? Usually they want full pop, but this one was reasonable. I only had to pay sixty-five percent.”
“Man, that sounds high,” I said.
Harkness didn’t react at all. He said, “It is, for anything but King. I’ll put it away and in a year it’ll look cheap, what I paid for it. What the hell difference does it make? What difference does anything make?”
“Yeah,” I said.
The Kings had been owned by a woman. Her husband was the collector but he had died and she was trying to figure out the rest of her life. King didn’t figure in it, but she could get a fair start with the money he would bring her. “It cost me plenty,” Harkness said, “every damn dime I had in the bank, but look at what I got.” It was all there, the entire King output: the five major Doubleday firsts, variant jackets on the two Salem’s Lots, all the signed limiteds. Harkness didn’t seem to care.
“I was done with it by four o’clock,” he said. “I should’ve come back. If I had, maybe she’d still be alive. I’d‘ve got back here before five and taken her to dinner and she’d still be here.”
“What did you do instead?”
“Went out to eat alone. Some burger joint near the campus. I sat there for an hour thinking about it.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Her.”
He looked at me with sad eyes that had aged immeasurably since the last time I had seen him. He said, “I know what you think, Janeway, but you’re wrong. She was a kid. I knew that. But there was something about her that got me down deep. I couldn’t shake her. You know what that feels like?”
I thought of Rita McKinley, but I didn’t say anything.
“I knew it was all wrong… man my age, screwing around with a girl her age. But what can you do? When they get you they get you. So I ate a cheap supper and walked around killing time, just thinking about it. Then I came back here. Unloaded my stuff. Worked here till ten o’clock. Went home.”
“You didn’t see anything?”
“What was to see by then?”
Clyde Fix, as usual, was no help. He had not seen Peter in months. He didn’t like the son of a bitch. Peter wasn’t welcome in his store. I asked Fix if he’d seen anyone resembling the man Emery Neff had described. He hadn’t seen anyone and wouldn’t tell me if he had. I wasn’t a cop anymore: he knew that. He didn’t have to tell me anything.
34
I sat in my store and called Motor Vehicles: told them I was Detective Cameron and needed a rundown on a murder victim. Impersonating a cop is against the law and, strictly speaking, it wasn’t necessary. Motor vehicle records are open to everybody, but being a cop speeds the process. Current driver’s licenses had been issued to two Peter Bonnemas in Denver. One lived in Cherry Hills Village, a posh country club neigh-borhood, the other in a rooming house on the fringe of Five Points. It wasn’t hard to choose: ten minutes later I pulled up at a rambling old brick tenement near 22nd and Arapahoe. I took a small pouch of tools out of my trunk, slipped it into my coat, and went inside. It wasn’t the Brown Palace: there was no security door and some of the mailboxes in the stale-smelling foyer looked like they had never borne a name. Peter’s name had been scrawled in pencil on a small white card and Scotchtaped to the mailbox for apartment 310. There was a letter inside. I took out my pouch and got a tool and picked open the box. It was really no lock at all, just a simple latch. I lifted the slim envelope out and closed the mailbox. It was handwritten and postmarked Portland, Oregon. The return address said “Mrs. Peter Bonnema, 12335 SW 123rd, Portland.” I took it without a second thought, slipped it into my coat, and went upstairs.
The lock on Peter’s door was almost as simple as the one on the mailbox. It’s a real wonder more of these guys don’t get murdered, I thought as I went in. I let out a long breath. Bobby Westfall’s so-called apartment had been a cradle of luxury compared with this. There was a dank smell about it, like curdled milk. The bed was a rollaway, layered with old dirt that had worn itself slick: there was no sign that the bed had ever worn a sheet. I saw empty cans on the floor, rat droppings in the corner, and everywhere, of course, the inevitable books. There were two small rooms and a toilet, and books were piled in every crack and corner. There were books on the sills of both windows and piled high in the middle of the floor. I knew I had little time; Cameron and Hennessey would be here before the day was done. I pulled on a pair of gloves and went to work. I handled the books carefully, so as not to destroy any prints, and it was the same as before— almost one hundred percent junk. It was so much like Westfall that I wasn’t surprised when I found, pushed away in the back of a closet, a two-foot stack of good books.
Very good books.
It was about the equivalent of the stack I had found at Bobby’s: great titles, all modern lit, first editions, perfect condition, a healthy mix of mainstream and genre. I didn’t bother making a list this time—I knew at once that when I walked out, these were going with me. I looked at the mysteries and actually felt my mouth water, like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Early Rex Stout… Ross Macdonald… Cornell Woolrich in his real name and both pseudonyms: a nice little stack adding up to at least four grand retail. I didn’t know yet how to assess it, didn’t know what to do with it, but I wasn’t leaving it here. Rats eat books, you know.
There was nothing else of any possible value: I was finished here as a bookman and now I went through the place with the eyes of a cop. The main room was depressingly bare, a bleak testament to the way some people live today. There was no desk where papers might be stored, no cabinet, no table with drawers. There were some trinkets, some Indian turquoise, probably mid-twenties Navajo that Peter had scouted at a flea market. I pushed it aside and left it there. Under the bed I found a bundle of letters held together by a rubber band. They looked like the same cheap stationery as the one from the mailbox. I thumbed through them and noticed the obvious common denominators. All were signed “Mumsy.” Each began with the same line: “Your big box of books arrived today.” There had been one letter every two weeks for the last three months. Mumsy was a lean, sparse writer: she got right to the point and didn’t linger over flowery sunsets. There was no return address inside because Peter would undoubtedly know it. She had put a return address on the envelope in case the letter, for some reason, had to be returned. Mumsy was a practical soul who didn’t write extra words and Peter didn’t save envelopes. I had probably fished the only Mumsy envelope in existence out of the mailbox. It had probably been delivered only this morning.
I didn’t open it till I got home. It was just like all the others. “Your big box of books arrived today and I put it with all the others.” Not much chitchat. “Went over to Dadsy’s grave today… Your friend Junie Sykes is expecting again, this makes six she’s had with five different men. I said at the time and I say again, you are well out of that. You can’t eat your heart out forever… Why don’t you come home?” A sudden
image of Peter wafted up, a vision of the bleak and solitary road he had chosen becoming so clear in the half-dark room. A young man then with little verbal ability, crushed by love. Junie Sykes had eaten him alive and sent him on his way, banished to this. Getting by on fifty-cent books and bummed cigarettes, still carrying the faint hope of the Big Score, the $10 million map found in a Salvation Army store for six bucks. In his mind, Peter Bonnema drove home to Portland in a solid gold Cadillac and snatched Junie Sykes from all that. He would come on like Gary Cooper, tall and lean and silent, infinitely ready to forgive. Life was sooooo good, in that dream, and it was only one… god… damn… score… away! Just that moment in time when something wonderful was put out by someone stupid, and he was there. He’d go home vindicated, king of the bookscouts!
I opened the drapes and read again through all the letters. It never varied. Mumsy acknowledged the books, wrote a line or two about Dadsy or Dadsy’s grave or what Dadsy would think of the world today, and slipped in a stinger about Junie Sykes. It was always “your friend Junie Sykes,” slapped on the page like an indictment. Mumsy’s apron strings snaked across the country, dooming her son to the life he led, sealing him in squalor.
Mumsy probably hadn’t been informed yet. The cops would still be in the early stages of investigating Peter’s next of kin, and without the Mumsy letters it might be days before they found her. I picked up the phone and called United Air Lines, got the next flight to Portland charged to my credit card. I called Hertz and had a rental car arranged on the other end.
If Jackie Newton wanted my money, he’d have to hurry. If I kept on this way, there wouldn’t be much left.
I had five hours to kill and I killed them well.
