Booked to die cj-1

by John Dunning

  ‘Are you crazy?“ Her voice was disembodied, floating on the storm.

  “Good evening to you, too. How’ve you been?”

  “Don’t you know you can die in this weather dressed like that?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing. Don’t scold me, now, it’s been a hard day.”

  I walked through the gate and got in her car. The heater felt great.

  She was certainly dressed for it: she wore heavy pants and a coat that buttoned under her chin. Her hat was pulled down over the coat and only a small square of her face could be seen: eyes, nose, and mouth. Enough.

  God, I loved her then.

  We went up the hill. The house looked mellow and warm. It was. I stood in the hall watching her take off her gloves, and I thought it again. Jeez, I love her. Never thought that before, about anybody.

  What a shock.

  “You believe in love at first sight?” I asked.

  She turned and looked at me directly. “What a silly question.”

  “What’s your silly answer?”

  She took a long time answering, of course…a long, endearing moment.

  “I think I do,” she said. “Yeah.”

  She blushed.

  “I am so tired of being alone,” she said.

  “Don’t be, then.”

  “Damn you,” she said. “Damn you, damn you, Janeway. Of all the things I didn’t need in my life, the list begins and ends with you.”

  “I bet you’ve been thinking about me constantly.”

  “You’re a thug. My God, a policeman! Me with a cop.”

  “I’m a refined, wizened dealer in rare books.”

  “You wouldn’t know a rare book if it fell on your head.”

  “But I learn fast. I soak up knowledge like mere mortals eat soup. I’m witty, I’m bright; I’m a bundle of goddamn laughs in case you hadn’t noticed.” I stopped, realizing suddenly, sadly, that 1 had lifted the pitch somewhere. It was almost the same half-joking plea that Miss Pride had used the night she’d come begging for a job.

  Rita was looking at me intently.

  “Here’s the best part,” I said. “I don’t mind taking orders from a woman.”

  “How kind of you. How generous.”

  “Can’t you just see it, lighting up the night sky? Janeway and McKinley. What a wow, huh?”

  “Six days ago I’d never heard of you. I was five thousand miles away, lying in the sun. Now you’re not only taking me over, you’re getting top billing.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. It’s like in vaudeville: the straight man always gets top billing.”

  “Shut up,” she said, coming close. She took off her coat and threw it somewhere. The air seemed electric between us: the fine hair was standing up on her arms and neck. I knew if we touched, the static would fry us both.

  She threw her arms around me and kissed me hard. The world went pop.

  “This is insane,” she breathed into my neck.

  I kissed her too. Her hand was on my gun. I could feel her heart; I could hear it, like a distant drumbeat.

  “You never cared about books,” she said. “It’s all just a ruse to get in my pants.”

  “I can’t keep anything from you.”

  “Well,” she said. “I guess it worked.”

  46

  I remembered something Ruby had said: It’s the most hypnotic business a man can do. He was talking about the book business, equating it to making love. I still had the gun in my hand: I don’t even remember now how that happened, but somehow the three of us wound up in bed together. I clutched the gun and held on for dear life. That piece of cold blue steel was my last link with sanity. I shuddered my way inside her and she jerked, pulling me all the way down. I held on to the gun and went all the way. This was so right. I closed my eyes and lost it. Oh, I lost it all. Anyone could’ve come through the front door and killed us both: I wouldn’t‘ve known, much less cared. They could’ve come through with a battering ram and six regiments of cavalry. I think maybe they did. They ripped the door out of the frame and stormed through on the way to the Little Bighorn, and the last man through picked up the door, gave it a paint job, hung it back, closed and locked it good as new. Brushed himself off, saluted, and called me sir: then left us there, before I knew they had come.

  “Janeway,” she said.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Tell me that isn’t your gun mashed against my head.”

  I took the gun in my other hand and propped myself up.

  She began to laugh. “Now that’s one for the books. I’ve just been screwed by a man with a gun and it wasn’t even rape.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said. “I never had a chance.”

  47

  It was two o’clock in the morning and we were just getting around to the steaks. “This is my day for decadence,” Rita said. “Lose my virginity. Go back on meat. I seem to be a wanton, savage creature at heart.”

  “Jeez, were you a virgin too?” I said.

  She tousled my hair. I liked that. It showed affection, not just lust. I opened two beers. The steaks were almost done.

  We ate. The food was wonderful, the company superb. We didn’t talk at all.

  It wasn’t till much later, sitting by the fire, when she started to unwind. “I called Paul right after I talked to you the other night,” she said. “The night…it happened.”

  “Paul is…?”

  “The guy I was gonna marry”

  “I love the past tense. Go on.”

  “It was three o’clock in the morning back there. I got him out of bed. Guess I could’ve waited, but somehow it seemed too important. God, it seemed earthshaking. I felt like my whole world had tilted off its axis.”

  I kissed the side of her head.

  “I called him to say good-bye,” she said.

  Suddenly there was no more white space, no eternity between the lines. “I met him in Greenpeace a couple of years ago. That’s where I go every summer, to work in the field. I saved a whale this year, can you imagine that? Got in a wet suit, put myself between him and the killers, and harassed them till they went away. I didn’t know I’d have the courage to do it till the time came: then there was no thought of not doing it, it was what I’d come for. We lost a volunteer this year, did you know that? We had a young man killed in a protest over a nuclear test. I knew him slightly, but his death made everything very suddenly real. I knew I could die too, and I didn’t want to. I expected to be blown into nothing every minute. Have you ever seen what a modern harpoon gun can do? It’s frightening, and here you are, taunting them, daring them to shoot you with it, knowing they’d like to do just that if they could find a way to call it an accident. They had me on NBC that night. Paul got me a videotape of the broadcast and I never looked at it: it diminishes the real experience too much. It’s what Hemingway meant when he wrote about hunting and war. Everything’s ruined when you talk too much. I used to read that and think, What macho garbage, but goddammit, he’s right. They show a twenty-second clip on Tom Brokaw and what it really was was a two-hour test of wills. Hemingway was right, the old fool. You do something that people call heroic and you can’t talk about it, you can’t sit in front of a tube and gloat over a tape, all you can do is carry it in your heart. Even talking about it this much fucks it up.”

  She pointed to the picture on the wall: the guy in the wet suit.

  “That’s Paul. I’ll take his picture down if you want.”

  “Leave it,” I said. I could afford to be generous. I knew Paul would be glad to let me be the picture on the wall and him be here on the sofa.

  “He’s a good man. I don’t know why things never really… what’s the word?”

  “Ignited.”

  “Yeah, that’s the word. He really is a fine man. Doesn’t deserve a bitch like me. You, on the other hand…”

  “I think I can handle you.”

  “I’m sure you do. So handle me, Janeway: tell me what you want to know.”<
br />
  “Anything you want to tell.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t go soft on me now. You’ve been pushing me since the moment I first saw you. Long before that, if you count that snotty phone message.”

  “Then tell me all of it.”

  It took her a while to get started. We loosened up with brandy and put some logs on the fire.

  “I was working in a bookstore in Dallas. We had a customer named William J. Malone. You know the name?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You would, if you’d been in the business longer. William J. Malone was a collector of books. You didn’t see his name much in AB. He was one of those guys who didn’t like limelight. A lot like me that way. Very private. No friends. Distant. I guess to people who didn’t know him, full of mystery. But all the so-called big boys of the book world knew him. He had no credit limit with anyone. A thug from your side of the tracks would say he had deep pockets. And the ruling passion of his life was books. Modern lit, that was his thing. He was the last of his line and he never married, but God— what a bookman! Malone knew everything. He had a wall of reference books but he didn’t need them. He had it all in his head. The joy of his life was to go into a bookstore and find wonderful things. He didn’t care about the money, it was all a game. He paid what they asked and never wanted a discount, didn’t matter whether he spent ten dollars or ten thousand. If he wanted something, he got it.

  “Malone knew more about books than any ten dealers I ever met. In Dallas, where he lived then, he was a major celebrity in the bookstores, though he tried not to be. I don’t know what first attracted him to me—maybe the fact that I didn’t scrape and bow whenever he walked in the door. All I know is, suddenly he was in my life. What kept drawing him back to that one bookstore turned out to be…am I vain enough to say it?…me. We had something going from the start, long before we ever talked of such things. It’s like something in the air that only the two of you can see. You know how that can be, Janeway, I know you know.”

  “I know now.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right. And when it happens, you don’t care who the other person is, how old he is, how much money he’s got. People who let stuff like that matter to them are fools. Things like race, religion, politics—none of it matters. So one day Malone came in and asked if I wanted to be his assistant. I quit my job on the spot. The guy I was working for was a jerk: I’d‘ve quit in another week anyway. I didn’t even ask Malone what kind of assistant I would be. I didn’t care. I had been bouncing around the book business for a few years— libraries, bookstores—and I was tired of it. I was ready for something different. Well, I got it.

  “For the next four years we went everywhere. We went all over the world looking for books. Everything I know that’s worth knowing I learned in that time. We lived in Paris for six months, went to England every summer. One of the most interesting Jack London collections—part of it’s still here, in the big room—we bought in Tokyo, of all places. You get the idea: there isn’t much more to tell. Malone never went back to Texas and neither did I. He bought this place. He liked the solitude. He liked the fact that it came with that big fence already up. You can’t put up a fence like that anymore—too many zoning restrictions—but they won’t let you tear it down either. Malone had always liked Colorado, not in the summer when tourists come swarming in, but in the dead of winter. He liked being snowed in. He was always different than everybody else. I’d still be with him, if he’d lived. I don’t think of it as a mad love affair, it wasn’t like that. But I know I’d still be with him.”

  “He died, though.”

  “You don’t have to ask that. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. What’s the version you heard? Was I supposed to’ve killed him for his money or his books?”

  “It was just talk.”

  “Yeah, right. Well, I did kill him in a way. He was fifty years old. He smoked too much and couldn’t quit, he had always smoked and he was dying from it. I guess there comes a time when it doesn’t matter anymore. One day he said to me, ‘Rita, I’m not going to die in a hospital.’ I knew then what I was in for. During the next couple of days he tended to business. Had a lawyer come up, dictated what amounted to his last will. I knew he was leaving it all to me. It was never discussed between us, but I knew him so well, and you might not believe this…I didn’t care. We were so businesslike. That’s even how he wanted to die, according to a schedule of his own making. He’d had a lethal injection made up—I knew where it was and what it was there for, and when the time came I went to the cabinet and got the stuff and helped him as best I could. God, I was such a coward. I couldn’t keep from crying and trembling…I had never seen anyone actually die, and I know he wanted to go with me keeping a stiff upper lip but I just couldn’t. I held his head on my lap while he gave himself the shot. That should’ve been all there was to it, only…he wouldn’t die. People tell you that stuff always works: it’s supposed to be painless and you’re gone like the snap of a finger, only it didn’t work that way. The man would… not… die. I thought he just didn’t get enough. It knocked him out before… you know. And he was in such pain! He writhed and twitched… and still he wouldn’t die! So I loaded that needle and I gave him another shot, enough to kill a dinosaur… and still he lived. It was like some nightmare. Then I remembered his gun.

  “I knew it was in the bedroom, but it took me a while to find the shells. I don’t know much about guns but I thought I could figure it out. I came into the room and sat beside him. His breathing was heavy and labored. He was struggling, fighting, and I took the gun and put it to his head and cocked it. I remember thinking, ‘How can I do this, how can I possibly find the strength?’ Then he seemed to relax and I knew he was gone. He just… slipped away… just in time. Another ten seconds and I might’ve been in real trouble. I didn’t even know how to uncock the stupid gun. I pulled the trigger and blew a hole in the wall. You can still see the mark. I think the sheriff suspects me of something even to this day. When they read the will, I just sat there and didn’t say anything, but it was an absolutely grand motive for murder. I knew Malone was well-off, but I was shocked at how much there really was. He never told me how much he had: it was his business and I never particularly wanted to know. I guess I was lucky: I might’ve had some real explaining to do if Malone hadn’t had the foresight to tell his lawyer what he intended. Even now there’s a lot of suspicion. To the people on this mountain, and to some in the book trade, I’m the woman who killed her boyfriend and got away with it. So I keep to myself, don’t have much to do with anyone, and that’s the story. That’s how I became rich and famous. It’s also why I’ve been giving it away in buckets. It never really felt like mine.”

  The day dawned cold and wet and miserable, one of those days in the Rockies when it’s too warm to snow and too cold to rain. We had slept for a few hours, and I came awake with her head nestled under my chin and my hand cradling her breast. I lay still, reluctant to wake her. But there was a killer to catch, and today was the day, and the day wasn’t getting any younger. I thought I had narrowed it down to an either-or. Everything about it had begun to make sense, except her part in it, and that made no sense at all.

  She turned over and opened her eyes. She touched my face and said, “Love me again,” and I couldn’t, couldn’t, say no. Then, spent, we lay under the covers and locked eyes and touched. At some point I said we had to get up. She said, “We don’t have to do anything, not ever again.” She did get up, though, and for a moment she stood by the bed, naked and lovely. She walked away and I heard the shower start. I stared up at the darkest part of the house and thought about it. And I thought: God bless America, I hope you’re not mixed up in this. I tell you it’ll break my heart if you are.

  48

  Either-or: six of one, half a dozen of the other. We came down from the mountain and I did a mental crapshoot. It came up Littleton. We rolled in on Hampden and turned south on Santa Fe Drive. The streets were still slick but it was daylight
now and I had made the drive down in less than forty minutes.

  I pulled into a Denny’s and stopped.

  “This’s where you get out.”

  “I told you before, Janeway, I have a constitutional problem with fast food.”

  “You’ll live through it. Have a cup of coffee. Read the paper. And just wait here for me.”

  “How long am I supposed to wait?”

  “Till I come back.”

  She gave me her long-suffering look. “I hope this isn’t the kind of treatment I can expect from you.”

  She got out and came around to my side. I rolled down the window and she stood for a moment looking at me, her coppery hair wafting around her head. This is how I’ll remember her twenty years from now, I thought: her priceless face framed in the car window on a lousy gray day. She leaned in and kissed me. “Don’t get killed,” she said in a tiny voice. “You too,” I said. She had already turned away and was walking toward the restaurant. “Be back before you know it,” I called, but she didn’t do anything at that. Strange girl, I thought: strange woman, still full of secrets.

  Our discussion that morning had been brief and to the point.

  “I’d like you to stay with me today,” I had said.

  “Sounds lovely. What’ll we do? Wanna fly to New York?”

  “I’m going out to get the guy who killed those three people.”

  “And for this you need me?”

  “I need to know you’re safe,” I had said. “I think there’s a possibility he may try to kill you next.”

  A few minutes later I pulled up at Val Ballard’s house. I could see the house in the misty morning. If I walked along the road, as I now did, I could soon see the garage. It was closed: the doctor was in. The road told me nothing: it was so full of puddles and melting snow that there was just no reading it. But the furrow he had plowed across the back yard was gone, washed away completely in the night, and there were no fresh tracks to take its place.