Booked to die cj-1

by John Dunning

  She shook her head and said, “I have no idea.”

  And that’s how the case ended: with a stalemate, a standoff between someone I loved and everything I believed in. With a dead man and a treasure, a lack of faith, a beautiful girl, and the big question still unanswered.

  53

  But no:

  It really ended on another day six weeks later. Emery Neff was in his grave and the Ballard heirs were embroiled in a battle of books that seemed certain to end up in court. Ruby was in business alone. Rita McKinley had been set free by the Boulder County DA, who had pronounced the shooting justified: she had gone somewhere and had left nothing, not even the damned recording, to tell people where she’d gone or when she might come home.

  I saw Barbara Crowell every couple of weeks. Mose had found a way to handle her case, as a favor to me. They had me billed as her star witness, and things weren’t looking too bad for her when all the mitigating factors were taken into account.

  Jackie, after all, hadn’t died. He couldn’t feed himself or talk quite right: he’d have to be carried to the potty from now on, but he was alive. Doctors think he might live that way for another thirty years. It doesn’t sound like much, but the alternative is nothing at all.

  As for me, I was going through the old familiar symptoms of acute burnout. The book business, which had been so fresh and exciting just three months ago, was suddenly old, and I was growing old with it. I dreaded opening the store: I let it slide as long as I could; then I went in and painted the bathroom and opened for business. I had been off for a month: I had spent a lot of money and my rent was due, and it was time to get going again.

  But in the end I was back where I’d been in the police department. The days were long and uneventful: the nights were worse. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’ve never been one to languish. I knew I was in some vast personal transition, but only the past was spread out, clear and ugly. The future was still a void.

  I closed on the Ballard house. The paperwork was done by the first of December and I was ready to move in. I had planned to be out of the store for three days during the move, and Ruby had promised to bring me someone reliable to run it. That morning, when he came in, the woman with him looked vaguely like someone I had once known. It took me a long moment to recognize her.

  I pointed to her face and snapped my fingers. “Millie Farmer, the teaching bookscout.”

  “Just bookscout, dad. I’m out of teaching forever. If I’m not going to make any money anyway, I might as well have fun doing it.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” I said.

  I broke her in: walked her through the store and showed her what was what and how to find it. I gave her Miss Pride’s key to the front door and said I’d be in each day at four o’clock to be with her when she closed. There seemed to be nothing more to discuss, yet we all knew better. Painful, unfinished business lay between us. There had been a strain between Ruby and me, and now it extended to her. We had never talked about Neff. It made Ruby squirm, as if somehow he had shared the blame for what had happened. Emery Neff had touched us all in some basic, primal way, and none of us had been able to throw off his ghost.

  Even now, getting into it wasn’t easy.

  “Wonder what’s gonna happen to those books,” I said.

  Ruby gave a fidgety shrug and looked out into the street.

  “We’ll never see another collection like that.”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  I looked from one to the other. They said nothing.

  “Hey, you want a job full-time?” I said to Millie.

  “Hell yes.”

  “You’re hired. Doesn’t pay much. Six an hour and all your books at twenty percent off.”

  “Dad, I just died and went to heaven,” she said to Ruby.

  I made another try at knocking down some walls. “The thing that beats me is how those books changed from club books to firsts. If I could get the answer to that, I’d die a happy man.”

  “They never were club books,” Ruby said.

  “It’s not that easy, Ruby. If it were just McKinley’s appraisal it would be simple. But I saw all the invoices, all the club flyers. On most of them he had written what he’d ordered and the date. Those damn books are there, the same books he ordered, only they’re first editions, not club copies. He was the most compulsive record-keeper you ever saw. When the books came in from the club, he wrote down the dates. Then he wrote what he thought of them after he’d read them. It’s all there, in Ballard’s own handwriting. Only somehow between now and then a genie got in his house and waved a wand and turned those books into gold.”

  I could see Ruby wanted to leave but he couldn’t find an exit cue.

  “What’s your answer?” I asked.

  “Ain’t got no answer. Hell, Dr. J, I don’t know. I don’t even think it’s very interesting. Where the old man got his eye for books—that’s where the real mystery is. If we knew that we’d all be rich in no time. How do guys like old man Ballard start from scratch and build a library that just knocks people for a loop? I don’t know. Somehow they’re plugged into the universe in this queer kinda way. They know what’ll be valued, not just now but years from now.”

  “And they don’t even think of value in terms of money,” I said. “They have a totally different agenda. And I guess it was a lot easier to build a library then, when the average cost of a book was two bucks.”

  “It’s all relative. You of all people ought to know that. A book has always cost about what a meal in a good restaurant costs. Did then, still does. I get sick of hearing how expensive books are. Which would you rather have, a good book or a tender steak? I know what I’d take, seven days a week.”

  He moved to the door: he was about to leave.

  “That was a good move, hiring this lady,” he said. “She’ll be good for your business, just like the other one. She’s got a sassy mouth but you can handle her. Just give her the back of your hand two or three times a day.”

  Millie stuck out her tongue.

  “You need to unshackle your legs, get free again,” Ruby said. “You’re going through something, I can see it written all over you. It’s a growth spurt. All of a sudden you’re tired of retail. You’re starting to see where the real fun is in the book business. Usually it takes five years: you’ve gone through it all in three months. You came into this business almost whole, and now you’re ready to move on. The Zen Buddhists have a word for it. Satori. It means sudden enlightenment.”

  “I don’t feel suddenly enlightened. I feel as dense as ever. I don’t think I’ll be able to rest till I know the answers to those two questions.”

  “What questions?” Millie said.

  “How did those books change into fine firsts… and who was the woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “The day Peter and Miss Pride were killed, a woman called and asked for Neff. Ruby talked to her.”

  Millie Farmer blinked.

  “Hell,” she said; “I believe that was me.”

  54

  I was out of my apartment in two hours.

  I was surprised at how little I had. I wanted few things from that old life: my furniture, such as it was, was old and worn; the Salvation Army had been glad to come for it, and I was having new stuff delivered that afternoon. There had been some doubt about the bed arriving today, and I was prepared to bag it tonight on the floor. I arrived on Madison Street before noon. It was a warm day for December, but Denver is like that: it can have rain, snow, and a heat wave all in the same week.

  Greenwald was sitting in a rocker reading a book when I drove up. He greeted me with a wave. I began to move my things in, arranging as I went. I gloried in the bookshelves: how many book dealers have room for ten thousand books at home? I looked through the front window and saw that Greenwald had fallen asleep with the book spread open across his chest. When I looked again, some minutes later, he was gone. But he was back again, wearing a sweater, when I ma
de my last trip to the trailer.

  “It’s going to snow tonight,” he said. “I just saw it on the weather. You can feel it coming already; there’s a chill in the air.”

  He had made us some lunch. “Just come over when you’re ready,” he said. I went into my bathroom to wash. The floor had two small smooth spots where Stanley Ballard had stood every morning. Untold numbers of shaves he had had, standing at this same glass. Scraping his face with an old-fashioned straight razor (the hook for the strop was still there, fastened to the wall). Looking in his own eyes and seeing no mystery there. Knowing himself thoroughly.

  Satori, I thought.

  Maybe I’ll become a Buddhist.

  I knew things I hadn’t known before. I could see Emery Neff sitting in his store that day. Ruby had walked up the street for a cup of coffee. Pinky had just called to say that she’d be closing up alone. But Peter was coming in, so everything would be fine.

  He knew then what he was going to do. He picked up the phone and dialed a number he had called often in the past few months.

  I want to see you… today, this afternoon… I need you.

  And Millie, who thought she’d come to love him, could never say no.

  The problem is, I’ve been gone from the store a lot. Ruby’s starting to think I’m not pulling my weight. So here’s what we’ll do. You call back in ten minutes. I’ll see that he answers the phone. Don’t tell him who you are, just ask for me. Be formal… cool and distant. Call me Mr. Neff. He’ll think I’m coming over on a buy, and we’ll spend the afternoon together.

  But he never came. Millie sat by the phone and it rang an hour later.

  Sorry, hon, it’s not gonna work… not feeling well… think I’ve got the flu. Going home to lie down…no, don’t come up, you’ll just get what I’ve got. I’ll make it up to you…

  An illusion, like one of his old magic tricks. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  Like that illusion of death he had performed for me alone: two cold capsules popped into his mouth, and you were ready-to believe anything.

  So simple, so easy, once you knew how it was done.

  I tried to call Rita, without much hope. There had been no answer up there for weeks, and there was none now.

  Then 1 remembered that other number. Bobby Westfall had written it down and dropped the paper when he’d been in talking to Harkness. It took me a few minutes to find it, and another few minutes to figure it out.

  An out-of-state exchange.

  I tried it with a Los Angeles area code and got the intercept operator.

  San Francisco.

  Intercept.

  It rang through to New York. A woman answered.

  “Greenpeace Action.”

  “Is this Greenpeace… International?”

  “We’re part of it.”

  “Uh…is Rita McKinley there?”

  “She was here yesterday.”

  Now what the hell was this about? What had Bobby been doing with a number for Greenpeace?

  “Do you know if she’s coming back?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I believe she was going to Europe.”

  He had been trying to reach Rita, just before he was killed. About the time she was off saving whales.

  She had been on NBC. Was it not possible that he had seen her Brokaw interview?

  Which would mean… what?

  Could it be Bobby’s Christian conscience at work? He and Neff had just pulled off the literary heist of the decade, and you could bet that something was at work.

  The woman on the phone was talking.

  “Is there a message, sir…in case we do hear from her?”

  “Just tell her Janeway called.”

  And please, please call back.

  55

  Now I sit with old Mr. Greenwald and I know the end is coming. I think I may even know what it is. Satori is working overtime, and my enlightenment is both sudden and overwhelming. It comes in waves, like a tide pushed up by a hurricane.

  “So the house is finally yours—the deal, as they say these days, is truly finished.”

  “It’s truly finished, Mr. Greenwald.”

  “Have some more coffee.”

  This is how it is in Greenwald’s world: civilized society comes first and business is done in its own good time.

  Being among the newly enlightened, I don’t push him.

  And eventually he does get to it. “Things have been preying on my mind since Stan died. I only wanted to do right by him, to do what he wanted done.”

  “I think you’ve done that, sir.”

  He gives me a little smile, gratitude and appreciation, but laced with doubt. Four people, after all, have died. It’s hard to know what to do when you don’t come equipped with a crystal ball.

  “Oscar Wilde once said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Judith and Val have become cynics in just that definition of the word.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “They have not turned out to be good people.”

  “No one’s responsible for that but them.”

  “Stan felt responsible. He was also horrified. He had a dream one night, not long before he died. They were fighting over his books, tearing them apart. The next morning he told me about it. He said, I don’t care about the house, don’t care about any of it…I just don’t want them to have my books. Give them away, throw them away, I don’t care, but I won’t rest easy unless I know they won’t get them.“

  “He had no idea what they were worth, did he?”

  “I think he knew, toward the end, that they were worth some money. Enough, at least, that there would be a squabble over them. But you’re right—he had no real idea. He’d be mortified if he knew.”

  “He could’ve saved a lot of trouble and just left them to you.”

  “Where would I put them? I have my own books, my house is full of books, most of them the same titles he had. Where would I put them?”

  “So he figured it the way he always figured—that his library would do the most good by being broken up and given away.”

  “Sure: give them to the people. Stan gave away books by the carload. He used the book club as his first line of reading, and gave those books away. Gave them to nursing homes, hospitals, people he knew and people he barely knew. He was especially interested in helping young people discover the world of books. So he gave them away, but the ones he liked he kept for himself. Gave away the club books and bought his own copies in the stores downtown.”

  “And the easiest way to break up the library…”

  “… was to leave a document proving that the books had no money value. Done by an expert no one would challenge. Only Stan and 1 knew, and he asked me to keep that secret until the last of his estate was disposed of. The house was the last of it.”

  And now we all know. Ballard left the appraisal among his papers but tucked a copy for good measure among his books. Emery Neff found that appraisal, scanned it, and jumped to the logical conclusion: that McKinley was a crook, lowballing so she could buy the books for a song. But Bobby had taken the time to actually read the appraisal. He alone knew the truth, that McKinley had been duped. That’s why he was trying to reach McKinley when the deal between Neff and himself had begun to go sour. Maybe a better deal could be struck with McKinley.

  Greenwald offers more coffee, served with a sad little smile.

  “Stan got the appraisal he wanted. We traded houses the night the appraiser came out. The books she looked at were mine.”

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  Document authors :

  John Dunning

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