by John Dunning
But slowly my own initial excitement was tempered by doubt. The fact that it had been so easy to uncover worked against it. That Koko, even with her long experience in libraries, had found it in one afternoon was not a good sign. It meant anyone set on promoting a fraud could also have found it. The thought that Josephine might have just come through Charleston to get background for some tall story was so unlikely it bordered on the absurd. But what if she had been here years ago, found the story of that old inn then, and saved it for another day? She might even have come to believe it. People do such things. When the stakes are great enough they will sometimes believe their own lies. I had a vision of Josephine at forty, hunting feverishly through old documents and newspapers, building the tale in her mind, then chasing it in vain for the rest of her life. But how did that explain the books? So far we had just two, my Pilgrimage and Jo’s First Footsteps. To me this was strong proof, but for Koko to publish anything serious we would need more than that.
I looked through the photocopies Koko had left. Just as I thought, writers had had their way with Opal Richardson and her dimwit sons for a hundred years. It had become a piece of Carolina folklore, with newspaper rehashes every few years for a new readership.
At the bottom of the last page Koko had written,Where ARE you? Call me when you come in. I don’t care how late it is, I won’t sleep till you do.
So I called her and got no answer. That old uneasy feeling began again.
I went outside and crossed the motel to her room. Knocked on the door.
Unease blended into anxiety and became worry.
I went to the desk. A man there told me she had been in and out all evening, asking for me. But he hadn’t seen her for at least two hours.
I called her room from the lobby and let it ring ten times.
By then I was alarmed. Where would she go after midnight? Maybe she was giving me a dose of my own medicine:If you want to keep in touch, picklepuss, you need to stay in touch.
There is nothing quite so helpless as a situation like that. You’re in a strange town. Suddenly you lose someone. There are reasons to be concerned; potentially, there are alarming possibilities, though it is unlikely that your enemies could have found you this quickly. You can’t go to the cops when someone’s been gone just a few hours. But you know something’s wrong.
All I could do was wait.
I walked out into the pungent Southern night and stood on the sidewalk looking up and down Meeting Street. Finally I retreated to my room, where I tried to watch the TV.
I stared at the screen.
At two-thirty my telephone rang. I picked it up with a feeling of dread and was overjoyed to hear her voice. She said, “Hey,” but her voice was flat. I could hear her tremble as she took a breath.
“What’s going on?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Hey, Koko, where are you?”
“In my room.”
“Where you been?”
“Walking around.” She sniffed. “Listen, I’ve got to go home.”
Uneasily I said, “Okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. Something was wrong with her. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
“Cliff…”
“I’m coming over.”
“I’ve got to go home,” she said again.
Then she sighed, very deep, and said, “They’ve burned my house down.”
26
We talked for an hour: Koko in her sadness, me as a release from the hot wrath I felt boiling inside me. Everything she’d had was in that house. Furniture handed down from her mother, books from her father and the books she herself had bought for years. Pictures, documents, the love letters of her parents: everything that told who she was and where she’d come from. I didn’t argue with her: I listened to her plans, knowing I couldn’t possibly let her fly back to Baltimore. It would be better if she realized that on her own, but I would restrain her if I had to.
She had called a friend, a woman she knew in Ellicott City. That’s how she’d learned about her house. “I needed her to water my plants. Now there aren’t any plants.”
“Koko…”
She looked at me.
“It’s a little late for me to ask you this,” I said. “Do you wish now you had never heard of Charlie or Josephine or Burton? Or me?”
“No way.”
I took heart from that, but I didn’t push it. I let her see on her own what it meant and how it had inevitably led to this point.
“No,” she said again when she did see it. “No way.” Then she smiled and said, “Well, there are times when I can do without you.”
I reached over and squeezed her hand. “You see what this means now.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Not for the moment. It’s a chance we can’t take.”
“What about the police? I could have them arrest those people.”
“If they left any evidence. My guess is, they had a torch do it. A professional fire man who leaves no trace. And they will all have alibis for the time when it happened.”
She just stared at the floor.
“It’s hard being a cop,” I said. “People don’t realize. We’ve got to play by all the rules while thugs like Dante can do what they want. Unless they make a mistake.”
“Won’t the police at least protect me?”
“I’m sure they’ll try. But they can’t watch you around the clock forever. There’ll come a time when you’ll be vulnerable.”
A moment later she said, “You’re the one they really want.”
I nodded. “They’ll use you to get to me. But they won’t be able to let it go at that.”
“Then what can I do?”
“Let’s take it one thing at a time. How’s your insurance situation?”
“The house is covered. It’s all my other stuff that’s lost.”
“Do you have a lawyer? Someone you can trust?”
She nodded. “My lawyer drew up my will. His father knew my father.”
“Does he have your power of attorney?”
“I never gave it to him. There never was any need.”
“You can do that easily enough. Then he can handle the house. Dealing with the insurance company, stuff like that.”
“Will I ever be able to go home?”
“I think so.”
It took another moment for the implication of that to settle. Her eyes opened wide and she said, “You’re going to kill him.”
“That’s not something you should worry about.”
“Oh please. Don’t treat me like I’m some fool who’s not involved.”
“I told him what would happen. He decided not to listen. At this point it’s him or us.”
She shook her head, horrified.
“Don’t waste your tears,” I said. “He’s a brutal man. He’d kill us without a thought.”
But she couldn’t get past the idea of it. “What if it wasn’t him?”
“That’s pretty unlikely, under the circumstances.”
“But what if it wasn’t? I don’t even know how the house caught fire at this point.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Cliff…what if you’re wrong?”
“Then I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
“Don’t make a joke of it, please. This is too awful to joke about.”
“It’s him or me, Koko. Think about that.”
“What about the others?”
“They don’t matter. They’ll fold up like a house of cards when Dante’s gone.”
Suddenly her eyes opened wide. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“I just remembered. I think I did something stupid tonight.” She closed her eyes and muttered what sounded like a curse. “I told my friend where I am.”
“Did you tell her not to tell anybody?”
“I didn’t think of it.” She put her hand over her eyes. “I didn’t think !”
Almost a full minute passed.
“Oh, I
am so stupid !”
“It’s okay, Koko,” I said softly. “We’ll work with it.”
27
The telephone rang at seven-fifteen. I rolled over on the bed, thanked the desk man for the wake-up, sat up, leaned over my knees, and stared at the phone. First thought of the day—call Denver. It would be like calling pest control for a rat problem. Call Denver from Charleston and a rat would die in Baltimore tonight.
I was first amazed by the detachment I felt and then by its slow reversal. It was as if only now had I begun to see the consequences, not for Dante but for me. To get this far, to be sitting here looking at that phone, I must have stepped naively indeed through the first half of my life and never thought about what such acts make of the men who do them. I had spent a lifetime on the right side of the law. Could I really be thinking now of becoming a cold-blooded killer? Never mind the reasons or the justifying. Never mind that someone far away would pull the trigger or that I had killed men myself in more forgivable ways. Make this one call and I’d be going all the way over to the dark side: I’d be an animal, just like him. And I knew that Dante, one of the real dark men, had seen this weakness in me that night at Treadwell’s. For all my tough talk, he was betting I’d never make that call, and in the end it would just be him and me.
I shaved, took my shower, and dressed well. I combed my hair for Erin’s sake.
It’s a beautiful day, I thought as I stepped out into it. Not too hot, not too much Charleston humidity. I left Koko a note and let her sleep. She needed it and her presence would only inhibit whatever was about to happen with Erin.
I stood at a traffic light on Market Street and thought about Dante. The light changed and I walked across Meeting and down the street to the Mills House.
Erin was at a table in the corner, looking through the News and Courier. She folded the newspaper and put it away as I came in. I sat across from her, waiting for her lead. The waitress hadn’t even brought my coffee when she said, “Lee wants to talk to you.”
“Okay. Any idea what’s on his mind?”
“He’s thinking of opening a bookstore on East Colfax and he wants your advice.”
I laughed politely. “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”
“We’ll call him in a little while.” She looked at her watch. “It’s still only six forty-five back there. In the meantime you can eat your breakfast and talk to me.”
“I won’t complain about that. Is this going to be a business talk or pleasure?”
“All business, I’m afraid.”
I snapped my fingers. “Alas.”
She regarded me with quiet amusement, then said, “As you guessed, we are involved with Archer in a delicate negotiation for a book Lee wants. We’re afraid your sudden appearance will complicate things and might make it impossible for us.”
“Well, so far Archer has no idea I’m here.”
“We’d like to keep it that way.”
“I hope you’re not going to offer me money to go away.”
She shook her head a little, but I didn’t think she meant no.
“That would be very disappointing, Erin.”
I could almost see her changing tactics. “We certainly don’t want to insult you,” she said.
“Glad to hear it. I like Lee and I respect him greatly. As for you…”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I like you too.”
“That’s nice to know.”
“Yeah. But it does make things difficult.”
“I don’t see why it should.”
I smiled. “I think you do.”
She said, “Look, would we rather you weren’t here? Yes, we would. Would we rather you went away? Yes, we would. Lee likes you more than you know, but he will be very upset if you get into this and mess it up. So will I.”
“Is that supposed to make me cut and run back to Denver?”
She looked unhappy, and this time I did not smile. I said, “So far you’re not doing too well, Erin. I know you’re a better negotiator than this. I know you know not to come into a situation and ruffle your adversary, unless it’s some knucklehead like Archer who takes offense at everything. And at this moment I am your adversary. If you want me to be your friend I’ll be happy to do that. But my friend is dead and, frankly, whether Lee gets another book or not doesn’t matter much alongside that fact. If you want peace between us, you two had better level with me.”
She leaned back in her chair. “God, you’re touchy this morning. Did you have a bad night?”
“You might say that. I’ve got my own moral dilemmas to work out.”
The waitress brought my coffee. I ordered lots of calories and she wrote that down and went away. Erin said, “The last thing we want is to get in the way of finding out who killed Mrs. Ralston.”
“Now that’s a much better start.”
“But I don’t see how we’re doing that.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’ll tell you if you do.”
Abruptly she said, “Okay, we’ll level with you. That’s what I was told to do anyway.”
“Told when?”
“Last night after you left I called Lee from my room. I told him you’re here asking questions about the book. His instructions to me were simple. ‘Tell him the truth,’ he said. That’s all.”
“That’s what I would expect from Lee. So why didn’t you just do that?”
“My own judgment call. A lawyer never wants to tell a third party anything about her client’s business, even when the client tells her to.”
“See? Right has a way of winning out over treachery and guile after all. Now you can get off to an even better start by telling me what book we’re talking about.”
“A handwritten journal kept by Richard Burton when he was here.”
“Gosh, that almost sounds like one of the Charlie Warren books.”
“At this point we don’t know whose it was, originally.”
I looked dubious.
“Look,” she said testily. “Archer has a book. He wants to sell it. He claims it’s been in his family for generations. He says he has rock-solid provenance.”
“And the thought of Mrs. G’s books never occurred to you?”
“Of course it occurred to me, do you think I’m stupid? That’s the first thing Lee and I did when the subject came up: I sat him down and went point by point over what had happened to the old woman, and what would happen if this turned out to be a stolen book.”
“And what conclusion did you come up with?”
“That Lee would be at risk if that turned out to be the case.” She shrugged. “He wants to take that chance.”
“And give up the book if he has to.”
“Yes, of course. That’s the chance you take if you want to play the game. In all likelihood there’ll never be a challenge. All the people are dead.”
“As far as you know.”
The moment stretched.
At last I said, “That would be a pretty good book, wouldn’t it? It might even put a new slant on history. I don’t think we’re talking about a revision on the order of, say, the South suddenly wins the war, but you can bet historians as well as book collectors will be interested.”
“Yes,” she said.
“The book would get a lot of attention.”
“Yes, it would. If the owner wanted it to.”
“I can see a story like that on the front pages of quite a few newspapers. And that might make it worth a lot more as a rare book.”
“That’s been Archer’s point all through the negotiations, and we agree with him. Where our negotiations break down is over how much that should be.”
“What are you offering?”
She stared at me.
“I tend to ask impertinent questions,” I said. “I guess that was one of them.”
“Yes, it was. But Lee wants me to tell you everything, so our offer was $250,000.”
“Wow.”
“So? You’re a bookman. Is that f
air?”
“You want me to be your arbiter now? Somehow I don’t think Archer will go for that.”
“Not for attribution, just for my own information. I’m curious.”
“A quarter of a million is a helluva price for any book. You could get Tamerlane for less, if you could find one to buy.”
“Then you agree it’s a fair price.”
“I haven’t seen the book. And remember, I’m no expert.”
She looked annoyed.
I said, “Hey, I’m sorry, but content is everything. I’d have to read it to offer even an incompetent opinion.”
“All right, forget I asked. We haven’t seen it yet either.”
The waitress came with my breakfast, set it nicely on the table, and left.
“Archer wants half a million,” Erin said.
I laughed. “That’s our boy.”
“Certainly is. We should be glad he’s not asking a full million, or two, or ten. It wouldn’t matter. What he does want is still out of the question. Lee is not a poor man, as I’m sure you know, but he hasn’t got that kind of money to throw around on something this shaky.”
Abruptly I said, “I hear you were pretty hard on Archer last night.”
She scoffed, “You hear, indeed.”
“I hear you even threatened him, in an oblique way, with legal action.”
“You’d better get your hearing checked. Whatever I might’ve said was nothing more than part of a negotiation.”
“Tactics.”
“Exactly.”
“Still, you’ve got to have a valid reason for a threat like that.”
“I never threatened him. If he thinks I did…” She shuddered. “The deeper I get into this deal, the less I like it. I wish Lee would just tell Archer to get lost and be done with it. But he thinks the book is so historically important that it’s got to be bought.”
“I understand that, all right. There are books like that, that must be bought. So does Lee think Archer might actually have stolen this book? How would he have done that?”
