by John Dunning
I touched the Mantle, opened the cover.
“It’s signed.”
“What do you mean signed? Who signed it?”
“Mantle.”
“So what does that do for it?”
“Makes it ten times the value is all. It’s probably a hundred dollars signed. Maybe a bit more now, I don’t know, they keep going up. I haven’t had one in a while.”
“Still, not exactly a motive for murder.”
“No.”
But I had a hunch now. I opened the Whiteman. It was signed in Whiteman’s distinctive hand. The Gabby Hayes—signed, an uncommon signature from any perspective. I had never even seen one and I guessed it might be as high as two hundred.
“Look at this,” I said. “The Cat Ballou is signed by Nat King Cole and Lee Marvin from the film. I’ll be damned.”
I opened the Stevenson. On the half title was a tiny signature, a hand I knew very well.
“John Steinbeck,” I said.
“What about Stevenson?”
I shook my head. “Stevenson doesn’t matter: his signature’s common as dirt and just about as cheap. Steinbeck’s name on wallpaper’s worth three hundred.”
“I don’t understand. Why would John Steinbeck sign that?”
“Maybe he gave it to somebody. He admired Stevenson and he wrote the foreword to the paperback of this book.”
I looked around the room with a new eye. “Well, damn, Parley, I think we’ve found something here.”
“I’m not sure what. Maybe you should look in the library across the hall.”
It was one of those moments, wasn’t it? Even before we went there I had a hunch what I’d find: a wall of books, and as I began taking them gingerly off the shelf and opening them, the hunch grew into a certainty. They were all signed, either by their authors or by well-known figures associated with their stories. Leonard Bernstein. Alfred Hitchcock. Wernher von Braun. Duke Ellington. Al Capp. John Wayne.
And on and on.
“Man, Parley, these are worth some money.”
“How much money?”
“I don’t know. There’s gotta be a thousand books here. If all of them are signed, even if the average is only—hell, I don’t know, say two hundred—what’ve you got?”
“Two hundred grand.”
“And that’s probably wholesale. John Wayne didn’t sign many of his books. He’s four hundred by himself.”
At that moment we heard a bump outside.
“Sounds like Lennie’s come home to roost,” Parley said.
But when I went to the door, no one was there.
I walked out onto the porch. The night was full, the grounds dark as pitch. I went out to the steps and shouted at the mountains. “Hey, Lennie! You out here?”
He was there. I could feel the slimy bastard all around me.
Suddenly nervous, Parley said, “Come on inside.”
“Listen, you prick,” I said to the darkness. “If you ever point a gun at me again, I’ll take it away from you and shove it and that badge up your ass. You got that?”
I stood there feeling naked. I felt vulnerable and alone, damn foolish, a silly cock framed like a bull’s-eye in the door light, but unwilling to move.
“Come on in here,” Parley said from somewhere far behind me. “Come on, Janeway, you’re giving me the creeps.”
Inside, I heard him take a deep breath. “What do you want to do now?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. This changes everything.”
“Does it?”
“Sure it does.” I thought about what might be done and how to proceed. “We’ve got to talk to Mrs. Marshall about these books.”
“Surely she knows what they are.”
“You’d think so, but if they were valuable, wouldn’t she say that? This wouldn’t be the first time somebody died and left a spouse in the dark.”
He didn’t seem convinced. I said, “Well, look at it this way. She’s sure not handling it like it means anything to her. I’ve got a feeling she hasn’t got a clue what her books might be worth.”
I glanced back into the room. “Other than that, let’s keep it quiet for now. These books are unprotected in a vacant house, far from anywhere. A book thief could clear this room in an hour, so nobody needs to know but her. That includes the sheriff and Lennie, no aspersions on either of those fine gents. Let ’em think these are just what they look like, a bunch of cheap books.”
I looked it all over again. “I wouldn’t mind spending a day in here, just to go through it and see what she has. I could give her a loose appraisal if she wants it.”
“You can ask her in the morning.”
I could see he wanted to leave. Outside, the snow was piling up, but damn, I hated to leave those books like that.
“C’mon, Cliff, it’s gettin’ cold in here. We can’t do anything else tonight.”
“One more thing. Just give me a few more minutes.”
I walked through the room making notes in my notebook. I wrote down where things were and put in my impressions. I jotted down some titles and where they were on the shelves. It wasn’t much, just enough that, maybe, I’d know if someone had come in and disturbed them.
We were halfway back to town when suddenly Lennie pulled in behind us. He followed us on in as if he had been there all along, dropping off as we passed the sheriff’s parking lot.
8
McNamara was a widower who had lived in the county thirty years. “I eat down to the Paradise Café ever since Martha died,” he said. “We never had any children, so that’s where I do my socializing, such as it is. You feel like grabbing some supper over there?”
“Sure.”
We sat in a corner booth and I learned that his wife had died two years ago. They had been together almost fifty years. I could sense some of his loss when he mentioned her, and maybe I could imagine the rest of it.
“I try to keep busy,” he said. “Sometimes I go a little stir-crazy, but most of the time I find enough work to do.”
Actually, he said, there wasn’t much legal work in a small county like this. “The house keeps me busy. I work in Martha’s garden and putz around. Funny, I never gave a damn about the garden till she was gone, and then it became more important than I’d have believed to keep those green sprouts coming. I feel good watching it bloom in the spring, kinda like she’s still here. But there’s no gardening this time of the year and now I miss it. I do keep my shingle hung out. If a legal dispute does come up, I usually get it. I’ll travel if the case calls for that… over to Hinsdale County, up to Gunnison. That’s rare, but I keep busy.”
He broke some bread. “For a while I thought of moving to Chicago. I was there on a visit to my sister when I met Martha. Christmas, 1939. Now my sister’s long gone too. When Martha died, I thought maybe I’d move back there, but in the end what the hell would I do? I’m too old to get a job, even doing legal research, and I think the big city would be worse than living out here in the sticks. At least I know this kind of solitude: the other I can only imagine, but what I imagine is pretty excruciating.”
He laughed. “Hey, don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’ve had a pretty good run at life. Where you staying tonight?”
“Hadn’t thought about it.” I looked outside at the snowstorm. “I’d better start thinking right after we eat. I’d hate to have to sleep in my car.”
“Don’t worry. There are only two places, the Paradise Hotel and a motel back out on the highway, but neither one of ’em ever fills up. I wouldn’t wish those places on my worst enemy. The old sheriff used to sometimes let people sleep in the jail. I’d rather sleep there than in either of those fleabags.”
The waitress, a buxomy gal named Velma, poured some coffee and flirted with Parley. He watched her ass as she walked away and we smiled foxily at each other. You never get too old to look.
I paid our tab. “Put your money away, I’m on an expense account.”
Outside, he
huddled into his coat. “You could stay with me if you want to,” he said almost shyly. “The room’s warm and private, it’s free, and the roof don’t leak.”
“Well, that’s generous of you. I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“Ah, hell, you’d be doin’ me a favor. I’d like the sound of a voice in the house.”
“In that case you’re on.”
“Now let’s walk up the street and see if anybody saw your little run-in with Lennie this morning.”
His house was at the south edge of town, on a one-acre tract with trees and light underbrush and a clearing in the back that was probably the garden. The house had been built in the twenties and was still solid. “I don’t have much to do to it,” he said. “I paint it every five years or so and I had it inspected in 1980, but it’s solid as Gibraltar. I expect to be here for the duration, however long that is.”
Inside it was spotless, with the kind of spit-and-polish attention that made me stop at the door and take off my shoes. He’s keeping it that way for her, I thought. He said, “Don’t worry about it,” but I removed the shoes anyway. He fired up a big fireplace and I got the tour. “This place has always been too big,” he said. “Martha wanted it that way, in case her brothers came to visit. They did a few times, but now they’re gone too.”
We walked back through a hallway and he turned on the lights as he went. “My only complaint about it these days is that it gets so god-awful dark in here. I never noticed that before, but now it can be depressing. So if you see a dark corner, feel free to turn on a light. Back here are the bedrooms.”
There were three rooms with beds. “You can have your pick,” he said. “My room is clear over on the other side of the house, so you can bump around, sing in the shower—you won’t bother me a bit. We don’t get TV down here. The signals just won’t come in over these mountains, so I hope you brought a good book to read.”
I stashed my stuff in one of the bedrooms and joined him in the front room for a nightcap. We talked about my case against Lennie if I chose to bring one. Only two of the stores on that corner had still been open, but Parley had collected three names. “I’ll talk to the others tomorrow.”
At Jenkins’ Hardware the proprietor had not only seen it but had discussed it with a customer, who was also willing to talk. Lennie’s tactics were well-known in the county. “I think we’ve got a chance not only to get it dismissed but also to cause Lennie some general embarrassment,” Parley said. “That’s got to be worth doing.”
“You’re sure taking a lot of trouble with this.”
“It’s what I do. You can’t let an asshole make a mockery of the law.”
“No,” I said.
“Does that mean you’ll fight it?”
“Hey, how could I not fight it after all your hard work?”
“That’s the ticket, boy, no pun intended. If the judge won’t listen, I’ll appeal the son of a bitch, I don’t care if it is just a traffic dispute.” He laughed suddenly. “I’ll get my friend Griff Edwards to do a piece on justice in Paradise for the Paradise Mountaineer. Embarrass the sons of bitches, that’s language they understand.”
We talked about Mrs. Marshall. I asked how long he had known her and he said, “Just about as long as she’s been here. Eight years or so. But long don’t mean well. She and Marshall kept to themselves.”
“Didn’t you tell me you knew her better than him?”
“When she first came here, she got talked into being on an old-town preservation committee. That’s how she met Martha and that’s how I met her. We had dinner once, the four of us, and whenever they went out of town, I’d drive up there and keep an eye on their place. That’s about the extent of it.”
“Did they always have a big library like that?”
“If they did, they had it hidden. I guess the first time I saw those books was three or four years ago. And it’s grown some since then.”
“Did either of ’em ever tell you what it was, where they got it?”
“No, but I didn’t ask. Lots of people have books.”
“You mean you just said, wow, what a lot of books?”
“Something stupid like that. It was just a wall of books to me.”
“Did you get any feeling for how they were getting along back in the beginning?”
I didn’t think he’d answer that, but he said, “Laura never struck me as a happy woman. I always liked her, but she was… private… if you know what I mean.”
“Secretive?”
“Don’t read your own stuff into my words, son. Private means private: not that she had anything to hide, just stuff she’d rather keep to herself that wasn’t anybody else’s business anyway.”
He poured himself another shot, gestured to me, and I shook my head.
“Right from the start I sensed some tragedy in her life,” he said. “That wouldn’t have anything to do with your friend the lawyer over in Denver, would it?”
“Could be.”
I sipped my brandy. “I’ll be talking to Erin in the morning. I’ll see if she’ll tell us about it.”
“Just tell her I’m a curious old bastard. Got nothing to do anymore but poke around in other people’s business.”
“Yeah, Parley, I’ll be sure and tell her that.”
The big question was still there between us. At some point I asked it.
“So what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know that, do I? I don’t know much more than what you heard her say this afternoon. I told her a dozen times not to say anything…”
“Well, now that she has…”
He shrugged. “Could be any number of things. Maybe Marshall was a womanizer and she got tired of it. Maybe he abused her and she got tired of that. We know it wasn’t for any big life insurance claim. The policies they had wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. So far she hasn’t shown much willingness to talk about the two of them. I don’t know if these things happened, but I will tell you that Laura never struck me as a woman who’d put up with much bullshit. That’s why one day she walked out on the preservation committee, right between the crumpets and the tea. Too much bullshit, too many pissy little kingmakers more interested in having their way than getting things done. That seems to be the way of all committees, from the UN all the way out here to West Jesus, Colorado.”
He coughed and leaned forward, warming his hands. “There’s another theory, I guess, but so far it’s just my own intuition.” He grinned like an old fox. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Sure I would.”
“I don’t think she killed him at all.”
9
“Then who did?” Erin said.
“He doesn’t know, or isn’t telling,” I said. “So far it’s just a feeling he’s got.”
I listened to the telephone noise while she mulled it over almost three hundred miles away. I was standing at a downtown Paradise pay phone, basking in the great Colorado autumn morning. The snow had stopped during the night, the sun had cast the valley in a brilliant glow, and all along the street I could hear the scrape of steel on pavement as people dug out and got ready for a new day.
It was Saturday and I had called Erin at home. She listened intently: there was no talk now of come on home or pack it in. I heard her sip her coffee and sniff. Her voice was thick, as if she was getting a cold.
“He doesn’t know who did it,” she said at last. “He doesn’t know who might have done it, or why, or why she might be covering up for someone. He doesn’t know her all that well either. This is just some gut feeling he’s got.”
This was not said sarcastically or to diminish anything the old man believed. It was just Erin, in her lawyer voice, putting some facts in order.
“Anything else?”
“I asked the same questions you just did,” I told her.
“And he had no reason at all for his hunch.”
“Nothing he was willing to put to words, let alone take into court.”
“Where were t
he kids when all this went on?”
“In their bedroom, asleep, way over on the other side of the house.”
“And the sounds of gunshots didn’t wake them?”
“She says not.”
“You believe that?”
“I’m just telling you what she told McNamara.”
“A .38 makes a lot of noise,” Erin said.
“Tell me about it.” I touched my shoulder, where I had once been shot by one. “I guess it’s possible. There are three big rooms and a hall between the kids’ rooms and the front room where Marshall was shot. Maybe, if all the doors were closed.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of the reports yet.”
“Not yet. Parley’s got the CBI reports and other evidence the DA has.”
“What’d the CBI say, did he tell you that?”
“He’s not ready to tell us that; not till we know we’re either in or out. He did say it was two days before the CBI got out there.”
“Jesus! What was that all about?”
“They weren’t called right away. A lot of the physical evidence—the bullets, the blood, some fibers, some hair—was collected by the Sheriff’s Department and sent over to the lab in Montrose. Parley was pretty disgusted.”
“He should be.” I knew what she would ask next and she asked it. “How do you read him?”
“He’s a solid old guy, sharp under all that folksy stuff. I wouldn’t blow him off.”
“But you haven’t really questioned her yet?”
“Just what I told you about yesterday.”
“No idea what the books might mean, if anything?”
“Not yet.”
A moment passed. I thought it could go either way. She was making a decision now, and maybe then I’d have my own decision to make. “You said he was into books. Even way back when you knew him.”
“Yeah, he was,” she said. “I told you about that, remember?… That night we met in your bookstore two years ago, I told you my first boyfriend was a book freak like you. But I guess, given the way it all turned out, I didn’t know what he was into.” She sniffed. “Any reason to think the books might be part of it?”