by John Dunning
“I’ve got a few chores to do before we talk,” Willis said. This was okay. For the moment I was at the man’s beck and call; if I computed what he was paying me on a per-hour basis, I would be way ahead of the game for the seeable future. I had never made anything close to this kind of money when I was a cop, so if he wanted me to sit I could sit here all week. At some point I would hear his story, I’d tell him what if anything I could do or try to do for him, and maybe, if the answer was nothing and his demeanor was civilized, I’d consider giving him a chunk of his money back. For the moment I didn’t want to drop even a hint of that possibility. Willis asked if I wanted coffee. I didn’t; I had had my quota in the restaurant but I said sure, I’d take a cup, I’d be sociable. Who knows, it might help us break some ice, I thought. Willis disappeared and I was left to give the room another inspection alone.
The first thing I noticed was, there were no books anywhere.
The second thing, which took me slightly longer to determine, was that Geiger himself appeared in none of the winner’s circle pictures. I got up and walked along the wall looking at them.
A winner’s circle picture, in addition to being a quality professional photograph, gives some good information in three or four lines. First there is the name of the winning horse. Then it tells the racetrack where the win occurred; then the date, the name of the winning jockey, the horses that ran second and third, the distance, the winner’s time, and the names of the owner and trainer. In all of these, H. R. Geiger was named as the owner and trainer, but the only men who had come down to stand with the winning horse and jockey were Willis and the groom. There was no gang of celebrants in any of them and this, maybe, told me a little more about Geiger. Even in cheap claiming races a crowd often assembles around the winning horse. The groom must be there to hold the horse; the jockey, still seated in the saddle, and a whole bunch of people dressed in suits and ties, flowery dresses or plain shirts and jeans, all friends of the winning owner. I had seen winner’s circle pictures that had twenty grinning people crowded together as if they personally had pushed the hapless nag the entire six furlongs. But here was a whole wall showing only four faces in each: Willis and the groom, the jockey, and the horse. Willis wore his western attire, boots, the hat, and a string tie tight at his neck. The pictures were in chronological order. The oldest was from April 1962, the most recent from March 1975, about twenty years ago. Geiger’s winner in that first shot had been a dark filly named Miss Ginny, who had gone to the post with all four legs wrapped. Willis was a slender young man in those days, he stood almost timidly; the jockey wore a look of authority as if he, not Willis, had been running things; and the groom was a serious black kid who looked straight into the camera. The picture had been taken at Hot Springs, Arkansas: a bright, sunny day from the look of it. The top half of the photo shows the finish line and I could see that Miss Ginny had won handily, beating the place horse by five lengths.
I moved along the wall looking at each individual picture until, at some point, I felt uneasy. I didn’t know why then: If I had thought about it at all I might have attributed it to the almost unnatural sameness of the people in the circle. From year to year they never changed places: it was always Willis standing alone on the far left, then a broad gap, then the groom, the horse, and the rider. The jockey was the same skinny white kid for that first half-year; then a series of jocks had replaced him, each riding for the old man for a year, more or less. The ginney was mostly the same black kid; he had been in the first picture and was in the last, with three white kids taking turns with him, holding the horse in the sixties. What was so unusual about that? I finally decided it must be Willis. He wasn’t the owner or the trainer; he didn’t hold the horse; he had no real purpose in the picture as far as I could see, and yet there he was, standing far apart, staring into the camera with that same eerie way he had. Expressionless—that’s how I would describe him. He looked almost like a mannequin, a man with no soul.
“Here’s your coffee,” he said suddenly from the doorway.
I turned and looked into those vacant gray eyes. His expression never changed: maybe that was part of it. Only when I had irritated him back at the restaurant was it plain just from looking at him that I had. I said thanks and took the mug. Our hands touched briefly before he drew his away. His skin was cold. He wore his western shirt buttoned tight around his neck—not even the string tie to give him a more naturally uptight look. If uptight was what he was trying to project, Junior Willis was doing that. His long sleeves were also buttoned, and the whole picture was of a man who couldn’t relax even for a moment. He had not brought any coffee for himself, and as soon as he had delivered mine he left the room again. I drank it to be polite and waited some more. Fifteen minutes passed, marked by no sound other than the ticking of the clock in the corner. I heard footsteps: Someone walked down the porch just past the window. I heard a door close and I figured whoever it was had come inside. There was a momentary murmur, two voices talking in monotone: then an angry shout. “Goddammit, doesn’t she realize these horses can lose the best part of their racing lives while they screw around with a snag in the will? We’ve got to get everybody on board and pulling in the same direction here.” I heard Junior’s voice, lower but still mostly distinct. “Let me warn you about something, Damon. I know she’s your sister,” and at that moment Damon said, “Half sister, goddammit, half sister!” There was a pause, then Junior said, “Maybe she’s your sister but I know her a helluva lot better than you do, and I’m telling you, you’d better not try any of your loudmouth bully-boy tactics on her. In the first place, she doesn’t care whether these horses ever race. In the second place, she won’t be moved by money or threats, and in the third place, it’s just plain dumb to piss her off. Let me work on her.” There was more talk in lower muffled tones, as if they had moved away and were standing across a room or perhaps in the next one. Nothing then for another ten minutes. I looked at the clock and soon I heard footsteps again.
Willis came in alone. Now he looked more annoyed than before. I watch people in situations like that, I am a veritable hub of nerve-endings, I notice changes, and what I knew at the moment was that some kind of change had occurred, no matter how small. A change in the face of an unchangeable man is something you notice. I tried to make it easy on him: I sat at the front of the desk and said, “Just been looking at your pictures,” and Willis only nodded. He didn’t seem to be focusing well; he was trembling mad. Then, almost thirty seconds later, his eyes did focus on the wall and he said, “So what do they tell you?” I thought there was a clue in that: He was trying a little too hard to find out if I could see my own hand in front of my face. So I looked again and suddenly I saw what I had missed the first time around. Then I had been looking too intently at the action in the winner’s circle itself: now I saw a dozen flecks of white behind it as I quickly skimmed the whole gallery. In April 1963 a woman had stood in front of the lower grandstand behind the winner’s circle. Her face was clear in that first long-ago shot; I could see that she was decked out in a white dress with a carnation on her lapel. I glanced at the next picture and there she was again, same white dress, fresh carnation, and she stood in the same place behind the circle. Whatever had just happened on that spring day in 1963, she liked it. I didn’t point this out immediately. I said, “They tell me you’ve been with Geiger a long time,” and I glanced at the other pictures. The woman was always in the same place behind the action, in that gap between Willis and the horse. For more than ten years, with some notable gaps, she had been there when Geiger had won a race.
“Who’s the woman?” I said.
“Mr. Geiger’s wife.”
“Was there a reason why she never came down in the winner’s circle?”
“I’m sure there was. There must have been.”
“Am I supposed to guess that as well?”
“Go ahead. I won’t be able to tell you if you’re right; I never discussed things like that with either of them. But giv
e it a shot if you want to.”
“Well, let’s see. She was shy. She was humble. She was eccentric or quiet or just superstitious.”
“Interesting choice of guesses.”
“Which would you pick?”
I didn’t think he’d answer that. But after a moment he said, “Maybe all of them.”
“Interesting answer.”
“She was an interesting lady.”
“I take it from the past tense that Mrs. Geiger is no longer with us.”
“She died in 1975. She was just forty years old.”
“Was this an unexpected illness?”
“You sound suspicious.”
“I was a cop for years. Homicide cops are always suspicious when people die.”
“It was quite unexpected. She had severe allergies.”
“And that’s what killed her?”
He nodded. “Mr. Geiger was devastated. They were very close.”
“Did he stop racing after that?”
“Not right away. But he didn’t put up any pictures after she died.”
“He didn’t need to. What he’s got fills up the wall nicely.”
“There are many more in the file. Mr. Geiger won a lot of races. But this represents the best of them…the best of her. It covers the whole brief time they were together.”
I didn’t know whether to find this touching or morbid. She had been dead about twenty years and he seemed to be saying that Geiger had never stopped mourning. I left some open pages in my notebook, where Mrs. Geiger had died, and creased the corners.
“There were some gaps in the continuity,” I said. “Here’s just one in 1964, then she was back again in 1966, then there are other gaps along the way.”
He looked at the 1964 shot. “That’s when she was…that’s when she had Sharon. Her daughter.”
He was still uptight: he had trouble saying the word pregnant, and he quickly changed the subject. “Lots of people recommended you. Still, I can’t help wondering how much of a book expert you are in real life.”
“That depends. I know how to tell the front free endpaper from an errata sheet. I know a first edition when I see one. Beyond that it gets fuzzy pretty fast. There comes a point where the best expert is the guy with a good gut…the guy who’s cautious and on guard…who’s got the best instincts. The guy who can look at a book he’s never seen before and say, ‘that knocks my socks off,’ and be right almost every time. And the guy who knows how to look it up once his instincts have been, so to speak, aroused.”
I told him there are experts on Americana, good solid bookmen who know nothing and don’t care about modern lit. “I am a generalist. That means I know a bit about a lot of things and not everything about anything. I have a fair understanding of what makes a book valuable, and I’ve got a good system for finding out what I myself don’t know.”
He stared at me.
“Just for the record,” I said, “I have never called myself an expert on anything. But I’ve got good juice. When I see a book I usually know if it’s a bad one, just a good one, or maybe a great one. Beyond that we’ve got to search and find out.”
This seemed to please him. “How do you do this searching?”
“I’ve got a good reference library. And I was on the book fair circuit for most of a year. I saw some great books and I made some great contacts. Specialist dealers, collectors, experts in their fields, guys I can call on if I need them. And a few gals, too.”
“How are your experts on kids’ books?”
“I know just the man if the books are good enough. The best expert you can get.”
Immediately I had thought of Carroll Shaw. Shaw was the curator of the booming collection of juvenile material at the Blakely Library in Northern California. I knew him the way many booksellers and librarians come to know each other, as voices on the telephone. I also knew a high-end specialist in Americana and a librarian who was putting together a collection of incunabula. I had never met any of these men but we had done some good business together, and a mutual trust had formed between us. That year I spent on the book fair circuit was like a postgraduate course in bookselling. I discovered again what I had heard long ago through the grapevine, that a bookman is only as good as his contacts. If I came across a great piece of scarce juvenilia, I knew Shaw would buy it and he wouldn’t quibble over the price. Sometimes when I called and he wasn’t in, when I was on the road and time was running short, I would buy a piece for him on a blind, at my own risk. Once I spent fifteen thousand on a book I had never seen but I knew well by reputation, I liked it and I was ready to live with it if it went bad. I liked Shaw because he always got me the money with no hassle. I didn’t have to hard-sell him a book, I never wasted his time with second-grade stuff, and now he had become one of my valued contacts. I scratched his back; he scratched mine. He was always my first stop when I needed a quick answer to an obscure question on an eighteenth-century kids’ book. A ten-minute phone call often saved me ten hours of digging through reference books.
“That’s good,” Junior said, warming to me, at least for the moment.
I turned again to the wall of pictures. “Mrs. Geiger was a striking woman. Is there a reason for the white dress?”
“She liked it. Isn’t that reason enough?”
“Maybe. But this goes beyond liking something, don’t you think? Was it some kind of good-luck thing, a superstition of some kind?”
He didn’t answer that. After a while I said, “It’s almost like a fetish.”
I braced for another explosion but he faced this invasion into Mrs. Geiger’s character calmly.
“She did believe strongly in luck if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I guess what I’m asking is how relevant all this might be to the real reason I’m here. Look, I’m perfectly willing to shoot the breeze, but if there’s a point I’m missing it.”
“Mrs. Geiger was the book collector.”
“Ah.”
“She was a very serious book collector. She spent at least as much money on her books as Mr. Geiger spent on his stable.”
“You can buy a lot of books for what one of these horses would cost you.”
“Or maybe just one. It’s like anything else; it’s relative. At least I’ve learned that much this year. You can buy a cheap horse or a cheap book. Expensive horse, expensive book. She knew what she was doing with books just like Mr. Geiger always knew horses. She was damned good at it. Maybe you think you’re good at it but I’d bet serious money that she was better. She was a helluva great bookwoman. She could have been a dealer at the top levels of your profession.”
“Why wasn’t she?”
“She didn’t choose to be. Money didn’t matter, so why sell ’em if you don’t need to?”
“What kind of stuff did she collect?”
“Kids’ books, history, you name it. No popular junk history…original documents, early books. If a book had significance she knew what that was, like you were just saying about experts, and she bought it. She never worried about the money, but she knew that a truly rare one would go nowhere but up. Didn’t matter what field it was in, she had a feeling for a great book.”
“There are people like that. I envy the hell out of ’em.”
“There was no one like Candice. Someday somebody will write a book about her and her books.”
“Sounds like you know a bit about it yourself.”
“I know what I could learn in my spare time. I’ve been reading up on it, trying to make sense of it. But by the time I knew enough to talk to her about it…”
I arched my eyes, waiting for the answer.
“By then she had been gone for years,” he said.
“So you do know books, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’ve been trying to educate myself, but it’s not easy when you’re tucked away in Nowhere, Idaho, and you’ve got nobody to talk to. Like you said, there’s a lot to learn, a lot of trial and error, and I’ve got horses to take
care of. I can sometimes tell one edition from another, but I don’t know enough to appraise anything. The terminology alone…but that’s why I need you, isn’t it?”
I walked along the wall and looked at the pictures, paying no attention now to the horses or to Willis. Now I looked at her. She was always directly in the center, never more than ten feet behind the circle: apart yet central. Her face was the one ever-changing element. She wasn’t beautiful but she sure was striking. She had an unforgettable face. She looked like a lady, then a temptress, then a reveler; she looked thoughtful and regal, mischievous and funny and sad. In one shot she stuck out her tongue impishly, and in the very next one, taken on the same day at Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha, she looked ready to cry. Geiger had won two races that day.
“She looks drugged in this one,” I said.
“She should have been an actress. She’d have been a great one.”
“But she didn’t do drugs…”
“Hell no. Do us all a favor, don’t go there again.”
“Did she ever do any theater?”
“No. She played all her roles just for him.”
I thought we had arrived at an unexpectedly intimate place in our talk. He smiled, the first time I had seen that from him, on the wall or in person, and I felt myself trying to warm toward him in spite of my earlier misgivings. I knew there was more that needed saying but for the moment I wasn’t inclined to push him. Then I said, “Tell me about them, Mr. Willis,” and I seemed to be pushing him after all.