by John Dunning
I got back to the hotel before ten o’clock. As I walked in, the desk clerk said, “Mr. Janeway, there’s been a gentleman asking about you.”
“What kind of gentleman?”
“Elderly African-American. He waited here for more than an hour.”
“He didn’t say where he was going?”
“I thought he was still here. Maybe he just stepped out for a minute.”
“Well, if he comes back in the next two hours or so, have him call upstairs.”
I sat in my room and looked at the telephone. This was it, I thought: this had to be about the Geigers; no one else knew I was here. I read some of the local paper that the hotel had left outside my room that morning and I learned again how small cities have most of the same problems that Denver has. You can’t go far enough today to escape murder, rape, global warming, mayhem, and the troubles of fools. I waited and read, but when the phone rang again it wasn’t my African-American. Immediately I recognized the deep voice: Carroll Shaw at the Blakely Library.
“Hey, Cliff, we haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Way too long. I haven’t seen anything lately that’s got your name on it.”
“If you do, I’m always buying.”
“So I take it you got my message about the Geigers.”
“Sure did. I wish I could tell you something about it but the word is that stuff’s locked away like Fort Knox.”
“But you’ve heard of it.”
“Oh hell, yeah. There were rumors in the book trade twenty years ago. A woman in white just shows up suddenly and makes your day; makes your whole year if you’ve got the right stuff. Book dealers have been talking about her forever. I’m surprised you never heard of her till now.”
“You keep forgetting, I got a late start in this. What’s the scuttlebutt?”
“Only what I’m sure you already know. Young heiress buys every flawless high spot she can get her hands on, back when you could still pick up stuff like that. Dies young and leaves the books to her daughter. As far as I know, the daughter’s still sitting on it, up in Montana or South Dakota, some damn place.”
“She’s sitting on half of it right here in Idaho. The old man got the other half.”
“That I didn’t know. Jesus, is he still alive?”
“Was, until last month.”
“He must’ve been close to a hundred.”
“He was up in his nineties; eccentric as hell from what I could pick up. He was pretty well-heeled, didn’t need money, on the outs with all his kids; God knows what’ll happen to the book collection now that he’s in the ground. I think they all know now that it’s something special, so they won’t put it out in the trash. But none of them except the daughter knows how to take care of it.”
“If you do get in to see it, I’d be very interested in a report.”
“Already seen it, both the daughter’s and the old man’s. I was out there today.”
“That thumping sound you hear is my heart beating overtime.”
“Oh, it’s great stuff, Carroll. I didn’t come close to appraising it; couldn’t even examine much of it in the time I had. But what I did see sure made me think of you.”
A moment passed. “I’d fly out there just for a look,” Carroll said. “No strings attached.”
“That might be possible with the daughter’s half. I can ask her.”
“Please do. What about the rest of it?”
“It’s locked up in the old man’s house. There may be some squabble over his estate. At the moment it’s being watchdogged by an assistant, fellow named Junior Willis.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“Some substantial cash and some damn nice racehorses.”
“Nothing wrong with racehorses, but you know I’m interested in the books. And you also know we’d pay top dollar, and an extra-good finder’s fee for your trouble.”
“I know you would. But it may be an ethical problem for me to get that closely involved with the money. I was officially on Willis’s payroll…still am, till I decide how much of his money to send back.”
“Send it all back and let us deal with it then. I don’t even want to know how much it is.”
“Five thousand big ones.”
“Cliff, you’re getting deaf in your old age. That’s way more information than I need.”
“I gotcha. Look, I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
“Meanwhile ask the daughter when I can come see her. No strings attached.”
I said I would, we hung up, and that same instant the phone rang under my hand. The desk clerk said, “That gentleman’s down here to see you, sir.”
“Good. Send him up.”
I picked up the papers from the bed and splashed some cold water in my face. Two minutes later there was a soft knock at the door.
In that first second as I looked into his face he seemed faintly familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where or when we might have met. He smiled almost timidly and said his name, “I’m Louis Young, sir,” and I shook his hand and invited him in. Whatever this was, I thought again, it had something to do with the Geigers, but I played it cool. “Would you like a drink, Mr. Young?”
He shook his head but his eyes said yes-maybe. I said, “I’m having one.” I wasn’t but I sensed something about to happen, I felt circumstances changing, and that called for a bit of fellowship. I coaxed him. “Maybe a little one?”
“A little one, then.”
“Bourbon okay or would you rather have something else?”
“That’d be fine, sir.”
I called down and ordered two drinks. We sat on opposite sides of the desk and I said, “I’m getting strong vibes from you, Mr. Young; like maybe we’ve met somewhere but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“I worked for Mr. Geiger.”
I caught the past tense and I remembered. “You worked for Geiger for many years. I saw your pictures with Mrs. Geiger and Mr. Willis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were in a lot of them.”
He nodded. “I was the ginney, sir. I was the groom.”
“You were a young man in those early pictures.”
“I was a boy.”
“That would mean you had been with Mr. Geiger at least thirty years.”
“Yes, sir. I never added it up, but that’s got to be pretty close.”
Again I got a sense of some deep hurt in his voice. “What happened?” I asked.
“I was let go along with the servants.”
Now I could see the hurt in his face and I didn’t ask why.
“So how’d you hear about me?”
“I do some occasional work for Miss Sharon. She said you were a policeman they hired to find out what happened to her mamma.”
“Well, I’m not exactly a policeman and I haven’t been hired for anything yet. Otherwise she’s got it almost right.”
He smiled, affectionately I thought. “She’s like that sometimes, especially when she’s going on no sleep. She should use me more than she does if I might say so myself.”
“What do you do for her when you do it?”
“Afternoon work. I muck stalls, soap tack…some of the same stuff she does herself in the morning. With twenty or thirty horses there’s always something to do. I go over full-time three days a week. And once or twice a month we take the big truck and I help her get a load of hay.”
There was a knock at the door. “Our drinks,” I said.
I let the fellow in; took the glasses and the ice and the two tiny bottles and gave him a tip. The waiter left and I turned my attention to the liquor. “May I call you Louis?”
“Everybody just calls me Louie.”
“Louie, then, if that’s okay with you.” I opened the two little bottles and began to run water out of the tap. “You really want a lot of water in this?”
“Better not make it too stout, sir, I gotta drive home.”
“My name’s Cliff and I’d be pleased if you d
ropped the sir.” I cut the booze with some water and handed him a glass with ice. “So what’s this all about?”
“Might I ask you something, sir?”
“Sure. But I may not answer if you keep calling me sir.”
“Cliff,” he said shyly.
“Thank you.” I waited for his question and finally he said, “Would it be possible—can we keep this conversation private?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to give me evidence of a crime?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Are you going to tell me something that would put someone in trouble if I sat on it?”
“No.” But he looked uncertain and I waited without committing myself.
“Whatever comes of it,” he said, “I’d rather it didn’t come from me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
That didn’t relieve him either. He began to fidget with his glass and I said, “As long as there’s no ethical or legal reason that compels me to tell someone, I won’t.” I didn’t tell him that ethics would be my call or that I had long ago drawn my own lines on silly, restrictive laws.
“I’d just rather Miss Sharon didn’t even know I came here.” His eyes roamed around the room. “I’m not sure it’s possible to keep it from her, but I had to try.”
“What would she say?”
“Probably nuthin’. I just don’t know if she’d be all that happy about it.”
“And that matters to you.”
“Sure it does.”
“What would she do about it?”
He shook his head and I had the craziest notion. He seemed on the verge of tears.
“What would Sharon do, Louie?” I asked again, gently now.
“Well, I’ll tell you this much. She wouldn’t take it out of my hide. She’s not like that.”
“But you don’t want to disappoint her,” I ventured.
“Yeah. I’d do just about anything to avoid that.”
“So what you’re telling me is, she’s a good woman. That’s what I thought this morning when I met her. I had an impression of someone who is honest and caring and hardworking. A straight-shooter.”
“I’d say that’s a good sound judgment.” For another moment he seemed lost in thought. Gradually then his eyes came back to mine.
I said, “I take it she confides in you.”
“Well, I’ve known her a long time.”
“Long time, meaning…”
“I remember the day she was born.”
“That would be quite a long time in her frame of reference.”
“Even in mine. More than half my own lifetime ago.”
A moment passed. “So let me ask you again, Louie, what is it you want me to do?”
“We want to hire you.”
I groped through a tired brain for something intelligent and came up blank. “Oh,” I said.
“We think she maybe could use somebody like you.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me, the house people. All of us.”
“What exactly are you hiring me for?”
“Just to keep an eye on things. Just for a while, you know? Could you do that?”
“I suppose I could go out and see her again tomorrow.”
“Would you do that?”
“If it would matter, sure.” I watched his face, his hands, his fingers tapping lightly on his knees. “Would it matter, Louie?”
“I think she’d like that. She might not say so, but…”
He sipped his drink and said, “That gal’s got a heart as big as Montana.” His voice quaked and I was strangely moved by his words. Coupled with the look on his face they spoke volumes about this woman I barely knew. For half a minute his eyes got moist and he dabbed at them with his shirtsleeve. We sipped our drinks and an uneasy silence fell over us. At some point he said, “She hired us all after Mr. Geiger let us go. Maybe you heard about that.”
I nodded and he said, “We go in three days and she pays us for the whole week. Quite a bit more than we got working a week for Mr. Geiger, and that was fair enough.”
“Hey, who wouldn’t like a deal like that?”
“That’s just how she is. Man, there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for her. We’d be happy to work every day, but she needs her space…time when it’s just her and the horses.”
“I can understand that.”
“We’d each toss in half a week’s salary; that’s how we’d pay you.”
There I was, facing the same question I had asked Junior. “I’m still not clear what you’d be hiring me to do.”
“Come out, talk to her, see what you think.”
“About what?”
“Maybe it’s just me. Probably just an old man’s fears. But I can’t shake the feeling she’s in some kinda…I don’t know…maybe some trouble she don’t even know about.”
“Are we talking about real trouble, Louie, as in danger?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know. It seems downright silly when you put it that way.”
“What could she be in danger from?”
“It’s hard to get a handle on it. But I keep thinking about how her mamma died—sudden, you know. No warning.”
I thought of that too. I thought of the wall of winners in Geiger’s office and now in my mind I saw the changing faces. “Lots of people work for a man like Geiger over the years,” I said nonchalantly. “Most of ’em not like you, there for half a lifetime.”
“Yeah, they come and go. That’s how it is on the racetrack. Come and go. Move away to the other Coast and maybe you never see ’em again.”
“I saw the pictures on his wall. Tell me about them. Looks like a pretty steady crew.”
“Yeah, Mr. Geiger always used just one jockey at a time. Raise him up from a bug boy. He had one ginney for each four horses. He’d teach a bug boy from scratch, pay him just a salary, and have his services in the mornings for workouts as well as the races in the afternoon. He’d get a weight allowance, five pounds off scale for using a bug boy, and if he win the hands would get something extra.”
A bug boy would be an apprentice jockey, he said, in case I didn’t know.
“Most of those boys got good pretty fast. Mr. Geiger was a great teacher back then, and his boys listened to what he said. If they didn’t, they didn’t last long. Lotsa big-name jocks started as bug boys with Mr. Geiger.”
“Tell me about the ones who took the hard way out.”
“Yeah, well, you know. There’s always some of those.”
Geiger’s first boy for one, he said: “Not the very first one, I never knew that one, I’m talkin’ about the kid who was here when I first hired on.”
A word-picture of a ninety-eight-pound punk billowed up from the past. Johnny Brewer, his name was…a self-important fool who strutted along the shedrow, bossed the ginneys rudely, and rode recklessly when he thought he could get away with it. One day he tried to squeeze through on the rail where there wasn’t any hole and caused a bad spill. He broke his back and had been in a wheelchair ever since.
“What about Sandy Standish?”
“Oh yeah, but that’s different. Mr. Sandy was okay.”
“You ever hear from him?”
“Miss Sharon keeps in touch. They was real close.”
I scribbled some thoughts in my notebook. “Who else?”
“Some other fellas, they wasn’t with us long.”
I asked him what else he remembered and wrote down some names. “We had a good crew then,” he said. “It was a real happy shedrow in those days. We had laughs, man, I thought I’d die at some of the stuff them daggone white boys pulled on us.”
The only trouble with good times is they never last, I said, but bad news always seems to come around again. “Like now. I heard Cameron’s come back.”
“Yeah, I saw him prowlin’ around the house last week. He got outta there fast when he seen me comin’. So I didn’t see him to talk to.”
“Did you tell Sharon?”
“
Oh yeah, sure. I couldn’t let something like that pass.”
“What’d she say?”
“Sluffed it off. She’s not afraid of anybody. But she needs to be more wary.”
“Of her brother?”
“Maybe especially.”
There was something about his voice, his face, what he was saying and what he hadn’t said. An evil thought went through my head and the moment was pregnant with rank implications. “I heard Cameron was bad news.”
“They all are. But yeah, he’d be the worst.”
“Do you think he stole the books?”
“We got blamed.”
“I know you did. But it might have been Cameron.”
“That’d be my guess. Since you asked.”
“Tell me more about Cameron and what he does.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand…”
I think you do, Louie, I thought.
“What’s the worst thing he’s ever done?”
He was surprised by the question; I could see him struggling with it. Whatever he knew, it was not something he wanted to talk about. What could that be? I thought. Again a brutal, rank image crossed my mind and I didn’t have to be Albert Einstein to see it.
“I’m not just asking this to shovel the dirt, Louie, it’s a question I often ask. It helps if I know what a guy is capable of.”
“Just figure anything. He’d do just about anything you can imagine.”
“What’s he actually done that you know about?”
His eyes looked away.
“We’re not talking about money now, are we, Louie?”
He looked back at me and his face was a thousand years old. I could see the shape of it now, a dark secret he had never told anyone. I was guessing but in that moment I’d have bet a small bundle on it. I cocked my head and looked in his eyes. “Louie?”
“I don’t know what you want. I don’t know anything…”