The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  “Bax,” I said pleasantly.

  He came forward slowly, one step at a time.

  “So where’s Martha gone?”

  “Didn’t we go through this yesterday?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. You said you didn’t know.”

  “But you didn’t believe that.”

  “Still don’t, but what the hell. I just wanted to tell her I’m sorry about last night. Maybe you can tell her when you see her.”

  “No reason for me to see her.”

  “Yeah, right. So what’re you up to this morning?”

  “Thought I’d come over and rub your horses. Isn’t that the routine?”

  He laughed dryly. “I knew you’d say that. How’d I know you’d say that?”

  “Great minds think alike.”

  “That must be it. You decided what you’re gonna do when Sandy gets here?”

  “He’s got first dibs on me. I’m gonna miss your gals, though. Even Rigger has his moments.”

  “I’m sure he does, if anybody can ever figure out when he’s having one. Anyway, you be sure to come over and see us.”

  I smiled in the dark.

  “You’re actually becoming a pretty good hand, Janeway. Next thing you know I’ll have to pay you.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  “I’ll bet you’re having so much fun, you’d keep right on working for nothing.”

  “Only a fool would do that, Bax.”

  “And you ain’t no fool, are you, pal?”

  He came closer. I still couldn’t see his face: The morning was black as hell in the dark places under the shedrow roof. He took a breath and said, “This is nice but I gotta get movin’. See you over there then.”

  He turned away but stopped when I said his name.

  “Now what’s on your mind?”

  “I’ll be happy to work my shift. I’ll be on time, I’ll do my stuff, I appreciate the chance to learn it, actually. Ruth is a great gal and a fine teacher. But, Bax…”

  He turned back and looked at me, looked toward me actually, for I was as much in the shadows as he was. “What’s on your mind now, cowboy?”

  “Don’t come up on my tack room in the night like that.”

  “Why, pilgrim, did I scare you?”

  “Just don’t do it.”

  “You musta been talkin’ to Martha, Cliff. Next thing you know she’ll have you believing all kinds of bad stuff.”

  “It’s not a good idea, Bax. Not good to sneak around like that.”

  “I wasn’t aware I’d been sneaking. Thought I’d just come over and say hi to start the day, but I will certainly watch that in the future. I’d appreciate it, though, if you’d take a little more respectful tone. Remember who the boss is.”

  “Over there you’re the boss. This is my own turf over here.”

  “Thanks for straightening that out, pilgrim. Got any other tips for a fella who can’t seem to do anything right?”

  “Can’t think of any right now. See you in a few minutes.”

  Over in Bax’s barn, Ruth and Dulcie were up and at it. I heard the coffeepot perking as I knocked on the open tack-room door. “Want an egg sandwich?” Ruth said.

  “Sure. Two with their eyes closed.”

  “Mayonnaise?”

  “You bet.”

  She plopped two more eggs onto her hotplate. The three of us sat around for a few minutes, eating our shedrow sandwiches and sipping our coffee until Rigger got there. The morning opened like a glorious picture book, the sun streaked down the mountain range in the east as the work began. I rolled under the webbing and began tending my first horse: the mucking, the hauling, the dumping; all the glamour stuff that started each day. Suddenly I felt a grip on my shoulder as I came back into the shedrow from the muck bin; I turned quickly and there was Bax, grinning in my face. “Hey, Janeway,” he said in his cool voice, almost melodic. “Glad you’re still with us, buddy. I just knew you were gonna be a good one.” Then he disappeared into his morning, out to the track with Rigger. He worked straight through and we all worked with him, at his pace. He left us as usual as soon as the work was done, saying nothing more to anyone.

  I went downtown and checked that thrift store the moment it opened, but of course my MacDonald was gone. I touched the inch-wide gap where it had been and I swear it felt warm.

  30

  The craziness stretched across the day. I found three dead mice in my shedrow, at the door of my tack room. One had a string tied around its neck. I remembered Bax had claimed to be appalled by death, a guy who would never touch a dead mouse, but I had only his word for that. Maybe he had been yanking my chain then, maybe he was the exact opposite. At noon I was called to the stable gate for a telephone message. I expected something from Sandy, but when I called the number it rang at a local funeral home.

  When I returned to Bax’s barn he asked how I was doing. “I want you to be happy here, Janeway,” he said. “By God, I’m going to steal you away from Sandy.”

  “Oh, Bax, I am delirious with joy,” I said, and he roared laughter all the way down the shedrow. In the distance I heard him saying, “Hey, Ruthie, Dulcie, let me tell you what that goddam Janeway said…”

  It wasn’t that funny, Bax. But I heard the girls laughing anyway.

  He hung around all day. I heard Dulcie and Ruth talking when he made a coffee run up to the kitchen. Ruth was puzzled and a little annoyed. “What’s going on with Bax?” she said. “He’s acting keyed-up and weird as hell today.” Dulcie laughed and said maybe this was the beginning of one of his mood swings. “Well, I hope not,” Ruth said. “This job is tough enough without having him breathing down my neck in the off-hours.” She was rubbing six, which I had discovered was truly a helluva workload, and with all that she was normally a tireless and cheerful worker. We did a light mucking at noon: Bax returned in half an hour, walked along the shedrow, and looked in on each of his horses. A few minutes later Damon and Junior arrived. I was in my gray’s stall brushing out his mane and I heard Junior first, talking to one of the girls. “How’d you like to rub two more?” he said, and the two of them laughed at the joke. “These are two damn great ginneys you got here, Bax,” Junior said, but he got nothing for his trouble.

  This is the kind of man Baxter Geiger was. He was spacey, that was already obvious. I didn’t know what he had, maybe a textbook case of attention deficit disorder, maybe something much worse than that, but today he was clearly unclear. He would focus intently to the exclusion of everything else around him, then he’d snap back in an instant, refocus on his original point, and become annoyed with everyone around him who had missed some vital piece of it. At the moment he looked alternately spacey and riveted to what was happening. He had told Junior nothing about my being there, and didn’t until the moment when we all met face-to-face. He passed my stall and quietly said, “Come on out here,” and I followed him up the shedrow to the tack room at the end. “Hey, boys,” he said loudly, “here’s a friend of yours,” and Junior stepped out and stopped in his tracks.

  “The hell you doin’ here?”

  I smiled and said, “Same old stuff, Junior. Muckin’ and haulin’.”

  Junior looked at Bax. “You know who this is?”

  “Junior, I know who everybody is,” Bax said.

  Damon came to the door. “What’s this?” he said, beginning to bristle.

  “Do I answer that, Bax, or do you?” I said.

  “Oh hell, you do it.”

  “I am a man of many faces,” I said, deadpan. “I’m the guy who will rub your horses, I will muck your stalls, and all for free. I am also the guy who’s looking for a killer, and if that happens to be you, Damon, I will hang you so far out to dry your ass will have two new cracks in it.”

  Bax laughed like mad: he doubled over and slapped his knees with both hands.

  “That’s it, you’re out of here,” Damon said. “We don’t need this shit.”

  “I think you’re forgetting whose shedrow this is,”
Bax said, still laughing. “I’m the one over here who gets to decide just what shit we need or do not need.”

  “I said get rid of him,” Damon said, and Bax’s smile did a slow fade.

  “I mean it, Bax,” Damon said. “He’s in here under false pretenses. If I report him you know they’ll deep-six his ass out of here.”

  “And if you do that,” Bax said, “I’ll pull our horses out of this here race meet, and you boys can pack both of your asses back to Idaho.”

  “Don’t you threaten me,” Damon said.

  “That’s not a threat, asshole, that’s a promise.”

  “You can’t do anything without going through God and the executor all over again.”

  “Don’t push it, Damon,” Junior said.

  “I’m not taking orders from you either,” Damon said.

  “Oh yes, you are,” Bax said. “You’re so used to having everything your way, but it ain’t gonna be like that this time. You’re taking orders from every damn body, and if I want Janeway, you’d better not mess him over.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Couldn’t help myself, then almost died laughing with Bax, who was doubled over again, convulsed. From a distance the girls were watching and struggling not to laugh as well.

  “You crazy prick,” Damon said, and he stalked out.

  Bax sagged to the ground laughing. He pointed at me and yelled, “Yeah!”

  I gave him a hand up, but then he yelled “Yeah!” and it all began again.

  He yelled across the shedrow. “Did you hear that, Ruthie? Yeah! Goddam, I like you, Janeway! Where the hell did the attitude come from?”

  “It comes easy when you’ve got nothing to lose.”

  That night Bax came down late, around ten o’clock. Ruth was strumming a guitar and singing softly in a high, lovely voice. Suddenly there was Bax, standing in the tow ring like a statue. But when you looked at him it was impossible to say how long he had been there: It might not have been suddenly at all. Ruth stopped playing and almost dropped her guitar. “Jesus, Bax!”

  Bax came into the shedrow. Gone was the hilarity of the afternoon: Now he was somber, almost angry-looking. “Take a walk with me, Janeway.”

  We walked out toward the darkened racetrack.

  “We sure put that bastard Damon in his place today,” he said. “That was great.”

  But he wasn’t laughing now. The happy hour was in the distant past.

  We walked a few steps, then he said, “I still want to know what you’re cookin’ up with Martha. And where the hell is she?”

  “I believe she’s out of touch.”

  “The hell does that mean, out of touch?”

  “I think it means she doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  “She’s nuts. You know what she told me? You got any idea what she thinks?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Goddam woman says I killed Candice. She thinks I blew my own brother’s brains out. But of course you knew that, I’m sure she’s already told you.”

  “So did you? Kill Candice?”

  “Hell no! Jesus, you got a nerve asking me something like that with a straight face.”

  “You know where she’d get that idea?”

  “I know exactly where she got it.”

  “Want to share it with an interested party?”

  “She overheard me talking screwy to one of my horses years ago.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “That horse refused to run in the mud. I said I oughta put the son of a bitch in the ground. Said I’d put him where I put Candice.”

  “And you don’t see why that would bother her?”

  “Look, it was just me being me. I don’t treat my horses like that, I was putting on a show for Martha. Can’t you understand that?”

  “It wasn’t funny, Bax.”

  “Well, that’s too damn bad, that’s how I am sometime. She was a screwy bitch and I wanted to rattle her cage. But then she wouldn’t let it go, she kept looking at me like I was some kind of monster, and after a while it was almost a game, seeing how long it could go on.”

  He took a deep breath. “Now I’m getting real tired of it. So listen, Janeway, and maybe some things will clear themselves up. I did put Candice in the ground. I was one of her pallbearers, for Christ’s sake. Now what do you want to make out of that? Tell Martha that when you see her. Tell her I won’t kill her.”

  Then he smiled in the moonlight and said, “Not today, anyway.”

  We looked at each other for a quiet minute.

  “How could I?” he said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  31

  Sometimes awareness comes slowly in a murder case; sometimes it rises up suddenly and knocks you flat. Sometimes you get an idea and you go with that; sometimes you’re actually right. One of the biggest burdens on a working cop comes when he knows something in his gut and then must get the proof and do it by the rules. I didn’t have that problem anymore, but the guesswork was the same. If you’re wrong you do what I told Sharon many days ago, you drop back and punt. However it happens, the idea is the thing while it’s hot, and it changes the complexion of everything. I hadn’t had many moments of awareness in the Candice case: I had been too busy getting myself into the racetrack, staying there, surviving two attempts on my own life, and talking with old railbirds who remembered the days of Geiger. The key was finding out who had been close enough to tamper with her food and angry enough to do it. Awareness came slowly the next morning, almost before I was awake. I must have been running things through my mind in my sleep, because I woke up strongly believing two or three things that I had only held as possibles or probables before.

  Baxter was crazy. His lunacy wasn’t an act.

  He was probably certifiable.

  But he hadn’t done it.

  His explanation of what had happened seemed crazily consistent in the early morning. If I was right about that, Martha would be heartbroken.

  I began to narrow it down in other ways. If not Bax, who? Somebody who had been much closer than the brothers, someone who was Candice’s little secret: a fling almost unknown in her lifetime but a man known now, perhaps in a completely different context.

  Somebody who’s right under your stupid eyes, Janeway.

  Maybe not her first real fling, but certainly her last.

  A bookman, not a horseman.

  But he had killed Candice for some personal reason, unrelated to books, and then, being the book freak he was, he had begun to plunder her library.

  He had been getting Cameron to lift them when Cameron had access to the house. He himself had certainly been in that book room but never alone, not often enough or long enough to steal them on his own, or to do much more than remember certain titles and where they were. But he was a bookman, able to vividly remember and burn into his mind a few cherry things in a sea of things that might be far greater, able to reconstruct an accurate but scattered list of items to get.

  Why leave the one when there’s something of greater value right there on the same shelf? That question rang again in my head and now I came up with two possible answers: Either he had been sucking up information so quickly he was almost drunk with it and hoped to hell he could remember it later—or he was truly a freaky, bizarre collector, after certain things because they had deep personal significance, probably from his childhood.

  In either case he needed a cheap replacement for every book he had Cameron take—early printings, reprints with some age on them—that would look like real items to a casual browser.

  He hadn’t sold any of them publicly. These were memorable, unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime items, but neither Erin’s checks nor my own had turned up any of Candice’s books in bookstores anywhere. It was hardly a perfect check we had run, but if they had been sold to a dealer, even years ago, wasn’t there at least a fair chance we’d have heard something?

  Why had he killed her? Murder is a drastic act, almost guaranteed to alter your outlook. Killi
ng Candice pushed him on that road to madness.

  Maybe she saw the madness there and she intended to leave him.

  Not because of the books at all.

  He didn’t kill her for her books.

  He couldn’t have, because her death removed him from what little access he’d had.

  The books were only what started it.

  Sometimes an ordinary man turns psychotic by degrees. The first time he kills, the consequences are deep, profound, and on some people they have a spiraling effect. Time passes—in this case years. His crime works on him around the clock. He sees Candice everywhere. The bookwoman haunts his dreams and maybe his waking life as well.

  By now he may believe he is out of danger, he’ll never be caught, but the deed itself remains a crushing burden. If I really wanted to fantasize, I could picture a tortured man having conversations with Candice in his mind.

  Suddenly he is threatened and the motive changes from greed to survival. He becomes frantic as he imagines his world unraveling.

  Cameron threatens him. He kills Cameron.

  I threaten him. He tries to kill me.

  Tries again in a pitch-dark shedrow.

  Whoever he is, he’s got a lot to lose now.

  The Mad Hatter, I thought without rhyme or reason.

  There are people who would say catching him would be the best thing I could do for him. That’s what he really wants, those people would say.

  Uh-uh, I thought in the darkness. To him, getting caught is unthinkable. Now he’ll kill anybody, everybody, to avoid that.

  And whoever he is, he’s not Bax.

  “We’ve got a new horse for you,” Ruth said. “Bax bought her yesterday from a trainer over in Barn 18. We had to get another stall, but we can pick her up this morning.”

  The trainer’s name was Bowden: the horse was Miss Fritzi. “I’ll bed her stall if you want to go pick her up,” Ruth said.

  I walked over with a lead shank and retrieved Miss Fritzi. I liked her right away. She had a personality like Pompeii Ruler’s: easygoing, curious, affectionate. She was a brown filly, three years old with a white blaze on her head and two white feet. “Hey, sweetie,” I said to her, and I led her back through the stable area. Ruth had her new home ready when we arrived.