Tonight, though, I’m taking Polly to the Biograph Theater, to see Clark Gable’s latest. Her friend Anna’s coming along, a third wheel if ever there was one, who wears red dresses that don’t do a thing for her substantial figure; but who’d look for the world’s most wanted fugitive between two women, one of them dressed for the circus? Tomorrow I’ll take the train. If I make all the hook-ups I need, I’ll boost a car and scout out some prospects on the way back.
Don’t try to talk me out of it, America. You owe me.
—John Dillinger
July 22, 1934
A Web of Books
The three stories I’ve published so far involving Avery Sharecross comprise my clandestine series, never mentioned among my several others. Somehow, I think the dusty old bookseller’s modesty would approve. He lets me revisit one of my great loves, the world of books; a web that snared me long ago. [Spoiler alert: Don’t read this story until you’ve read “The Tree on Execution Hill.”]
• • •
The visitor stepped inside the bookshop and blinked. The muted light and cool, dank air seemed otherworldly after the bright heat of the New Mexico street. As he closed the door, feathers of dust clinging to the spines of the decaying volumes on the shelves crawled and twitched in the current of air. The place smelled of must.
“Can I help you?” bleated the old man seated behind the dented desk. He was thin and angular, his shoulders falling away under a fraying sweater. Dull black hair spilled untidily over his collar. His face was narrow and puckered and dominated by spectacles so thick he seemed to be peering from the other side of a fish tank.
“Are you the owner?”
The old man nodded. “My name is Sharecross.”
“Jed Kirby. I’m an investigator with Southwestern Life and Property.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. The missing finger on his right hand—he’d tired of saying souvenir of Vietnam—provoked unwanted questions. “I tried to call you yesterday.”
“The lines are down east of town. A Santa Ana blew through over the weekend.”
Kirby dismissed this with a wave of his good hand.
“I’m looking for a man named Murchison, Alan Murchison. We think he has information about an item of missing property insured by us.”
“I don’t know the name. Is it a book that’s missing?”
“A very rare volume titled The Midnight Sky, by James Edward Long, published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1758. About ten inches by seven, four hundred and fifty pages, bound in brown Morocco with gold leaf on the page ends. It was stolen from a private library in Albuquerque last month. We think Murchison is the thief.”
The bookseller opened an enormous volume on his old gray desk, paged through it, read. “Yes. Only two copies are known to exist. Each is worth as much as some whole collections. What makes you think he’d come here?”
“He’s on the run. He was nearly apprehended in Silver City, but he managed to elude the police. He’ll probably try to unload the book for whatever he can get and use part of the money to skip to South America. Our information has him heading this way.”
“Dear me, that seems like a lot of trouble over one book, even that one.”
“The book’s just part of it, although it’s the part that most directly concerns us. The law would dearly love to have him. He murdered the owner in order to gain possession.”
“Dear me.”
“It pieces together like this.” Kirby caught himself gesturing with the incomplete hand and switched. “Murchison, a dealer who supplies rare curiosities to collectors who don’t ask questions, went to this man Scullock with an offer to buy the book. When Scullock refused to sell, Murchison lost control and split the fellow’s cranium with a bronze bust of Homer the police found near the body. Then he grabbed the book and left. When the customer he had lined up got suspicious and backed out of the deal, he took off.”
Sharecross’s forehead stacked with deep wrinkles. “Your company must be particularly anxious to recover the item, since you beat the police here.”
“It’s insured for two hundred thousand dollars, payable to Scullock’s heirs if we fail to get it back. MY employers aren’t in the business for their health.”
“Who is?” The old man stretched a scrawny arm and lifted a book the size and thickness of a bathroom tile from a stack at his feet. “Two hundred thousand is far outside my budget, Mr. Kirby. This is more my speed.” He handed it to the visitor.
It was bound in burgundy leather, and heavier than it looked. Kirby ran fingers over the hand-tooling, opened it carefully, and glanced at the publisher’s ads bound into the back of the book. “First edition?”
“Third. Browning’s Ring and the Book, the one with the erratum on page sixty-seven. I paid seven-fifty for it in Las Cruces two years ago. That’s more than I can afford to pay for any book, but I couldn’t resist it. The pension I get from the Santa Fe Police Department won’t stand that kind of strain often.”
Kirby looked up, startled. “You were a policeman?”
“Detective. Many years ago, I’m afraid.”
Too many, thought the other. He’d probably retired before two-way radios. Kirby returned the volume. “Old books don’t really interest me. You’d know Murchison if you saw him. He’s small, kind of fragile-looking, with prematurely white hair. Wears tweed jackets and smokes a pipe.”
A fresh furrow joined the others on Sharecross’s brow. The other spotted it. “He’s been in, hasn’t he?”
“A man answering that description, yesterday.” He looked down at the Browning distractedly. “But it was to buy a book, not sell one. A badly dilapidated copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies for ten dollars; I thought it overpriced at that, but he didn’t haggle. He said his name was Thacker. I think he’s staying at the hotel; or he was.”
“Where’s that?”
“Across the street, next to the town well.”
Kirby hurried out. As the door closed behind him, he glimpsed Sharecross easing another heavy tome down from a high shelf.
Twenty minutes later the visitor was back. Behind the desk, the bookseller lifted his eyebrows at him over the big book. The Directory of Book Collectors, it said on the spine. A subtitle said it was the current year’s edition.
“What kind of law you got around here?” Kirby demanded.
Sharecross hesitated. “Sheriff McCreedy. But he’s at the county seat. There’s no way to reach him with the telephone lines down, short of driving twenty miles. What’s wrong?”
“Murchison’s dead. Someone shot him.”
“Shot him! Are you sure?”
“Bullets make holes. The blood’s still fresh.” Kirby paused. “The book isn’t in his room. I searched. His door was unlocked.”
Sharecross dragged over the old-fashioned upright telephone on his desk.
“You said the lines were down,” Kirby said.
“Not in town. Hello, Birdie?” He spoke into the mouthpiece. “Birdie, get hold of Uncle Ned and ask him to fetch the sheriff. It’s urgent.” He rang off. To Kirby:
“Ned Scoffield’s pushing a hundred, but he drives that old Indian motorcycle of his like Evel Knievel. He’ll have the law here by sundown.”
“Whoever killed Murchison was after the book. Now that he has it, there’s no way he’ll be within fifty miles of here by sundown.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have it. Did you search Murchison’s car?”
“Car!” He cuffed his forehead. “Stupid! He didn’t walk here. Where would I find it?”
“Behind the hotel would be my guess. It’s where all the guests park. Maybe you should wait for the sheriff.”
But the old man was talking to the visitor’s back. He was already out the door.
Kirby got the dead man’s license number from an upset clerk at the front desk. The plate belonged to a late-model sedan under a skin of desert dust. The inside was an oven. He stripped off his jacket and got to work. After half an hour he climbed out, empty-handed and gasping, and lean
ed back against a fender to mop his face with a soaked handkerchief. Sharecross approached through shimmering waves of heat, his hefty directory under one arm.
“Nothing?”
Kirby shook his head. He was too overheated to talk.
“I see you checked out the trunk and engine compartment.” The bookseller nodded at the open lid and dislodged hood. “I just came from Murchison’s room. He was shot twice at close range. Whoever did it must have used a silencer or he’d have alerted everyone in the hotel.”
“What were you doing there?” Kirby was cooling off slowly. Dusk was gathering.
“I conducted a search of my own. Once a cop, always a cop. There’s something missing besides The Midnight Sky.”
“A towel?”
“The Shakespeare I sold him. You didn’t happen to find it?”
“No, but why should you care? You got your ten bucks.”
“It seemed strange that a thief who’d kill for James Edward Long’s magnum opus would bother with so common an item. Also, I asked some of the other merchants what they could tell me about Thacker, or Murchison, or whatever he was calling himself. Carl Lathrop at the dry goods said he sold Thacker thirty feet of extension cord last night, just before closing.”
“Why extension cord, of all things?”
“We may never find out. Every investigation has a loose end, usually more than one. I’d rather concentrate on why was he wasting time here when he knew the law and your company were hard on his heels. Why stop here at all, for that matter? Why not head straight for old Mexico and peddle the book in Acapulco or Cancun, where the wealthy tourists congregate? That’s a lot of mistakes for an experienced criminal.”
“He’d never been chased before. Maybe he panicked.”
“The panicked usually run.”
“Paralyzed with fear, then.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he came here to meet someone.”
“A dame, in this town? From what I’ve seen, the entire female population dated Methuselah.”
“I was thinking an accomplice. Maybe he wasn’t in this alone. When the deal with the customer fell through, the partner decided to eliminate Murchison, sell the book for whatever he could get, and keep the money for himself; or maybe it was Murchison who got greedy, but it didn’t go down the way he had planned. I was thirty years with Homicide, and in all that time I never came across one example of honor among thieves.”
“You were with Homicide?”
“I was in command.” Sharecross polished his glasses on the sleeve of his old sweater. His eyes, sardine-colored behind the lenses, were as sharp as flint. “Well,” he said, putting the glasses back on, “we can stand here spinning theories all night and freeze to death. The desert cools off fast when the sun goes down. Why don’t we go back to the shop and wait for the sheriff?”
On the way they passed the town well. It was partially boarded over and the ancient peaked roof leaned ten degrees off plumb.
“If it’s dry it should be torn down and the hole filled in,” Kirby said. “It’s a safety hazard. Someone could fall in.”
“You’re probably right, but I’ll be sorry to see it go. When it does I’ll be the second-oldest thing in town after Uncle Ned Scoffield.”
The bookshop seemed absolutely gloomy by electric light. Pacing up and down the aisles, glancing at the titles on the shelves, Kirby asked his host why he quit the police. “Job get too tough?”
“It got too easy. The pattern never varies. Someone kills someone else, then tries to confuse the issue. But the more he tries, the simpler the case gets. In the end he catches himself in the web he spun. Tracing the provenance of a book, now; that’s a challenge.”
Sirens shattered the desert peace. Two blue and white prowl cars ground to a halt in front of the shop, their lights throbbing and splashing red and blue all over the street. A middle-aged man whose tanned face matched the color of his uniform shirt strode into the shop, towing three deputies in similar dress. They all wore Stetsons and high boots.
“What’s going on, Avery?” demanded the middle-aged man.
“Murder, Sheriff. The victim is registered at the hotel under the name Thacker, though he’s known elsewhere as Alan Murchison. You’ll find him in room fourteen with two bullets in his chest.”
He inclined his head toward Kirby.
“I think a paraffin test of this gentleman’s hands will show within a reasonable margin of certainty that he fired the gun.”
Before Kirby could react, one of the deputies seized him and hurled him up against a wall full of books. He was forced to brace himself on his arms and spread his feet.
“The old man’s crazy!” he shouted. “Why would I—” Rough hands frisked him.
Sharecross said, “You won’t find the gun on him. My guess is he chucked it in the well. As things stood, he barely had time to kill Murchison, search his room for the book, ditch the murder weapon, and come back here to report the crime.”
Sheriff McCreedy told his deputies to watch the prisoner and accompanied Sharecross outside, at his invitation. The sun was almost gone.
“I’ve something else to show you before we look at the body.” The old man gave him the particulars as they walked.
“The man you arrested was the dead man’s partner,” he said, when he finished bringing the sheriff up to date. “I should refer to him as Jed Carlisle instead of Kirby. That’s the name he’s listed under in The Directory of Book Collectors. Carlisle was the customer who commissioned Murchison to find The Midnight Sky. The way I read things, Murchison tried to shake him down for more money by threatening to pin the owner’s murder on the customer; which was almost certainly the case. Carlisle agreed to his terms, said he’d meet him here. It’s an out-of-the-way place, perfect for what he had in mind: It’s just a speck on the map, after all. Then he came here, posing as an insurance investigator to throw off the authorities, and shot Murchison to death.
“He made three mistakes,” Sharecross continued. “The first was failing to find out where the book was hidden before he silenced his victim.”
“But where—?”
They’d stopped in the middle of the street. “Bear with me a little longer. I don’t think Kirby, or Carlisle, has much respect for rural law officers, Sheriff. When he failed to find the book in the hotel room or in Murchison’s car, he was content to sit back and let you comb the town for it, confident that when it was found he could step forward and claim it for his ‘company.’ I’m sure when you search him you’ll find business cards and all kinds of credentials that would pass muster with the kind of dopes he expected to find in charge of the investigation.”
McCreedy smiled. “I always like that part. Being underestimated by crooks is what got me elected, on my arrest record.”
“I told him straight out it’s the ones who think they’re clever that are easiest to nail. I always tried to play fair with the enemy. That’s what got me promoted, on my arrest record.”
“Did you remind him of the name of this town?”
“Good Advice? That would be stating the obvious.”
“What made you suspect him in the first place?”
“He seemed to have more than a layman’s knowledge of that book. I tested him by handing him a rare Browning. He claimed that kind of thing didn’t interest him; if that were so he’d simply have glanced at it to be polite and handed it back. Instead he stroked the binding, lifted open the cover as if it were made of glass, looked closely at the advertisements bound at the back. That’s what I do, every time. I doubt he could help himself any more than I could. Old habits.” He shrugged. “After that I consulted an odd little source, valuable for the kind of gossipy minutiae you won’t find in Who’s Who in Book Collecting. Most booksellers won’t bother with it, but I’m something of a vacuum cleaner for texts on my vocation. I went through it entry by entry until I found one that fit the man I knew as Jed Kirby. There aren’t very many wealthy bibliophiles missing the third finger from their right hand. He
cut it badly slitting open uncut pages with a paper knife and it had to be amputated. I understand he was more upset about having stained a rare book with his blood than the loss of the digit; that’s typical.”
“You said he made three mistakes. What was the third?”
“Look in the well.”
They were standing beside the ancient excavation. Shadows filled it. McCreedy unhooked his flash from his belt and trained the beam down inside.
“No, look under the roof.”
He redirected the beam. The rod that had once supported the bucket now supported something that looked nearly as old as the well itself: a thick volume of paper bound in crumbling leather, the covers split alongside the hinge of the spine, secured to the rod with a black knot.
“So that’s The Midnight Sky,” the sheriff said. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“That’s because it isn’t.” Sharecross jerked loose the knot. The book dropped into the well, vanishing into the shadows. As it did, an oil-skin-wrapped parcel rose into the glare of the flashlight.
The bookseller caught the package before it reached the rod, untied it, looping its former tether around the rod, and undid the wrapping. Handsome leather and bright gold leaf glittered as if with an illumination of their own.
“Carlisle’s third mistake, Sheriff. He was in too much of a hurry when he disposed of the gun in the well. It might have occurred to him he wasn’t the first who thought it an ideal hiding place. Tied securely, the Shakespeare kept The Midnight Sky accessible; being almost the same size and weight as the more valuable book, it made the ideal counterweight. Note what Murchison tied them with.”
The sheriff stared at the black thing looped around the rod. “Looks like ordinary extension cord.”
“Thirty feet long would be my guess. If he’d bought that much rope and Carlisle found out, the well would have seemed the logical next step. Electrical cord was just offbeat enough to throw anyone off.”
“Except you.”
“It was a guess. So were Murchison’s motives. He probably rigged this to buy time while he found a way to double-cross Carlisle, probably the same way he was double-crossed himself. I told Carlisle there was no honor among thieves.”
Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Page 5