Booked to Die

by John Dunning

  When I turned back to my work, Miss Pride was standing there. “I’m not sluffing off, you know. I wanted to see how you bought these things. I’m going to be your buyer someday, so you might say this is my first lesson. Why did you buy these and not something else? Why pass up the Jane Fonda book? I thought that was an enormous seller.”

  I sat beside her on the floor and went through them book by book. Some of it Ruby had told me. Baseball books are all wonderful, Dr. J. Football books are a waste of paper. For some reason baseball fans read and football fans drink beer and raise hell. Basketball sucks and hockey can be slow. But always buy golf books, any damn golf book that comes through the door will sell. Buy anything on horses or auto racing. Buy billiards and chess, the older the better, but don’t ever buy a bowling book. On my own, I added this: a good biography on Jackie Robinson is worth ten books on Joe Namath. Robinson’s story had conflict and drama and racial tension, not to mention baseball. It would still be interesting a hundred years from now.

  And as for the Jane Fonda Workout Book, phooie! There are two distinct kinds of book people, best-seller people and the others. Sometimes they cross over, but usually a best-seller like Jane Fonda or Dr. Atkins lives and dies on the best-seller list. Every single person who wants one gets it while it’s hot: six months later you can’t give them away.

  We worked on toward evening. I could see she was getting tired, but I was just coming into my second wind. Every so often she’d come out and stretch, then go back in for another hour. She asked if Mr. Seals was planning on coming tonight. I said I didn’t know: Mr. Seals came and went according to his own whim. That night Mr. Seals did not come. At eight o’clock I told her to go home: I’d stay and putter around a little more. She said she’d stay and putter with me. We ate a late supper, delivered, and I pushed on to eleven o’clock. I could’ve gone another three hours, but it’s no fun working with a zombie. She was making a heroic effort, however, for a dead person.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t have to. But it’s midnight and you’ve worked hard and this is East Colfax Avenue. Get your stuff and let’s go.”

  “Well the fact is, Mr. Janeway, you’re embarrassing me. I have no home. There’s no place to drive me to.”

  “Then where are you staying?”

  “At the moment I’m, um, between things.”

  “What the hell are you doing, sleeping in the park?”

  “I hadn’t quite decided yet, for tonight.” She went into the back room and fetched the little valise she’s been carrying. “The fact is, I just got to Denver an hour before I turned up on your doorstep. I got here with five dollars and spent half of that in the Laundromat. That’s how I found out about you—there was an old newspaper there from Sunday. Fate, Mr. Janeway.”

  “Well, Miss Pride, tonight you sleep in a good bed.” I reached for my wallet.

  “No you don’t, I’m not taking any money for this. I told you—”

  “Pardon my French, Miss Pride, but bullshit.”

  “I want a job, sir, not day wages.”

  “Day wages would look pretty good to me right now if I had two bucks in my pocket. Besides, nobody works for me free, not now or ever. So take the money”—I shoved $60 in her hand—“and we’ll go find you a motel.”

  “I will take it, then, but only if you agree that it’s a loan against wages.”

  “Don’t push me, Miss Pride. You’ve been real good today; don’t try to back me into a corner at the last minute. Now let’s button it up and get out of here.”

  • • •

  It had been a good day. We had gone from strangers to those first halting steps into friendship. We had sat on the floor and broken bread together, which is a fairly intimate thing: we had talked about books and points, and about hope. What we didn’t know about each other would fill its own book: what we did know was a simple broadside. I sure liked what I did know. I liked her. She brought out something I had never felt before, an unexpected sensation of paternity. I felt suddenly responsible for her welfare.

  The motel we found was a few blocks from the store: she’d be able to walk back and forth easily. I gave her a key so she wouldn’t have to wait on the sidewalk in the morning, and I went into the motel and paid her up for a week.

  The next day was a copy of the first: we worked, we ate, we said little. Bookscouts came to sell their wares, and Miss Pride stood and watched over my shoulder. In the evening Ruby joined us and we worked till ten. I paid them both and Miss Pride did not argue. Ruby never argued when money was coming his way.

  The three of us got along fine. The place was shaping up. “Lookin’ booky, Dr. J,” Ruby said. It felt solid, good; it felt great. We talked and laughed, especially at dinnertime, and I paid the tariff and was glad I had these people around me.

  Miss Pride was from Edinburgh, “Auld Reekie,” she called it. In natural conversation she spoke a Scotch dialect that was all but indecipherable: I was so glad she had learned English as well. Her story—what she chose to share of it—might have been one of those Horatio Alger tearjerkers of the 1890s. She was an orphan, desperately poor in her own land. America had always been her big dream. She was here on a one-year work visa, which, she hoped, could be extended. She had been here six months, mostly in New York, but the last three weeks on the road. New York had disappointed her: her sponsor had died suddenly, leaving her to cope in the tough Big Apple. But Denver felt right. She felt good about Denver. Denver was where her version of the American dream was to begin.

  Ruby draped himself in a drop cloth and stood with his paintbrush pointing up. “Send us your tired, your wretched, your bookscouts,” he said, and we got a good laugh out of that.

  We finished up one night ten days later. The place looked like new; it looked truly marvelous. Miss Pride went over it with a vacuum while Ruby packed his tools for the last time. I just walked from room to room, unable to remember when I’d last felt such peace and satisfaction.

  Now came the books. I emptied out my apartment and brought in everything from storage. Ruby was astounded at what I had. “I’m tellin’ you right now, Dr. J, this fiction section is gonna be the most important one in the West. Good God, look at the Milagros! I can’t believe it. John Nichols hasn’t got this many.” I told him I thought I’d make a pyramid of Milagros in the glass case, but he shook his head. You put these out one at a time, he said: in a rare book section, you never put more than one copy out, it would undercut the illusion of scarcity. You wanted that feeling of urgency to always be a customer’s companion, the notion that he must act now, today, else it be gone forever. The three of us sat up all night pricing. Miss Pride priced the common stock using the standard ratio: she’d look it up in Books in Print, and if ours was a perfect copy she priced it half of the in-print tariff. Ruby and I priced the collectibles, arguing incessantly about high retail and low, scarcity, demand, and, always, condition. “Remember, Ruby, I don’t want to be high,” I would say, and Ruby would look at me with great disgust. “You still haven’t learned anything,” he would say. “You still don’t know that it’s easier to sell a good book high than low. Dammit, people like to think that what they’re buying is worthwhile. Price it too low and it looks like you don’t value your own stuff.” He would hold a book against his head and close his eyes as if the book could speak. When it spoke to him, he would make his pronouncement. “Seventy-five bucks,” he’d say, and I would argue, and he’d throw up his hands. “Seventy-five dollars, Dr. J, you can’t sell the son of a bitch for less than that. Do you want to look like a fool?”

  And so it went, till well after dawn. The night had passed in a wink and suddenly it was over. “It’s always that way when you’re lookin’ at books,” Ruby said. “An hour goes by in a minute: you don’t know where the hell the time went. It’s like making love to a woman… the most hypnotic business a man can do.”

  Then they were gone. Ru
by went home for a few hours’ sleep and Miss Pride went to her room. I walked through the store and only then did it hit me—what I had taken on, what I’d left behind, how drastically my life had changed in only one month. I took a deep breath. The place smelled of paint fumes and sawdust. It smelled like a new car, though the actual odor was nothing like that. It was real, it was alive, and it was mine. It was sweet and exciting. I had a sense of proprietorship, of direction. I had a lifetime of work ahead of me, and it was very good.

  21

  That was all some time ago.

  We had a sensational opening week. I sold two signed Milagros the first day, and did almost $1,000 before the day was out. The three Stephen Kings flew out the door on the second day. By the end of the week I had taken in $3,000. I started a beard, shaved it, started it again and shaved it. I never, ever, wore a necktie. People said I was in danger of becoming a bohemian.

  Jackie Newton sued me for $10 million. It looked like something that would drag on for years. I had a lawyer who was also a friend, and he said not to worry, we’d work it out.

  I didn’t worry. I had one or two regrets: occasionally I dreamed about Bobby Westfall and his unknown killer, but I told myself I was out of the worrying business forever.

  Today it seems as if my years as a cop were all part of another lifetime. I never hear sirens in my sleep, and even a report of a gunfight in progress between police and drug dealers leaves me strangely detached. I’ve gone to a few funerals since I quit the department, but as time goes by I’m treated more and more like an outsider. I still run. I keep in good shape because it makes good sense. I keep my gun because that makes good sense too, but I’ve got a permit now, just like any other law-abiding citizen.

  I see a few old friends a few times a year. I never see Carol. I hear she’s living with a sergeant over on the west side. Hennessey’s the same old buffalo. We sit and drink beer and talk about old cases, old times.

  I get the feeling he doesn’t try as hard these days. He never did talk to Peter. He never found Rita McKinley. The U-Haul lead fizzled and went out.

  The cops weren’t about to solve the Westfall case. As it turned out, I had to do that.

  Book 2

  22

  My days settled into a glorious routine. I was up at seven; I ate breakfast in a café a few blocks from my apartment, I read the paper, had my coffee, and was on the streets by nine. I left the opening of the store to Miss Pride. She had her own apartment now, still within walking distance; she was there faithfully by nine-thirty, leaving me free for, as Ruby put it, the hunt. From the beginning I was amazed by the stuff I found. In the old days I had gone into thrift stores and junk shops occasionally and never found anything. From the moment I became a book dealer, good things began to happen. Suddenly there were real books on the shelves of those dust palaces where there’d been only dogs before. I know two things now that I didn’t know then. Then I had been looking with a much narrower eye, seeking out titles in my area of interest only. Now I bought a medical book on eye surgery, a fat doorstop with color plates, circa 1903, that I never would’ve touched in olden times. It cost me $1: I lowballed it to an out-of-town medical specialist for $100. I bought a two-volume set on farming from the early 1800s, very technical, for $10; I think $125 would be very reasonable for it in a store. The second thing I learned is that books are seldom found on a hit-or-miss basis. The hunt is not a random process. I had to be where the books were, and I had to be there all the time. A good book placed in the open for a small price could be expected to last only hours, maybe minutes—then a bookscout would come along and pick it off. I tried to be there first, and I was, a fair number of times. I drifted across town and sucked them up like a vacuum.

  I bought extensively and well in my chosen field, first edition lit and detective fiction. I read the trades and saw trends coming. I got on the Sue Grafton bandwagon, though I don’t care much for her stuff, at just the right time. Her first book, A Is for Alibi, has been going crazy in the used book world, appreciating at around a hundred percent a year until now people are asking $300 to $400 for a fine first. Grafton is breezy and readable, entertaining but never challenging. Her father, C. W. Grafton, once wrote one of the cleverest, most gripping novels in the literature. His book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is by most accounts a cornerstone, but if I want to sell it I have to do it on her popularity. I put one away for a more enlightened time. I discovered Thomas Harris when people were still selling Black Sunday for $6.50. His Red Dragon put me on the floor, even if he did make a sophomoric break-and-enter mistake with a glass cutter in the early going. You can’t break into a house that way, you might as well use a hammer and knock the glass out, but writers and the movies keep the myth going anyway. Gimme my glass cutter, doc. I’ll just cut a little hole in this here glass case and pluck the Hope diamond out. Uh-huh. Try it sometime. Somehow it didn’t matter. Red Dragon was such a good book that Harris could’ve fed me the untreated discharge from the Metro Denver Sewer Plant and I’d’ve been standing there like little Ollie Twist with my gruel-bucket in my hand, begging for more. More? You want MORE! Even then he was putting the polish on that big riveting pisser of a book, Silence of the Lambs, simply the best thriller I’ve read in five years. I thought of old Mr. Greenwald all the time I was reading it and I wondered if he’d like it. It proves, I think, the point I was trying to make that day, that wonderful things can come from anywhere, even the best-seller list. Thomas Harris. All he is is a talent of the first rank. I hope the bastard lives forever, but in case he doesn’t, I’ve been squirreling him away. Collectors are starting to find him now: in recent catalogs I see that Black Sunday is inching toward the $100 mark, and I’ve got six perfect copies hidden in a safe place.

  Janeway’s Rule of the Discriminating Bookscout was born. Buy what you like, what you read. Trust your judgment. Have faith. The good guys, like Melville, might die and be forgotten with the rest, but they always come back.

  I was practicing what Maugham has called the contemplative life. At night I read some of the books I’d found. I read things I had never imagined or heard of, and I listened to good music, mostly jazz, and studied incessantly the catalogs of other dealers. I learned quickly and never forgot a book I had handled. This is how the game is played: you’ve got to be part businessman, part lucky, part clairvoyant. The guy with the best crystal ball makes the most money. The guy in the right place at the right time. The guy with the most energy, the best moves, the right karma.

  I had been here before: I knew things that hadn’t yet happened. I was home at last, in the work I’d been born for.

  I had been in business three months when I was pulled back suddenly into that old world. It started a few days before Halloween. I had two visitors in the store: Jackie Newton and Rita McKinley.

  23

  I had come to the store late that day after a tough round of fruitless bookscouting. The days were getting shorter: we were off daylight saving time and darkness had fallen by five o’clock, the time we normally close for the night. Usually I tried to get in by four—Colfax is a rough street and I didn’t like leaving Miss Pride to close up alone—but that day I had scouted Boulder and had run later than expected. It was almost five when I pulled up in front of the place and parked. I saw Miss Pride, alone in the front room, adding up the day’s receipts. When I came in she rolled her eyes toward the back rooms, and when I came closer she held up the calculator to show me what she’d done that day. The total was $1,425, my best day ever. I gave a little whistle. “Couple of high rollers,” she said. “They’re still here, in back.”

  She showed me the receipts. They had bought John Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán, a very nice 1843 first edition in the original boards, and the expensive Louise Saunders-Maxfield Parrish Knave of Hearts, which I had bought from a catalog only last month. The tariff for the two items came to almost $1,200.

  “Just an average day if it wasn’t for them,” I said.

  “Th
ey are definitely strange ducks, Mr. Janeway,” she said, keeping her voice down. “But when they spend this kind of money, who’s going to quarrel?”

  “Strange how?” I asked.

  “Well, they came in here about three-thirty. The one did all the talking. He asked for you right off. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked when you’d be back. I said probably before five. He asked to see the best books in the house. I showed him the Stephens and the Parrish. He said, I’ll take these, just like that. Paid with hundred-dollar bills.” She cocked the cash drawer open slightly, so I could see the wad of money. “Then he wouldn’t take any change. He gave me twelve hundred-dollar bills and said keep the change. I told him it was against policy, we didn’t accept tips, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. I thought he was going to leave but he didn’t. He walked all around the store. Like I said, he’s in the back room now.”

  I shrugged. “No accounting for people, Miss Pride. I’ll take his money.”

  “I thought you would.”

  I sat where she had been sitting and started looking through the other sales. “You can take off now if you want.”

  “Oh, I’ll hang around a bit. Mr. Harkness is coming by in a few minutes to take me to dinner.”

  I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  I went back to my bookkeeping. Far be it from me to tell her who she could see. But yes, dammit, now that she mentioned it, there was something a little wrong. She was a sweet young girl and Jerry Harkness was a relatively old man. Honey draws flies, remember? And yeah, I was a little ruffled and I didn’t like it much. Hell, I was too old for her, and Harkness had me by a good eight years. I had gone around the horn to keep my relationship with Pinky Pride on a purely professional level, and she was going out with Jerry Harkness.