by John Dunning
You get a vision—not necessarily what is, but what might be.
I was making love with Rita and suddenly I heard Ruby’s voice. It’s the most hypnotic business, he said, and just like that I had broken Neff’s alibi. Try to use that in a courtroom. You couldn’t, but baby, I saw the vision. At last I put it into words. “I just kept digging, kept after it. It’s a process of elimination as much as anything. Judith didn’t do it. Ballard didn’t do it. There wasn’t any turtle-faced man, Neff: it was just a cover you made up on the spot. Once I saw that it might’ve happened that way, I started remembering things. They all added up to you.
“Here’s what happened. Stop me if I go wrong. You walked in a minute or two before five. You threw a bunch of cream puffs down in front of Ruby, knowing he’d go into an instant trance. Then you went back to the crapper, only you didn’t stop there. You went on out into the back yard, around the building, and up the street. Your timing had to be perfect. Any little thing could’ve messed you up: any glitch between one place and the other. A customer who lingered past closing time… somebody who saw you go into my store just after five… any one of a dozen things, and all of them broke your way. You must’ve been desperate, Neff, to’ve tried something like that, and it damn near worked.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what desperation is…”
“But it all worked. It was already dark: there was nobody on the street; luck was riding on your wagon all the way. It took you what… thirty seconds to cover the ground from your back door to my place. You forced Miss Pride to lock the door, then you herded them into the back room and shot them. You were back in your own place in no time, surely less than five minutes. You came through the back and stashed the gun—it was probably still there, somewhere behind the shelves, when I talked to you the next day—and when you came up front, Ruby was right where you’d left him, thinking no time at all had passed. You couldn’t’ve done a better job on him if you’d hypnotized him. In a way it was better than hypnosis.
“The flu was also a fake, a cover for the shakes you had after killing three people. Once I realized that, I started seeing other pieces everywhere. I remembered Ruby once telling me how you protect your privacy. I remembered him talking about the farm you’d inherited. Longmont’s just thirty miles from Denver: the truck Bobby used had seventy-four miles on the odometer when he brought it back. I thought how strange it was that you gave your phone number to no one. Even your partner didn’t have it. Ruby had laughed about that one night when we were working late in my store—how you didn’t want to be called at home no matter what. There was something wrong with that, Neff; it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I remembered. Hell, I had seen your phone number: I’d seen it written down somewhere. Then I remembered where. It was in Bobby Westfall’s little address book.”
He laughed sadly and shook his head. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
“It’s there in his book,” I said. “We can dig it out of the evidence room and I can show it to you. I’m surprised it took me so long to remember it. So why would you give your number to a bookscout, Neff? There is no bigger pest on this earth than a hungry bookscout, yet you give him your private number when even your partner can’t get it. That doesn’t make sense… unless you and Bobby have something going together. Then it makes all the sense in the world. And that’s what happened. You had something going with Bobby. Something more important than your partner or your business or anything else in your life.
“Then there was the matter of the driver’s license. Bobby didn’t have one but you didn’t know that. Ruby knew it, but not you. You still didn’t know it, even after you killed Bobby. You never understood how Peter Bonnema got involved in it, because you always assumed that you and Bobby were in it alone. The one thing I never could figure was how you found out about old man Ballard and his books.”
“I’ve known about them for years. Known about… thought about them…”
“How’d you know?”
“I had a little bookstore on Eighth Avenue. This was long ago, before Ruby and I even knew each other. It was on Eighth near Ogden. That’s not far, you know, from where Mr. Ballard lived. One day he came in. We got to talking. He said he had a lot of books. One thing led to another, and I said I’d like to come see them. He was very cordial. So I went to his house… I went to his house. The man was… simply incredible. He had the best eye for books… I can’t imagine how he so consistently managed to pick up these things and save them… things that appreciated—I don’t know how else to say it—beyond belief. And he’d been doing this for forty years. In some cases he had two or three copies of a single title, untouched copies pushed back behind the ones you could see on the shelf. They were all first editions, every one… the most immaculate collection I have ever seen, and, Mr. Janeway, I have looked at a lot of books. And the damnedest thing… the rarest thing… he didn’t care about them at all for that purpose. It was like he had no idea or interest in how much they might be worth. Here was the big score everybody dreams about, and there was no way I could buy them, I could just never get the money together. But the old man… God, he was so naive. I thought maybe if I threw some money at him—not too much but enough, I could get them away from him. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t check any further and for a few grand I’d pull off the heist of a lifetime. I was actually… trembling… as I tried to assess it. Started to throw out a figure and called it back. Didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t make it too high or low. You know how it is—go too low and he figures, hell, he might as well keep them; go too high and he begins to suspect what they’re really worth. You know how it goes—you play people in this business as much as books. I looked around. He didn’t live in luxury, didn’t look rich. Five thousand dollars, I thought: that’d really make a difference to this old man. So that’s what I said, and he smiled like a gentleman and said that was most generous but he wasn’t interested in selling them at that point. Maybe someday, he said. That was ten, twelve years ago, and I want to tell you something, there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about that stuff. I’ve dreamed about it… it comes to me a dozen times a day, when I look out the window or see the shit the scouts bring in… when I realize how hopelessly I’ve mired myself in the workaday crap.”
“And then he died.”
“Yeah. The first thing I thought was, now it’ll get out. Somebody’ll go in there and find it and it’ll make a major story. The AB’ll carry it, it’s that big. Imagine my surprise when nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it when those two idiots started to put it in an estate sale. I actually stood outside in the rain one night and watched them through the window. And I went wild with hope. My God, I went crazy. I had to get it, but it had to be done in such a way that it would never be tied to me. I knew there’d be trouble if it became known later that I had bought it. The courts are very consistent on this. They always return valuables to an original owner if someone with specialized knowledge buys it too cheap. And Christ, we were talking less than pennies on the dollar. We were talking nothing!”
“So you hired Bobby to do it.”
“The books needed to simply disappear. I needed for them to be swallowed up by someone anonymous. I thought he could keep his mouth shut… he seemed perfect.”
“Except for one thing. He had no driver’s license.”
“Two things,” Neff said. “I didn’t count on him getting so bitter about it. I thought he’d be happy with a few hundred for a hard night’s work. But right from the beginning we were bickering, and after a while there was a threat implied in everything he said to me. That one night he just pushed it too far. I picked up the crowbar and before I knew it he was on the floor at my feet. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I wrapped him in an old blanket and dumped him downtown. Then I burned the blanket. And of course, you’re right, the son of a bitch never did tell me he had no license.”
“Of course not. Why would he want to screw thing
s for himself? By then Bobby smelled a big score too. He went to a friend of his, Peter, and got him to rent the truck. By then Peter smelled a score. He followed Bobby to Ballard’s house and waited up the block while Bobby carried out the books. In the morning he followed Bobby again, and Bobby led him straight here. Then Bobby was killed and Peter put two and two together and started bleeding you for the books. He sucked your blood out, first book by book, then by the box.”
“It took me months to find out who he was. He was so careful—made me box them up and leave them at a place in the country, and he’d go pick them up later, when he knew I wasn’t watching. I might never’ve found out, but he got too cocky. He sold you a book from Ballard’s and I saw it in your store and knew where it had come from…”
“… and you started following him.”
“I was in the gas station across from the DAV. Didn’t think he could see me there but the bastard had eyes like a hawk. I thought then it was all over; I thought he’d tell you right there on the street.”
“He was too scared—too scared to think.”
“Yeah, but that wouldn’t last. Once he had time to think, I knew he’d be back. I had to get him before that happened.”
“He tried to call me that night, in fact, but luck was still breaking your way. He got my recording. He tried the next day too, but I was up in the mountains, at McKinley’s place. Finally he had to make a choice: hole up, leave town, or come to me. He knew I was always there at closing time. If he arrived exactly at five, got off the bus right at the store and came straight inside, he’d be fine. He figured I’d protect him. So he called Pinky and told her he was coming in. A few minutes later I called Pinky and told her I wouldn’t be there. At that point we didn’t know what he wanted or how to reach him: I just assumed he needed money, and I told Pinky to give it to him. I also told her to let you boys know she’d be closing alone, so you could watch out for her. She followed my orders after all, and got herself killed for it. She told you, didn’t she? Didn’t she, Neff?”
He stared at his hands and said nothing.
“She told you her silly boss was worried about her, but it would probably be okay because Peter was coming in. Peter would be there at five. That’s when you knew you had to do it: that’s when the whole bloody mess got planned. Peter got there at five, and instead of finding me waiting for him, he found you. You came in right on his heels. What you didn’t know was that Pinky was talking to Rita McKinley’s recorder. And what she said puts it all on you, as clearly as if she’d told us your name. She said, ‘Hi, everything’s okay.’ I thought about that for a long time after the lab boys got it out of the recording. Why would she say that? It didn’t make any sense. She was in the middle of saying good-bye: she was telling me someone had just come in and she’d have to call me back. Why would she suddenly say, ‘Hi, everything’s okay,’ in the middle of hanging up? The only thing that makes sense is that she was talking to the guy who had just walked in. Couldn’t be anybody but Harkness, Ruby, or you. Pinky still thought she was talking to a friend, the nice man from the store up the street who had come in to check on her at closing. It’s okay, she was saying, Peter’s here, I’m not alone. But Peter was already screaming. He knew what was happening. A minute later, so did she.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say: nothing except, for me, the most important thing.
“I’ve actually come to hate those books,” Neff said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take ’em off your hands.”
“Yeah.”
I held my breath, afraid to ask, scared silly of what the answer would bring.
“Who was the woman, Neff?”
He looked at me and didn’t answer.
“I need to know that. Was it Rita?”
His lip curled up in a sneer. “Rita,” he said. “The big-time book dealer. The biggest thief of all.”
“What’re you talking about? What’s that supposed to mean?”
He smiled and reached into his shirt pocket. I cocked the gun but he only laughed in that faint, sad way. When he opened his fist, he had two tiny capsules in his hand.
“What’s that stuff?”
“Guess.”
We looked at each other: a long, searching moment. Barbara Crowell flitted through my mind, along with a hundred suicides and suicide attempts I had known over the years.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
But he popped them into his mouth and swallowed.
“I knew you’d get me,” he said. “Knew it that first day, when they put you on Bobby’s case. So I had these ready….”
He doubled up and fell out of the chair.
“Neff,” I said weakly.
I looked for the phone, but you can’t do much with cyanide. It works in a minute.
He went into the shakes and groaned, a long cry of agony.
His pulse slowed, and I could almost see his heart giving up.
I got down beside him and opened his shirt.
Biggest mistake I ever made.
He moved like a snake. I didn’t know what had hit me. Suddenly I was down and he was up and through the haze I knew he had kicked me in the head. He had caught me in the temple with the point of his shoe: the hardest kick he could muster. I spun around and he was on my back. He had a rope: I don’t know where it came from, but he was a magician and there it was, twisted around my neck. He cut my windpipe, and the next twenty seconds were so desperate that I couldn’t think of anything but my heaving lungs. I know the gun fell: it skittered across the floor and slammed into the wall. I was up on one knee with this thing on my back, and I couldn’t shake it and if I didn’t shake it I was going to die.
I tried to buck him and couldn’t. We slammed into the wall. He held on, stuck to me like we’d been born that way, grotesque Siamese twins bent on killing each other. The world turned red. I was losing consciousness….
I heard a scream, then a shot, and the rope went slack.
God, I could breathe again!
But I still had to struggle for it, and for at least a minute I had the heaves.
When the world cleared, I saw Rita standing over Neff’s body. She was staring at the mess she’d made, clutching my gun with both hands.
52
I found the key to the storage locker in Neff’s hip pocket. It was the only lock-it-yourself place in Longmont.
We drove the four miles from Neff’s house in what seemed like total silence. Only when we reached the storage yard did I realize that the radio was still playing.
Benny Goodman. “It Had to Be You.”
I drove to unit 254, opened the door, and walked in. It was like walking into King Solomon’s Mines.
He had shelved the locker and some of the books were out on open display. Yes, they were wonderful things.
But I was tired of looking. If you get too much new blood, you begin to drown in it.
Rita had lingered but now she came in. She didn’t touch anything, just walked along and looked at the spines.
“Well, this is it,” I said wearily. “This is what people kill for.”
She was just standing, staring at nothing. She looked older in the dim light.
On a worktable in a corner, I found some papers. The name Rita McKinley caught my eye and I leafed through them.
“Looks like a copy of your appraisal,” I said. “You want to tell me about this?”
She shook her head and said, “I have no idea.”
And that’s how the case ended: with a stalemate, a standoff between someone I loved and everything I believed in. With a dead man and a treasure, a lack of faith, a beautiful girl, and the big question still unanswered.
53
But no:
It really ended on another day six weeks later. Emery Neff was in his grave and the Ballard heirs were embroiled in a battle of books that seemed certain to end up in court. Ruby was in business alone. Rita McKinley had been set free by the Boulder County DA, who had pronounced the shooting jus
tified: she had gone somewhere and had left nothing, not even the damned recording, to tell people where she’d gone or when she might come home.
I saw Barbara Crowell every couple of weeks. Mose had found a way to handle her case, as a favor to me. They had me billed as her star witness, and things weren’t looking too bad for her when all the mitigating factors were taken into account.
Jackie, after all, hadn’t died. He couldn’t feed himself or talk quite right: he’d have to be carried to the potty from now on, but he was alive. Doctors think he might live that way for another thirty years. It doesn’t sound like much, but the alternative is nothing at all.
As for me, I was going through the old familiar symptoms of acute burnout. The book business, which had been so fresh and exciting just three months ago, was suddenly old, and I was growing old with it. I dreaded opening the store: I let it slide as long as I could; then I went in and painted the bathroom and opened for business. I had been off for a month: I had spent a lot of money and my rent was due, and it was time to get going again.
But in the end I was back where I’d been in the police department. The days were long and uneventful: the nights were worse. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’ve never been one to languish. I knew I was in some vast personal transition, but only the past was spread out, clear and ugly. The future was still a void.
I closed on the Ballard house. The paperwork was done by the first of December and I was ready to move in. I had planned to be out of the store for three days during the move, and Ruby had promised to bring me someone reliable to run it. That morning, when he came in, the woman with him looked vaguely like someone I had once known. It took me a long moment to recognize her.