by John Dunning
After wading through the dreck, it was good to be back in a real bookstore again. In a place downtown, she spent most of her money on a miniature book, a suede-leather copy of Shakespeare no larger than the tip of her thumb. “I’m really a sucker for these things,” she said. “I’ll buy them if there’s the least bit of margin.” I knew almost nothing about the miniature-book trade, only that, like every other specialty, it has its high spots that are coveted and cherished. Eleanor filled me in as we drove. “This was published by David Bryce in Glasgow around the turn of the century. Bryce did lots of miniatures, some of them quite special. I once had a Bryce’s dictionary, which they called the smallest dictionary in the world. It was only about an inch square and it had about four hundred pages, with a little metal slipcase and a foldout magnifying glass. You could carry it on a key ring.”
I held the Shakespeare between my thumb and forefinger. “You think there’s any margin in this?”
“I don’t care, I didn’t buy it to get rich. Maybe I could double up wholesale, but I think I’ll keep it for a while as a memento of this day. It’ll be my good-luck piece. I think I’ll need one, don’t you?”
Bookscouting gives you the same kind of thrills as gambling. You flirt with the Lady in much the same way. You get hot and the books won’t stop coming: you get cold and you might as well be playing pinochle with your mother-in-law. I was hot, and when Luck is running, she flaunts all the odds of circumstance and coincidence. I found two early-fifties Hopalong Cassidy books by a guy Eleanor had never heard of, some cowboy named Tex Burns. I savored the pleasure of telling her that Tex Burns was like Edgar Box, a moniker…in another lifetime he had been a young man named Louis L’Amour. Amazing to find two such in a single day, but I take Luck where I find her. These cost me $4 each and were worth around $250.1 razzed Eleanor for not knowing. We headed north and I said, for at least the fifth time, “I thought everybody knew about Tex Burns.” She crossed her eyes and looked down her nose at me, a perfect picture of rank stupidity.
It was the damnedest day, full of sorrow and joy and undercut with that sweet slice of tension. I’ll blink and she’ll be gone, I thought at least a dozen times: I’ll turn my head for a second and when I look up, she’ll be two blocks away, running like hell. But I had set my course and the day was waning, and still there had been nothing between us but the most cheerful camaraderie. Out of the blue, in midafter-noon, she said, “I guess it’s a good thing you turned into an asshole when you did: I may’ve been on the verge of falling in love with you and then where would we be?” Coming from nowhere like that, it put me on the floor. It also brought to a critical point a problem I had failed to consider—I had to pee in the worst possible way. I told her to stay put, disappeared into the rest room, and found her still there, working the shelves, when I came hustling out a minute later. I didn’t worry much about her after that.
She took me to a place near the university called Half Price Books. It nestled modestly on a street named Roosevelt Way, a cornucopia of books on two floors. There were no real high spots, but I could’ve spent two hundred on stock, it was that kind of place. I bought only what I couldn’t leave and got out for less than eighty. We were going out the door when Eleanor spied a copy of Trish Aandahl’s book on the Gray-sons. “You oughta buy this,” she said. “It’s a helluva read.”
She was a little curious at how fast I did buy it. I still hadn’t told her about my interest in Grayson and probably wouldn’t now until we were on the airplane and well away from here. “You drive,” I said, throwing her the keys. “I want to fondle my stuff.” But all I did as she wove through the crowded, narrow streets was browse through Aandahl. The jacket was an art deco design, with elegant curlicues and old-style fringe decorations. It was dominated by black-and-white photographs of the Grayson brothers, a little out of focus and solving none of the mystery of the men. The art director had overlapped the pictures and then pulled them apart, leaving parts of each infringed upon the other, the ragged gulf between them suggesting disruption and conflict. The title, Crossfire , stood out in red: under it, in black, the subtitle, The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard Grayson . Richard’s resemblance to Leslie Howard was more real than imagined: Darryl Grayson’s image was darker, fuzzier, barely distinguishable. His was the face on the barroom floor, and not because it had been painted there. The jacket blurb on Trish Aandahl consisted of one line, that the author was a reporter for the Seattle Times , and there was no photograph. If the lady wasn’t interested in personal glory, she’d be the first reporter I had ever known who felt that way. I thumbed the index: my eye caught the name of Allan Huggins, the Grayson bibliographer, mentioned half a dozen times in the text. Gaston Rigby made his appearance on page 535, and there were three mentions for Crystal Moon Rigby. Archie Moon was prominent, entering the Grayson saga on page 15 and appearing prolifically thereafter. A section of photographs showed some of Grayson’s books, but, strangely, the only photographs of the subjects themselves were the same two of poor quality that had been used on the jacket. It was 735 pages thick, almost as big as the Huggins bibliography, and packed with what looked to be anecdotal writing at its best.
The only negative was that it was a remainder copy, savagely slashed across the top pages with a felt-tip marker. I hated that: it’s a terrible way to remainder books, and Viking is the worst offender in the publishing industry. “Look at this,” I griped. “These bastards must hire morons right off the street with a spray can. I can’t believe they’d do that to a book.”
“It’s just merchandise to them,” she said. “Nobody cares, only freaks like you and me. It is a fine-looking book, except for the remainder mark.”
“I saw a woman once who would’ve been a beauty queen, if you could just forget the fact that somebody had shot her in the face with a .45.”
We were stopped at a red light about a block from the freeway. She was looking at me in a different way now, as if I had suddenly revealed a facet of my character that she had been unable to guess before. “Are you interested in the Graysons? If you are, I know a guy who used to have the best collection of Grayson books in the universe. Maybe he’s still got a few of them. His store’s not far from here.”
“I think we’ve got time for that. Lead on.”
Otto Murdock was an old-time Seattle book dealer who had seen better days. Twenty years of hard drinking had reduced him to this—a shabby-looking storefront in a ramshackle building in a run-down section on the north side. “This man used to be Seattle’s finest,” Eleanor said, “till bad habits did him in. For a long time he was partners with Gregory Morrice. You ever hear of Morrice and Murdock?”
“Should I have?”
“If Seattle ever had an answer to Pepper and Stern, they were it. Only the best of the best, you know what I mean? But they had a falling-out years ago over Otto’s drinking. Morrice does it alone now—he’s got a book showplace down in Pioneer Square, and Otto wound up here. I hear he ekes out a living, but it can’t be much…he wholesales all his good stuff. They call him In-and-Out Murdock now. A good book means nothing but another bottle to him.”
She pulled to the curb at the door of the grimiest bookstore I had seen in a long time. The windows were caked with dirt. Inside, I could see the ghostly outlines of hundreds of books, stacked ends-out against the glass. The lettering on the hand-painted sign had begun to flake, leaving what had once said books now reading boo. The interior was dark and getting darker by the moment. It was a quarter to five, and already night was coming. A block away, a streetlight flicked on.
“He looks closed for the night,” I said.
“He’s still got his open sign out.”
I knew that didn’t mean much, especially with an alcoholic who might not know at any given time what year it was. We sat at the curb and the rain was a steady hum.
“I’ll check him out,” Eleanor said. “No sense both of us getting wet.”
She jumped out and ran to the door. It pushed
open at her touch and she waved to me as she went inside. I came along behind her, walking into a veritable cave of books. There were no lights: it was even darker inside than it had looked from the street, and for a moment I couldn’t see Eleanor at all. Then I heard her voice: “Mr. Murdock…Mr. Murdock…hey, Otto, you’ve got customers out here.” She opened a door and a dim beam of light fell out of a back room. “Mr. Murdock?” she said softly.
I saw her in silhouette, moving toward me. “That’s funny,” she said. “Looks like he went away and left the store wide open.”
I groped along the wall and found a switch. It was dim even with the lights on. I took my first long look at how the mighty could fall. Murdock had tumbled all the way down, hitting rock bottom in a rat’s nest of cheap, worn, and tattered books. His bookshelves had long since filled to overflowing, and the floor was his catchall. Books were piled everywhere. The piles grew until they collapsed, leaving the books scattered where they fell, with new piles to grow from the rubble like a forest after a fire. I walked along the back wall, looking for anything of value. It was tough work—the fiction section was almost uniformly book-club editions of authors who aren’t collected anyway: Sidney Sheldon, Robert Wilder, Arthur Hailey. A sign thumbtacked to the wall said books for a buck. Cheap at half the price, I thought.
“You see anything?” Eleanor asked from the far corner.
“Four computer books, two copies of The Joy of Sex , and five million Stephen King derivatives.”
She sighed. “Put ‘em all together and what’ve you got?”
“Desk-top breeding by vampires.”
She gave a sharp laugh, tinged with sadness. “This place gets worse every time I come here. I’m afraid I’m wasting your time; it looks like Otto hasn’t had a good book in at least a year.“
You never knew, though. This was the great thing about books, that in any pile of dreck a rose might hide, and we were drawn on through the junk in the search for the one good piece. I had worked my way around the edge of the front room and had reached the door to the back when I heard Eleanor say, “Good grief, look at this.” She had dropped to her hands and knees, out of sight from where I stood. I asked what she had and she said, “You’ll have to come look, you’ll never believe it.” I found her near the door, holding a near-perfect copy of The Fountainhead .
“It’s a whole bag of stuff,” she said. “All Ayn Rand, all in this condition.”
There were two Fountainhead firsts, both binding states, red and green, in those lovely crisp red jackets. There was an Atlas Shrugged , signed Ayn in old ink and inscribed with endearment as if to an old friend. Finally there was the freshest copy of We the Living that I ever hoped to see in this lifetime. A Rand specialist had once told me that there were probably only a few hundred jacketed copies of We the Living in existence.
Six, seven grand retail, I thought. Sitting by the door in an open bag, in an unattended store.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Eleanor said.
I shook my head.
“If the door blew open, they’d get screwed by the rain in a minute,” she said. “Jesus, Otto must’ve really lost it.”
“Look, you know this guy—do you think he’s so far gone that he wouldn’t know what he could get for these?”
“I doubt that. Otto might not know about the new guys—the Graftons, Paretskys, Burkes—but he’d sure as hell know about Ayn Rand.”
We stood there for a minute and touched them.
“What’re you gonna do?” Eleanor said.
“Damned if I know. I’m dying to buy these from him.”
“What would you offer him?”
I pondered it. “Three grand. Thirty-five hundred if I had to.”
“You could get them for less than that. There are some guys in this town who’d pay him that kind of money, but Otto’s burned his bridges here. I’ll bet you could get ‘em for two.”
“I’d give him three in a heartbeat.”
“Take ‘em, then. Leave him a note, make him an offer like that, and you’ll be doing him the biggest favor of the year. Tell him you’ll send the books back if he doesn’t like it. I guarantee you you’re doing him a favor, because nine out often people would come in here and see those books and take ’em and run like hell. You know that’s true. Take ‘em and leave him a note.”
“That’s probably against the law,” I said, but I knew it probably wasn’t. In most states, theft requires evil intent.
I put the books back in the bag, folded the top over carefully, and tucked it under my arm. “What’s in the back room?”
“Just more of the same,” she said.
We went on back. The room was cluttered with books and trash. In a corner was an ancient rolltop desk half-buried in junk books and old magazines.
“I see he still reads the AB ,” I said.
“That’s probably how he sells most of his books.” Eleanor looked along the shelves behind the desk. She held up a thin canvas bag. “Here’s his briefcase. He never goes anywhere without this. In the old days, when he and Morrice were top dogs, you’d see him at book fairs and stuff, and he’d always have his two or three best pieces in this book bag. It was his trademark: if he liked you, you’d get to look in the bag; if he didn’t, you wouldn’t.”
She fiddled with the straps. “Wanna look?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Reluctantly, she pushed the bag back to the corner of the desk. “He probably hasn’t used it in ten years, except to carry a bottle around.” She sighed. “Not a Grayson book in sight. So much for my good intentions.”
“That looks like another door over there.” I walked across the room and opened it.
A set of steps disappeared into the dark upper floor.
“Try calling him again,” Eleanor said.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted Murdock’s name up the stairwell.
“He’s just not here,” she said.
“I don’t know. Something’s not right.” I moved into the stairwell.
“Don’t go up there. That’s how people get blown away.”
I turned and looked at her.
“Otto’s got a gun. I saw it once when I was here last year.”
“Good argument.” I backed away from the stairs.
“He’s gotta be up there sleeping one off. He’ll wake up in a panic over those books, come running down the stairs, and when he finds your note, he’ll be so relieved he’ll drop dead right there on the spot.”
I wavered.
“Goddammit, take the books,” she said. “Don’t be a fool.”
She’s right, I thought. I went back and sat at Otto’s desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and wrote out my offer. I made it three thousand and signed it with both my Denver phone numbers, then taped it to his canvas bag where he’d be sure to find it.
In the car we sat fondling the merchandise, lost in that rapture that comes too seldom these days, even in the book business.
It was just six o’clock when I happened to glance in the mirror and saw Pruitt watching from the far corner.
14
He appeared like a single frame in a set of flash cards. You blink and he’s gone, and you’re not quite sure he was ever there at all. I was as sure as I needed to be: I was suddenly tense, keyed up and ready to fight. We headed down to the Hilton. I was driving now, handling the freeway traffic with one eye on my mirror. If he was on my tail as I swung into town, I didn’t see him. He was a magician, good enough to make you doubt your eyes. The invisible man, Slater had called him, the best tail in the business, and he wasn’t keeping after me because he liked my looks. Who is Slater ? The voice of Trish Aandahl played in my head. I had a hunch I was about to find out who Slater was and what he wanted. He had just five hours to break the stalemate: if Pruitt didn’t play Slater’s hand by then, we’d be in the air and it would all be academic.
I parked in the hotel garage and took Eleanor to my room. I poured us drinks, cutting hers sl
ightly with water. She asked if she could use the shower and I said sure. I sat on the bed at the telephone, happy for a few minutes alone.
I punched up Slater’s number in Denver.
A woman answered. “Yeah?”
The lovely Tina, no doubt.
I tried to sound like someone from their social set, a cross between George Foreman and Bugs Moran: “I need Slater.”
“So who’re you?”
“I’m the man with the money.”
“I’m not followin‘ ya, Jack.”
“Just put Slater on the phone, he’ll be glad you did. Tell him it’s the man with the money.”
“Clyde’s not here.”
“So where’s he at?”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a bagful of money, sweetheart, and I’ll tell ya what, if I don’t get to give it to him pretty damn quick, I’m out of here. Slater can fly to Jacksonville and pick it up himself.”
“I don’t know anything about this.”
“That’s how you want to keep it, hon. Let’s just say Slater did a little job for me and this is the bonus I promised him.”