by John Dunning
I called Denver.
A sleepy voice answered the phone. “ ‘Lo?”
“Neal?”
“Yeah…who’s this?”
“Cliff Janeway.”
“Cliff…Jesus, what time is it?”
I looked at my watch. It was exactly 11:18. My plane for Albuquerque was taking off even as we spoke.
“It’s after midnight back there. Listen, I’m sorry, I know how hard you sleep. But I’m lost in Seattle and I need one helluva big favor from an old pal.”
I heard him stirring on the bed thirteen hundred miles away. His wife asked who it was and he told her. She gave a long-suffering sigh and I told him to give her my regrets.
“Lemme move to the other phone,” he said.
I waited, hoping that loyalty between old partners was still alive and well in Denver.
“Yeah, Cliff?…What the hell’s goin‘ on?”
“I need a big one, Neal.” I slipped into the lie with a little dig from my conscience. Hennessey was too straitlaced to hear the truth, and I’d make sure that none of it ever came back to bite him. “I’m supposed to meet a guy and we missed each other in the night. All I’ve got is his plate number and I need an address.”
There was silence on the line.
“This is important, Neal…I can’t tell you how badly I need this. I thought there might be something on NCIC…you could tap into that in twenty seconds.”
“You got reason to suspect the guy’s car is hot?”
“No, but those goddamn computers tell you everything. If the guy’s even been late paying his traffic tickets…”
“Cliff,” Hennessey said in that measured tone I knew so well, “sometimes you’re a hard guy to be friends with.”
“I’ll be singing your praises with my dying breath.”
“Dammit, this information is not intended for this kind of use.”
We both knew that. As always, I waited him out.
“I’ll make a call, but I’m promising you nothing.
Call me back in half an hour, forty minutes.”
I knew it wouldn’t take that long: Hennessey would have the information almost instantly, such was the power of a cop in the age of computers. He would get the dope through the DPD dispatcher, who would tap into the national system, and then he’d brood for half an hour before he decided to let me have it.
Meanwhile, I had some time on my hands.
I was walking again, on through the rain into the night. I needed wheels, so I went to the gas station where Rigby had had Eleanor’s car towed. It was still there, in a fenced yard behind the rest rooms. I told the attendant I was her brother and they had sent me over to fetch it for her. He didn’t worry much: we weren’t exactly dealing with a Lexus here, and he was anxious to get it off his lot. “I rustled up four pretty fair used tires with another eight, ten thousand in ‘em. Tab comes to eighty-six dollars and ten cents. You wanna pay that now?”
I said sure: I was well past the point of brooding over money, so I handed him my sagging MasterCard. “She’s all yours,” he said, slotting my card through his machine. “Keys’re over the visor.” I went back to the yard and opened the car door. It squeaked on rusty hinges. The seats had worn through, the windshield was cracked and a cold draft wafted up from below. The odometer was playing it for laughs—it showed 34,512, which could only be serious if the meter was on its third trip around. I opened the glove compartment. A small light came on, a pleasant surprise. I saw some papers—registration, proof of insurance, and a sheath of notes that looked to be tables of current book valuations, handwritten on ledger paper in ink. They were all Grayson Press books.
There were separate pages for each title. They were fully described, with many variants noted, with prices and the names of dealers who had sold them. These had been taken from Bookman’s Price Index , with the volume numbers in the margins. She had sifted the material as professionally as any book dealer, noting the year of sale and the condition, along with her own impression of whether the dealers tended to be high or low. It was a ready reference on Grayson’s entire output. The final sheet was marked Poe/The Raven, 1949 edition . Only three copies were listed for the past ten years. In pencil she had noted that Russ Todd down in Arizona had sold an uncataloged copy for $600. I knew Russ well enough to call and ask if I needed to. Most interesting, I thought, was the word edition , which appeared for this book only. It seemed to indicate what I already knew—that some people believed there had been another edition and Eleanor may have been one of them.
I tucked everything back as it was. In a slipcase at the side of the glove compartment I found her address book. It fell open to the letter G , so often had that page been used. She had written some names under the general heading Grayson . There were book dealers from coast to coast, several of them known to me as specialists in fine-press books. There was a local number for Allan Huggins, the Grayson bibliographer, and at the bottom of the page were three names in bold, fresh-looking ink.
Nola Jean Ryder.
Jonelle Jeffords.
Rodney Scofield.
Jonelle Jeffords I remembered as the name of the woman in Taos whose house Eleanor had burglarized. There was a phone number beginning with a 505 area code. The number for Rodney Scofield was a 213 exchange, which I recognized as Los Angeles. The space beside Nola Jean Ryder was blank.
I sat behind the wheel, crossed my fingers, and turned the ignition.
Yea, verily, it started.
I was back in business. I had wheels.
I stopped at the Hilton and called Hennessey. I knew by the cautious sound of his voice that he had what I wanted.
“I’ve got bad vibes about this.”
“Neal, it’s your nature to have bad vibes. The time for you to really start worrying is when you don’t have bad vibes.”
“Very funny. Someday you’ll get me fired, I’ve got no doubt of that at all. No, don’t tell me about it, please…you’re not gonna kill this guy, are you?”
“Now why would you ask a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. I just had a vision of the beaches up there littered with cadavers, all of ‘em named Pruitt. It doesn’t sit well at one o’clock in the morning.”
“I’m just gonna pay him a friendly little visit.”
“Like the Godfather, huh? You’ve got that edge in your voice.”
There was nothing else to say: he’d either give or he wouldn’t.
“Your plate’s registered to a Kelvin Ruel Pruitt. He’s got half a dozen old unresolved legal problems, all in Illinois. Careless driving, failure to appear, a bad check never made good, stuff like that. They’re not about to go after him in another state, but if he ever gets stopped in Chicago, it’ll be an expensive trip.”
He sighed and gave me Pruitt’s address.
“Bless you, Mr. Hennessey, you lovely old man. Now go back to bed and make your wife happy.”
“She should be so lucky.”
I sat at the table and unfolded a Seattle street map. Pruitt lived in a place called Lake City, north of town. I marked the map, but I already had the routes memorized. As a courtesy I called Taos and told them Rigby had escaped. The lonely-sounding dispatcher took my message and managed to convey his contempt across the vast expanse of mountains and plains. I didn’t bother telling him that I was going to find Rigby and bring her back to him. I didn’t think he’d believe that anyway.
19
It was a fifteen-minute drive at that time of night. The draft from the floorboards became a freezing gale, numbing me in my wet clothes. The heater was only partly effective, just beginning to get warm as I reached the Lake City turnoff. I went east on 125th Street, zigzagging through dark and narrow residential lanes until I found the street where Pruitt lived. It was wrapped in wet murk, the sparse streetlights as ineffective as candles. The rain kept coming, beating down like a draconian water cure. The first thing I saw as I turned into the block was the fat man’s car, parked under a tree at Pruit
t’s address. I whipped around and pulled in behind him, then sat for a few minutes with the heater running, recovering from the cold drive. The house was draped by trees and flanked by thick underbrush. None of it could be seen from the street. There was also no sign of Pruitt’s Pontiac, which was troubling but might be explained by a garage out back. It was now 1:18 by my watch: almost three hours since they’d snatched her off the street. I had to assume the worst and go from here. Assume all three men were in the house. Figure one of them would be posted as a lookout. The fat man and the kid didn’t scare me much: I had dealt with goons many times, and they always fold when the game gets rough. Pruitt was the X-factor, the unknown. You never know what a psycho will do, or what you’ll have to do if you get him started.
I pulled my gun around to the front of my belt. Still I sat, bothered by something I couldn’t pin down. Then I saw that the fat man’s car door was open in the rain, cracked about six inches. The interior light had come on: this had run the battery down and cast the car in a dim, unnatural glow. He took her in the house, I thought: he had to carry her and never got his door closed, then he forgot to come back out and shut it. I thought of Otto Murdock’s store, pulling that connection out of the rain, from God knew where. Things were left empty, open, unattended. People went away and didn’t come back. Nothing sinister about that, except my own nagging feeling that somehow it shouldn’t be that way.
I’d have to move Eleanor’s car, I knew that. Pruitt would know it on sight, and if he happened to drive up, I’d lose my biggest advantage, surprise. I drove around the block and parked in the dark behind a pickup truck. Again I was walking in the rain. I approached the fat man’s car cautiously. Walked around to the driver’s side and looked in. His wallet lay open on the seat. It was stuffed with money…five, six hundred dollars. I fished out his driver’s license and stared at his picture. William James Carmichael, it said. I wrote down his name and address. I looked in the glove compartment and found several letters addressed to Willie Carmichael. I put them back, got out of the car, and walked to the driveway that led back to the house.
It was heavily draped with trees. I could see lights off in the distance, and a walk that skirted the drive. The walk was shrubbed but too visible, I thought, from the house. I came up the drive, dark as a load of coal, planting each step firmly. It converged with the walk near a flagstone approach to the front door. The only light came from the front windows, dimmed by curtains and reflecting off the slick stones of the walkway.
Three long strides brought me flat against the house. I moved to the door, looking and listening. There was nothing doing anywhere. The door was locked, hardly a surprise. I put my head against it, listening for footsteps, movement, anything that betrayed some living presence. There was nothing.
Just…a faint strain of music.
I took my head away and the music stopped. I listened again. The beat sounded tauntingly familiar, like something I knew but couldn’t quite call up. The steady hiss of the rain all but drowned it out. It quivered just outside my senses, one of those half-remembered bits of business that drives you crazy at two o’clock in the morning. Other than that, the house was still, so quiet it gave me a queasy feeling. I eased back into the brush and around to the side. I saw a light in a window, dim and distant, escaping from another room well back in the house. I pushed through the undergrowth and looked through a small crack in the curtain. I could see a piece of a drawing room, neat and well-furnished with what looked to be antique chairs. Somehow it didn’t fit what I knew about Pruitt, but you never can tell about people: I really didn’t know the man. I squinted through the crack and saw a doorway that led off to a hall. The light came through from the front, and nothing was going on back here.
I touched the glass and there it was again, that rhythmic vibration, as much feeling as sound. I put my ear against it, and on came that faraway melody, that staccato tune that was right on the tip of my…
I froze, unable to believe what had just gone through my head.
“Eleanor Rigby.”
Somewhere inside, someone was playing that song.
Over and over.
Loud enough to shake the walls.
At two o’clock in the morning.
I kept moving. Everything was the color of ink. I came into the backyard, taking a step at a time. Around the edge of a porch, groping, groping. I touched a screened door and saw a long, dim, narrow crack of light. I pulled open the door and moved toward it. It was the back door of the house itself, cracked open like the fat man’s car. The music seeped through it like some dammed-up thing that couldn’t get through the crack fast enough. I had my gun in my hand as I nudged the door with my shoulder. It swung open and the music gushed out.
I was in a black kitchen, lit only by the glow from another room. I could see the dim outlines of a range and refrigerator, nothing more…then, straight ahead, a table with chairs around it. I crossed the room, feeling my way. The music was loud now: I had come into a hallway that led to the front. I walked to the end, to the edge of the parlor. It looked like some proper sitting room from Victorian days. The light came down from above, where the music was playing. I reached the stairs and started up. There was a blip that sounded like a bomb, and the music started again, a shock wave of sound.
I saw a smudge on the stair, a red smear ground into the carpet…
Another one…
…and another one.
More at the top.
I heard a soft sigh. It was my own. The overhead light at the top revealed a dark hallway. I could see a room at the end of it, dimly lit as if by a night-light. I saw more red marks on the carpet coming out of the hall. I moved that way, the hall closing me in like a tunnel. There was a door on each side halfway down, the one on the left open, the room there dark. I kept flat against the wall, breathing deeply, aware of the sudden silence again as the record ended. The room smelled strongly of ashes. My mind caught the smell but it didn’t hold: there was too much going on. I reached inside and felt along the wall with the palm of my hand, found the light, flipped it up, and the flash turned the room the color of white gold. I could see my reflection in a mirror across the room: I was standing in a half-crouch with the gun in my hand, moving it slowly from side to side. It was some kind of office. There was a desk and a filing cabinet, with one drawer hanging open and several files strewn across the floor. The walls were painted a cream color: the only window was covered by a dark curtain.
I turned and faced the room across the way. I could see the thin line of light at the bottom of the door, and in the light cast out from the office, more crusty red smears on the floor. There, I thought: that’s where all the blood’s coming from. I pivoted back on my heel and flattened against the wall. Turned the knob, pushing the door wide. And there he was, Fat Willie Carmichael, and I didn’t need a medical degree to know he had done Pruitt his last favor. The room looked like a slaughterhouse, with blood on the bed and the floor and the walls: splotches of it spewed as if by a high-pressure pump. The fat man had fallen on his back and died there. His head was wrenched back and I could see that his throat had been cut. His fingers were rigid and clawlike, clutching at nothing. I stood in the doorway, heartsick with fear for Eleanor. My hand was trembling, I felt like a rookie cop at his first bad murder scene. I had looked upon more rooms like this one, streaked with red violence, than I could ever add up and count, and now I shook like a kid. There was still one room to check—the open door at the end of the hall.
I reached the dim circle of light and the music came up full as I peeped in. I almost laughed with relief— nobody there! The record player squatted on a table near the window, one of those old portables from the days before stereo. A 45-rpm disc spun wildly. The set was fixed to the automatic mode: the record would play like that forever, till the power failed or the needle wore the grooves off. It was starting again now, a concert from hell.
It was so loud I felt shattered by it. I had an urge, almost a need, to rip out t
he plug. The night-light flickered precariously, the bulb on its last legs. I found the switch and turned on the overhead, washing the room in light. It looked like a guest room: there was a single bed in a corner facing a portable TV set, a telephone on a table near the record player, a digital alarm clock. The bed had been rumpled but not slept in. Someone had lain or sat on top of the covering.
Handcuffed to the bed.
The cuffs were still there, one bracelet snapped tight to the bedpost, the other lying open on the pillow. The key had been left in the slot where it had been used to release the prisoner from the bed. The cuffs were the same make and style as the set Slater had given me. I came closer and examined the bed, turning back the rumpled folds of the blanket. There I found the book, no larger than a thumb joint, Eleanor’s miniature Shakespeare, her good-luck piece.
I fingered the soft suede leather, opened the cover, and looked at the publisher’s name. David Bryce and Son/Glasgow .
I put it in my pocket and came back up the hall. Last chance at the death scene, I thought. I was thinking like a cop, and I was not a cop, this was not my town. In an hour the room would be full of real cops. I stepped inside, giving the body a wide berth. I looked at Fat Willie Carmichael and thought, Talk to me, baby , but the fat man was keeping his last awful secret to himself. He had been taken from the front, stuck in the sternum with a weapon that was wicked and sharp, then slashed deep across the neck. Either wound was probably fatal, but the killer had hacked him up in other ways, as if venting some raging fury or settling an old score. His clothes were ripped apart: pocket change was scattered around, and his keys were thrown against the wall. The killer had been looking for the one key, I guessed, to unshackle his prisoner in the next room. I looked around the edges of the body: I could see his gun—he had retrieved it from the car and it lay under his hip, still in its holster. This indicated an attack of surprise: taken from the front, but too quickly to react. Or done unexpectedly, by someone he knew.
Time to call the cops, I thought. Out in the hallway, I smelled again that faint whiff of ashes. The office across the hall was thick with it. I looked into the room and saw where it came from—a wastebasket, half-filled with some burned thing, a bucket of ashes. I got down on the floor and touched the can with the back of my hand. It was still warm. I probed into it with my knife, carefully…carefully, lifting one layer away from another. Whatever it was, it had been thoroughly burned, with only a few solid remnants left to show that it had once been sheets of paper. Maybe a police lab could make something out of it; I couldn’t. Then I saw a flash of white—two pages fused together in heat, with small fragments un-buraed. And as I leaned over it, I smelled another odor, half-hidden under the ash but unmistakable if you knew it. Ronsonol. The can and its contents had been doused with lighter fluid to make sure the papers would burn. Some of the fluid had soaked into the carpet but had not burned because the fire had been confined to the inside of the can. Lighter fluid was a smell I knew well. It is one of the bookscout’s major tools, used for removing stickers from book jackets safely and without a trace. Paper can be soaked in it without getting stained, wrinkled, or otherwise damaged, unless someone remembers what lighter fluid’s really for and sets it on fire.