Bookman's wake cj-2

by John Dunning

  I sniffed around the can and again probed it with the knife. I worked the point between the two pages and jiggled them apart. The words still and whisp stood out on the unburned fragment, the two words arranged one over the other, at a slight angle, with the paper charred close around them. The lettering was striking and quaint: the typeface lovely. Here was the Raven , I thought. It might not make sense, but it looked as if Pruitt had it all along, lost his mind, whacked Willie Carmichael, and burned the damn thing. It didn’t make sense, I thought again. I parted the ashes and went deeper. There was only one other scrap with unburned letters: ange , it said. I took this piece, to have a sample of the typeface, and left the other segment for the cops.

  I nudged off the light with my elbow and left the room as I’d found it. I stood for a moment in the hall, listening. But the record had numbed my senses, and now I had to concentrate just to hear the song.

  I moved through the hall to the stairs. Looked down into the drawing room.

  Something was different. I waited and listened and waited some more, but I saw and heard nothing.

  It was my life that had changed. My dilemma. The universe.

  I took a solid grip on the gun and went down quickly. Everything was turned around, like a house of mirrors at a carnival. There were two doors: I looked through the other rooms with that same sense of dread and found nothing: then went back through the hall the way I had come. I didn’t know what was eating me until I got to the kitchen. There’s more, I thought: I’ve missed something, I haven’t seen it all yet. I nudged open the swinging door, groped for a light, found it, flipped it, and saw what it was that I had missed.

  The woman was sprawled in a lake of blood by the table. I had walked past her in the dark, so close I might’ve stepped on her hand. Like Fat Willie Carmi-chael, she had died by the knife—throat cut, body ripped and torn. I moved closer and looked at her platinum blond hair. I didn’t want to look at her face, but I did. It was Pruitt’s girlfriend, Olga.

  Then I saw the footprints, my own, and, oh, Christ, I had walked through her blood coming in. It was like looking down and seeing your crotch covered with leeches: your skin shimmies up your tailbone and your gut knots up and you just want them gone. I didn’t even stop to think about it—the whole fifteen years I’d spent with DPD was so much jackshit, and I went to the roll of paper towels near the range and ripped some off, wet them in hot water at the tap, and washed out the prints. And in that moment, while I played footsie with the killer, I became part of his crime.

  Call the cops, I thought: call them now, before you’re in this any deeper.

  I rolled the bloody wet towels into a tight ball, wrapped it in two fresh ones, and stuffed it in my pocket. Everything till then had been blind reflex. Again I thought about the cops, but even then I was smearing the water tap with my handkerchief, where I’d touched it wetting the towels.

  Stupid, stupid…

  I left the record playing: give the cops that much, I owed it to Eleanor, even if I had to pay the price.

  I was lucky on one count—the heavy underbrush made it unlikely that neighbors would see me coming or going. Almost too late, I remembered that I had gone through Fat Willie’s wallet: I went back to his car and smeared it with my handkerchief. I walked around the block and sat in Eleanor’s car with my feet dangling in the rain. I took off my shoes, knowing that human blood can linger in cracks longer than most killers could imagine, and I turned them bottoms-up on the floor.

  I drifted downtown, my conscience heavy and troubled.

  I was at least five miles away when I called them. I stood in a doorless phone booth outside an all-night gas station and talked to a dispatcher through my handkerchief. Told her there were two dead people, gave her the address.

  I knew I was being taped, that police calls today can be traced almost instantly. When the dispatcher asked my name, I hung up.

  I stopped at Denny’s, put on my shoes, and went inside for a shot of coffee. It was 3:05 a.m. I sat at the fountain and had a second cup. I thought of Eleanor and that record blaring, of Slater and Pruitt, of Crystal and Rigby and the Gray son boys. I wished for two things—a shot of bourbon and the wisdom to have done it differently. But I was in the wrong place for the one and it was too late for the other.

  BOOK II

  TRISH

  20

  I found what I needed over my third coffee. It always happens, I don’t know how. When life goes in the tank, I bottom out in the ruins and come up with purpose, direction, strength.

  I knew what I had to do. It was too late now to do it the right way, so the same thing had to happen from a different starting point.

  I sat at the counter looking at her card.

  I made the call.

  She caught it on the first ring, as if she’d been sitting there all night waiting for me.

  “Hello.”

  “Trish?”

  “Yup.”

  “Janeway.”

  “Hi.”

  She didn’t sound surprised: she didn’t sound thrilled. She sounded wide-awake at four o’clock in the morning.

  “You said if I’d like to talk…well, I’d like to talk.”

  “When and where?”

  “As soon as possible. You say where.”

  “My office, half an hour. Do you know where the Seattle Times is?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “I’ll tell you, it’ll save time. Go to the corner of Fairview and John. You’ll see a big square building that looks like all newspaper buildings everywhere. You’ll know you’re there by the clock on the Fairview side—the time on it’s always wrong. Turn into John, park in the fenced lot on the left, come across the street and in through the John Street door. The guard will call me and I’ll come down and get you.”

  The clock on the building said 11:23, but it was an hour before dawn when I got there. The rain was coming down in sheets. I parked in a visitor’s slot and made the sixty-yard dash in eight seconds, still not fast enough to keep from getting soaked again. I pushed into the little vestibule and faced a middle-aged man in a guard’s uniform. I asked for Miss Aandahl: he didn’t think Miss Aandahl was in. He made a call, shook his head, and I sat on a bench to wait. Water trickled down my crotch and I felt the first raw tingle of what would probably be a raging case of red-ass. I squirmed in my wet pants and thought, I hate this goddamn town.

  She came in about ten minutes later. She was wearing a red raincoat and hood. She was brisk, getting me quickly past the formalities with the guard. He looked at me suspiciously as I disappeared with her into the building. We went past a receptionist’s booth, empty now, then through a door to the right and up a set of stairs. We came out on the second floor, in a corridor that led past a string of offices. There was a bookcase filled with review copies, overflow from the book editor, with a sign to the effect that the staff could buy them (the money to go to charity) at $3 a copy. In a quick flyby, I saw some hot young authors—David Brin, Dan Simmons, Sharyn McCrumb—whose newest books, with author photos and publicity pap laid in, could already command cover price plus 50 percent in a catalog. That’s the trouble with review books; they tend to be wasted on book editors. I wanted to clear out the case, buy them all.

  She was standing about thirty feet away, waiting. I joined her at the edge of the newsroom, a huge chamber quiet in the off-hours. It gave the impression that news happened on its timetable, at its command. Let there be news , the keeper of the key would shout at eight o’clock, and fifty reporters would materialize at their computers, clicking furiously. On the far wall was a full-length mural of the world, with clocks showing times in various places. The world looked as peaceful as the newsroom, which only proved how little the world knew.

  She hung up her raincoat, then led me into a narrow place defined on both sides by tall filing cabinets. It was crowded with desks, maybe a dozen of them packed into a space the size of a medium-sized living room. It was like walking into a canyon: it was part of the
newsroom yet it wasn’t, because an editor couldn’t see in there without getting up and making the grand effort. I didn’t have to be a reporter to know what a coveted spot it was…out of sight, out of mind. Her desk was far back in the corner, as secluded as you could get without moving up in management, getting yourself glassed in and becoming a different breed of cat.

  She sat and motioned me to a chair. She looked different somehow from the image I had retained from our one meeting in the courthouse cafeteria. She looked harder and tougher, more of the world. Then she smiled, like the child looking up at Frankenstein’s monster, and I felt good again.

  “Nice racket you’ve got,” I said. “You people must get some great poker games going back here.”

  “We call it the Dead Zone. They’ll have to kill me to get this desk.”

  “Are they trying?”

  “So they say.”

  She didn’t push me. If I wanted to small-talk and break the ice, she could do that. She was looking straight in my eyes.

  “You look miserable…tired, wet, and hungry.”

  I nodded. “Your city has not treated me well.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and managed to look it. “You’ve come in the rainy season.”

  “Oh. How long does that last?”

  “Almost all year.”

  She offered coffee but I had had enough. We looked at each other across her desk.

  “I came here from Miami,” she said. “My first month was a killer. It rained twenty-eight out of thirty days. I was a basket case. I was ready to go anywhere. If the newspaper in Grand Island, Nebraska, had offered me a job covering the grasshopper beat, I’d‘ve been on the next bus out of here. Then it cleared up and I learned what a sensational place this is.”

  “I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

  “There’re two secrets to living here. You’ve got to dress for weather and you can’t let it get you down.”

  “That’s two for two I missed.”

  “Now the only thing that bothers me is the traffic. This town has got to be the worst bottleneck in the United States. It’s great as long as you don’t need to drive, or if you do need to drive, you don’t need to park.”

  “It sounds better by the minute.”

  “I guess I’m here for the long haul. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. What’s Denver like?”

  “I had forgotten what rain looks like till I came here.”

  “Sun city, huh?”

  “Somebody once said that Denver has more sun and sons of bitches than any other city in the country.”

  She smiled and said, “I’ll stay with the rain. I bought a boat last year, I’m a pretty fair sailor now. Sometimes I just take off on Friday and drift up the coast. I put in at some warm-looking marina and spend the weekend exploring. If I’ve got a difficult piece to write, I do it there, out on deck if the weather’s nice.”

  “Is that where you wrote your book?”

  “Would have, if I’d had it then. Have you read it?”

  “Not yet, but it’s high on my list. I just picked up a copy.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you read.”

  I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard a reporter say. She shrugged and said, “It’s a good book, I’m not apologizing for it; if I had it to do over again, I’m sure it’d come out mostly the same. A little better, maybe. That’s the curse of being a writer, you never want to look back at what you did last year because the trip’s too painful. You see stuff you should’ve done better, but now it’s set in stone.”

  “What would you change?”

  “A thousand little things…and of course I’d write a new ending.”

  “Of course?”

  “The ending leaves the impression that the Graysons died in an accident. Just some tragic twist of fate.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Not true.”

  “They were murdered, you said.”

  “Read the book, then talk to me again. Just keep in mind that the last chapter wasn’t what I would’ve done, then or now.”

  “If you didn’t do it, who did?”

  “It was sanitized by an editor in New York. The problem was, I had produced this monster-sized book and it was ending with more questions than it answered. They didn’t like that, they felt it would not be satisfying for a reader to go through seven hundred and fifty pages and come out with the kind of questions I was asking. Especially when the experts seemed to agree that it was an accident and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t. The book really didn’t need to end with any unanswered questions at all. They died. That was the end of it.”

  “But not for you.”

  “I still keep my finger in it. As you can see.”

  “You must have something in mind.”

  She smiled into the sudden pause that stretched between us. “I’ve been doing some fiction lately. I’m finding a voice, as the literati say. I’ve had three or four pieces in the literary reviews and I’m working on a novel. Maybe that’s how I’ll finally get rid of the Graysons. I read somewhere that fiction’s the only way you can really tell the truth. I never even understood that when I was learning the ropes, but I sure believe it now.”

  She gave me a look that said, Hey, I’m not pushing you, but why the hell are we here ?

  I said, “I’ve got a deal for you.”

  “I already own the Space Needle, I bought it last year. I never could resist a deal.” She got up and came around the desk, patting me on the shoulder. “Let’s go get some breakfast. I don’t think I want to hear this on an empty stomach.”

  21

  It was a lick and a promise, all I had time for. My reading on her would have to be the abridged version, once over lightly. This is your life, Trish Aandahl, a tour of the high spots. From that I’d decide: move on alone or bring her to the party.

  Conventions and courtesies, five minutes. She had grown up in Ohio, her parents simple people who lived for the moment. Life was what it was: you worked at it every day and got up the next day and did it again. Her father had worked for wages in Cincinnati; her mom found jobs in restaurants, dime stores, car washes, wherever there was women’s work that demanded no special skills. They had produced a child unlike either of them, a daughter who didn’t believe in women’s work and grew up thinking she could do most anything. At least the parents had had the wisdom to indulge her differences.

  She beat the clock with a minute to spare. She knew I was fishing, but she had tapped into my growing sense of urgency and was willing to give me some rope.

  Personal color, three minutes. Trish was her real name, listed that way on her birth certificate. Her mother had named her after a best friend and had never known that the name was a diminutive of Patricia.

  She was alone in the world. Her parents were dead and there were no other children. If there was a man in her life, it wasn’t readily apparent. She wore no rings, but that doesn’t mean as much as it once did.

  She was amused now, wondering how far I’d go into this Dick-and-Jane style personal Baedeker. I wondered about her gripes and dislikes and gave her one minute for that.

  She didn’t need it. Phonies, stuffed shirts, chiselers, and liars. Her code was much like mine, her hate list virtually identical.

  Extra bit of business, thirty seconds. She was a chronic insomniac, able to sleep undisturbed only about one night in four. That’s why she had been sitting there by the telephone, reading a novel, when I called.

  I knew everything about her by the time the waitress brought our breakfasts. What more do you need to know about anyone, until the chips are down and you discover that you never knew anything at all?

  “I’m ready to tell you about Slater,” I said.

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “Because the circumstances have changed and I want something back from you. Isn’t that how life works?”

  “If it’s an even trade, sure. Is the Slater story worth anything?
”

  “I think you’ll find it interesting. The entertaining part is trying to figure out where it’s heading. It’s still unfolding, as you newsies might put it.”

  “The terminology is breaking . I don’t do breaking stories anymore.”

  “I think you’ll do this one.”

  “So what do you want for it?”

  “A lot less than you paid for the Space Needle. Are we off the record yet?”

  “If that’s how you want it.”

  I threw in a zinger, to test her dedication to the code. “Don’t take offense at this, but how do I know your word is good?”

  She did take offense: she bristled in her chair, and for a moment I thought she might pick up and walk out. “I’ll tell you the answer to that, but you’re only allowed to ask it once. You can check me out with a phone call. I worked in Miami for four years. I went to jail down there over just this kind of stuff.”