by John Dunning
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood
there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared
to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness
gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered
word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the
word, “Lenore!”
Merely this and nothing more.
I took the charred scrap from my wallet and looked for the letters ange . It was there, twice, in the sixteenth stanza, reference to the sainted, radiant maiden Lenore, who had been named by the angels.
I made photocopies of the three pages and headed back to the Ramada.
In my room I did my hair, watching with some amazement as the black became white and then gray and by degrees I took on the appearance of my father. I quit when it seemed right. When it dried, I hit it with the grease pencil, giving myself a slightly speckled look.
I redid my face and made a better job of it.
There was a kind of fatalistic rhythm to my movements. I was doing what I had to do and time no longer mattered. Eleanor was either dead or alive: if she still lived, I rather liked her chances for the immediate future. He wasn’t about to kill her, not after all this grief, till he had what he wanted. Never mind the ashes: appearances could be deceiving, and the feeling persisted that what I wanted was still out there somewhere, alive and well. If I could find it first, I’d have a strong bargaining chip, and there was a fair chance we’d even converge in the hunt. I didn’t know Seattle, I had no idea where Pruitt or the fat man’s kid might do their drinking, but I did know books. I’d let the cops do the legwork—the job I’d set them on at no small personal risk to myself, the work they had the manpower and the skill to pull off—and I’d go after the book.
It was now after ten-thirty. Supercop would be finished with Trish, at least for the moment, and he’d be on the phone to Denver, going after my mug shot and stats. I pictured the looks on Hennessey and Steed and almost laughed at the thought. It would go against Steed’s grain, but he’d have to honor supercop’s request and wonder to himself if I had finally popped my buttons and started cutting out paper dolls. As for Hennessey, I’d have some serious fences to mend there, but what else was new?
I knew I was tired—the last real sleep I could remember was the Rigby loft, more than forty-eight hours ago—but I didn’t want to stop. I sat on the bed and began working the phone. I opened Eleanor’s little address book to the Grayson page and decided to start with Allan Huggins, the man who knew more about the Graysons than they had known about each other. I punched in the number, but there was no answer.
I kept going. I called Jonelle Jeffords in Taos. A machine answered. “Hi, this’s where Charlie and Jo live. If you’ve got something to say that I might want to hear, leave a number, maybe I’ll call you back.”
No bullshit there: old Charlie cut right to the short strokes. I hung up on the beep.
I sat for a while looking at the name Rodney Scofield. It seemed vaguely familiar, like something I’d heard once and should’ve remembered. Finally I called his number cold, a Los Angeles exchange.
A recording came on. I wondered if it’s possible in this day and age to punch out a phone number and actually speak to a living human being.
I hung on through the entire recording, hoping for some hint of what Scofield was about. A female voice began by telling me I had reached the business offices of Scofield Plastics on Melrose Avenue. Their hours were nine a.m. to five p.m. , Monday through Friday. At the end was a menu of punch codes: if I wanted to reach the voice mail of various department heads, I should punch one, two, three, and so on. Finally, there was this:
“If you have business pertaining to the Grayson Press, please press number eight, now.”
I punched it.
The phone rang.
A recording began on the other end.
“This is Leith Kenney. I’m not here but I do want to talk to you. If you have Grayson books for sale, or information about single books or collections, please call me back or leave a number where you may be reached. You may also reach me at home, at any hour of the day or night. We are interested in any primary Grayson material, including letters, photographs, business records, broadsides, and even incomplete projects and partial layouts. We pay top cash money, well above auction rates. We will match any offer for important material, and we pay equally well for information that results in major acquisitions.”
He gave a home number and I called it. Again came that scratchy, unmistakable sound of a recording machine. There again was Kenney’s voice, apologizing. He had stepped out but would return soon. Would I please leave a number?
No, I would not.
I had a hunch I had found Pruitt’s moneyman, and I wanted to catch him cold.
I slept five hours. No apologies, no bouts with conscience. My tank was empty: I needed it.
I awoke at four o’clock in a state of anxiety. I had heard a bump somewhere and had come to life thinking of supercop. Dark shadows passed outside, beyond my window, probably a SWAT team getting ready to crash the door.
But when I parted the curtains, it was just a family checking in. The rain had stopped for the moment, but a heavy cloud cover hung over the city, and the streets were wet from a recent drenching. I took a hot shower and dressed, thinking of my immediate future in terms of moves.
My first move had to be to ditch Eleanor’s car. I walked over to the lobby, giving the clerk a good look at me in my old-man role. I used the cane well and was satisfied when he gave me nothing more than a smile and a passing glance.
I bought a Seattle Times from a box and sat in my room browsing the classifieds. I found the car I wanted in less than a minute, but when I called, the party had sold it. I tried again: there were plenty more like that. All I wanted was something cheap that would run for a week.
The one I found was twenty minutes away, in a ramshackle garage behind a tenement house. It was a Nash from the fifties, the oldest car I would ever own. The body was consumed by rust but the engine sounded decent, rebuilt, said the young man selling it, just three or four years ago. He wanted four hundred: it was a classic, he said, selling hard. I told him everything today was a classic and offered him three. “This is a great make-out car,” he said. “The seats fold back into a full bed, with five different positions.” I gave him a long gray stare and asked if I looked like a guy who needed five different positions. He grinned and said, “Just need wheels to get you to the ”VA, huh, pops?“ We settled on three-fifty with no further commentary.
The whole business took less than half an hour. He brought out some papers and signed them over to my Raymond Hodges alias and had one last-minute doubt about the license plates. “I think you’re supposed to pull those plates and go down to motor vehicles and get a temporary.” I told him I’d take care of it and he accepted this cheerfully. I left Eleanor’s car on the street a block away, noting the address so I could call the Rigbys to come pick it up. It was a quiet residential neighborhood and I thought the car would be safe there for a few days before somebody called in and reported it to the city as abandoned.
Back in the motel, I made my phone checks again. Neither Leith Kenney in L.A. or Charles and Jonelle Jeffords in Taos were yet answering the telephone, but I reached Allan Huggins on the sixth ring.
“Mr. Huggins?”
“Speaking.” He sounded out of breath, as if he’d run some distance to catch the phone.
“My name’s Hodges, you don’t know me, I’m a book dealer from Philadelphia. I’ve been hired by a private investigator to track down a book and I’m hoping it’s something you might be able to help me with.”
His laughter was sudden and booming. “You’re a card, aren’t you, sir?…A book dealer who’s also a detective, you say? What’ll they think of next?”
“I guess i
t’s that combination of skills that makes me as good a bet as anybody to find a book that nobody thinks is real.”
“Aha, you must be looking for the Grayson Raven …Darryl Grayson’s lost masterpiece.”
“How’d you know that?”
“It’s what everyone’s looking for. I must get half a dozen calls a year on it, maybe more. It’s one of those urban myths that got started just after the Graysons died. It just won’t go away, and it’s all preposterous, just total nonsense. Read my bibliography.”
“I’ve done that.”
“Well, then…”
“It’s a great piece of work, but it won’t answer the one question that keeps coming up.”
“Which is…?”
“If there’s nothing to it, why do so many people keep chasing it?”
“Now you’re asking me to be a psychologist, and all I ever was, was a poor bibliographer. This is the reason I stick to books. No matter how complicated they become, bibliographically, their mysteries can always be solved. With people, who knows? Have you ever solved the mystery of anyone, sir—your brother, your son, the woman you love?”
“Probably not. Maybe I could come see you, we could put our heads together and solve the riddle of the Graysons.”
“Not very damned likely.”
“I won’t take much of your time.”
“If you think it’ll help, come ahead. But I can tell you right now, you won’t get any encouragement from me in this Grayson Raven business. If you ask me was Grayson planning another Raven , my answer would have to be yes. I’ve alluded to that much in my bibliography. But there’ve been no major changes in the Grayson Press bibliography since my book was published. Some poems by Richard have turned up, and maybe fifty significant broadsides. But in my humble opinion, the Raven project never got off the ground. If you want to ask me why foolish people keep chasing that myth, I have no idea.”
“Maybe you could show me some of their books. I’ve heard you have the biggest collection in the world.”
My compliment fell strangely flat: he didn’t seem unusually proud of the fact, if it was a fact. But he said, “When will you come? I’m not doing anything wonderful right now.”
“Now is fine.”
I took down his address. He lived on the sound, in Richmond Beach. Five minutes later, I banked the Nash into 1-5, heading north.
24
Huggins lived in a two-story brick house on a large wooded lot facing the water. It was well back from the street, hidden from the world. In the last light of the day I could see the water gleaming off in the distance as I drove into his yard. I saw a curtain flutter: a door opened and he came out on an upper deck.
He had a shock of white hair and a curly white beard, a big belly, and burly, powerful arms. Santa Claus in coveralls and a flannel shirt, I thought as I came toward him. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows: he looked like a working man waiting for some wood to chop. We shook hands and he welcomed me to his home. There was a spate of polite talk as we went inside. I asked if he’d been here long and he said yes, twenty-six years in this house this coming November. His wife had died a few years ago and for a while he had considered selling it—lots of old memories, you know, lots of ghosts—but he had kept it and now he was glad he had. It was home, after all: everything he had was here, and the thought of moving it all, of winnowing down, was…well, it was just too much. Then about a year ago all the pain had begun melting away. He had begun taking comfort in these nooks and crannies and in all the thousands of days and nights he had lived here.
We went through the living area and into his kitchen, where he had just brewed a pot of coffee. The window looked down a rocky hillside to Puget Sound, which stretched away like an ocean into a wall of coming darkness.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” he said, “I’m terrible with names.”
I fed him my alias again and he repeated it in an effort to remember. The coffeepot gushed its last orgasmic perks and he poured two huge mugs without waiting for it to end. “I like it strong,” he said, and I nodded agreeably, waving off the sugar and cream. “So,” he said, getting down to cases, “you want to know about the Gray sons. Where do you want to start? I’m afraid you must be the guide here, sir—I don’t mean to brag, but my knowledge of the Grayson Press is so extensive that we could be here for days.” He gave a helpless-looking shrug.
“I’m not sure where to start either. I said I wouldn’t take up much of your time, but I’m just beginning to realize what a deep subject this is.”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Even the Aandahl biography is a monster. It’ll take me a week to read it.”
He made a derisive motion with his hand. Santa was suddenly cross. “The woman’s a maniac.”
“Who, Aandahl?”
“Journalists,” he sneered. “All they ever want is the garbage in a man’s life. Gossip. Bedroom stories. Lurid sex. But what can you expect from a newspaper reporter?”
“I guess I won’t know that till I’ve read it.”
“Don’t waste your time, you won’t learn anything about the books, Mr. Hodges, and isn’t that what we’re here to discuss? Listen, if Darryl Grayson himself were sitting with us at this table, he’d tell you the same thing. A man is nothing. All that matters is his work.”
I had never been able to swallow that notion, but I didn’t want to push him on it. It seemed to be a sore spot that he had nurtured for a long time.
“I don’t mean to be harsh,” he said in a kinder tone. “It’s easy to like Trish: she’s witty and quick and God knows she does turn a phrase. I’m sure she can be delightful when she’s not chasing off to Venus or obsessing over the Grayson brothers. But get her on that subject and she’s crazy. I don’t know how else to put it.”
He gulped his coffee hot. “I’ll tell you how crazy Trish Aandahl is. She thinks Darryl and Richard Grayson were murdered.”
I stared at him as if I had not heard the same words from Trish herself. “Is she serious?”
“Damn right she is. She gets her teeth into something and never lets go of it. She’s like a bulldog.”
“I guess I’m at a disadvantage here. I just got her book and I’ve barely had time to look at it.”
“You won’t find any of this in there. The publisher made her take it out.”
“Why?”
“The obvious reason—she couldn’t prove any of it. It was all conjecture. As a reporter you’d think she’d know better. But I hear she fought with her editor tooth and nail, really took it to the wall. It almost jeopardized the book’s publication. If she hadn’t listened to her agent’s advice, the whole deal might’ve fallen through.”
“What advice?”
“To take what she could get now—publish the biography without all the trumped-up mystery. To keep working the other angle if she believed it that strongly. If she could ever prove it, it might make a book in itself, but as it was, it just undercut the credibility of the book she’d written.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Of course it’s reasonable. But a reasonable person also knows when to stop. What’s it been now, three or four years since her book was published? Four years, and I don’t think she knows anything more today than she did then. But she’s still out there digging. Or so I hear.”
“I take it you and she are not bosom buddies.”
He smiled, struggling to mellow. “We’re certainly not enemies. It’s just her book I don’t like: I don’t like it even without the epilogue, or whatever she called the murder chapter. Who cares how many prostitutes Richard Grayson knew in Seattle, or that even poor Darryl never could keep his own pants zipped? I just don’t like that kind of business. I’m not a prude, I’m just suspicious of it. Trish will tell you she did more than three hundred interviews for her book. I say so what. How can we be certain that even Archie Moon, who was Darryl Grayson’s friend for life, was telling her the truth?”
“Peopl
e usually tell the truth when they know they’re being quoted in a published record of their best friend’s life.”
“That’s what you think. You’ll pardon me if I remain a skeptic. I’m not saying Moon would lie—I just know that people do put their own spin on things. It’s human nature. How can anyone know what really went on between Grayson and Moon over a forty-year friendship, when one of them’s dead and the other might have an ax to grind? Moon’s agenda might be nothing more devious than to have Grayson viewed well by posterity. So he might not tell you something that would undercut that, even though it might well contribute to a better understanding of Grayson’s genius and how he made his books.”
“It sounds like you’re saying that Grayson’s genius had a dark side.”
“Can you imagine any genius that doesn’t? It comes with the territory, as people say these days. You’ll hardly ever find a truly brilliant man who isn’t a little sick in some way. But what difference does it make? The Graysons are of general interest only because of the books they produced. If they hadn’t done the books, they’d be nothing but a pair of swaggering cocksmen, forgotten by everybody including Ms. Trish Aandahl. Anyone can lie down with whores, but only one man could have done the Thomas Hart Benton Christmas Carol . Only one. That book was a creation , you see, and that’s what I choose to focus on. I don’t do interviews for my work, I’m not interested in what people say about the Graysons, all I want to know is what really happened. My disciplines are rigid, precise, verifiable, true. If that sounds like bragging, so be it. I don’t report rumors or pillow talk.”
He held my eyes for a long moment, then said, “You look like you disagree with everything I’ve just said.”
“I’m absorbing it.”
He poured me another cup, got a third for himself, and sat down again. “Very diplomatic, sir. But look, tell the truth—as a bookman—do you actually like biography?”