by John Dunning
A simple question could tie us up for an hour. Huggins was expansive: a gesturing, conjecturing, extrapolating encyclopedia on the Graysons, and I didn’t know enough to be able to decide what of all he was telling me was relevant. Then I thought of the one thing that might boot us up to another level—that scrap of charred paper in my wallet.
“Could I ask you something…in confidence?”
“Certainly.”
I took the paper out and put it on the counter between us.
“What’s your opinion of that?”
He squinted at it, then got out his glasses. I heard him take in his breath as if an old lover, still young and beautiful, had just walked into the room. He looked up: our eyes met over the tops of his glasses, and I could see that my hunch was right. I had shaken him up.
“Where’d you get this?”
“I can’t say. That’s part of what has to be kept confidential.”
“What do you think it is?” he said, suddenly coy.
“You’re the expert.”
He gave a mirthless grin. “You’re trying to tell me that this little fragment is part of something that I’m an expert in. But what can you expect from me, with such a small piece? There are only four letters. How can I tell?”
“The word angel appears in The Raven .”
“I know that. But what’s it prove? You think this is part of Grayson’s Raven ? It isn’t.”
“How can you tell?”
He picked up the fragment and held it up to the light. He looked at it through a jeweler’s eyepiece, then put it back on the counter.
“The paper, for one thing. Grayson would’ve used a much finer stock than this. Probably an old stock. And he’d have printed it damp. You follow what I’m saying—he’d dampen the paper slightly, so the press could get a real bite into it, so the ink would go deep and become part of the page. Look at this and you’ll see the ink’s sitting right on top of the paper, which is a common and I’ll bet cheap brand of copy paper.”
I felt a surge of relief. It was a photocopy, my hunch was right, the real book was still out there, somewhere.
I picked up the paper chip and put it in my wallet. Huggins followed it with his eyes. He seemed irritated when I put the wallet away in my pocket.
He looked at the clock. “It’s getting late.”
I apologized for eating up his evening.
“A few more questions?”
He nodded. “Make it quick, though. I’ve got a headache coming on.”
I took Eleanor’s address book out of my pocket and opened it to the Grayson page.
“Does the name Nola Jean Ryder mean anything to you?”
He took off his glasses and squinted at the book, then at me.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“It just came up,” I said, not wanting to tell him. “It’s probably not important.”
“She was one of Richard’s…girls.”
“Is she still around?”
He gave a faint smile. “Thinking of talking to her?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“What could you possibly hope to gain by talking to one of Richard’s old whores?”
“Is that what she was?”
He shrugged.
“It’s like you said yourself,” I said. “With a man like Grayson, who knows where the answers are?”
He grunted. “You think she’s got your Raven ?”
Before I could answer, he said, “You’ll find everything that’s known about Nola Jean Ryder in Trish’s book.”
“You sure make her sound mysterious.”
“Do I? I don’t mean to, though she’s certainly mysterious enough. She disappeared after the fire and she hasn’t been seen since.”
We looked at each other and the questions rose in my throat. He cut them off unasked. “Look, I don’t know a damn thing about that. I told you before, this is not my thing. If you want to talk about Grayson’s books , then I’m your man. But if you’re interested in people, especially the whores in their lives, then you’ll have to ask Trish. Or read her book.”
I started to put the address book away.
“What other names do you have in there?” He was suspicious now, his tone accusing.
I looked at the page. “Jonelle Jeffords.”
He shrugged.
“Rodney Scofield.”
He sat up with a start. “What about Scofield?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Did Scofield send you here?”
“I don’t even know the man.”
He looked dubious.
“Really.”
“Then where’d you get his name?”
“It’s just something I picked up.”
“Of course it is.” His tone was suddenly mocking, almost hostile. “Really, sir, I think you’ve been taking advantage of me.”
“I can’t imagine how.”
“Can’t you really? Do you think I’m a complete idiot? You come in here and I don’t know you from Solomon Grundy. How do I know who you are or what you really want? You’ll have to leave now. I’m tired.”
Just that quickly, I was hustled to the door.
I took a chance, told him to call me at the Ramada if he had second thoughts, but I probably wouldn’t be there beyond tonight. I sat in the car and looked at his house. The questions had only begun. I still didn’t know why Trish Aandahl thought the Graysons had been murdered, and I never did get to see Huggins’s books.
25
On the way downtown I stopped at a Chinese joint. I ate some great moo-shoo and arrived back at the Ramada at eight o’clock. I sat on the bed and made my phone checks. Leith Kenney was still incommunicado: in Taos, the recorded welcome mat continued on the Jeffordses’ phone. By nine o’clock I was tight in the grip of cabin fever. I tried Trish Aandahl, but there was no answer. Outside, the rain had resumed its hellish patter. Nothing to do at this time of night but wait it out.
At quarter after nine a knock at the door made me jerk to my feet, knocking the phone to the floor. I stood for a moment, that line from Poe running through my head…
“ ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.“
. . . and slowly I moved to the window and parted the curtains. I could see the dark outline of a man, his shoulders and legs and the back of his head. He knocked again: he meant business. He had probably heard the phone falling and knew I was here, and he didn’t seem interested in helping me by moving back out in the light so I could see his face. I bit the bullet: went to the door and opened it.
It was the deskman. “Sorry to disturb you, I just wanted to check and see if that’s your car. I didn’t recognize it from anybody who checked in today.”
I assured him it was mine: the other car had belonged to a friend. He apologized and went away. But he stopped in the courtyard and looked back at the Nash, just long enough to give me the jitters. He didn’t write the plate number down, and I watched him through the curtain until he disappeared into the office.
If I had any thought about staying here past tonight, that ended it. I’d be gone with the dawn, looking for a new place and a new name. I sat on the bed and tried the phone again, but the world was still away from its desk. Kenney and Jeffords I could understand, but Trish had asked me to call, you’d think she’d be there. I would try her each half hour until she came in. I was reaching over to make the ten-o’clock call when it rang almost under my hand. It caught me in that same tense expectancy, and again I knocked it clattering down the table to the floor. I gripped the coiled wire and the receiver bumped its way back up the nightstand into my hands.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Hodges?”
“Yes…yeah, sorry about the racket.”
“It’s okay, I’ve done that a few times myself.” There was an awkward pause. “It’s Allan Huggins.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been thinking about that chip of pape
r you showed me.”
I waited, letting him get to it in his own way.
“Actually, I haven’t thought about anything else since you left.”
“Have you changed your mind about it?”
“No…no.” I heard him breathe…in, out…in, out. “No, I feel sure it’s a photocopy. The question I can’t get out of my mind is, what’s it a photocopy of?…And where’s the original?…And how and when was it made?”
“Interesting questions.”
“I’m wondering if I could see it again. I know I wasn’t too hospitable when you were over earlier. I apologize for that.”
“It’s no problem.”
“Would it be asking too much…Could I perhaps make my own photocopy from your sample? I’d like to study it at greater length.”
“I don’t think I want to do that just now. You can see it again, if you’d like.”
“I would like, yes…very much. The lettering’s what’s getting to me. The more I think of it…I’ve never seen that exact typeface, and yet…”
He didn’t have to elaborate: I knew what was going through his head.
“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he suggested hopefully.
“I’ll give you a call if I can.”
“Please do…please.”
“You could do something for me while we’re at it Call it a trade-off.”
“Surely,” he said, but his voice was wary.
“Tell me why the name Rodney Scofield set you off like a fire.”
“Don’t you really know?”
“No,” I said with a little laugh. “I keep telling you, I never heard of the guy.”
He grunted a kind of reluctant acceptance. “Tomorrow, then. We’ll talk about it then.”
He hung up. I made my phone checks yet again, to no avail. Outside, the rain fell harder, bringing my spirits down with it.
In this mood of desolate pessimism, having exhausted for the moment my last best hopes by telephone, I lay back on the bed and started reading Trish Aandahl’s book on Darryl and Richard Grayson.
26
The earliest Grayson alphabets were etched in the cool, hard sand of Hilton Head Island in the fall of 1937. It was a wild beach then: there were no luxury hotels or golf courses, and the beach was fringed by strips of jungle. On Sunday mornings Grayson would crank up his ‘29 International pickup and clatter out on the oyster-shell road from Beaufort. Never again have I known such a sense of freedom and raw potential , he wrote, years later, to a friend in Atlanta. Never have I had such a clear vision of the road ahead . He was seventeen and on fire with life. He walked the beach alone, glorying in the solitude and in the wonder of his emerging wisdom. His cutting tool was a mason’s trowel. He covered the beach with alphabet, running with the sunrise and racing the tide. He knew all the classic typefaces: he could freehand a Roman face that was startling, and when the tide came up and washed it all away, it left him with a feeling of accomplishment, never loss. It was all temporary, but so necessary—the sweet bewilderment, the sudden clarity, the furious bursts of energy that sometimes produced nothing more than a sense that in his failure he had taken another vital step. It would come, oh, it would come! He could do things at seventeen that he could not have dreamt at sixteen. His youth was his greatest ally, as fine an asset as experience would be when he was forty. A photograph exists—two photographs, reproduced back-to-back in Trish’s book. The young Grayson stands on the beach, his face in shadow, the sand behind him etched with letters. The same scene on the verso, a young woman standing where Grayson had been. The capsule identifies her as Cecile Thomas, the day, September 15, 1931. He was my first love, the dearest, most desperate, most painful. I was eighteen, a year older than he was, but he was in all ways my teacher . On that moonlit night, warm for early autumn, they had become lovers on the sand, obliterating the writing he had done by firelight. Never mind , he said, I’ll make you another one , and he did, running blind in the dark with the tide going out, and when they came back in the morning, the incoming tide had not yet reached it.
Oh, it’s perfect , she had said: when the tide finally did come up and wash it away, I cried, and he laughed and said it was nothing . Someday, Grayson told her, he would create something that couldn’t be washed away, so why cry now for trifles such as this? God, I loved him…still do in a way. I couldn’t believe how it affected me when I read of his death, and I hadn’t seen him in more than twenty-five years . The world was a poorer place when he died. He cared nothing for money or roles or the things that drove others. He learned his art the only way an artist ever learns, by probing the secrets of his own vast heart. He always took the road less traveled, always: he rose up on the page and strode across it, an unspent force even in death. Here he comes now, walking up Hilton Head alone. He carves up the sand with his trowel, running an alphabet of his own creation, knocked off on the spot. The tide licks away the A even as he touches off the small z , and he stands ankle-deep in the surf, breathing the pure Carolina air and tasting his coming victories. Only the spirit of Trish Aandahl is there to keep him company, this woman yet unborn, a kindred essence wafting in the wind. Somewhere in the cosmos they connect, inspiring her to better prose, perhaps, than she can ever do. And slowly as she writes of Grayson, a dim picture emerges of herself. She’s there beside him, coaxing him along the sandy shore. She tells me things about Grayson that would leave a photographer baffled. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
27
I finally reached Leith Kenney at midnight. The conversation was short but potent.
“Mr. Kenney?”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling from Seattle.” I didn’t tell him who I was. I was more interested at this stage in finding out who he was. I played my trump card right out of the gate. “I’m calling about Grayson’s Raven . The 1969 edition.”
I heard him catch his breath, as Lewis and Clark might’ve done at their first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. I knew one thing right away: I had dealt myself a strong hand, even if I couldn’t see all the cards.
I let his pause become my own. Then I said, “Are you interested in talking about it?”
“Oh, yes.” His voice quivered at the prospect. “Yes, sir,” he said, underlining the sir part.
His eagerness was so palpable that I knew I could run the show. “Tell me about Rodney Scofield.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Look, I’m just a guy who’s stumbled into something. I was tipped to you people by somebody who might know a lot more than I do. But right now I don’t know you boys from far left field.”
“Mr. Scofield is a businessman…”
“And?”
“He collects books.”
“Grayson books.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s fair to say that Mr. Scofield is a pretty substantial man.”
“You can check him out. You’ll find him in most of the financial reports that are available in the library.”
“And who are you?”
“Well,” he said as if it should be obvious, “I work for Mr. Scofield.”
“Doing what, besides taking questions about Grayson?”
“That’s my full-time job.”
I thought my way through a stretch of silence. “Would it be fair to say that Scofield would pay a small fortune if a Grayson Raven were to fall into his hands?”
The silence was eloquent. Mr. Scofield would pay more than that. Mr. Scofield was that most dangerous of book animals, the man with the unquenchable passion and the inexhaustible bank account.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said.
I hung up before he could protest. I wouldn’t worry anymore about Leith Kenney or Rodney Scofield. I had their number, I knew where they were, and they’d be there when I wanted them.
Trish was another matter. I let her phone ring ten ti
mes before giving her up. I tried her desk at the Times , but she wasn’t there either.
Jonelle Jeffords continued keeping the world at bay with her husband’s answering machine.
At half past midnight, I shut down for the night.
I would sleep six hours. If supercop didn’t come in the night, I’d be well out of here in the morning.
I had a plan now, a destination that I hoped would take care of the lodging problem. It was a gamble, gutsy as hell. For that reason alone I thought it was probably the safest hotel in town.
In the morning I would become Mr. Malcolm Roberts of Birmingham. I was going back to the Hilton.
I let Trish put me to sleep with her lovely prose.
In the first hour of the new day, I walked in Grayson’s shoes.
28
The Grayson odyssey twisted its way through Georgia half a century ago. The forces that shaped them were already centuries old when they were born. Their grandfather was still alive and whoring when they were boys in grade school, the gnarled old buzzard a whorehouse regular well into his eighties. The old man never stopped righting the Civil War. The big regret of his life was not being born in time to be killed at Fredericksburg, where his father had died in 1862.
A plantation mentality ran the house of Grayson. The father ruled and allowed no dissent. His politics were boll-weevil Democrat and his neck was the color of the clay hills that stretched around Atlanta. Women were placed on pedestals and worshiped, but they quickly lost their sex appeal if they wanted anything more out of life than that. It was Darryl senior’s profound misfortune to marry Claudette Reller, a free spirit who could never quite see the charm of life in a cage. She abandoned her family on a sunny day in 1932, walking off in the middle of her garden-club luncheon without notice or fanfare. Her sons, ages eight and twelve, never saw her again. She was said to have died three years later in Paris. The old man announced it at supper one night and forbade her name to be uttered again under his roof.
The young, fair-haired son obeyed his father well. A psychologist would say, years later, that he never forgave his mother and that every experience with sex was a slap at her memory.