by John Dunning
Kenney was a past president. His field was fine-press books.
But he had not run an ad in the magazine since 1986. I found out why in that year’s December issue, in a news column headlined “Kenney to Close S.F. Bookstore.” No, he laughed, he was not going broke. He had been offered a job that was simply too lucrative and challenging to pass up. He was going to create a world-class library on the career of Darryl Grayson. He would be looking for anything that pertained to the man’s life or work—ephemera, photographs, correspondence, business records, and, of course, the books, in any quantity. Multiple copies were eagerly sought. The work of Richard Grayson was also of interest, Kenney said, but it was clear from the tone that he was considered an association figure. As far as posterity was concerned, there was only one Grayson.
I didn’t want to park in the Hilton garage: my rust bucket was a little too prominent for a class hotel like that. I put on my raincoat and carried my bag, leaving the car parked on the street.
I rode up the elevator to the lobby on the ninth floor. Paid cash for two nights and told them I might be longer. I asked for a quiet room on a high floor, where I could see the city.
The clerk had rooms on fifteen, seventeen, and twenty.
Seventeen would be fine, I said. I was given a key to 1715.
I rode the elevator up and walked along the hall. The door to my old room was open. I walked past and looked in.
Two men were there, going through the wastebas-ket. The big one with the pale olive skin stood up and turned as I came by. I turned as he did, letting him see the back of my tired gray head.
I opened the door and went into my new room. Couldn’t help gloating just a little as my door clicked shut.
Score one for old dad in the game of guts football.
Up yours, supercop.
32
I sat on the bed and called Leith Kenney in Los Angeles. This time I had no trouble getting through to him.
He had had a dozen hours to think about it and decide how he wanted to handle it. He gave me the direct frontal approach, which I liked. We were two bookmen talking the same language, even if only one of us knew it.
If the material was genuine, he wanted it. If there were questions of ownership or provenance, he would still pay top money for possession and would hash out the legality when the thing went to court. This to him was a foregone conclusion. We were talking about a substantial sum of money, and people tend to bicker when money arises. At the same time, Kenney had no doubt where The Raven would end up, where it should end up. He was prepared to top any offer, many times over. He was prepared to fly to Seattle at a moment’s notice or fly me to Los Angeles in Scofield’s private jet. He was prepared for just about anything.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If you’ve got something you even think might be the genuine article, we want to see it and we’ll pay you for that privilege no matter how it turns out. We’ve been looking for this item for a very long time.”
“That’s pretty good, for a book the bibliographer swears was never made.”
“We know it was made. Mr. Scofield has seen it. He’s held it in his hands. Maybe Allan Huggins wouldn’t be quite so smug if he had done that.”
Before I could ask, he said, “It was a long time ago, and that’s all I want to say about it until I know more about you. You’ve got to appreciate my position, sir. I don’t even know your name. Mr. Scofield may be the only man alive who has actually touched this book, and we don’t want to be put in the position of giving away what we know about it.”
That was fair enough. I didn’t like it, but I had to live with it.
“Remember one thing,” Kenney said. “If you do turn it up, people like Huggins will be all over you. Don’t make any deals on it without giving us a chance to top their bids. We will top them, you’ll be shocked at how much. And you’ll be doing yourself or your client a terrible disservice if you sell it anywhere else.”
At last we were down to bedrock. The big question.
“How much money are we really talking about here, Mr. Kenney?”
“Whatever you’d like.”
33
I didn’t move for a while: just sat on the bed listening to my inner voice. It drew my mind back across the hall to the room where Eleanor and I had spent our last few hours together.
Homework’s finished, said the muse. One more phone call, maybe two, and you can hit the street.
In the room across the hall, Eleanor had mailed a letter. Against my better judgment, I had watched her write it and then I had let her send it off.
What was it, who got it, where had it gone?
Questions with no answers, but sometimes the muse will give you a hint. Her nearest and dearest was one obvious call, a risky one I’d rather not make on this telephone. Still the letter had to be chased—if it deadended, at least it would lead up an alley that had to be checked anyway.
And then there was Trish, a source of growing discontent. I seemed to have lost her in the heat of the moment. She faded to black while I scrambled around covering my tracks, and now, suddenly, my need to hear her voice was urgent.
The muse played it back to me.
Call me, she said. Don’t disappear, I have some things to tell you.
Having said that, she herself had dropped off the earth.
So the nightwork was there. Chase the letter, track down Aandahl.
I called her home, wherever that was, but the telephone still played to an empty house. I tried her desk at the paper, without much hope. At the end of three rings there was a half-ring, indicating a shift to another line.
A recording came on, a woman’s voice.
“Hi, this’s Judy Maples, I’ll be running interference for Trish Aandahl for a few days. If it’s vital, you can reach me through the main switchboard, four six four, two one one one.”
I called it. The operator wouldn’t give me a number for Maples, but did offer to patch me through to her at home. The phone rang in some other place.
“Hello.”
“Judy, please.”
“This is she.”
“I’m a friend of Irish.”
“Aha. What friend would you be?”
“One who’s a little worried about her.”
“She’s fine. Something came up suddenly and she had to go out of town.”
“When will she be back?”
“Not sure, couple of days maybe.” There was a kind of groping pause. “Trish left a package for a friend, if you happen to be the one.”
“What’s in it?”
“Can’t tell, it’s sealed up in a little Jiffy bag. Do you think it’s for you?”
“Is there a name on it?”
“Initials.”
I took a long breath. “How about C.J.?”
“You got it. Trish didn’t know if you’d get this far or not. For the record, I have no idea what this is about. I’m just the messenger gal. She told me to say that. It’s true. I left your package with the guard at the paper. If you want to go pick it up, I’ll call him and tell him to release it to you.”
I said okay, though nothing about it felt okay.
I walked out past my old room. The cops were gone and the place was closed tight. I rode the elevator down, drew my raincoat tight, pulled my hat down to my eyebrows. The day was going fast as I went out into the timeless, endless rain. Everything in the world was gray, black, or dark green.
I fetched my car, went to the Times , and got my package.
It was a cassette tape, wrapped in a single piece of copy paper. A cryptic four-line note was handwritten on the paper.
If you’d like to stay at my house, consider it yours. I have no reason to believe you’d be unsafe there. The key’s in the flowerpot. Don’t mind the dogs, they’re both big babies.
Trish
A postscript told her address, on Ninetieth Avenue Southeast, Mercer Island.
I put it back in the bag and slipped it under my seat, then moved on to t
he main business of the evening.
I wanted to be well out of the downtown area when I made this call. I drove south, got off the freeway near Boeing, and looked for a telephone. Phones are like cops: there’s never one when you need it.
At last I stood at a little lean-in booth and made the call. It was a hard quarter to drop.
I heard it ring three times in North Bend.
“Hello.”
“Crystal?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Janeway.”
You could eat the silence, it was that heavy. I didn’t know how to begin, so I began by telling her that. But she already knew.
“The police were here. They’ve been here off and on since noon.”
Good for the cops, I thought: good for them, not so hot for me.
I was getting nervous. It already seemed I’d been on that telephone a long time.
“Are the police there now?”
“No. They may come back tonight.”
The funny thing was, she never once stated the obvious: she never said, “They’re looking for you, you know,” or anything like that. Still, she wasn’t going to give me what I needed unless I could move her that way.
“I’m going to ask you for something. I wouldn’t blame you if you told me to go to hell. I haven’t done much right so far.”
She was listening.
“I guess I’m asking you to trust me. I’d like you to believe that everything I’ve done, at least after that first night, I’ve done for Eleanor.”
She punished me with silence. I endured it till I couldn’t anymore.
“Crystal”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“I’m trying io find your daughter.”
“I guess I knew that. And I don’t know why, but I do believe it.”
The wall between us crumbled. Whatever she’d been telling herself with the logical part of her brain gave way to instinct.
“Even when we were talking to the police, I kept thinking of you,” she said. “Kind of like an ace in the hole.”
“That’s what I am. It may not be much…”
“I get feelings from people. Not psychic, nothing like that, but people hit me either warm or cold. When I hugged your neck on the porch that first night, I felt the warm between us. Sometimes people just connect, you know what I mean? I could see that between you and Ellie right from the start. It was warm, but not the kinda thing a mother needs to worry about…except maybe on her side.”
She gave a little laugh. “That’s why I never really gave up on it, even when it came out why you were really here.”
“I’m going to find her if I can. I don’t know how and I’m starting pretty far back. I need your help.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Are the cops taping this call?”
“They talked about doing that. There was some doubt about whether it’d be productive. Just a minute.” She put the phone down and blew her nose. Then she said, “They’re not exactly expecting a ransom demand.”
“When will you know?”
“They may come back tonight and put it on. Or they may not.”
“If they do and I call back, could you let me know?”
“How?”
“Clear your throat when you answer the phone. I’ll try to find a way to let you know if I’ve got anything new.”
“Or you could call Archie. He wants what we all want.” “A couple of questions. Do you know a guy named Pruitt?“
“He’s the one the cops are looking for. They think he took Ellie with him.”
“Had you ever had any contact or dealing with Pruitt before this came up?”
She paused as if groping for words. “I knew who he was.”
“Tell me about it.”
“A crazy man. He seemed to think we had something…”
“A book.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. He wouldn’t go away, though, wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d go to town and see him watching from a car. Then he started bothering us on the telephone. At night he’d call, play music. Just a few notes, but we knew it was him.”
“He was stalking Eleanor too.”
She expelled a shivery breath.
“Listen, did you get a letter from Eleanor in yesterday’s mail? It would’ve probably been on Hilton Hotel stationery.”
“It never came here.”
“It may come tomorrow. What time is your mail delivered?”
“Whenever he gets here. Early afternoon as often as any.”
“I’ll try to call then.”
“What’s in the letter?”
“That’s what I need to find out. It might be her laundry bill. For our purposes, think of it as some dark secret she’d rather not tell the world. Is there anybody else she might send something like that to?”
“Amy Harper,” she said immediately. “Nobody but Amy.”
I remembered the name. “Eleanor mentioned her once. Said she’d gone to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there.”
“Amy moved into Seattle, I coulda told her that. Her life out here’d turned to hell the last six months, especially after her mom died. I worry about that child, don’t know what’s gonna become of her. She’s made some wrong choices in the last few years. But really a sweet kid. She and Ellie were like sisters all through school.”
“I seem to remember there was some kind of rift between them.”
“They had a falling-out over Coleman Willis. That’s the fool Amy let knock her up when she was still at Mt. Si High. Then she made it worse: married the fool and quit school and had a second kid the next year. The trouble between them was simple. Ellie had no use for Coleman Willis, couldn’t be in the same room with the man. Amy was still trying to make it work. You can see what happened.”
“Sure.”
“But Amy’s no fool. There came a time when even she’d had enough of Coleman and his bullshit, and she took her kids and left him. She and Ellie got together once or twice after that. I really think they’d fixed things up between ‘em, I think they were good as new.”
“Is there a phone number for Amy?”
“God, Amy can’t afford a telephone, she’s lucky she’s got a roof over her head. I’ve got an address if you want it…it’s a rooming house on Wall Street. Are you familiar with the section they call Belltown?”
I wasn’t.
“It’s easy, right off downtown. Just a minute, I’ll get it for you.”
34
It was just fifteen blocks from the Hilton, about as far as Oz is from Kansas. It made me remember myself as a kid, bouncing around for a year of my life in places not much better than this. Now I go through these neighborhoods and the memory of rank and scummy beds hits me like a shot of bad whiskey. It’s a chilly reminder of what life hands out to those who slip and can’t climb up again. The young seem unbothered by the lack of elegance: time, they believe, will see them through it, and time when you’re twenty is a thing you’ll never run out of. You can sleep anywhere when you’re running on your rims, and you don’t give too much thought to the dripping tap or the cracked and faded walls or the mice that come tearing across your landscape. The young endure and hope, until suddenly they’re forty and time isn’t what it once was. The old suffer and save their hopes for the real things in life—a high, dry present and a quiet place to die.
On the second floor of this environment, at the end of a long, dim corridor, lived Amy Harper. The floor creaked with every step and the walls were thin. I could hear people talking—in one room shouting— as I walked past the doors and stopped at 218.
Be there, I thought, and I knocked.
She was: I could hear her move inside. Soft footsteps came at me and a soft voice asked who I was. I said I was a friend of Eleanor’s.
She opened the door and looked at me through a narrow crack. I could see a chain looped across the crack, a little piece of false security she had probably bought and installed herself. A man like
me could break it with one kick, long before she had time to get the door closed.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“My name’s Janeway, I’m a friend of Eleanor’s.”
For a moment she didn’t know what to do. I got the feeling she’d have opened the door if she’d been there alone. But I could hear a baby crying and I knew she was thinking about her children.
“Crystal gave me your address,” I said, and at that she decided to let me in.
It was just what I’d expected—a one-room crib with a battered couch that pulled out and became a bed; a table so scarred by old wars and sweating bottles that you couldn’t tell what color it had been; two pallets for the children; a kitchenette with a gas stove and an old refrigerator; a bathroom the size of a telephone booth. There was one good chair: she had been sitting in it, reading a paperback. Stephen King, the grand entertainer of his time. God bless Stephen King when you couldn’t afford a TV.
She had been nursing the baby: she still held it in the crook of her arm. Her left breast had soaked through the faded blouse she wore. She covered it, draping a towel over her shoulder, excusing herself to put the child in the pallet next to the other one. “So, hi,” she said with a cheery smile as she stood and brushed back a wisp of red hair. Crystal had called her a sweet kid and the adjective seemed just right. Amy Harper had.the sweetest face I’d ever seen on a girl. You looked at her and saw a young woman who wanted to love you.
She couldn’t offer much—a cup of instant decaf or a diet Coke maybe—but her manners were alive and well. I let her fix me some coffee, mainly because she seemed to want to. She went into the kitchenette, stand-up room for only one, and turned on the gas. “So how is Eleanor?” she called back across the room. Apparently they had not been in touch.
“Actually she’s not so good,” I said, sitting on the chair where she had been. “She seems to’ve disappeared on us.”
She looked out of the kitchen, her face drawn and suddenly pale.
“I’m trying to find her.”
“What’re you, some kind of detective?”