by John Dunning
“You didn’t have much about her in your book.”
“I didn’t know much about her. She was just a girl Richard met and brought home. I couldn’t find out where she came from and nobody knows where she went. It’s like she dropped off the earth when the Graysons died.”
“How much work did you actually do on her, trying to track her down?”
“Quite a bit. Probably not enough. By then it was obvious even to me that I wasn’t going to get it in the book. I was still making more changes on the galleys than the publisher wanted to live with, and we were up against a horrendous deadline. The book was already scheduled and promoted as a March title and publishers want everything done yesterday.”
She shrugged and poured herself more coffee. “I had to let her go. Then, after the book came out, I tried to keep up with it, but I had a living to make. I wasn’t exactly Robert Ludlum, flush with royalties. It made me some money, but not enough to stop being a working gal.”
I reached for the coffeepot. “So what do you think about it now? Are you thinking this missing woman is hiding out down there in Taos?”
“When I saw the truck pull up, I didn’t think at all, I just wanted to get out of there. Halfway back to town I realized that, yeah, I had been thinking of them as one. In my head, Ryder had become Jeffords.”
“Which is at least possible, I guess.”
We looked at each other.
I said, “If you had to make book on it now, what do you think happened twenty years ago?”
“I think Nola Jean Ryder set fire to that shop and killed the Graysons. I’ve always thought that.”
“Okay,” I said in a semidoubting voice. “Make me believe it.”
“I probably can’t, unless you’re willing to give me some veteran’s points for intuition.”
“I’ll play with you up to a point. But you’ve got to have something concrete, you can’t just pull this intuition act out of thin air.”
“I’ve got three things and that’s all, you can take it or leave it. First, I talked to the fire investigator who worked the Grayson fire. This man is extremely competent, and he’s convinced it was arson. He’s got my slant on life, if you know what I mean…we talk the same language, he gets the same vibes I do. You don’t meet many people like that, and when you do, you listen to what they say. And he knows that fire was set, it just killed him not to be able to prove it. In a thirty-year career you get maybe half a dozen like that, so strong yet elusive. It sticks in your craw and you remember every bloody detail till the day you die. That’s my first point.
“Here’s the second. Nola Jean Ryder was very much in evidence at the Grayson place all through the last year of their lives and was never seen again afterward. She was there the day of the fire. Archie Moon saw her arguing with Grayson. Her relationship with Grayson was volatile, very stormy: he couldn’t seem to live with or without her, and toward the end it got so bad it affected his work. One man I talked to saw Ryder in the North Bend pub that afternoon, drinking with some guys. She went off with one of them and was gone a couple of hours. Then she was seen walking back to Grayson’s in the early evening, in a light rain. That’s the last time anybody ever saw or to my knowledge heard of Nola Jean Ryder. A few hours later the Graysons died and she dropped off the edge of the earth.
“Last point. Nobody who knew her doubts that she was capable of doing it. She had a temper that went off like a firecracker and burned at a full rage for hours. Even today it makes people uneasy to talk about her. Archie Moon told me some stuff, then he clammed up and called it ancient history and said he didn’t want to talk anymore. Rigby wouldn’t talk at all. Crystal at least was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, for a while anyway. Nobody could understand the hold she had on Grayson: it was as if, after a lifetime filled with women, he had met the one who brought him to his knees.”
“This is Darryl Grayson we’re talking about now.”
“Absolutely. Richard’s the one who first met her, but it was Darryl Grayson who wound up with her. I guess things like that can’t be explained, how a woman can get under the skin of even a strong man and make him do just about anything.”
“And vice versa.”
“Yes. There isn’t much that separates us when you get down to what counts.”
I sat thinking about what she’d told me, then it was my turn to talk. I told her about Amy Harper and she listened like a bug-eyed kid, trying to imagine that treasure hidden all those years in the Harper woman’s attic. “I never understood why she was so hostile when I tried to interview her. Now I know. She considered Grayson her own personal territory. She was going to write her own book.”
Then I told her about Otto Murdock. I watched the sense of wonder drain out of her face, replaced by horror and dread.
“Did you call the police?”
“Sure. I seem to spend a lot of my time doing that.”
“Where’d you call them from?”
“Phone booth not far from Murdock’s.”
“Did you talk to Quintana?”
“He didn’t seem to be there. Supercops in this neck of the woods have a different work ethic than I used to have.”
“Did you tell the dispatcher this was part of Quintana’s case?”
“I had to. I’ve told you how important that is, for the main guy to know that stuff right out of the gate.”
She took a deep breath. “Sounds to me like you did everything but give them your name.”
“I did that too. I wanted to make sure it got to him right away. That part of it doesn’t matter anymore, he’d know it was me anyway. They’ve got me on tape twice now and I’ve never been much of a ventriloquist. They’ll also have the paper I left.”
“What paper?”
“Last Friday when I went to Murdock’s with Eleanor, I took some pricey books out of his store. I left an offer taped to the canvas bag.”
She closed her eyes, then opened them wide. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You left him a note and signed your name to it. Then you went back there tonight and the note was still there but he was dead, and you left the note there for the police to find. Is that about it?”
“It’s a bookseller’s code, Trish—thou shalt not steal thy colleague’s books. I owed the man three thousand dollars. Now I owe it to his estate, wherever that goes. Maybe he was one of those nuts who left everything to his pet cat, but that doesn’t change my obligation to him. If I walked out with that note, I’d be stealing his books, in the eyes of the law and in my eyes too.”
She looked at Grayson’s notebook but did not touch it. “What about this?”
“I didn’t steal that, Murdock did. When I’m finished with it, it goes back to Amy Harper.”
She gave me a long, sad look.
“All right,” I said, “what would you have done?”
“I can’t even imagine. I’m not making light of it, it’s just that I’m starting to worry about your chances of ever getting back to Denver as a free man.”
“I’ll worry too if you think that’ll help. But I’m still going to pay off Murdock’s cat, so I can own those books with a clear conscience and not add grand theft to all the other stuff I’ve got hanging.”
She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she had to be thinking.
“If this is getting too dicey for you, I can understand that. If you want to change your mind, I’ll understand that.”
“No,” she said too quickly. Then, after a few seconds’ thought: “No, I’m fine.”
She gestured at Grayson’s notebook. “But look what you’ve done, you’ve messed up another crime scene. Quintana will have your head on a stick.”
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t have to find out.”
“I hate to break this to you, Janeway, but luck is not the first word that crosses my mind when I think of you.”
“Then you’ll have to admit that I’m due for a break.”
“You’re hanging by a thread. You’re
walking a tightrope with deep trouble on both sides of you. It had to occur to you that this little notebook just might be the motive for that old man’s murder.”
“Then why didn’t the killer take it?”
“How should I know?…Maybe he couldn’t find it…you said yourself the place was a mess.”
“He didn’t even look for it, that’s what I’m telling you. The place was a mess, but it was an accumulated mess. There weren’t any drawers emptied, no papers thrown around. I didn’t see any ashes on the floor. I don’t think the killer even knew this notebook was there.”
“Then why was Murdock killed?”
“I don’t know that. All I can tell you is, it’s different than the others.”
“Different killers?…Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, it’s the same guy, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find one motive at the bottom of it. But he was drawn to these guys for different reasons. Carmichael was killed for what was in Pruitt’s house. Same thing with Hockman, years ago: he was killed for what he had. Murdock was killed for what he knew.”
She leaned over and looked at the notebook close up. But she avoided touching it, as if whatever lay beneath its cover had been hopelessly tainted. “It’s still a wonderful motive for murder. Imagine what someone like Huggins would pay for it. He’d sell his house to get it. It’s the map to Treasure Island, the only thing a Grayson freak would ever need for the scavenger hunt of his dreams.”
I was thinking the same thing, with Scofield playing the Huggins role. A rich man could chase down the subscribers or their heirs and suck the market dry in no time. Each year fewer Graysons would appear at auction and no one would quite know why. Suddenly dealers would list them in catalogs as rare and mean it. In ten years the prices on the few odds and ends would be stratospheric.
I told her about Scofield and Kenney and about the interesting talk I’d had with Mrs. Kenney earlier in the evening. She listened with her fingers to her lips and came to the same conclusion I had reached a few hours before.
Kenney and Scofield were flying in to meet Pruitt.
That meant Pruitt had been in touch, sometime since I last spoke with Kenney, probably well within the last twenty-four hours.
“My God, he’s found the book,” Trish said breathlessly.
“That…would seem to be the case.”
“What else could it mean?”
“I don’t know what it means. Or might mean for Eleanor.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna be there when the deal goes down. After that it’s up for grabs.”
She said something under her breath that sounded like “Jesus.”
I nudged Grayson’s notebook in her general direction. “Maybe you should break down and give this a look. It tells us some things we never knew before.”
“Such as what?”
“It turns out that Grayson did a tiny lettered run for each of his books. A superlimited series that went to a few select customers.”
“I don’t remember seeing that in Huggins.”
“It wasn’t in Huggins. I looked.”
“Huggins would never leave something like that out.”
“Unless he never knew about it. Or maybe he did know and couldn’t verify it, like the fact that Grayson was working on another Raven .”
“This is different than another Raven . The Raven might not even exist. But if there was a lettered series, Huggins would have to have it.”
“But the limitation was so small it was next to nothing. None of the books has ever turned up to prove their existence, and until now it was assumed by everybody that Grayson’s records all went up in the fire.”
She still made no move to pick up the notebook. I picked it up for her and opened it to the first page.
“Each title had five hundred numbered copies. There were also five lettered copies. These were for customers who had been with Grayson from the beginning…the faithful. They loved his books way back when everybody else could care less.”
I watched her eyes. It was beginning to come to her now, she was starting to see the dark road we were heading into.
“These lettered copies usually preceded the regular run by a month or so,” I said.
Suddenly she knew where we were going. I could see it in her eyes.
“ A ,” I told her, “was a fellow named Joseph Hockman, of St. Louis, Missouri.”
She didn’t say anything. She reached across the table and took the notebook out of my hands. She read the name in Grayson’s own hand, as if nothing less would make her believe it. She put it down on the table, looked across at me, picked it up, and read it again.
“ B ,” I said, “was Mr. Reggie Dressier of Phoenix, Arizona. C was Corey Allingham of Ellicott City, Maryland. D was Mike Hollingsworth, looks like a rural route somewhere in Idaho. E was Laura Warner of New Orleans. That’s all there were. The faithful five.”
She finally got past Joseph Hockman and let her eyes skim the page. “He knew Laura Warner from Atlanta.”
“I know he did. I read your book.”
“Jesus!…Have you checked these other names yet?”
“I’ve only had the damn thing a couple of hours. I didn’t want to make any police checks from this telephone, even to departments a thousand miles from here. There are other offices I could check, but they won’t be open at midnight.”
“No, but the newspapers will be.”
She sat at her telephone and made some calls: to night city editors at the Arizona Republic , the Baltimore Sun , the Idaho Statesman , and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. While people in distant cities chased down any clip files that might exist, we sat at the table drinking coffee.
Now that she had begun on Grayson’s notebook she couldn’t leave it alone. “I’ve interviewed some of these people. Look, here’s Huggins…number twenty-three of the regular run. He got in early.”
A minute later she came to Otto Murdock, number 215.
“Let’s look at what else we’ve got,” I said. “I hear dawn cracking.”
We had our physical evidence spread out on the table between us. We had Richard’s poem, which Trish had yet to read. We had the paper chip from Pruitt’s house, and the sheet she had brought back from St. Louis with the two dim letters standing out in the soot. And I had brought in from the car an envelope containing the photographs I had found in Amy Harper’s attic.
Trish opened the envelope and looked at the first picture—the Eleanor woman, shot at Grayson’s printshop in May 1969.
“Imagine how the kid must’ve felt, finding this,” she said. “You grow up thinking you know where you come from. Your home and family are the real constants in life. Then in one second you see that nothing’s what you thought it was.”
She turned the picture down and looked at the one beneath it. Three people walking in the woods: the Eleanor woman, another woman, and a man.
“Look at this,” she said. “There’s Charlie Jeffords.”
“Really?” I took the picture out of her hand. The guy was standing in a little clearing, smirking at the camera. The Eleanor woman was posing with him in the same sleeveless blouse, her arm over his shoulder. The other woman stood a few feet away, clearly unhappy.
“This is Jeffords?” I said. “You’re sure of that?”
“Sure I’m sure. He’s got dark hair here and that horny leer of his’ll never be there again, but yeah. Same guy I talked to in Taos.”
“I wonder who the other woman is.”
She shook her head. “This bothers me a lot. It’s fairly obvious now that Jeffords was a player of some kind in Grayson’s life and I missed it. Damn.”
I wanted to move her past it, beyond her own shortcomings. I took the handle of my spoon and changed the subject, nudging the chip of paper until my words still and whisp lined up opposite her Fr .
“I’m no expert,” I said. “But this typography looks the same to me.”
“They seem to be
the same point size. But the letters are different so it’s hard to be sure.”
I unfolded the library copy I had made of the original “Raven” and showed her the words still and whisp where I had circled them in the fifth stanza. “Here’s where your Fr comes from. Fourth line, second stanza, first word. ‘From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.’”
But I could see she had already accepted the inevitability of its being there. She picked up the yellow pages and read Richard’s poem. I watched her face as she read it, but she went through the entire thing deadpan.
“What do you make of this?” she said, putting it down.
I told her what I thought, the obvious supple-mented with guesswork. It was a rough draft of something, hand-dated July 1967, two years before the Graysons died. There were numerous strike-outs and places where lines had been rewritten between lines. In the margins were long columns of rhyme words, many keyed to the dominant suffix ore . Mixed among the common words— core, store, door, lore — were exotic and difficult possibilities such as petit four, centaur , and esprit de corps .
“Whore,” she said, looking up from the page. “That’s one Poe couldn’t use.”
In technique it was like “The Raven,” written out in eighteen full stanzas with the Poe meter and cadence. The tone was allegorical, like the old Orson Welles version of Julius Caesar in a blue serge suit. You couldn’t quite be sure what was real and what had been skewed for effect, or how much might just be the author’s own grim fantasy.
The style was in part mythic. It told the story of two young gods, one fair, the other dark: brothers forced to choose between good and evil when they were too young to understand the consequences. The road to hell was an orgy without end, lit up with laughter and gay frolic. Salvation came at a higher price.
One took the path of least resistance and tumbled into hell. The other chose the high road, finding strength in purpose and contentment in his work. But temptation was a constant, and in the end the darkhaired god was his own undoing.
Rigby was the symbol of blind youth. His was the only proper name in the tale. Richard had chosen to write it that way, the entire eighteen stanzas a lecture to youth.