by John Dunning
I pushed past the waiting area and saw Scofield and Kenney sitting at the booth in the corner. They were looking at something on the table between them, studying it so intently they couldn’t even hear the commotion up front.
I walked right over and pulled up a chair. Scofield jerked back, as startled as if I’d attacked him. He grabbed a book off the table and put, it out of sight on his lap. Kenney looked at me with unruffled eyes and I jumped into the breach as if we were all old friends.
“I’m glad to see you didn’t come all this way for nothing.”
“Do I know you?” Kenney was wary now, but in his manner I caught a glimmer of recognition.
“That’s a good ear you’ve got. I’m the guy you’ve been talking to on the phone.”
He didn’t say anything. I could see he was with me but he tried to shrug it off. This was all a moot point: they had what they’d come for.
“Before you go flying back to Tinseltown,” I said, “I should tell you there’s a lot more where that came from.”
“Lots more what?”
“I don’t have time to draw you a picture. I’m talking sixty cartons of Grayson ephemera. I’m talking notes, diaries, letters, sketches, photographs. You name it, I got it.”
Kenney took the news like a world-class poker player. But Scofield began to tremble.
“And, oh, yeah,” I said as an afterthought: “I also happen to have picked up Grayson’s original subscriber list along the way…if something like that could be of any interest to you.”
Scofield fumbled in his pocket and got out a vial of pills. He took two with water. Kenney looked in my eyes and said, “What do you want?”
“Right now just listen. You boys go on up to Seattle and wait for me in your room at the Four Seasons. I’ll either come to you or call you later today or tonight. Don’t talk to anybody about this till I get back to you. Are we all on the same page?”
They looked at each other.
“Yes,” Scofield said in a thin voice. “We’ll be there.”
I got up and left them, pushing my way through the crowd. Outside, the yard looked like a convention of lunatics. People ran back and forth, crawled under cars in the mud, screamed at each other. Two fistfights were in progress off to the side, and in the distance I heard a siren.
I didn’t see Bowman or Trish and didn’t have time to look. I got in the truck and drove away.
I was well up the highway when I realized that something was clinging to my windshield. It was a crisp C-note. Franklin flapped madly against the glass as I banked north into 1-5. I didn’t stop even for him. In a while he lost his hold and blew away.
46
I was waiting at a table in the Hilton coffee shop when Huggins came in. He glanced around nervously, scanning the room twice before he saw me. A flash of annoyance crossed his face, but he chased it away and put on a passive mask in its place. I didn’t move except to raise my eyes slightly as he crossed the room in my direction.
“Mr. Hodges,” he said, sitting down.
“My name isn’t Hodges, it’s Cliff Janeway. I’m a book dealer from Denver.”
If this surprised him, he didn’t show it. His eyes had found the bait that had lured him here, that charred paper chip that had been haunting his dreams since Saturday night. I had put it out on the table, on top of the sheet Trish had brought back from St. Louis.
He leaned over the table and looked at it. “May I?”
“Carefully.”
He picked up the fragment and again gave it the long, hard look through the eyepiece. His breath flared out through his nostrils as he looked. When at last he put the paper down, his eyes looked tired, as if he’d just gone halfway round the world.
“What do you think?”
He grunted. “It’s hard to say.”
“Come on, Mr. Huggins, let’s not play around. The day is going fast and I’ve got lots to do.”
“I’m not sure what you want from me.”
“Let’s start with this.” I shoved the paper from St. Louis across the table and under his nose. “That look like the same alphabet to you?”
It pained him to look: you could see it in his eyes, the sure knowledge that he had something here but he’d never be able to keep it.
“Mr. Huggins?”
“Yes…I guess I’d have to say it probably is.”
We looked at each other.
“So,” he said: “now you can go tell Scofield and that’ll be that.”
I was finding it hard to argue with him. A part of me knew where he was coming from and sympathized with his viewpoint. As a bookman I was offended at the prospect of Scofield buying up every remaining scrap of Grayson’s work. But I had Amy Harper to consider. This stuff was her future.
Suddenly Huggins was talking, one of his now-familiar monologues. But the tone was different: his voice had taken on the soft weariness of the defeated. “Twenty years ago, Grayson was an incredibly fertile field for a collector. He had just died and his books could still be had at almost every auction of fine-press items. I built my own collection piece by piece, scrap by scrap. It was so satisfying. You carve out your expertise, you shape and define it, and because of your scholarship others come into it and find the same pleasures and satisfactions you have. But you remain the leader, the first one they think of when they’ve taken it as far as they want to go with it and they’re ready to sell. Then a man like Scofield comes along and everything changes.”
He sipped his water and gave me a hard look. “I haven’t been able to buy anything now for more than seven years. Only isolated pieces here and there, things that fall into my lap. You can forget the auction houses…Scofield’s man is always there, always. And you can’t outbid him, you’d have to be Ross Perot…I don’t know, maybe it’s time I donated what I’ve got to a library and got out of the Grayson business. The trouble is, I don’t know what else there is in life. I’ve never known anything that can give me the thrill of finding a Grayson variant…the thought of not having that is almost more than I can bear. Now, with my wife gone, the notion of clearing out my Grayson room and giving it all away…and yet, I’ve always been a practical man. When something’s over, it’s over.”
“You could try taking pleasure in what you have.”
He gave me a bitter smile. “I think you know better than that. The thrill is in the hunt, sir.”
“Of course it is. And I wish I could help you.”
“But in the end you’re just what I feared most…Scofield’s man.”
“Not quite that. I wasn’t lying to you, I didn’t know who Scofield was.”
“But you do now, and that’s where you’ll go. I don’t blame you, understand, but I can’t help fretting over it and wishing money didn’t rule the world.”
We seemed to be finished. Then he said, “How did you find it? Was it Otto Murdock?”
I sat up straight. “What about Murdock?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Obviously you know the name.”
“How does he figure into it?”
“The same way everyone else does. He’s been chasing it.”
“You mean the Grayson Raven ?”
“That, or anything else that’ll keep him in potato water for the rest of his life.”
“I understand he was a pretty good Grayson man once.”
“Second only to yours truly,” he said with a sad little smile. “Otto really had the bug, fifteen, twenty years ago.”
“And had a helluva collection to prove it, I’ve been led to believe.”
“Until he started selling it off piece by bloody piece to pay the whiskey man.”
“Where’d he sell it?”
He gave a little laugh. “That shouldn’t be hard to guess.”
“You bought it.”
“As much of it as I could. Otto was going through periods of trying to straighten himself out. Then he’d fall off the wagon and have to sell something. He sold all the minor stuff first. Then, just about the t
ime he was getting to the gold-star items, along came Scofield with all the money in the world to buy them from him. I was like a duck shot right out of the water. Scofield paid him fifteen thousand dollars for a Ben-ton Christmas Carol that wouldn’t get fifteen hundred at auction. How do you compete with somebody like that?”
I let a couple of heartbeats pass, then I said, “Have you seen Murdock recently?”
“Hadn’t seen him for years, till about a month ago.”
“What happened then?”
“He called me up one night and asked if I could get some money together.”
“Was he trying to sell you something?”
“That’s what it sounded like. I never could get him to be specific. All he’d say was that he was working on the Grayson deal of a lifetime. Stuff he’d known about for years but had never been able to get at it. Whoever owned it was unapproachable. But that person had died and now somebody else had come into it, somebody who didn’t know as much or care as much about it. He needed some money to approach her with.”
“How much money?”
“He wasn’t sure. He had seen this person once and he couldn’t tell if she was as naive as she seemed or was just taking him for a ride. My impression was, she wasn’t a heavyweight, but you only get one shot at something like that. Misjudge her and you lose it. Pay too little, lose it. Pay too much, you still lose it. What he asked for was five thousand.”
“He was going to try to steal it.”
“I figured as much. If he was going to pay five, it had to be worth fifty. God knows what a madman like Scofield would pay.”
“Why wouldn’t Murdock go to Scofield for the money in the first place?”
“Who knows what Otto was thinking? If this really was a once-in-a-lifetime Grayson score, you’d want to try to buy it yourself and then sell it to Scofield. That’s how I’d do it, if I was Otto and had a little larceny in my heart.”
“So when he came to you for the five, what’d you tell him?”
“What do you think I told him? I said I’d need to know exactly what I’d be getting for my money. You don’t just hand over five thousand dollars to a man who’s fully capable of drinking it up in a lost weekend.”
Now he wavered. “I made a mistake. I can see it in your face.”
“You both did. He could’ve bought it all for a hundred dollars. She might’ve given it to him just for hauling it out of there.”
He looked ready to cry. He didn’t want to ask, didn’t dare ask, but in the end he had to.
“What the hell are we talking about?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“No,” he said dryly. “I probably don’t.”
“So Murdock came and went. Was that the last time you saw him?”
“Saw him, yes.”
“But you heard from him again.”
“He called me about ten days ago. He had been drinking, I could tell that immediately. He was babbling.”
“About what?”
“He was raving about some limited series of Grayson books that I had missed in my bibliography. He seemed to think Grayson had made a special set, just a few copies of each title, at least since the midfifties.”
“What did you tell him?”
“To find a good hangover cure and go to bed.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“They’re all dead. That’s what he said, they’re all dead, all five of ‘em.”
“What did you make of that?”
“Nothing. He was hallucinating.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“Just about. He rambled on for a while longer. Talked about getting himself together, becoming a real bookman again. Said he was going to write the real story of Darryl Grayson: said it had never been told but he was going to tell it, and when he did, the book world would sit up and take notice. It was all drunken balderdash.”
He looked weary, suddenly older. “If you want to chase down a drunk’s pink elephants, be my guest. Archie Moon and the Rigbys might know something. Otto said he’d gone out to North Bend and talked to them about it.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t take any more.”
He was ready to leave now. As he pushed back his chair, I said, “By the way, did you know Murdock was dead?”
He blinked once and said, “No, I didn’t know that.”
“I’m sure it’s been on the news by now.”
“I don’t read newspapers and I never watch anything but network news on television. I can’t stand these local fools.”
“Anyway, he’s dead.”
“How?…What happened?”
“Murder.”
He blinked again. “What the hell’s happening here?”
“Good question, Mr. Huggins. I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.”
47
A my Harper had brushed out her long red hair and put on her one good dress. She looked less all the time like the doe-eyed schoolgirl I had rescued from Belltown. She had found someone to stay with her children overnight: a good thing, because this was going to run late.
She wouldn’t be doing any lifting and toting today. She was going to sit in a chair and supervise while a billionaire’s handyman did the work for her.
We zipped along 1-90 in the Nash and I told her what the game plan was. Somewhere on the road, ahead of us or just behind, Scofield and Kenney were heading for the same destination: I had called them from Amy’s room and told them where to go. She listened to what I was telling her and demanded nothing. She had a Spartan nature, patient and gutsy and uncomplaining, and I liked her better every time I saw her.
A kind of muted excitement filled the car as we flew past Issaquah for the run into North Bend. I was anxious without being nervous. I knew what we had: I knew the power it would hold over Scofield, and even Amy felt the strength of it as the day gained momentum. I had taken on the role of Amy’s guardian, her agent, in the talks to come. But a murder case was also on the fire: the fate of another woman I cared about greatly was still in doubt. It’s not about money , I thought again. I believed that now more than ever. But money had become so mixed up in it that only the moneyman could help me untangle it, and I wasn’t above using the Grayson papers as a wedge on him.
It seemed impossible but it was still only one o’clock. I thought about Trish and wondered how she was doing with Pruitt. I had left Bowman’s truck at her house and changed over to the Nash before meeting Huggins at the Hilton.
Now I banked into the familiar North Bend off-ramp. The day was lovely, chilly like a mountain pool, and the wind swirled clouds behind the mountain in the distance. For a moment I thought I saw the Indian in the mountain, but when I blinked and looked again, he was gone. I headed down toward the main street and turned into the motel where I’d left the stash.
The black Cadillac was there in the yard.
“They’re here,” I said.
I got out, went to the office, and asked for Rodney Scofield. Room four, the man said, and I walked up the walk and knocked on the door.
Kenney opened it. He had a cocktail glass in his hand, ice bobbing in amber liquid.
We went in. I drew up a chair and Amy sat on the foot of the bed. “This is Miss Amy Harper. She’s running this show. My name’s Cliff Janeway, I’m a book dealer from Denver.”
“Leith Kenney.” He shook hands, first with Amy, then with me.
“Where’s Scofield?” I asked.
“In the bathroom. He’ll be out. Want a drink?”
“Sure. What’re we having?”
“Can you drink Scotch?”
“I’m a William Faulkner bourbon man. That means between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”
He smiled: he knew the quote. Suddenly we were two old bookmen, hunkering down to bullshit. He looked at Amy and said, “Miss Harper?”
“Got a Coke?”
“7-Up.”
“That’ll be cool.”
Kenney and I smiled at each other. He took a 7-Up out of a bag, filled a glass with ice, and poured it for her. He asked how I wanted my drink and I told him just like they shipped it from Kentucky.
A door clicked open and Rodney Scofield came into the room.
He was thin, with a pale, anemic look. His white hair had held its ground up front, retreating into a half-moon bald spot at the back of his head. His eyes were gray, sharp, and alert: his handshake was firm. He sat at the table, his own 7-Up awaiting his pleasure. He had a way about him that drew everyone around to him, making wherever he chose to sit the head of the class. He was a tough old bird, accustomed to giving orders and having people jump to his side. Now he would sit and listen and take orders himself, from a girl barely out of her teens.
It was up to me to set the stage, which I did quickly. “Everything I told you in the restaurant is true. Gentlemen, this is the Grayson score of your lifetime. This young lady here owns it, and she’s asked me to come and represent her interests.”
“Whatever you pay me,” Amy said to Scofield, “Mr. Janeway gets half.”
I looked at her sharply and said, “No way.”
“I won’t even discuss any other arrangement.” She looked at Kenney and said, “If it wasn’t for this man, I’d‘ve given it away, maybe burned it all in the dump.”
“Amy, listen to me. I couldn’t take your money, it’d be unethical as hell, and Mr. Kenney knows that.”
“Lawyers do it. They take half all the time.”
“So do booksellers, but this is different. And you’ve got two kids to think about.”
“Maybe I can help you resolve this little dilemma,” Kenney said smoothly. “Let’s assume for the moment that you’ve really got what you think you’ve got. That remains to be seen, but if it’s true, Mr. Janeway would have a legitimate claim for a finder’s fee.”
I felt my heart turn over at the implication. I had come here chasing five thousand dollars, and now that jackpot was beginning to look small.
“What does that mean?” Amy said.
“It’s a principle in bookselling,” I told her. “If one dealer steers another onto something good, the first dealer gets a finder’s fee.” I looked at Kenney and arched an eyebrow. “Usually that’s ten percent of the purchase price.”