by John Dunning
“That doesn’t sound like much,” Amy said.
“In this case it could he a bit more than that,” Kenney said.
I leaned forward and looked in Amy’s face. “Trust me, it’s fine.”
“Let’s move on,” Kenney said. “Let’s assume we’re all dealing in good faith and everybody will be taken care of. Where’s the material?”
“It’s not far from here,” I said. “Before we get into it, though, I need to ask you some questions. I’d like to see that book you bought back in the restaurant.”
Kenney was immediately on guard. “Why?”
“If you humor me, we’ll get through this faster.”
“What you’re asking goes beyond good faith,” Kenney said. “You must know that. You’ve told us a fascinating story but you haven’t shown us anything. I’ve got to protect our interests. You’d do the same thing if you were me.”
I got up and moved around the bed. “Let’s you and me take a little walk.” I looked at Amy and said, “Sit tight, we’ll be right back.”
We went down the row to the room at the end. I opened the door and stood outside while he went in alone. When he came out, ten minutes later, his face was pale.
My first reaction to the Grayson Raven was disappointment. It’s been oversold as a great book , I thought as Kenney unwrapped it and I got my first real look. It was half-leather with silk-covered pictorial boards. Grayson had done the front-board design himself: his initial stood out in gilt in the lower corner. The leather had a still-fresh new look to it, but the fabric was much older and very fine, elegant to the touch. In the dim light of the motel room it gave off an appearance of antiquity. The boards were surprisingly thin: you could take it in your hands and flex it, it had a kind of whiplash suppleness, slender and tough like an old fly rod. The endpapers were marbled: the sheets again had the feel of another century. You don’t buy paper like that at Woolworth’s and you don’t buy books like this on chain-store sale tables. The slipcase was cut from the same material that had been used for the boards: the covering that same old silk. A variation of the book’s design, but simpler, serving only to suggest, was stamped into the front board of the slipcase. My first reaction passed and I felt the book’s deeper excellence setting in. The effect was of something whisked here untouched from another time. Exactly what Grayson intended, I thought.
I opened it carefully while Kenney stood watch. Scofield hadn’t moved from his chair, nor had Amy. I leafed to the title page where the date, 1969 , stood out boldly at the bottom. A plastic bag containing some handwritten notes had been laid in there: I picked it up and moved it aside so I could look at the type without breaking my thought. The pertinent letters looked the same. Later they could be blown up and compared microscopically and linked beyond any doubt, if we had to do that. For my purpose, now, I was convinced.
I flipped to the limitation page in the back of the book. It was a lettered copy, E , and was signed by Grayson.
E was New Orleans. Laura Warner’s book.
“Well,” I said to Scofield. “How do you like your book?”
“I like it fine.”
“Then you’re satisfied with it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” His eyes were steady, but there was something about him…a wavering, a lingering discontent.
“Are you satisfied you got what you paid for?…That’s what I’m asking.”
“It’s the McCoy,” Kenney said. “If it’s not, I’ll take up selling shoes for a living.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have to do that, Mr. Kenney,” I said. “But something’s wrong and I can’t help wondering what.”
They didn’t say anything. Kenney moved away to the table and poured himself another drink.
“On the phone you told me something,” I said. “You said Scofield had touched the book and held it in his hands.”
I looked at Scofield. “What I seem to be hearing in all this silence is that this is not the book.”
“It’s not the one I saw,” Scofield said. “I don’t know what this is. It may be some early state or a variant, maybe some experiment that Grayson meant to destroy and never did.”
Kenney sipped his drink. “It’s a little disturbing because we know that Grayson didn’t do lettered books.”
“So the hunt goes on,” I said with a sly grin.
Scofield’s eyes lit up. This was what kept him alive as he headed into his seventh decade. The hunt, the quest, that same hot greed that sent Cortez packing through steamy jungles to plunder the Aztecs.
I fingered the plastic bag.
“That’s just some ephemera we found between the pages,” Kenney said.
I opened the bag and looked at the notes. One was from Laura Warner, an enigma unless you knew how to read it. Pyotr , she had written, don’t you dare scold me for teasing you when you yourself tease so. It does please me that you can laugh at yourself now. Was this a test to see if I’d notice? How could you doubt one who hangs on your every word? I’m returning your little trick, lovely though it is, and I await the real book with joyful anticipation .
None of us rehashed the words, though the last line hung heavy in the room. I opened the second note, a single line scratched out on notebook paper. Hang on to this for me, it’ll probably be worth some money. Nola .
“What do you make of it?” I said.
“Obviously it’s passed through several hands,” Kenney said. “People do leave things in books.”
I turned the pages looking for the poem “Annabel Lee.” I found it quickly, with the misspelled word again misspelled.
Kenney had noticed it too. “Strange, isn’t it?”
I held the page between my ringers and felt the paper. I thought of something Huggins had said: there’s no such thing as a perfect book. If you look with a keen eye, you can always find something. I pressed the page flat against the others and saw that the top edge trim was slightly uneven. There’s always something.
“Just a few more things and we can get started,” I said. “I know you boys are dying to get into this stuff, but you have to help me a little first.”
“What do you want?” Scofield said.
“I want to know everything that happened when you saw that other Raven and held it in your hands. I want to know when it happened, how, where, who was involved, and what happened after that. And I want to know about Pruitt and where he came from.”
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with you.”
“I’ve got a hunt of my own going, Mr. Scofield. I’m hunting a killer and I’ve got a hunch you boys are sitting on the answers I’ve been looking for.”
48
Twelve years ago, Pruitt had been a hired gun for Scofield Industries. He was a roving troubleshoot-er whose job took him regularly into fifteen states, the District of Columbia, Europe, South America, and the Far East. Within the company he was known as the Hoo-Man, an inside joke that had two cutting edges. HOO was short for his unofficial title, head of operations, but in private memos that floated between department heads it was often spelled WHO . Pruitt knew who to see, who to avoid, who would bend, who would bribe. In third-world countries, Scofield said without apology, bribery was a way of life. If you wanted to do business in Mexico, it was grease that got you through the doors. You could play the same game in the Philippines, as long as you played by the Filipino rule book.
The remarkable thing about Pruitt was his ability to function in foreign countries without a smattering of language. There were always translators, and Pruitt knew who to ask and how to ask it. He was fluent in a universal tongue, the whole of which derived from half a dozen root words.
Love and hate. Sex. Life and death. Fear. Money and politics.
The stuff that gets you where you want to go, in far-flung places that only seem different from the town you grew up in. A military junta has a familiar look to a guy who’s gone before a mom-and-pop city council in Ohio, asking for a liquor license.
Gr
ease rules the day, from Alabama to Argentina.
This was a big job and Pruitt was good at it. He was always at the top of his game when the specs called for double-dealing and mischief. He was a shadow man whose best work could never be preplanned or monitored. He was judged strictly on the big result, success, while the boss insulated himself in a glass tower high over Melrose Avenue, never to know the particulars of how a deal had been set up.
“I wasn’t supposed to know these things,” Scofield said. “But I didn’t get where I am by not knowing what’s going on. I have a remarkable set of ears and I learned sixty years ago how to split my concentration.”
Pruitt had witnessed Scofield’s Grayson fetish from the beginning. He watched it sprout like Jack’s beanstalk, exploding in a passion that was almost sexual. Pruitt knew, without ever understanding that attraction himself, that this spelled money.
With cool eyes he saw Scofield’s collection outstrip itself ten times during the first year. By the end of year two it resembled a small library, with the end nowhere in sight. Scofield was no green kid, to burn bright and burn out when his whim of the day withered and left him dry. Scofield knew what he wanted for the rest of his life. He was a serious player in the Grayson game. Pruitt may have been the first of the Scofield associates to understand the old man’s real goal: to be not just a player but the only player.
By the middle of the third year, Scofield had acquired many of the choice one-of-a-kind items that push their owners into paranoia. He had moved the collection from the office to his mansion in the Hollywood hills, where it was given an entire room in a wing on the second floor. Scofield was nervous. He summoned his security people, discussed plans for a new system, impregnable, state-of-the-art. Pruitt, who was expert in such things, was brought in to consult and was there to help supervise the installation.
Thus sealed in artificial safety, Scofield breathed easier. But no system is better than the men who create it.
Pruitt waited and watched, biding his time.
“That year I began buying books from Morrice and Murdock in Seattle,” Scofield said. “My dealings were all with Murdock, who was then considered the country’s leading dealer in Grayson books.”
It was the year of the Morrice and Murdock breakup, when Murdock stumbled out on his own in an alcoholic stupor. “He still had a lot of books,” Scofield said, “things he had hoarded over the years. But he was cagey, difficult. He knew Grayson was on an upward spiral, but the books were his ace in the hole. He also knew that I was the market: if I happened to die or lose interest, it would stabilize and Grayson would settle into his natural level, still upward bound but at a much slower rate. Murdock wanted to make all he could on every book, but even then he was afraid of selling. No matter what I paid him, he seemed to go through it at an unbelievable clip.
“He was the kind of man who would promise the moon and give you just enough real moonbeams that you couldn’t help believing him. He talked of fabulous things, hidden in places only he knew about, and all that time he dribbled out his books one or two at a time. I bought everything he showed me and paid what he asked. I knew the day was coming when he’d get down to brass tacks and I’d see what he really had. I’ve had experience with alcoholics. Eventually they lose everything.”
In the fourth year the big break came. Murdock called, claiming to have a client who owned the only copy of Darryl Grayson’s last book.
But the deal had to be handled with tenterhooks. The woman was extremely nervous. She would only meet with Scofield under mysterious conditions, in a place of her choosing, with her identity fully protected.
“Did you ever find out,” I asked, “why this was?”
“It was fairly obvious to me,” Scofield said, “but Murdock explained it later. His client knew Darryl Grayson personally. They had had an intimate relationship. She had been a married woman then, still was, and if any of this came out, her marriage might be jeopardized.”
“Did you buy that?”
“Why not, it was perfectly feasible. Have you read the Aandahl biography on the Graysons?”
I nodded.
“Then you know how Grayson was with women. The fact that a pretty young woman was married to someone else wouldn’t have slowed him up much. She wouldn’t have been the first woman to have carried on with Grayson while she was married to someone else. And Grayson was known to have given his women presents—books, notes, charts…mementos of completed projects. It was part of the pleasure he took in his work, to give out valuable pieces of it after the main work was finished. Once a project was done, Grayson wasn’t much for keeping the records or hanging on to his dummy copies. For years it’s been assumed that these were all destroyed, but I’ve never been convinced of that.”
“So what happened?”
“We flew to Seattle.”
“Who is we?” I looked at Kenney. “You?”
Kenney shook his head. “I hadn’t been hired yet.”
“I took Mr. Pruitt,” Scofield said.
“Surely not,” I said in real dismay.
“There was no reason to doubt him then.”
“But what purpose did he serve?”
“He was what he always was: a bodyguard. I learned long ago that it pays to have such men with you. When you’ve got money, and that fact is generally known, you get accosted by all kinds of people.”
“But you had nobody with you to function as an expert…nobody like Kenney?”
“Murdock was my expert. He had already had one meeting with this woman and had examined the book himself. There was no doubt in his mind what it was.”
I didn’t point out that the ax Murdock was grinding would’ve given Paul Bunyan a hernia. It wouldn’t help to beat that horse now.
“So you took Pruitt,” I said. “What happened when you got there?”
“Murdock met us at the airport and took us straight to the meeting place. I wasn’t at my best: I’m prone to colds and flu, and I felt I was coming down with something. The weather was bad: I remember it was raining.”
“What else does it ever do in this town?”
“We went to the place she had picked out, a restaurant downtown. She wanted to meet in a public place, probably for her own protection. Murdock had reserved a table in a far corner, where she’d told him to go. It was dark back there, but that’s how she wanted it. We did it her way…everything, her way.”
He sipped his drink, gave a little cough. “She was late. We waited half an hour, maybe more. Murdock and I had little to talk about. It seemed like a very long wait, and I was not feeling well.”
“Where was Pruitt all this time?”
“Posted at the door, up front.”
“So when she finally did get there…”
“She had to walk right past him.”
“And he’d have seen her.”
“But not to recognize. She wore a veil…black coat, black hat…and a deep red dress. The veil did a good job. I never saw her face and neither did Murdock. With the veil, and the darkness at that table, she could’ve been anyone.”
“Did she bring the book?”
“Oh, yes.” He trembled at the memory of it. “It was superb…magnificent…completely lovely. Beyond any doubt, Grayson’s masterpiece.”
“You could tell all this in the dark?”
“Murdock had come prepared. He had a small penlight and we examined the book with that. You can’t be sure under conditions like that, but there we were. I still didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t seem to know either. She seemed in dire financial need one moment and unconcerned the next, as if her two greatest fears were selling the book and losing the deal we had come there to make. The ball was in my court: I felt I had to do something or risk losing it. I had brought some cash—not much, about twenty thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. I offered her this for the opportunity to examine the book for one week. The money would be hers to keep regardless of what we finally decided to do. We would sign a paper to th
at effect, handwritten by me and witnessed by Murdock. In exactly one week we’d meet back at that same restaurant. If the book passed muster, she would be paid an additional fifty thousand. Her reaction was palpable: it was more than she’d dreamed…she took it, and I felt I was home free.”
The room was quiet. Kenney stood back like a piece of furniture. Amy sat on the edge of her chair. I held fast to Scofleld’s pale eyes.
“So you had the book,” I said. “Then what?”
“We flew back to Los Angeles with it. I wrote Murdock a check for his work, and at that point I decided to have some independent appraisers fly in and look at it. I called Harold Brenner in New York.”
He looked at me expectantly. I had heard the name, had seen Brenner’s ads in AB , but I had never had any dealings with the man. Kenney said, “Brenner’s one of the best men in the country on modern small-press books.”
“But Brenner couldn’t come out till the end of the week,” said Scofield. “This would still leave us time to have the book examined and get back to Seattle for our meeting with the woman in red, early the following week. Then I got sick—whatever I had caught in Seattle got dangerously worse, and on my second day home I was hospitalized as a precaution. That night my house was burglarized. My choice Grayson pieces were taken.”
“Including The Raven , I’m sure,” I said. “How long did it take you to realize that Pruitt was behind it?”
“The police were surprisingly efficient. Pruitt had been out playing cards that night: four other men would swear that the game had gone on till dawn and he’d only left the room once or twice to use the facility. But from the start, one of the detectives knew it was an inside job. How could it be anything else?…Who else would know how to defeat the system and get in so easily? The big problem was proving it…they had to catch the perpetrator and make him talk. Within forty-eight hours they had questioned everyone remotely connected with the installation of the security system, including all of Pruitt’s local cronies. Early on the third day they made an arrest, a petty hoodlum named Larson, who had known Pruitt for years. When he was picked up, he still had one of the break-in tools in his possession.”