The Dirty Book Murder

by Thomas Shawver

  The Dirty Book Murder is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Shawver

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI and the ALIBI colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7927-0

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  www.readalibi.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Sunday, June 20

  The young women disappeared, each after the other, a week apart. One had been an all-state basketball player, another placed in the high jump at the Kansas Relays, and the third was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. The pictures of them that appeared on television revealed well-scrubbed midwestern coeds blessed with the silk-haired, snub-nosed beauty of unsoiled youth, their eyes alight with hope and steady resolve.

  Six months later, the initial media frenzy had run its course without any significant leads, the grief-stricken parents were left to handle their agonies alone, and the bewildered investigating team was reduced by half due to ongoing budget concerns. I went back to reading the classifieds first.

  Most weekend mornings I sit on my back porch, sipping Irish coffee and checking the newspaper for upcoming estate sales. This is followed by a glance at the sports headlines and, if I have time, the Metro section. The sequence has more to do with the nature of my job as owner of Riverrun Books than a lack of curiosity regarding the news, although the disappearance of those local college girls at the beginning of the year had altered my weekend reading habits for a while.

  Normally, I’ll pay two or three dollars for common novels and nonfiction, then price them for my shop or on the Internet for ten. Rare and important works are a different story, of course. That’s when being a bookman can get interesting.

  Consider, for example, two advertisements that caught my eye one such morning in June. While each piqued my interest for different reasons, both contributed to the strange business that is this story.

  The first was an item in the auction column.

  I ordinarily avoid such sales. Not only are they time-consuming, they tend to be depressing affairs where bankrupts desperately seek to unload tractors and restaurant tables for a tenth of their value to Bubbas in bib overalls partial to spitting tobacco juice on other people’s shoes.

  Nonetheless, in the midst of the listing for restaurant equipment, I spotted a bit of gold among the dross. Possibly fool’s gold, but one never knows.

  “… bar stools,” it proclaimed, “tables, electric can opener (industrial), lots of erotic books (includes Shakee Hen), towel dispensers …”

  Whoa. I might have passed the “erotic books” with a smirk if there had been no parenthetical addendum, picturing nothing more than a mildewed collection of girlie magazines and yellowed paperbacks with selected pages stuck together by some unspeakable substance.

  But the parentheses held the promise of something else. Did the words Shakee Hen in the advertisement actually refer to a sample of Shoku-hon, also known as Shunga, the erotic art of Japan?

  These woodblock prints, when produced by feudal Japan’s greatest graphic artists like Utamaro and Hokusai, conveyed the sexual practices and conventions of a lively, uninhibited society in the most intimate detail. I recalled enough art history to know that when these prints first reached Europe in the waning days of the nineteenth century they influenced the post-Impressionist movement and Western art was never the same.

  The auction was scheduled to begin the following Saturday afternoon at a warehouse on Eighth and Main in the River Market area. It meant missing a Royals baseball game, but that hasn’t meant much to me since George Brett hung up his glove in 1993.

  I turned to the second classified advertisement, reading it with amusement dimmed by concern that Anne, my twenty-year-old daughter, might have seen a similar notice posted on the bulletin board at the University of Colorado’s drama department.

  WANTED: Local actors as extras for the filming of The Life of Jesse James. Send black-and-white glossy photo and brief background info to Gayle, Box 32, Kansas City Star.

  It was an invitation guaranteed to keep dozens of starry-eyed western Missourians up all night working on their “brief background” letters. I must confess that for an unguarded moment I, too, felt the siren call.

  After all, the entertainment channel was buzzing with rumors that the movie was to be directed by the great Robert Langston. No motion picture actor had gone as far or fallen as low as “Long Bob” in his thirty-year career. Who wouldn’t want to be part of Langston’s heroic comeback? Who, indeed?

  Anne, an aspiring director and theater major who admired Langston’s early work, before drugs, booze, and three disastrous marriages destroyed his career, would be first in line to associate with this Hollywood legend, no matter how faded his star. I was all for my daughter getting practical experience, but she, who in her first two years at school had shown a far greater affinity for parties and skiing than Molière and Arthur Miller, could ill afford to cut any more classes. At mid-semester she had informed me I’d be getting a bill for a summer of make-up classes she intended to take.

  Somewhat comforted by this reminder of her renewed dedication to getting a degree in Colorado, I felt reasonably assured she wasn’t aware of the casting call. So I relaxed, poured a cup of coffee, and imagined what my own response to “Box 32” would say:

  Michael Malachy Bevan, age 44: former lawyer, rugger, Marine. Currently a book merchant. Full head of hair, handsome in a jug-eared, farm-boy sort of way. Like you, Mr. Langston, I have suffered. Widowed. Disbarred. Freaked out. Padded cell or modern equivalent. Unforgiving former clients with ties to the mob. Similarly unforgiving daughter. Character lines around eyes.

  As I folded the newspaper, the telephone rang. It was Anne calling from Boulder. Collect, of course.

  “I’m coming home for a few months to work on the Jesse James movie as a gaffer or something.”

  “What about school?”

  “I’m taking a sabbatical from my studies.”

  “Honey,” I said, “only tenured professors and disgraced CEOs are allowed to do that.”

  “Really, Father! This is a on
etime chance to be involved in a major motion picture and I’m not going to let it pass.”

  I had learned long ago not to argue with Anne once she had made up her mind. “How’d you get the job?”

  She didn’t respond, so I asked again.

  “I know someone on the picture,” she answered grudgingly.

  “Really?” I said with a chuckle. “Let me guess. Is it Long Bob Langston?”

  Fifteen seconds of silence followed.

  I laughed again, but it was an uneasy “Please God, don’t let this be happening” kind of laugh.

  “Why, yes,” she said, somewhat surprised. “I’ve been seeing Bob for several months. You didn’t read about this in the tabs, did you?”

  Something started doing cartwheels in my gut, but my native wit came to the fore.

  “Afraid not. Can’t believe I let my subscription to the National Enquirer expire.”

  Silence again answered my sarcasm, but this time for a mere ten seconds.

  “If you must know, we met last September in Telluride. I was volunteering at the Nugget during the film festival when he came up to my table and said he was an old friend of yours.”

  “What!”

  “My reaction as well. It took a minute or two listening to him talk about ‘ramblin’ with Roddy in Edinburgh’ before I realized he’d mistaken me for Rod Stewart’s daughter. Kimberly was at the Fest and we do rather look alike. My British accent must have also reinforced his first impression. Anyway, he was very apologetic when he realized his mistake and invited me for dinner at the New Sheridan. He was very sweet and, well, one thing led to another.”

  “Annie, the guy is thirty years older than you.”

  “I grew up, Father. You just didn’t notice.”

  “Right,” I said, resisting the urge to hurl the telephone through the front window. “I’ll have your room ready at the house.”

  “Fine.”

  “We need to catch up on a few things. Now, about school—”

  “Try to be nice to Bob,” she interrupted. “It’s extremely important for him that things go well on this movie.”

  “Nice, huh? ‘Nice’ like I’m happy about this or ‘nice’ like I really don’t care? No can do either way.”

  “I’m only asking you to be civil. Please. We’ll be in next week.”

  “All right,” I said, but not before clearing my throat four or five times. “I’ll try to channel my inner Oprah.”

  After slamming the telephone down, I wondered why humans are the only creatures who bother to have anything to do with their half-grown offspring.

  Chapter Two

  Saturday, June 26

  Steam rising from the tar-papered warehouse roof matched my mood as I pulled my jeep Cherokee between twin pickup trucks in the graveled parking lot. I hadn’t spoken to Anne since her telephone call the previous Sunday and if she and her aged Lothario had arrived in town, they hadn’t bothered to let me know.

  Inside the overly lit auction hall at the River Market, a battalion of bargain hunters inspected the flea-market junk that passes for antiques in the Midwest: round oak tables, rocking chairs with cane-webbed seats, colored-glass globes, milk cans topped by seat cushions, iron plows, wagon wheels, graphite telephones, and hundreds of “rare” Depression glass bowls.

  The auctioneer wore a wide-brimmed Stetson hat tilted precariously on the back of his head. Pink suspenders held up a pair of lime green pants. Over the left breast pocket of his denim shirt a plastic name tag announced “Colonel Herl Bender.” An empty holster hung on his waistband.

  A hundred or more hopeful entrepreneurs, woefully short of meaningful lines of credit, shifted impatiently in the stifling atmosphere for the lots of bar stools, cash registers, and commercial dishwashers to come up.

  Finally, the colonel, after solemnly instructing the audience to keep their bidding cards close at hand, waddled over to where a dozen barroom signs hung and proceeded to talk them up as if they were the Elgin Marbles.

  “This fine example of the Mr. Peanut character is made of one hundred percent molded plastic …”

  God, it was hot—sticky hot, the kind that causes a neck rash even after using a clean razor—and the odor of two hundred sweaty armpits was enough to make a middle-school janitor blanch.

  It didn’t take long before a sallow-faced woman skittered from the room, clutching a lace hanky to her mouth. The auctioneer, oblivious to her abrupt departure and the heaving sounds she made in the hallway, prattled on about the virtues of the original Naugahyde bar stools that had taken center stage.

  “Now what am I bid …”

  I had decided to give him ten more minutes when I spotted my fiercest competitor in the antiquarian trade standing by a table loaded with books, most of which were covered by a pale yellow bedsheet.

  Blessed with the charm of an Afghan warlord and the subtlety of a cement mixer, Gareth Hughes had once wrenched a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from the hands of an elderly woman at a library sale. When it turned out to be a worthless book club edition, he tossed it back on the table without apologies.

  He tried a similar tactic with me when I was new to the business. Only I wasn’t old, little, or a lady. It came down to bare knuckles in somebody’s living room with an audience of horrified suburban bargain shoppers. Fortunately, “Jumbo” Ralph Sadecki was in charge of that particular estate sale and he parted us before the police had to be called.

  I saw Hughes a few weeks later at a book fair in St. Louis. By mid-afternoon each of us had acquired our quota of Americana and sat down at a table to share talk and a pitcher of beer.

  Having grown up in Cardiff, he spoke with a Welsh accent, but traces of other languages muted the musical lilt of his native tongue. He said he admired me for standing up to him. I countered by acknowledging his expertise and his ability to survive without having an open shop. If his ethics weren’t up to Plato’s standards, they were no worse than most of the lawyers encountered in my prior career.

  A solitary man, grossly fat and opinionated, Gareth Hughes could be as touchy as a polar bear with an ass full of razor blades. Once, near the end of a long drinking session, he admitted to never having known the companionship of a woman. The only surprise to me in that revelation was that he appeared to deeply regret the situation.

  Curmudgeons are not uncommon in the antiquarian trade. When asked, most will admit to preferring books to people. And why not? What personality could be more charming than a 1910 edition of Pervigilium veneris bound by the Doves Press; or more amusing (and rare) than Beau Brummel’s Unpublishable Memoirs, a little volume that was published, the title notwithstanding, in 1790?

  In Gareth’s case, however, the noble thoughts contained in the classics and the beauty of illustrations in old manuscripts meant nothing to him other than how they enhanced the material value of the object.

  Despite his limitations, he had a fine knowledge of collectibles and enough line of credit to buy what he wanted in the mid range. He wasn’t in the rarefied league of great bookmen on the East and West Coasts—people like Ken Lopez, Peter Stern, and Ed Glaser—but he held his own in the Midwest.

  The only other person I recognized in that squalid River Market warehouse was Richard Chezik, a former book scout who now sold exclusively on eBay. He was a squat, one-armed lout with stringy hair that cascaded to his shoulders as if he were a lost member of Black Sabbath.

  Among other misdemeanors, he cadged beers off unsuspecting locals at dive bars by claiming he’d lost his wing to an IED in Fallujah (the enemy in fact being a guardrail on I-29 and a fifth of McCormick’s vodka). I’d kicked him out of my shop a year earlier for selling books to Prospero’s Bookstore that had mysteriously vanished, unpaid for, from mine.

  Staying clear of Chezik, I snuck up to Hughes and gave him a friendly nudge. It startled him more than I intended.

  “Jaysus, you bloody shite,” he said with a hard glance. “What brings your sorry ass down here? Auctions and flea markets are my
territory.”

  I pointed to the partially covered books.

  “It’s nothing but old Bibles, magazines, and encyclopedias,” he told me. “Go back to your store where people bring books to you.”

  “What about the erotica?”

  His feigned look of innocence confirmed that whatever the sheet concealed was enough reason to stick around in the airless, hundred-degree heat.

  “Ah, hell,” he conceded, nodding in Chezik’s direction. “Just don’t let that parasite see that we’re interested in them.”

  “It’s too late,” I said. “Anyway, he’s only keen for contemporary firsts.”

  “Ya think so? With you and me hovering over this pile like a hen on her chicks? He’ll do his best to be a player when he gets a peek at what’s under the sheet.”

  Edging past Gareth, I pulled the cloth up for a closer inspection. What I found astonished me. When I looked back at him and silently whistled my appreciation, he answered with a peevish frown instead of the knowing wink of a fellow booklover.

  As predicted, Chezik gravitated toward me as soon as I picked up the first leather-bound book. Carefully opening it, mindful not to let sweat drop on its beautifully illustrated cover, I saw that it was in French. That gave me an advantage since I could read and speak a fair amount of the language.

  L’École des biches, the title read, ou moeurs des petites dames de ce temps (School for Courtesans, or habits of the little ladies of today), number fifty-three of a limited edition of sixty-four copies.

  A dozen short vignettes graced its pages, at least two of which centered on lesbianism. It was in perfect condition with a supple leather binding that gave slightly when handled. The linen-threaded pages displayed a strong yet feathery texture that had maintained its cream color for over a century. Although there were no illustrations, the feel of the book conveyed its own sense of tactile sensuality.

  Laying L’École down gently, I turned my attention to an oversized book of etchings and ink drawings by André Masson that reeked of violent sex. Etching number seventy-two displayed a couple kissing, tears flowing from the woman’s closed eyes as a dagger sliced into her shoulder. A more colorful and delightful book of watercolors followed. It was by the female Danish artist Gerda Wegener, whose charming illustrations were filled with costumed characters diving under petticoats and into trousers merrily seeking the not-quite-hidden forbidden fruit.