The Dirty Book Murder

by Thomas Shawver

  “I just can’t stand it when someone with money shoves me around when it comes to books. I don’t mind losing a bid to a bookman like you. It’s when the idjits who don’t really care end up with the goods that bothers me.”

  “I understand, Gareth.” And I did.

  “You want to know who the foreigner works for?”

  “Sure.”

  “Martin Quist.”

  “That’s the second time I’ve heard his name today.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I heard he’s backing a motion picture. The family owns some banks in Lawrence or Salina, don’t they?”

  “And Medicine Lodge, Goodland, and about fifteen other small towns. Their real fortune comes from their oil and gas leases. Martin’s the black sheep. He lets other family members take care of business while he lives off his trusts. About a year ago I sold him a first U.S. edition of Mein Kampf. He sent the South African to collect it. The fellow’s name is Kramm, Rolf Kramm.”

  “That book isn’t particularly hard to come by. Is Quist a serious collector?”

  “I don’t know any dealers who have worked with him. I think he just likes Hitler.”

  “Given today’s purchase, we can add classic erotica,” I said. “Thanks for the tip. Now I owe you that beer.”

  “Save it for another time.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “Did you phone me earlier this evening?”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason,” Hughes said as he turned to walk away.

  “Gareth?”

  “Yes?”

  “I understand why you wanted that Colette, but, one way or the other, you’re going to have to return it. It’s not worth the risk.”

  His answering smile was about as smooth as a handful of tacks.

  “Oh, I think it is, Mike. And, just so you know, it wasn’t the only Hemingway prize I rescued from that pile at the auction. Are you familiar with in our time?”

  “Sure. It’s considered his earliest published work. You stole that, too?”

  Another smile. “The ghost of Dr. Guffey would never forgive me if I’d let it fall in the hands of a man like Quist. There’s more to this than you can imagine. Maybe I’ll tell you some day. Yes, for sure I will. Some day in our time.”

  “Dr. Guffey? Who in the hell is he?”

  But Gareth had already gone, lumbering down the street toward the Wornall Bridge like a fat French goose which, as it turned out, he’d be just as lucky as. It was the last time I saw him alive.

  Returning to Fitzpatrick’s and the loving arms of the symphony’s second-chair flautist wasn’t an option after that fight with Gareth.

  It was just as well since pretty Ms. Epstein was considerably younger than I. The last thing I needed was to give my daughter additional ammunition to use against my position that Langston was too old for her. Anne didn’t respect me for a number of reasons—some valid, some not—but, so far, hypocrisy hadn’t been one of them.

  It was starting to rain as I walked past half a dozen hand-holding couples to my jeep. Five minutes later I arrived home to a hungry cat and an empty bed.

  Chapter Eight

  Sunday, June 27

  I awoke early the next morning to a beautiful day. The heat of the previous week had broken and a cool breeze blew in from the south, bringing a hint of rain. I put on my running gear and went outside filled with enough positive thoughts to make Norman Vincent Peale blush, determined to come up with a solution for Anne’s misguided infatuation with Bob Langston.

  After jogging for a mile and a half, nothing had come to mind (nothing legal anyway) and as I approached Brush Creek the old funk that comes with parental helplessness settled in.

  Heading west toward the low skyline of the Country Club Plaza, I descended to the concrete path that runs parallel to the man-made canyon containing the waterway. I paused to catch my breath under the Main Street Bridge, then jogged into the sunshine again.

  To my left, a stone wall hunkered below a gently sloping hillside covered with flowers and prairie grass. A series of stately apartment buildings designed and built in the 1920s, when Art Deco meant something, towered above the slope. Brush Creek flowed lazily on my right, fifty feet wide and ten feet deep, bordered by another hill and the shops, restaurants, and tennis courts of the Plaza shopping district.

  The tangy scent of barbecue wafted from a restaurant and the carillon bells from a campanile tower played a Haydn concerto. Flocks of pretty girls dressed like Easter trinkets in shorts and halter tops sat on marble steps leading down to the creek or lounged on grass as they watched wiry college athletes exchange volleys on the tennis courts. Gaudy banners promoting blue jeans, cologne, and Boulevard Beer festooned the juniper trees and wire fences surrounding the courts. A voice on a loudspeaker announced a match and politely called for a player from the University of Kansas to report to the head referee’s chair.

  On such a perfect morning it occurred to me that given any sort of good weather at all, it’s hard to beat a Midwest city in its scrubbed-up places.

  The water matched the color of the bluebird sky, the breeze creating tiny whitecaps on its otherwise clear surface. A meadowlark on a branch cocked its head. A pair of chattering beauties, their faces bright as sunflowers and their bodies shaped like reeds, waved from the street above.

  I felt flattered to warrant such attention until I realized the girls weren’t looking at me at all, but at something over my shoulder in the distance.

  I followed their stares downstream where two pontoon boats floated next to the dock just past the Wornall Bridge. A man dressed in white overalls stood in the center of the first boat gazing at an object directly across from him. An ambulance slowly drove across the bridge, followed by a police car.

  I jogged toward the scene, curiosity picking up my pace, until I joined the crowd of gawkers gathered on the hillside above a bend of the creek.

  A yellow plastic police tape hung across the path. Thirty feet beyond it, emergency medical technicians and policemen stood in grim anticipation watching two men in a flat-bottomed fishing boat struggle to pull a body from the water. While one held the collar behind the neck, the other placed a blunt-edged grappling hook underneath the torso.

  Once they had the body secured to the side of the boat, a police officer on the bank pulled a rope drawing the craft to the side of the creek bed. Another used a grappling hook to haul the corpse onto the path.

  The dead man lay facedown like a slumbering walrus. Water seeped from his soggy overcoat and trousers staining the concrete a darker gray. The back of his head shone with blood mixed with water and something yellow and pink. The left arm had landed under his body when they hauled him out. The other arm lay splayed out in front of his face with the palm down so that it covered his features.

  The police weren’t letting anyone past the yellow tape, so I scrambled up the hill and made my way to the bridge where more onlookers had gathered for a better view. I wedged in between a woman carrying a baby in a backpack and a young man holding a briefcase under his arm. Like everyone else, they stood motionless, mouths slightly open, staring silently at the corpse.

  I recognized the detective in charge.

  Underneath a porkpie hat too small for his head, Detective Lieutenant Buford Higgins was six feet of muscle going to fat in late middle age. His broad Irish face featured a bushy mustache that one rarely sees these days outside Durango and a smashed nose that bespoke an active career in law enforcement.

  During the Corretti bribery trial in my salad days as a trial lawyer, I made a fool of him on the witness stand. He wasn’t the only cop who didn’t appreciate my methods of cross-examination, but Lieutenant Higgins had a memory longer than most.

  I watched with the others as he carefully shifted the corpse’s head back and forth, poking the wound with a pencil, then turning the body onto its back. That’s when I recognized the horribly bloated face of my colleague.

  One doesn’t make the connection easily betwe
en the living and the dead under those circumstances, but it was Gareth all right. He wore the same ugly paisley tie from the night before and nobody else in Kansas City would have been wearing a heavy overcoat on a warm summer night. An oily black substance still clung to his lower lip and chin. At least what was left of his lip. There are fish in the creek, after all, and he had been there all night.

  It appeared he had been struck by a hard object and was shoved or fell into the water to drown. I was about to go down to report what I knew about Hughes’s final night on earth when the thought occurred to me that I was probably the next-to-last person to see him alive and that, as witnessed by a hundred or so people in Fitzpatrick’s Pub, it wasn’t under the most genial of circumstances.

  It didn’t help my nerves knowing that Higgins would be in charge of the investigation. While that big ol’ country boy hadn’t been much on the witness stand, he was a persistent and instinctive homicide detective who could marshal a small army of investigators. Two of them were probably making their way to the bars on the Plaza and in Westport to see if anything untoward had occurred the night before.

  I was already practicing my alibi when a flurry of new activity away from the corpse caught my attention. A cop had found something in the bushes next to the stone parapet twenty feet upstream.

  The object looked like a baseball bat flattened by a steamroller, but I recognized it instantly as an Irish hurling stick used for Gaelic Athletic Association games, just like the one given me on a rugby tour to Ireland. I kept mine under the counter at the bookstore to wield in the unlikely event a robber was stupid enough to think my daily sales worth stealing.

  When the cop handed it to Higgins, I saw the broad ash covered with dried blood and bits of hair and flesh. I noticed something else as well, something that caused a nuclear mushroom to cloud my brain.

  For several seconds I stared stupidly ahead, my eyebrows scrunched together as if miming Richard Nixon, while I muttered “Jesus H. Christ” over and over.

  The hurley had alternating strips of black and white tape at the grip and the stamped crest of the Cross Keys Gaelic Athletic Club above them.

  I had put that tape on in the fall of 1994 when I captained the K.C. Blues on a tour to Ireland. During an off day in Dublin we traded rugby balls for hurling sticks and nearly beat the locals at their national game. The hurley didn’t say “Property of Michael M. Bevan, Esquire,” but it might as well have.

  Before backing away from the low railing, I studied the scene unfolding below.

  The body, having been photographed from every angle, was placed on a gurney and covered by a white blanket. A man in a jumpsuit tagged the hurling stick with a yellow identification card, wrapped it in a clear plastic bag, and made his way up the stone steps to a police van parked on Ward Parkway. The ambulance attendants unlocked the wheels of the gurney then pushed it up the ramp.

  As the grim procession moved through the throng of bystanders on the bridge I whispered a parting prayer for Gareth’s soul, the only funeral my fellow bookman was going to get.

  The door of the ambulance closed and I returned my gaze to the creek bed to find the squirrel-like eyes of Higgins staring up at me.

  I nodded, he nodded back, and, with a thready smile, returned to his job, leaving me with the feeling that my brain had just been x-rayed.

  He couldn’t have connected me with that hurling stick so soon, but it worried me enough not to take further notice of the tanned and limber girls by the tennis courts as I began the run home.

  Chapter Nine

  It took less than ten minutes to cover the final mile and a half to my house, a compact bungalow built in 1923 when the Arts & Crafts style was all the rage.

  There were three main rooms on each of the two floors and an open porch on the west side. A wall of French doors in the living room looked onto a garden that featured a small pond. The backyard extended sixty feet to where the detached single-car garage sat unobtrusively, its sides covered by a profusion of honeysuckle that my wife, Carol, had planted our first day living there.

  We bought the place shortly after my discharge from the Marine Corps for $70,000 when we didn’t have much money. It was to be our starter home, but we became so attached to it that we never considered moving. Instead, we spent any money that would have gone to a more expensive house by filling it with Stickley furniture, mica-shaded lamps, and Oriental rugs.

  If there was one positive thing my daughter and I still shared, it was affection for that old place.

  After feeding Feklar, my cat, I took a shower, put on a pair of khaki hiking shorts and a black knit tennis shirt, fixed toast and juice, and went outside to sit and think by the garden.

  I’m not one to meet trouble halfway, but events had unsettled me enough that I needed to hold the glass in both hands while I took stock of the recent developments.

  The South African at the auction must have realized Hughes had stolen the Colette and killed him for it. Did he do it on orders of his employer, this Martin Quist creep?

  Could there have been something even more important about the book than its remarkable provenance?

  How did the murderer borrow my hurling stick—and why did he think it a good idea?

  Was it pure revenge for my running the auction price to over his employer’s limit and getting him into trouble? Or was there another reason for their setting me up as their patsy?

  Finally, there was the surprising last-second bid by Richard Chezik. Who would entrust a guy like that to bid such a large amount on their behalf?

  There were a lot of questions I needed answered. And fast. But I needed a lawyer first. I gulped the juice, tossed the toast onto the grass for the birds, and drove my jeep three miles to Kansas.

  * * *

  Crossing State Line Road at Sixty-first Street, I entered a real estate agent’s paradise of Tudor mansions, Spanish haciendas, and columned Colonials, all fronted by yards slightly smaller than the Azores.

  Tim Winter lived in a more modest Cotswold variety nestled on a two-acre corner lot. What the house lacked in size was more than made up for in its tasteful design and serene location next to a willow-graced pond.

  Even if he hadn’t become one of the best lawyers in Kansas City, I would have been walking up the path to Tim’s door that early Sunday afternoon to see his wife. I needed an understanding friend. Alice Winter, of all my acquaintances, came closest.

  Soft-spoken, calm, and unprepossessing, she was a tall, shapely woman with a face just this side of beautiful that radiated a restrained emotional power. In Europe she would have passed for an aristocrat by her bearing alone, but her natural dignity and gentle nature belied a bitter ennui that only I ever seemed to notice.

  Alice and I had grown up next door and been the best of pals. As a child she comforted me when life with my parents disintegrated. At fifteen we initiated each other in the intimacies of physical love. After our junior year of high school I moved in with my grandparents across town and we drifted apart.

  It was lonely at first trying to get along in a sometimes unpredictable world without her, but I soon got used to it, even finding myself relieved at my newfound independence.

  I’m not sure Alice was ever able to say the same thing about me.

  I went off to the University of Iowa and she attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. We continued to see each other during summer breaks. Shortly after I graduated law school, but before I left for the Marines, we even discussed getting married.

  A year later, I fell in love with Carol, the daughter of a British Royal Marine exchange officer at Camp Lejeune. I didn’t have the courage to telephone Alice that I had found my future wife. Instead, I wrote her a breezy letter that began with a description of the weather in North Carolina and ended with “Oh, by the way …”

  It took her several months to respond, but the letter that finally arrived oozed with thoughtful wishes for the “lucky English girl” and just the right touch of wistfulness at our hav
ing grown apart. She added in a postscript that she and Tim Winter were to be wed in the spring of that year and regretted she would be unable to attend my wedding. I never received an invitation to hers.

  By the standards of middle-American society the Winters enjoyed a comfortable marriage, due mostly to Tim’s successful career and the pride they shared in their son. Happiness was another matter. Beneath the veneer of conjugal harmony, a darkness of spirit lurked within Alice and I couldn’t help but feel I was partially to blame.

  I knocked on the door and moments later Alice appeared, inviting me in with a smothering hug.

  “Is Tim home?” I asked, pulling away.

  “He and Mark are training at the high school. They’re running the stadium stairs with rocks in their backpacks. If you ask me, the rocks are in their heads.”

  “Which mountain is it this time?”

  “McKinley.” She sighed. “I wish he wasn’t taking our boy. Colorado fourteeners are one thing, but the highest peak in North America is a whole different matter for a high school kid.”

  “Tim would burrow to hell if he set his mind to it.”

  “So would Mark,” she said, with reluctant pride. “Both of them bore easily, I suppose. Their joint response to my concern is that Tim’s father escorted him up Aconcagua when he was Mark’s age—as if the actions of that abusive shit justified anything.”

  We went into her kitchen, a sunny airy space where copper pots hung from iron hooks on thick wooden beams and checkered paper from the Ralph Lauren catalog covered the walls. Swaths of dried basil, recently plucked from the garden, were spread out on a five-by-ten foot island in the center of the room. Thin slices of ham and Swiss cheese rested on a cutting board next to a jar of imported mustard and a loaf of bread.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asked. “I thought the boys would be home by now and lunch is just sitting here.”

  “Sure.”

  Alice prepared sandwiches for both of us, cutting the crust off the bread before applying mustard, ham, and cheese.