The Dirty Book Murder

by Thomas Shawver

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  Tim hesitated, but only enough to put down his pen and pick up a letter opener in the shape of a miniature Bowie knife. He ran it ever so gently across the palm of his hand as he spoke.

  “Unfortunately, I do. He’s a member of the Stable Club. His father had dealings with my father when they were in the oil and gas business. When I was a child and the Quists visited Kansas City, my mother forbade me to play with him, if that tells you anything. The family still operates out of a little burg twenty miles north of Salina, and run the county like earls in a fourteenth-century fiefdom. They sent Martin back east for school, but I understand it didn’t take.”

  “Did Exeter expel him for playing with matches and torturing cats?”

  “Actually, it was St. George’s Academy in Newport. Martin probably wet the bed as well. The family shipped him to a place in southwest France that was part prep school, part prison. By the looks of him, he picked up some culture and jet-set refinement along the way. He went to Brown, got a degree in art appreciation or some damn thing, then spent time in New York and Paris where he still keeps apartments. He moved here five years ago in order to keep an eye on the family holdings while maintaining a distance from his siblings, whom he loathes. I understand the feeling is mutual.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “In the old Haliburton pile of bricks and marble. You could see it from here except for those blasted trees. He likes to throw lavish parties. The wife and I are never invited. I’ve done rather well, but apparently not well enough to rate an invitation. Alice wouldn’t go anyway. Like my mother, she thinks he’s a very naughty boy.”

  “He’s a friend of Bob Langston’s,” I said.

  “So I’ve heard. Martin was always starstruck. The word around the country club is that he’s hurting for money, having invested in a couple of dreadful horror flicks that went directly to DVD. He recouped some of the loss by backing a series of porn films, but that was the last straw for his relatives.

  “It’s one thing to gamble on speculative oil and gas ventures, quite another to risk the family fortune on gang-bang films. His brother and sister have obtained a temporary order freezing a major share of the family assets. Ted Garvin from the Hastings, Flynn and Cordish firm is representing them at a probate hearing set for next month.”

  “But the Langston movie is legit.”

  Tim nodded. “Quist will use that evidence at the hearing. But he’s running out of money in the meantime because his trust fund assets are restricted to basic necessities pending Judge Taylor’s ruling. It’s chicken-or-the-egg time for him.

  “He needs money to ramp up production on the Jesse James flick and thereby provide evidence of his intent to produce a legitimate enterprise, but the money to produce it is vanishing. He must have had a conniption fit when Kramm told him what it cost for those books at the auction.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “poor Rolf.”

  Tim Winter leaned forward, resting his elbows on the leather-topped desk. “No, Mike. Given Martin Quist’s propensity to never forgive an insult to his pocketbook, I rather think it is poor you.”

  Pretending to laugh, I said, “Quist tried to take Langston to lunch at the Stable Club, but they were refused service. I didn’t know the ‘Barn’ had gotten so stuffy as to not let film stars wallow up to the trough.”

  “That wasn’t the reason. Quist was banned indefinitely for fondling the tennis pro’s wife at last year’s Christmas party.”

  “Lovely. Did you hear how Langston hooked up with him?”

  “According to Ted Garvin, Quist lost all credibility in Hollywood years ago, but was willing to gamble what was left of his fortune on Langston’s dream for a comeback. Long Bob was equally desperate. I can’t think of any other reason for even that reprobate actor to get involved with such a shit.”

  “That reprobate,” I said glumly, “is sleeping with my daughter.”

  Tim Winter’s eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t offer an apology. Nor did he look surprised. He laid down his glasses and got up from behind the desk.

  “You know how this business works, Mike. Even if you whacked Gareth Hughes and tossed him into Brush Creek, I’ll do my best to defend you. He was a big man, a quarrelsome man. Self-defense is a major option to consider. Lack of intent to kill gets you a lesser offense.”

  I looked up at my former law partner and suddenly didn’t like that he had a thriving practice, a fine house, a charming wife, and a son who, by all indications, didn’t have a drug problem. And I particularly didn’t like recognizing that there was a time when I was just as distrustful and condescending to people who had been in the same spot I now found myself.

  Tim leaned against the side of the bookcase, narrowing his eyes. He put the point of the letter opener under his chin and scratched a follicle. “What else do you have to tell me? You’re holding something back.”

  I gazed at the leather-bound books on the shelves next to him, then pretended to study the Kazakh carpet with its hexagonal patterns of navy blue and gold.

  “The police found a hurling stick close to Gareth’s body,” I said. “My hurling stick. His blood and pieces of his skull were attached to it.”

  “I assume you were going to mention that sometime in our conversation?”

  “We were having so much fun talking about books, it slipped my mind.”

  “Uh-huh. Get me a list of your staff and any regular customers who might have had access to the stick.”

  “All right.”

  We looked at each other for a moment before I said with more than a tad of irritation:

  “I’m innocent, Tim.”

  He raised his chin a fraction and smiled faintly.

  “Of course you are. We’ll visit Lieutenant Higgins tomorrow morning to put his suspicious mind at rest. I’ll call to keep them from picking you up today should they be so inclined. Ten A.M. all right?”

  Alice was still in the kitchen making a new set of sandwiches when I let myself out. I said good-bye to her, but she made it a point not to notice.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was noon by the time I returned to Riverrun. Violet was listing books for sale on the Internet. The shop was quiet except for a few browsers in the history section, but soon the post-brunch crowd from Avenues Bistro would be flooding in. I looked underneath the counter for my hurling stick.

  It wasn’t there, of course.

  I moved my laptop to a table in the far corner of the store to log in. BiblioFind confirmed what Tim had told me. Most of the earlier inscribed Hemingway firsts were listed in the mid-to-upper five figures, but Printers Row Fine and Rare Books in Chicago offered the only one with a previously owned Dr. Guffey provenance: a first edition, first printing of Three Stories & Ten Poems. Printers Row was asking $225,000.

  If what Tim had said was true, the Kansas City physician’s copy of in our time was even more desirable, but the odds were close to nil that another Guffey-owned book would appear on the private market.

  It was enough of a miracle that Printers Row had kept Three Poems from the ravenous clutches of the JFK Library in Boston, let alone the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Individual collectors, no matter how wealthy, were finding it increasingly difficult to compete with such well-endowed institutions. The upside, however, for private owners was that prices on those items still on the open market increased exponentially with each passing year.

  According to Tim, Louis Henry Cohn had bought the Guffey in our time at the Parke-Bernet auction in 1958 and Cohn’s widow sold their rare book collection to the University of Delaware in 1985. I checked on the Internet for the catalog listing of the school’s library holdings. It confirmed that the slender twenty-seven page book remained there.

  So much for Gareth Hughes’s hint that someone locally might have it.

  Except.

  For all his faults, it wasn’t like the Welshman to mislead when it came to books. As the day wore on and the regular customers
began to pile into my store, I became more convinced that Gareth believed the slender volume that was in the front rank of twentieth-century literary rarities had somehow become available. I was also certain that if he didn’t have it on the night of his death, he knew who did.

  I returned to the counter and called the University of Delaware’s Special Collections Library. Half an hour and three library assistants later, I was finally connected to the main curator.

  “That particular volume isn’t here,” Professor Wilson Traynor, MFA, LLB, PhD, told me.

  “Is it on loan?”

  “You might say that. It’s been missing for ten years.”

  I gawked at the phone in my hand.

  “Did you investigate?” I managed to ask.

  “Of course. Only five people that week had access to the book according to our sign-in sheet, but our security procedure was practically nonexistent in those more trusting times. The librarians rarely asked people for identification before letting them go into the stacks. There could have been a dozen more that we don’t know about.”

  “Do you recall the names you had?”

  I heard the shuffling of notes as he cleared his throat. Obviously, I’d dredged up a very sore subject for Professor Traynor.

  “Three graduate students—Mary Evans, David Steinman, and Janet Wiglesworth. The great Hemingway bibliographer, Audre Hanneman, was another visitor, and then a private collector named George Land. All were questioned and cleared by the police. The assistant district attorney rather snidely advised me that the actual thief wasn’t likely to sign his real name.”

  “A pity,” I said.

  “You will let us know should you hear of its whereabouts, won’t you?”

  I promised I would, but the promise didn’t come easy. I put the telephone in its cradle and stared into space. I must not have been smiling.

  “Yo, boss, what’s the sorry look for?” It was Weston, concerned for my well-being again.

  “Something’s come up,” I said to him and Violet. “I’ll need your help running the shop until I can work it out.”

  “I have a dental appointment Thursday,” Violet said. “You’d better be back by then or you’ll be looking for someone else to type these book descriptions.”

  “Ah, goin’ to show a leg on us again, Skip?”

  “I’ve given it some thought, Weston. Gareth Hughes turned up dead in Brush Creek this morning, following a night when half of Kansas City’s Irish community saw us trading fists at Fitzpatrick’s.”

  “Heavens,” Violet said, “that is a bother.” An eyebrow arched, her chin jutted out, but for all the surprise she exhibited I might as well have told her the price of milk had gone up a nickel. “Have you talked to the police?”

  “I’ll talk to them soon enough.”

  I paused, took a breath and continued my story.

  “I’d been on my jog when I saw them fish him out of the water. Someone crushed the back of his head. The police found my hurling stick in the bushes a few yards away.”

  They answered this revelation with silence and cold slate eyes.

  “I had nothing to do with Gareth’s death,” I said acidly.

  Instead of a sympathetic nod, Weston pretended to be a deaf mute. Violet tried to sell a crocodile smile.

  “Think hard, folks. Who’s handled the thing recently?”

  I might as well have asked them to name the capital of Rajasthan.

  “Didn’t you show it to that New Zealand couple around Thanksgiving?” Violet finally offered.

  “And you took it down to the St. Patrick’s Day parade last March,” Weston added. “Otherwise, it just sat there, worthless as a drunk penguin. Was you shot away last night?”

  “I’d had a few, but not enough to make me crazy.”

  I took money out of petty cash, stuffed it in my wallet, then looked back at them.

  “I didn’t do it, drunk or sober, but Lieutenant Higgins will have questions that I don’t have answers for yet. I need time to investigate this on my own before the police come calling. It may take a couple of days.”

  Violet chewed on her lip for a moment before glancing at Weston. He took that as a cue to begin cleaning the espresso machine.

  “Okay,” Violet finally answered. “How can we get in touch with you?”

  “Leave a message with Pegeen Flynn at The Peanut.”

  When they went back to their duties I picked up the phone. My first call was to Richard Chezik, only to learn from his mother that he had left her a note saying he’d gone to parts unknown on a Greyhound bus that morning.

  I then called Colonel Bender, the auctioneer at the River Market warehouse, who remembered me with good feelings. I took the chance that the police hadn’t contacted him yet and that he still appreciated my volunteering to help take the books to Kramm’s car, not to mention jacking up the bidding beyond his wildest dreams.

  We discussed the Royals’ draft prospects for next season, the weather, and a few other things before I felt comfortable enough to ask whose estate provided the books for the auction.

  “They was George Land’s books,” Colonel Bender answered. “He died years ago, but his widow only recently decided to sell. She still lives at the house, 3618 Belleview Avenue.”

  The colonel even gave me her phone number, but I didn’t use it. Granddad Bevan hadn’t brought me up this way, but I decided to make an unannounced visit to a stranger’s home.

  I went to the restroom in the rear of the shop, splashed some cold water on my face, and headed for the back door, nearly colliding with Josie Majansik as she entered.

  “Whoa, big fella! Where’re you headed in such a hurry?”

  “I’m going for a sandwich.”

  “Mind if I join you? The newspaper’s buying.”

  “No thanks. Gotta go.”

  “Something’s bothering you,” she remarked with a tug on my elbow that I thought meant she actually cared for me. “Can I be of any help?”

  “No, but thanks. I need to handle this alone.”

  “Here,” she said, pulling a business card from her wallet. It was bent at the corners and slightly smudged. “Just in case you change your mind. I understand you had an argument with the late Gareth Hughes last night. It’s the talk of the newsroom.”

  I took the card and read, “Josephine A. Majansik. Reporter, Brush Creek Gumbo,” followed by a street and Internet address, a cell phone number, and the logo “A Progessive People’s Potpourri.” It was on one of those flimsy #5 cardboard things printed off a computer.

  “Where’s the union bug?” I teased.

  “It’s an alternative weekly,” she retorted, “not the campaign headquarters of the Democratic Party. My publisher can’t afford embossed lettering, let alone living wages.”

  “And children are starving in the Sudan. It’s a cruel world, Josie. I’m sorry I can’t give you a scoop.”

  “Mike, that’s not …”

  But I didn’t stop to hear the rest and left the building feeling empty as a church on Monday morning.

  After pulling out of the parking lot, I drove onto Brookside Boulevard where the first vehicle approaching in the opposite lane was owned by the Kansas City Police Department. It glided slowly past me, the officers within it obviously looking for the address of a charming used bookstore. I didn’t see much of a future in the rearview mirror so I kept driving to a section of the city named after the martyred patron saint of lovers.

  Chapter Twelve

  I crossed over Brush Creek on the Main Street bridge and took a left on Westport Road, passing a row of neighborhood taverns, tattoo parlors, and coffee bars until I got to Southwest Trafficway.

  After a couple of miles heading north on that gritty, potholed thoroughfare, I made an illegal left turn into the Valentine District, a leafy area where Kansas City’s lumber magnates and grain traders had lived in baronial splendor a century ago. The fine old homes were mostly inhabited by urban pioneers, energetic young professionals willing to
live close to shabbier neighborhoods as a trade-off for the old-world charm and quality workmanship one doesn’t often find these days.

  I parked the jeep on Belleview directly in front of Thomas Hart Benton’s former house and art studio and walked across the street onto the edge of the Land property. The house sat on a rise overlooking a dry creek bed where the debris of a recent flash flood lay lodged against a stone bridge.

  Tendrils of ivy meandered around the windows and chimneys like a monstrous octopus. A sizable number of slate tiles on the roof had become loose and fallen onto the untrimmed bushes below. It was midsummer but the dead leaves of several winters lay in the eaves and gutters. A copper drainpipe hung precariously off the brick front, a loose tin brace the only thing keeping it from collapsing to the ground.

  A fence comprised of rusted iron spears topped by pointy fleurs-de-lis guarded the property. Finding the front gate locked, I squeezed through a gap where several rods had rusted away, then stepped across the cobblestones of a circular driveway.

  A Bentley S1 Continental, its chassis splotched with bird droppings, squatted on flattened tires under a towering sycamore. At the opposite edge of the driveway, in stark contrast to the Gothic setting, was a spotless, late-model Nissan Sentra. The Kansas plates on it suggested I wasn’t the only visitor.

  I flattened my thumb against the porcelain doorbell only to watch it spring from its casing. The brass knocker worked better. Three solid knocks echoed in the chamber beyond the door and soon I heard the clacking of high heels on a wood floor, followed by the sliding of a bolt.

  Because of the outside condition of the house, I expected to be greeted by a bedraggled crone, but the tall, elegantly dressed woman who opened the door didn’t look anything like Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Her silver hair, intricately braided like a Swiss milkmaid’s, was as silken as a girl’s. When she tilted her head in a questioning look, her hazel eyes caught the glint of sun rays seeping past the highest leaves.

  She was a beauty, nothing less, and if she had more than a few crow’s-feet around those almond-shaped eyes, it didn’t matter—they just spelled character. She wore a wraparound tweed skirt that stopped above her knees and a matching jacket over a cream-colored blouse. The top two buttons were undone, exposing lightly tanned breasts that I suspect had never nursed a baby.