The Dirty Book Murder

by Thomas Shawver

  “What was so important that you had to crash the set and threaten my job?”

  “I suspect Martin Quist murdered a colleague of mine last Saturday night. Langston may be involved as well and I don’t want you caught in the crossfire.”

  “The TV news report said that you were seen brawling with the victim shortly before his death. Is that true?”

  “Yes. And you might as well know, if you haven’t already heard, the murder weapon was a hurling stick I brought back from Ireland.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’ve been set up, Anne. You have to believe me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because your life could be at risk as well.”

  “What evidence have you that Martin, let alone Bob, had anything to do with the murder?”

  “Quist desperately wanted a particular book in order to blackmail people, some very important people.”

  “A book? What kind of book?”

  “It doesn’t matter what kind. It’s what might be contained in it.”

  “How do you know he’s so desperate to have it?”

  “His man outbid me for that and other books at an auction.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. His man? Have you lost your mind?”

  “It’s complicated, honey. You’ve got to understand.”

  “I understand all right. I’m not ready to believe you killed someone, but now I know you’d say anything to get me to break up with Bob. How dare you accuse Martin Quist of murder. That’s so sick.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Bob introduced us three months ago, long enough to know how kind and generous he can be. In whose house do you think Bob and I have been sleeping the last two days?”

  I waited long enough for my saliva ducts to unjam.

  “Just come home, honey. I’m really afraid for you.”

  “Why this? Why now?” she cried. “Can’t we have a bit of normalcy in our lives?”

  “I didn’t ask for this particular nightmare, Anne. And when it comes to pushing the envelope of normalcy, I’m not the one sleeping with the best customer the Betty Ford Clinic ever housed.”

  I never mean to say stupid things, but it always seems to happen at the worst possible moments.

  “You’re the one in trouble, Father. Not Martin, not Bob, and certainly not me. Just leave us alone and fight your own fucking battles.”

  In the brief silence that followed, I heard another voice in the background. It belonged to Bob Langston.

  “There, there, that’s all right, baby.”

  He must have been holding her. His voice was very clear.

  Then one of them hung up the telephone.

  I stared at the receiver a long time after that.

  Deep-rooted acrimony between father and daughter is unnatural. It plays against all the laws of familial harmony. The lesions it creates aren’t the normal cuts and bruises that friends or even spouses inflict on each other. Those tend to heal easily with a gift or an apology.

  But the gulf between Anne and me was going to require considerably more. We’d spent too many of her formative years apart and, like a split in the skin that resists closing, didn’t share enough material to help the healing. I wasn’t ready to give up, however. Somehow we had to find a way to stop walking over each other with cleats.

  I walked zombielike into the kitchen, poured a couple shots of whiskey, and drained it with shaking hands. Weston Preston called such alcoholic impulses “elbow crookers.”

  With those cautionary words ringing in my brain, I put the bottle down and settled on the couch in the front of the empty fireplace and fell asleep.

  An hour or so passed before I realized that the doorbell was ringing. I let it ring for a few minutes more, but the caller had obviously noticed my jeep in the driveway and wasn’t about to leave.

  I staggered to the door and opened it to find Josie Majansik shifting from one foot to the other, tape recorder in one hand and writing pad in the other. She studied my face for an instant. Then, without a word, she took me by the arm and led me back to the couch.

  “After looking for you at the bookstore,” she said, pulling a coverlet over my legs, “I checked downtown at the police desk. The sergeant said you’d been released after giving a statement. I figured you’d be here.”

  “To get a story.”

  “Yes. No sense in lying.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Not anything I plan to use. Not now.”

  “Thanks.”

  I caught a scent of basil and ginger between her breasts.

  “I still plan to cover the murder case, whether you figure in it or not.”

  “I wasn’t thanking you for killing a story. I’m glad you came by to see me, for whatever reason.”

  She took my hands in hers. “What was she like, anyway?”

  “Who?”

  “Your ex-whatever.”

  “You presume an awful lot.”

  “Well, something makes you act the way you do.”

  “She isn’t an ex.”

  “Then what is she?”

  “Someone you would have liked to know.”

  “Still in love with her, huh?”

  “You might say that.”

  Josie looked around the darkened room. “You got any candles?”

  “In a drawer by the refrigerator. Upper shelf, next to the flashlight.”

  She went into the kitchen and returned with a candle last used ten Christmases ago, a screw-top bottle of wine, and two paper cups.

  “That’s one empty kitchen,” she said, lighting the candle.

  “You didn’t see the week’s supply of cat food.”

  “I suppose you’re the kind who eats out a lot. No need to plan for tomorrow. Live one day at a time and to hell with the future.”

  “Mind if I borrow that line for my family crest?”

  “Is that why she left you?”

  “You really want to know.”

  “I think you’d better tell me since I plan to stay here tonight.”

  “All right,” I said, pouring the wine. “A long time ago I met this English girl.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday, June 29

  I awoke alone. The furies of the day before and the mattress gymnastics of the night that followed had left me with a monstrous headache. The sun streamed through the side windows, however, promising another pretty day.

  I made my way to the bathroom. A shower and two aspirin had me feeling better and in the hallway the aroma of coffee greeted me. Somewhere, probably in the kitchen close to the coffeemaker, Josie was singing off-key to a song by Mick Hucknall of Simply Red.

  I put on a pair of white cotton shorts and a rugby jersey and walked downstairs. She stood at the kitchen counter, her back to me, wearing my charcoal gray XXL Riverrun Books T-shirt.

  The last line of James Joyce’s Ulysses stamped on the shirt was like an invitation: “… and yes I said yes I will Yes.” The shirt went all the way down to the back of Josie’s thighs, but her shapely, muscled calves were enough to excite me. She picked up three eggs in quick succession, cracking them expertly, and dropped them into a bowl.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  She turned, whisking tool in hand, and flashed me a beautiful smile. “And good morning to you, Sunshine. I hope you like scrambled eggs.”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Would you make some orange juice?”

  “Sure.”

  I took a can out of the refrigerator and as I stirred the juice, Josie beat the eggs while howling “Holding Back the Years.” My laughter didn’t faze her in the least.

  “Tragic, isn’t it?” she said. “I have the voice of a frog with tonsillitis. Oh, well. Can’t be helped.” She went back to croaking and whisking and adding a touch of milk to the eggs.

  We ate breakfast on the brick patio, watching cardinals and blue jays fight for places at the bird feeders.

  “Thanks for last night
,” she said.

  “The pleasure was all mine.”

  “Not necessarily. As a wise old Argentinean once said, ‘It takes two to tango.’ You’re a good lover.”

  “What a relief.”

  “You don’t kiss so good though.”

  “Blame it on chapped lips.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “You’re good at the mechanics, but no fire.”

  “At my age one has to be careful not to overheat the system.”

  She reached over to brush a piece of toast off my chin. “I don’t bite, Michael.”

  “Really? I seem to recall otherwise.”

  “Never mind that!”

  “If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m ancient enough to be …”

  “My older brother?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You don’t really believe you’re too old for me, do you?” she said. “I crossed the big three-oh two years ago.”

  “My God, you’re almost as old as Madonna!”

  “Spare me.”

  “I had a friend my age who dated a girl younger than you,” I said, taking the last bite of scrambled eggs. “The only thing they had in common was neither had heard of Coldplay. Trying to relate to things from opposite points of the age range can get embarrassing.”

  “If not exhausting.”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  “Well, I’m not too young for you, big fella.”

  “Say what? Hearing’s getting a bit iffy.”

  “Be serious.”

  “No, let’s not.”

  She leaned back in the Adirondack chair and pulled off her T-shirt, the only garment she happened to wear that morning.

  Brown nipples highlighted her firm breasts. She shifted her legs just enough to show a tuft of dark curls.

  “Well, come on, Methuselah,” she said, pointing to my shorts and jersey, “take those things off. Or do you need help?”

  She led me back upstairs where we did some more horizontal exercises.

  Afterward, Josie said she needed to go to her newspaper office. But first we took a shower together and that started the whole thing over again. It was half past noon before I made it to Riverrun Books.

  * * *

  Violet was hunched over the computer typing descriptions of books at a champion pace.

  “Well, if it isn’t the prodigal son,” she said without looking up.

  I wondered if there was ever a moment when the lady wasn’t annoyed.

  “Looks like you been in a needle fight,” the lunatic Weston Preston added.

  I puzzled over that, wondering if he somehow could tell I’d spent the morning in amorous activities.

  “You been to the hoosegow yet?” The barista was anything but subtle. “The cops have been askin’ us all kinds of things. I’m sorta surprised to see you here, if ya don’t mind my sayin’ so.”

  “Why is that?” I asked with a wire-thin smile.

  “Now, I’m not saying you linked your everlastin’ soul with Cain to slay the Welshman. But we all know you two got along about as good as a mama hen and a black snake.”

  “No one got along with Mr. Hughes,” Violet said in a surprise defense of me.

  “Most def’nitely,” Weston added hastily. “I just thought the brass badges held suspects for more than a day.”

  I considered asking Weston what he had been doing the night of the murder, but decided to pass, knowing the answer would be something like “at home in the forecastle, jerking the cat’s jib.”

  “Jus’ what was your alibi, boss?”

  “The one I gave the police and that’s all you need to know. Also, I’m not a suspect, but rather a ‘person of interest’ according to Detective Higgins. There’s quite a difference.”

  “Sure, boss. If you say so.”

  A line of customers pried Weston back to his coffee counter and an elderly lady entered the shop carrying a grocery bag filled with books to trade. The e-mail orders started flooding in and it was back to work for the three of us. The ecstasies of the previous evening and the morning were nearly, but not quite, forgotten in the rush to get small things done. For an hour or so, I was even able to set aside my legal and personal worries.

  As the day progressed, however, I tried to put more pieces together as to who, besides Quist, had a motive to kill Gareth Hughes. The books he’d stolen at the auction were extremely valuable in and of themselves; a quarter million each if the inscriptions and the provenance were valid.

  But Beatrice had made pretty clear there was something else to be gleaned from the Colette—information worth a million or more in blackmail capital.

  Try as I might to consider others’ motives, it all pointed to Martin Quist, who was desperate for a new infusion of cash to finance Langston’s movie. His Afrikaner henchman would have had little trouble dispatching even a man as large as Gareth. But I needed far more evidence before the police would take me seriously.

  As it happened, I didn’t have to wait long.

  The telephone rang at 3:35.

  “Riverrun Books,” I answered.

  “My name is Martin Quist, Mr. Bevan. I should like very much to speak to you. Will you be at your store for a while?”

  I wasn’t quite ready for this, but the voice sounded so civil it was impossible to not agree to talk.

  “Sure,” I said, “come over. Do you mind my asking what this is about?”

  “Not at all. We’ll discuss your health. Whether you prefer living to dying; matters of that nature.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Half an hour later, the Lincoln Continental I remembered from the auction parked in front of Riverrun. Rolf Kramm got out from behind the wheel and opened the rear passenger door. The man for whom it was opened said something to Kramm, then stepped out as if descending the passenger ramp of the Queen Mary.

  Martin Quist was of average height and carried himself with the lean, elastic look of an Ivy League middleweight boxer. Perhaps a year or two shy of forty, he had a receding chin and a broad forehead topped by ginger-colored hair. His tanned skin was the color of a medieval parchment. He wore a beautifully cut cream-colored suit, a white shirt, and a crimson and navy rep tie.

  I couldn’t imagine who his barber might be.

  Kansas City haircutters have names like Hank or Manny and their specialty is the Harrison Ford farm-boy look, cowlicks being especially popular.

  Not for this fellow, though. His trim styling with the sides brushed back was that of a Chicago advertising executive or a British cabinet minister. He exuded such a convivial confidence that I began to think I had misjudged him.

  That impression faded as he came closer. Rimless glasses fronting watery gray eyes caught the glare of the sun and sent it back at me. The smile that had seemed so pleasant at a distance was now a thin line, behind which tiny teeth showed like the silver fittings on a coffin.

  Because he carried a book in his right hand, I shook his left. It was small, but the grip was surprisingly powerful and he held it long enough so that I was the one disconnecting the exchange.

  “Hello, Bevan. Shall we sit out here? It’s such a lovely day.”

  “Sure. Would you like coffee? A soft drink?”

  “No, but thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”

  His thin lips parted enough to let the words slip out. Then he pressed them tightly together again so that it was difficult to hear just what he had said. He seemed to know that he made it difficult to understand him and it was obvious he preferred it that way.

  He placed a book of photography by Cindy Sherman on the green bistro table as we settled across from each other. Crossing his right leg over his left knee, he gave a tug at his trouser cuff. He sat back and silently studied me for a while, clearly enjoying my unease.

  “You’re a handsome fellow,” he finally said.

  Thoroughly caught off guard, I blushed like a first-grade communicant.

  “Don’t be embarrassed by compliments,” Quist conti
nued with the slightest condescension. “I only mention it because I see where your daughter gets her firm jaw. Surely the blond hair, high cheekbones, and extraordinary figure were gifts from her mother.”

  “Leave the personals alone,” I warned.

  Quist lifted his chin and lowered his eyes. The sides of his mouth twitched as if a school of minnows were trapped inside his gums. Only briefly did I see the tiny teeth when he spoke again through that tight smile.

  “No offense intended, Bevan. I only meant to praise your child. Anne is charming; utterly captivating as well as beautiful. You must be very proud of her. I know Bob Langston is. He introduced us last winter in Aspen. ‘How do you like my little rabbit?’ he said. They are staying with me during filming, you know. It’s quite cozy.”

  I tried to look deadpan. I must not have tried hard enough, because Quist’s tongue caressed his upper lip before speaking again.

  “Well, well, you do care. That’s not the impression one gets in talking to your daughter. Does it bother you that an aged movie star has stolen her heart? Or that the poor girl has an addiction to drugs?”

  For a moment, I considered introducing my fist to his esophagus. Instead, I asked, “How’s Langston’s picture coming along?”

  Quist studied the cuticles of his fingernails. He looked up with a sleepy expression.

  “It’s not his movie, Mr. Bevan. I happen to be the producer. We’ve had some misunderstandings, to be sure.”

  “You mean he owes you money.”

  “Yes. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I’ve been supporting him for some time now, in the style to which he’d like to be re-accustomed. He’s really quite talented when kept on a short leash.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “The book by Mademoiselle Colette; the one stolen by Mr. Hughes. A friend of yours kindly advised my associate, Mr. Kramm, of the theft.”

  “Richard Chezik?”

  “I believe that was the gentleman’s name.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  Quist sighed. “Then who does?”

  “I was under the impression that you did. After all, your man killed Gareth.”