Quist smirked. He was a natural smirker.
“That’s not the way I do things. Dumping him in the creek as if I had a message to send someone? Who would I wish to impress? Given time, I would have searched Mr. Hughes’s apartment and, failing to locate the book, would have extracted the necessary information from him. Rolf, after all, is quite effective with an electric drill. He prefers a Bosch but must make do with a Black and Decker here. When in Rome …”
He checked his watch then waved a pinkie finger at Kramm, who leaned against the Lincoln taking in every inch of me.
“I wasn’t even aware that the Colette was missing from the sale,” Quist said, looking back at me, “until after Hughes’s unfortunate demise.”
“I suggest you ask the cops where it is.”
“I have. They found many books, many lovely, expensive books, in your colleague’s hovel, but not the Colette.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I said mechanically.
“Of course you didn’t,” Quist agreed. “You had less of a reason than I. But someone set you up and you have the best motive to determine who it was. I suspect the police think the same thing or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
He opened the Cindy Sherman book and casually turned the pages before continuing.
“I don’t care who performed the deed, Bevan. I simply want what is lawfully mine. Get it for me. Please.” He stopped flipping pages and gave me his full attention. “Then we can be friends.”
“Like Bob Langston and you are friends?”
Martin Quist nodded, looking faintly amused. “Deliver the Colette to me and I shan’t trouble you or yours.” He hesitated before adding wearily: “I hope we understand each other.”
I understood all right. I knew that if Martin Quist wanted you, he would get you. I also knew that happiness is nothing more than a case of settled nerves and that it was going to be a while before I found it again.
“I’ll be going now,” he announced, rising languidly. “You may keep the Cindy Sherman work. It’s listing for a hundred or so on the Internet.”
We didn’t bother shaking hands again. Quist walked to the Lincoln while I remained at the table tapping a drum solo on the metal top.
After the car pulled away, I opened the book to a place marked by a yellow Post-it. The photograph showed a model, probably Cindy Sherman herself, lying faceup on the ground, legs splayed apart, her head swathed in a black cloth so that only one glassy eye remained visible. A milk white breast spilled from the black gown. A dart lay imbedded in the flesh an inch or two above the nipple.
I went into the store and placed a call to the production assistant on the Jesse James movie. Laura Dowell answered on the fourth ring. She thought Anne was on the set, but wasn’t sure and said they were only taking calls from Los Angeles today on orders from Langston. She gave me the number anyway, but no one answered. I dialed Miss Dowell again, gave her three listings, and told her that if I wasn’t at my house or the bookstore she could reach me by leaving a message with Pegeen Flynn at The Peanut.
“What about your mobile phone?”
“Just try those numbers.”
If I went underground I didn’t want to be traced by a cell tower.
I hung up just as Violet approached me with a sheet of Internet sales statistics.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
It was true. My hands trembled as if I had Parkinson’s. I took the papers from her and pretended to look at them.
Violet tapped my shoulder. “Why don’t you go home? Weston and I can take care of things here.”
I nodded, said something about the Alibris sales being lower than AbeBooks’s numbers, and pushed away from the desk.
“Vi, I heard that you helped George Land build his book collection.”
She turned her head a little to look at me. A streak of red spread across her cheeks.
When she didn’t respond, I added: “You also tried to buy them back from his widow shortly after he died.”
Her eyes hardened. “That was a long time ago, when I had my own store. She wouldn’t sell.”
The telephone rang before she could finish. She quickly picked it up, grateful for the interruption.
“For you,” she told me, covering the mouthpiece. “It isn’t Anne.”
“Take a message.”
Violet repeated what I said to the caller, listened to the response, then looked back at me. “Best take it,” she said, handing me the phone.
“Bevan here.”
“Thank God I caught you,” Josie Majansik said breathlessly. “Richard Chezik’s body was found by his mother in his carriage house. His throat was cut. District Attorney Crowell has ordered the police to arrest you.”
I remembered the sickly sweet smell. Richard had never taken that bus. And he wasn’t the author of that note.
“I’m not waiting for them to arrest me, Josie. Quist was just here. He insisted he didn’t have Hughes killed, but implied he would harm Anne if I don’t find the stolen book for him.”
I heard her fingernails tapping nervously at the other end of the line.
“Get over to my place pronto,” Josie ordered. “Don’t risk driving your jeep. I’m on the west side of the Plaza, behind the Capital Grille. The Chesterton Apartments at 460 West Forty-eighth, number fourteen, first floor.”
“Got it,” I said, jotting the address on a dollar bill.
“I’ll be waiting on the steps.”
I hung up, but kept my hand on the telephone until the shaking stopped. A cold anger replaced the anxiety as an adrenaline rush took over.
“I’m going back to the police station,” I said to Violet. Lying was getting easier. “More questioning, I’m afraid.”
“Good luck,” she said.
As I turned to leave, she took my hand and quietly added, “Forgive me for bristling at your questions about the Lands’ library. George was a friend and my best customer. Beatrice resented me, actually thinking I’d had an affair with her husband.”
“Did you know it was the Land collection that sold at the auction on Saturday?”
She returned my stare with a steady gleam. “I figured as much. Are you going to be all right?”
“Not really.”
“No shit,” Weston Preston said from behind his coffee bar. “You’re lookin’ real wonky, boss. Maybe you done rollicked around with too many fillies lately. It might help to get an oil change in your vee-hickle. It’s at twenty thousand miles and you know what they say?”
I didn’t know what “they” say and didn’t bother listening to the rest of his blather. I thought of telling him to “kill his own snakes,” an Ozark term for minding your own business, but I was too busy counting a wad of twenties pulled from the overnight cash box. I folded ten of them into my front pocket and added five tens to my wallet before leaving through the back door.
A twenty-minute jog through three miles of leafy backstreet neighborhoods brought me to Josie’s apartment building. If I’d known what I would learn there, I might have kept on running until I reached St. Louis.
Chapter Twenty
I turned the corner onto Forty-eighth Street and saw Josie standing on the front steps of her apartment building. She wore a white cotton blouse, a tan skirt, and a face as cheerful as a funeral. I hesitated before crossing the street in order to signal my arrival when an old man in a walker crept up behind me.
“Who are you waving at?” he demanded.
“No one in particular,” I said, bending over as if searching for something on the sidewalk. “I dropped my keys and … ah, here they are.”
He didn’t believe a word.
“I wouldn’t mess with that one.” He inclined his head toward Josie. “She’s trouble. I can tell.”
I had the feeling that any attractive woman born after the Korean War meant trouble to him. He shuffled toward the entrance of the Chesterton Apartments while I fiddled with the keys in my pocket and whistled “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Once he had crawled up the steps, t
he geezer nodded in my direction and whispered in Josie’s ear. Finally, the door closed behind him and Josie motioned for me to come in.
“What did he say?” I asked when we were inside.
“He said you were trouble.”
Josie’s apartment smelled of herbal candles and popcorn oil. The living room was dimly lit by a table lamp that rested on a plastic milk crate. A television set with a sixteen-inch screen and a VCR player on top sat like an afterthought in a dark corner. The west wall was a series of paned glass windows that looked out upon the courtyard, but the blinds were partially drawn, letting in slivers of daylight and not much of a view. Piles of paperback books lay scattered on a radiator. A worn sofa, partially covered by a moth-eaten horse blanket, sat against the east wall opposite the windows. Next to it, a three-legged end table supported a telephone and an empty beer bottle.
This disheveled nest didn’t match the woman I thought I knew. It was as if we had entered a rent-by-the-hour motel room and she was too embarrassed to admit it.
“Nice digs,” I said.
“Yeah, sure. I had no choice but to keep the previous owner’s furnishings. My salary doesn’t allow for luxuries. Help yourself to a beer and then we’ll go over some things. I need to get back to work soon.”
I stepped into the kitchen, flicked a cockroach off a hot plate, and opened the refrigerator. It was a Kelvinator manufactured before the invention of automatic defrosting. I pulled out a bottle and took a long pull of semi-warm Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“Your fridge needs Freon,” I said.
“And my car needs transmission fluid and I could use new heels on my damn shoes. Got any other advice, Mr. Fix-It, or shall we get down to business?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to critique your living quarters.”
Her face softened.
“Forget it, Mike. I’ve had a bad day, that’s all. Nothing like yours though.”
She arched her head toward another room. “My office is in there, but don’t get any ideas.”
I followed her into the bedroom, which wasn’t much of an improvement over the living room.
A card table with a laptop computer on it stood in the corner; the king-size bed was covered by a sheet but no bedspread; another three-legged table was crowned by a lamp with a cracked plastic shade. On the windowsill behind the bed was an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.
“I don’t.”
She picked up the laptop and sat on the edge of the bed, then looked up at me with a tired, expressionless gaze.
“I like you, Mike. Maybe even more than that. But I’m an out-of-town girl with a shitty-paying job and little chance of advancement. I’ll be leaving one of these days, probably sooner than later. I’m willing to help you, but you must realize I have my own life, such as it is, and I’m not looking for advice on housekeeping or anything else. And let’s get it out of the way before you ask: You aren’t the only boy I’ve kissed.”
The ringing of the telephone interrupted our happy talk. Josie rushed into the living room to answer it, mumbled a few words, and returned with her cheeks looking rosier than before.
“Who was that?”
“My editor. I can’t stay long.”
“How did he know you were home?”
“I work from here a lot of the time. Any more questions?”
“No. Sorry. I’m getting paranoid.”
“Given the circumstances, that’s understandable,” she said quietly.
I looked at our reflection in the full-length mirror hanging on the ceiling above the bed.
“Your office is, uh, unique.”
Josie managed a smile. “The landlord evicted the previous occupant for soliciting male prostitutes. He never got around to taking the mirror down and now I’m used to it. Take off your shoes and relax.”
She sat next to me again.
I told her about going over to Richard Chezik’s house, seeing his mother, poking around the cluttered library, and taking the books he had stolen from my shop.
“Do you think his body was upstairs while you were there?”
“Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure it was. I smelled just a hint of something cloyingly sweet. Bodies beginning to putrefy smell that way.”
“How do you know that?”
“First Iraq War.”
“I thought you were just a military lawyer.”
“Every Marine’s considered a rifleman, even JAGs. I handled my share of patrols outside the Green Zone.”
“Tell me about Gareth Hughes,” she said, opening the laptop. “Who was he?”
“A colleague of mine in the book trade. He grew up in Wales, worked on a sheep station in Australia, then as a forester in New Zealand before coming to the States. While knocking about the country working odd construction jobs, he would buy books from thrift stores in his off hours and sell them to local bookshops for a profit. By the time he settled in Kansas City, he’d become knowledgeable enough about rare books to make a living at it.”
“Who were his friends, his enemies?”
“None that I can recall; except for me. I was a bit of both.”
“Great. Now we’re getting nowhere.”
“Thanks for taking me in.”
“You’re welcome. Please concentrate.”
“That’s easy for you to say with that damn mirror above us.”
She put the computer aside and stood up. Just as quickly I pulled her down.
“Okay,” I said, handing the laptop back to her. “Gareth stole two books that collectors would pay a great deal for. One was by a sexual pioneering French woman named Colette that contained a very personal inscription to Sylvia Beach and another from Ernest Hemingway. It’s the kind of thing to keep members of the literary tea society hot in the britches. He also took an extremely rare Hemingway first edition titled in our time.”
“What are they worth?”
“Together, maybe half a million dollars. If the economy ever improves, possibly more. I suppose that’s plenty enough for certain people to kill for, but murder isn’t the means one expects from bibliophiles.”
“Well?” she demanded, tapping her fingers on the laptop. “Go on.”
“I don’t think Gareth died because of a book, but for what was concealed in one. The killer wanted a list in order to blackmail some of the most powerful people in this town.”
“Where were the names written?”
“Not sure. According to George Land’s widow, who put the books up for auction, they might have been written in the margins of the Colette, where her husband had described the sexual preferences of their friends. But Beatrice Land also mentioned that he had kept a much more detailed list, one that included compromising photos.”
“Were these ‘friends’ also business acquaintances?”
“I suppose so. Probably a politician or two as well. And let us not forget the clergy.”
“Hughes must have had the book when he was attacked,” Josie said. She removed a shoe to rub her right foot.
“Perhaps. He was wearing an overcoat even though it was a warm evening. It had deep inside pockets, handy for concealing stolen books. I always made him take it off when he was in my shop. But I can’t believe Hughes would walk into a bar in that condition lugging something that rare.”
“Do you think he left them at his apartment?”
She kept rubbing that foot. It was small and delicate and the toenails were painted a bright pink.
“He didn’t have anywhere else to put them.”
“Sounds reasonable. Tell me about Weston Preston and Violet Trenche. Loyal to the firm, are they?”
I leaned back on the bed and stared up at the mirror. Noticing that my widow’s peak seemed more defined, I added male-pattern baldness to my list of worries.
“They helped to put my life back together,” I said, scratching the back of my head. “They work for next to nothing to make my bookstore a success.”
; “I think you had something to do with that, too, Mike. Just tell me a bit more about them.”
“After getting out of the Merchant Marine, Weston raced motorcycles, worked as a mechanic at a used-car dealership, did other odd jobs, and learned to make coffee. He tends to live in an alternative universe at times, but I can’t complain about his work ethic. Kids enjoy his goofiness and so do most of the mothers. When there are no coffee customers he shelves books, cleans the bathroom, answers the phone, helps my customers, and lends an occasional hand to little old ladies trying to cross Brookside Boulevard. The place is as much Weston’s life as it is mine.”
“He lives alone?”
“He’s divorced with two grown daughters whom he never sees. Their mother’s been in once or twice to harangue him. He’s always looking for love, but plays the forlorn fool too much to find anyone who takes him seriously.”
“Then there’s Violet.”
“Right. She could run the place and probably thinks she should. Her husband was an architect and apparently quite accomplished. After he died of a heart attack, she used his life insurance to open an antiquarian bookstore. She traveled the country and Europe buying fine books and solidified her reputation by becoming an officer in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. Then she lost everything in a fire. She’s not a happy person these days. George Land had been a customer of hers. According to Beatrice, Violet and George were lovers. Violet denies it.”
“Naturally. Do you think she and Weston have anything going between them?”
“Get serious, Josie.”
I got up from the bed, walked over to the windowsill, and dumped the cigarette ashes into a wastebasket. Stuff like that bothers me. Without turning around, I said, “I saw you interviewing Edward Worth at the shop not long ago. How well do you know the guy?”
When I looked back, she was standing by the bedroom door with hands on hips and a half-smile that wasn’t a smile.
“Enough to wish he didn’t smoke.”
I looked at the ashtray.
“Does that mean what I think it does?”
“As long as we’re concerned, Michael, it’s none of your business what I do outside that bookstore of yours.”
The Dirty Book Murder Page 13