“You understand now what you must do to live?” Kramm said as he withdrew the gag.
Weston stared emptily at his tormentor. Although his eyes remained open, the shaking had stopped. I wasn’t entirely sure that he was conscious.
He had shown courage holding out this far, I’ll give him that. But as tough and stubborn as the old sailor was proving, I knew he wasn’t going to sacrifice his life, given the slim chance Rolf Kramm would keep his end of the bargain.
Kramm released his grip. Weston sucked air back into his lungs. His legs began to tremble again.
The South African stepped back from the table to sit on a kitchen chair. He pointed the gun at my sternum, surveying me as Weston danced for his life.
“He will talk,” he told me. “They always do.”
“Did Richard Chezik?”
“Who?”
“The one-armed man whose throat you cut.”
“Oh, yes. No resistance whatsoever when I showed him the box cutter. Couldn’t get him to shut up.”
“You killed him anyway?”
“Force of habit,” Kramm said tonelessly. He prodded Weston’s crotch with the gun. The barista’s startled response nearly caused the table to tip. “When Mr. Quist heard the weapon came from your store, he suspected that this worm killed Hughes on your behalf. Was he correct in thinking that?”
“If you say so,” I said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The police know I’m here.”
Kramm’s tongue, thick and gray as a garden slug, caressed the corner of his mouth. He pulled on his cauliflower ear and said, “I don’t believe you. It’s not to your advantage to have told them.”
He settled back in his chair to contemplate something. A few moments later, he ended his thoughts with a grin that displayed a silver right incisor. He looked at me and said over the racket caused by Weston, “It will please me to kill you. Your reckless bidding forced me to spend more than I had been instructed. Much of the difference came from my wages.”
“Well, shucks, Rolf, if that’s your only problem with me, consider this: I’ll cover your loss, up to forty grand, mind you, no more; and you keep it quiet that I paid Weston to knock off Hughes. No questions asked. We’ll pretend I never came here.”
What the hell, it was only money.
Kramm displayed a ruptured grin that I took for a no.
I tried reason. “Kill me and you’ll have to answer to Quist for going beyond his orders. People are going to ask a lot of questions.”
“Mr. Quist won’t mind. He hates you almost as much as he hates that movie man.”
“What’s his problem with Langston?” I asked over the rattling sounds on the table. “I thought they were pals.”
I didn’t particularly care to know, but it never hurts to stall when you’re facing the end.
“He angered Mr. Quist enough that forgiveness is no longer an option.”
“How?”
“Langston insisted that he stop supplying drugs to your daughter, even threatening to stop working on the movie. Such insolence has its price.”
I said nothing. What he said was enough to unfreeze the larynx of any father, but I never so much as blinked or twitched a muscle.
“I cain’t hold much longer,” Weston moaned. “The gammons are cramping.”
“Then talk while you still can.”
“I will. Jes’ git me down.”
Kramm pulled the cord tighter. “The list. Where is it?”
“In a storage box,” Weston groaned. “Close to the ticket counter at Union Station.”
“Whose box? What number?”
“George Land owned it! I don’t know the number. It’s embossed on the key.”
“Where’s the key now?”
“With Violet. It was wedged in the back board of some French book like she said it would be. It wasn’t on Hughes when I smacked him down, but I took his apartment key and wallet before shoving him into the crick. She told me to put the wallet in Michael’s jeep while she searched the apartment to find it.
“Please, Mr. Kramm, cut me down! You can have the books and all the rest. Jes’ leave us to have the store. That’s all she really wants. That and me.”
“Soon enough.”
A peculiar stillness came over Kramm’s face.
I must have made a sudden move then. Either that or Kramm decided he was tired of me watching his cat-and-mouse routine. The next thing I felt was the butt of his gun crashing into the side of my head above the right ear. It sent a white hot message through my skull.
I dropped to my knees, clawing at the point of pain that had centered behind my eyeballs. There followed another blow and a worse pain, accompanied by a pale light that turned blue and gray.
After what seemed like an eternity, but must have only been seconds, I blinked through a bloodred haze to watch Kramm stuff the towel back into Weston’s mouth and casually knock the table out from under him.
The Afrikaner had laid out as good a cue for action as I was going to get. My legs were rubbery and my head felt like ball bearings were ricocheting between my ears, but somehow I got into a crouch. I lunged into Kramm hard enough to bring him down. He’d been enjoying the spectacle of Weston’s flailing legs too much to notice me, but now the real fight began and I knew enough to not give away the advantage of surprise.
I could never have bested him in a fair fight, even if fully conscious. The only thing for it was to get the gun that he had dropped when I surprised him.
The weapon seemed to slide into my hand of its own accord. I shoved it under Kramm’s chin, pulled the trigger, heard a deafening explosion and felt the impact reverberate all the way to my elbow. The bullet entered the bottom of his jaw cleanly and exited the top of his head very uncleanly. The slippery mess of blood and brains caused a lot of trouble for me as I jumped to my feet and tried to support Weston Preston’s weight.
His legs were still jerking, but I was able to get my head between them and, by standing straight up, relieve the pressure on his neck. His bowels had loosened and the stench was horrific. I reached over my head and pulled the towel out of his mouth, allowing him to suck in a quart or two of oxygen.
I stood for a few seconds, gathering my strength while contemplating how to get him down. The only option was to lower him as gently as possible, letting him hang while I got a knife to cut the rope. Except for an involuntary twitch, he’d gone completely limp. There was no hope that he would support himself if I were to set up the table under him.
I bent my knees slowly until the rope was taut again. Weston jerked violently with the return of the terrible pressure, but it meant he was still alive. I pulled open three kitchen drawers before finding a serrated steak knife.
Setting up the table Kramm had knocked over, I climbed onto it. Holding up Weston’s weight with my right arm, I sawed the loose rope with my left. After a long minute the rope snapped. The barista sank onto the table, sputtering profanities while farting to high heaven.
When he started blubbering about my saving him from ol’ split-foot’s domain, I told him to shut up. When he begged me to find the key to the handcuffs, I told him I had better things to do, like dialing the police station. It didn’t take long for Higgins to get on the line.
“Good evening, Lieutenant.”
“Where the hell are you, Bevan?”
“At Weston Preston’s apartment. My former employee has a few things he’d like to tell you.”
I put the telephone to Weston’s mouth so he could tell his story the second time that evening, only this time without a rope around his neck while dancing the fandango.
“I hadn’t meant to kill him,” Weston wailed in the midst of a crying jag. “I followed him from the bar meaning to knock him out and take his key. He jist didn’t go out the first time I knocked him. He started to get up so I had to clack him with the stick a couple more times to protect myself, and then he rolled over into the water. He was a big man, Lieutenant. It was self-defense. You gotta believe me.”
Following that creative argument, I made sure he mentioned that he and Violet did all this with the intent of setting me up in order to take over my bookstore.
“I suggest you bring a clean-up service with you, Buford,” I said after retrieving the telephone. “Thanks to me, a South African corpse is leaking blood and other matter on the kitchen linoleum. Kramm admitted killing Chezik as well, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. If you haven’t traced the call by now, you can find Weston Preston and the late Rolf Kramm at 534 Madison, just off Thirty-ninth Street, Apartment 2C.”
“You’d best be there as well, Bevan.”
“Sorry, I need to attend to some other necessities. I’ll be in touch.”
“Now wait just a damn minute,” Higgins said evenly. “Josie Majansik isn’t one of them. She’s an FBI agent working undercover. Early in the investigation, Edward Worth agreed to be the sucker bait in the blackmail setup. Josie did her part to convince Quist that her rich boyfriend was prime for the taking. Because your daughter is wrapped up in this mess, maybe you’d like to help us.”
That got my attention.
“What can I do?”
“First, meet me at Violet Trenche’s house. It’s on Rosewood, over by the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Know the area?”
“Yes.”
“While I sneak into the back of her house, you ring her doorbell and greet her with the news that you know she had Weston kill Hughes for the book. Pretend you want to cut a deal and let her do the rest of the talking.”
“What if she doesn’t want to talk? What if she decides to answer my intrusion with a gun? After all, I’m the alleged killer of two men who’s gone on the lam.”
“I doubt that the old broad has ever touched a firearm. If she does have one and knows how to use it, I’ll be there to identify your remains. I might even recommend you for a medal.”
“Well, if you put it that way.”
After hanging up, I used the hanging rope to secure Weston to a radiator in the living room and tied a scarf around his mouth. I didn’t want him disturbing the neighbors before the cops arrived.
I went into the bathroom to wash off the blood and filth. The face in the mirror looked better than it should have after such a beating. There were bruise marks on either side of my head and my lower lip was split, but the internal stuff didn’t seem too bad.
Leaving the apartment, I found cover behind a lilac bush to watch an unmarked car and a hazmat van pull silently into the apartment parking lot. Rather than greet them, I slipped into Pegeen’s Saab and eased it onto Thirty-ninth Street, heading for Violet Trenche’s house.
Chapter Twenty-three
I turned left at the corner of Forty-eighth and Rockhill Road to a row of identical cottages in an area referred to by those who live west of it as East Berlin. It wasn’t in the inner city, but it was on the cusp and that meant it was the last stop for white middle-class widows and divorcées hanging by their polished fingernails to live in a “decent” neighborhood.
The homes had been built of native stone at the end of the nineteenth century on orders from William Rockhill Nelson, the founder of The Kansas City Star, to house his blue-collar employees.
For two generations, pressmen and their families had lived contentedly in the subsidized houses along Brush Creek. But after World War II came the white flight to the suburbs. The block of limestone dwellings survived the wrecking ball only because The Star used its influence to list them on the National Register of Historic Places.
Rejected by African Americans as too small and by upwardly mobile young whites as too close to “the line,” the block held a tenuous middle zone between the races.
A light shone through a side window of 1524 Rosewood Place. I waited for Higgins’s car to pass and watched it park half a block down the street. After a couple of heartbeats, I got out of the Saab and walked across a brown patch of lawn where two days’ worth of newspapers lay untouched. A wicker mail basket next to the door groaned under the weight of uncollected junk mail and bills. When I rang the doorbell, it chimed something from a Mahler symphony.
Violet, or rather a soused version of her, greeted me in a silk bathrobe that was all red except for a pair of gold Chinese dragons running down the sides.
Elegance gone bad is never pretty, but seeing her in this condition for the first time was downright depressing. Her face was as gray as unglazed bone china. Thinning hair, released from the confines of the bun, looked as if it had been tossed by an eggbeater and hung down to her shoulders in tangled rivulets streaked with shards of gray over patches of scalp. Eyeliner had missed its mark on one eye. Her lipstick forgot a lip. She wore a pair of pink slippers where the toes had been cut out to make room for bunions. She looked like Walter Matthau in drag.
I’d expected her to be rattled at seeing me, but I guessed wrong.
“Welcome to Rosewood,” she rasped, as if I’d come to Buckingham Palace. “Wanna drink?”
“No thanks.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I think you know.”
“Really?” A mocking smile.
She motioned me to enter, saying, “I don’t wish to disappoint you, but I haven’t the foggiest notion what has brought you here.”
I hate arguing with drunks, especially when I’m the sober one, so I held my tongue and followed her into a living room that looked like a set from House of Usher, minus the charm. She sat on a worn chintz sofa covered with kilim pillows and I settled into an armchair spotted by cigarette burns and wine stains. Framed steel engravings of Samuel Johnson, Montaigne, and Dickens hung in black and gray clumps on the walls.
There’s no denying that Violet’s love of books and literature was genuine. Handsome leather-bound volumes of the classics and crisp-jacketed moderns stood in ordered rows on sturdy oak shelves throughout the room. An elephant folio titled The Thousand Buddhas by Sir Aurel Stein covered half of a library table by the front window. Glancing into the adjoining dining room, I saw hundreds more volumes.
Under different circumstances, I would have instinctively read the titles, run my fingers over the bindings, and pulled out a book or two that interested me. But there wasn’t time and I’d already spotted what I had come for.
The coffee table had been made from an old ship’s hatch cover. A passport and Fodor’s Europe lay on a corner with a computer-generated airline ticket sticking out of the book. Next to those items was a cocktail glass half full, a bottle of vodka half empty, a key to a storage box, and an accordion file with a dozen or so typed pages stacked within it. On the top of the file rested L’Ingénue libertine by Colette and a thin morocco slipcase containing a slender volume of the Hemingway in our time.
“Going somewhere, Vi?” I asked.
She picked up her drink and slowly swished it from side to side.
“I’ve thought of visiting Europe,” she said, putting the glass to her lips.
“Plan on taking Weston?”
She downed her drink, wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her silk bathrobe, and in a clotted voice, sniggered. “Why on earth would I? He’s served his purpose. Can you imagine that Ozark rooster engaging my clients in Paris? Dear God, the horror!”
“He nearly died to keep your secret from a man who would have killed you. I think you owe him some consideration.”
She shrugged. “The infatuated idiot also backed half the amount of my bid at Bender’s auction. But he’s past forgiving. If he had kept his mouth shut, you wouldn’t be here. I suppose you are prepared to bargain with me.”
“Perhaps.”
While she poured herself another vodka, I picked up the slipcase and gently removed the in our time published by Three Mountains Press. I opened to the first page of the Rives handmade paper and read the inscription that began “Dear Dr. Guffey”:
This book was printed and published by Bill Bird who had bought an old hand press and set it up on the Isle Saint Louis in Paris. It came out later than it should because
I introduced Bill to Ezra Pound and Ezra suggested a series of books—“There’ll be me and old Ford and Bill Williams and Eliot and Lewis, etc and some others” Ezra said “and we’ll call it an inquest into the state of English prose.” Eliot didn’t include much—nor did Lewis and Ezra had five titles—Bill said, “What about Hem”?
“Hem’s will come sixth,” Ezra said. So when they were all printed and this one finally gotten out it was later than the Three Stories and 10 poems although Bill had the manuscript long before MacAlmon had the other set up—Ernest
I placed the book back into the case and set it on the table. It was nice to have held it, even if only for a little while.
“It’s over, Violet. You conspired with Weston to kill Gareth Hughes in order to get the Colette and the secret documents George Land had kept hidden.”
She leaned back on the sofa with half-closed eyes and a derisive look. Her fingers curled greedily around her drink. “Do tell, Michael.”
“You knew Beatrice would have to put George Land’s collection up for sale. After she refused to accept your offer following his death it was obvious she’d never sell it to you at any price. But as his lover, you knew better than she how troubled George’s finances had become with the collapse of his construction business. You knew they would come up for sale eventually.”
“The stress killed him.” A momentary tinge of regret seeped through her watery eyes.
“Beatrice didn’t realize the gold mine that his books represented,” I continued, “let alone the potential blackmail value of the New Moon Society list. To her the books were just scraps of paper. You waited patiently to regain what you thought to be rightfully yours, scrimping to put aside wages that one day could be used to regain the collection. When you learned Beatrice had put them up for auction with Herl Bender, you sent Richard Chezik to bid for them with your savings. Only you didn’t count on me being there. And certainly not Martin Quist’s man.”
“It did make for an inconvenience.”
“But all was not lost when Chezik reported that he had seen Gareth Hughes steal the Colette and the in our time. It even saved what you might have spent had your fifty thousand dollars been the high bid. All you had to do was steal them from the thief.”
The Dirty Book Murder Page 15