by John Dunning
“The old man really loved his books,” I said with admiration.
“Some guys like sex,” Judith said from the doorway. “Stan liked books.”
“So you sold the books for forty, fifty cents apiece?”
“I wasn’t gonna quibble,” Ballard said. “The guy came back with two grand. Two grand is two grand, and I wanted the crap out of here.”
I took a picture of Bobby Westfall out of my notebook. “Is this the guy?”
“That’s him,” Ballard said. “That a dead picture?”
I nodded and showed it to her. She nodded and looked away.
“Who do you think killed him?” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
We talked some more, and it all boiled down to this: They had struck a deal and Bobby had come one night last week and stripped the house of everything that remotely resembled a book. He had worn that same silly suit for the heavy work. They didn’t know anything else about him— where he’d come from, where he’d gone—the only record of the transaction was the receipt that Ballard had written out (copy to her, and you’d better believe it) to keep it straight and legal. Bobby had signed it with an undecipherable scrawl and left his copy on the table. All he wanted was to get the books and get on the road.
He had come for the books in a huge truck, a U-Haul rental. Now we were getting somewhere. Ruby had said that Bobby had no driver’s license: that meant someone else had to have rented the truck. I was hungry for a new name to be thrown into the hopper: I was eager to begin sweating that unseen accomplice. I felt we were one name away from breaking it, and I wanted that name and I wanted it now.
But Bobby had come to Madison Street alone. If someone else had rented the truck, why not ask that buddy to give a hand with the heavy lifting? The obvious answer was that Bobby wanted no one to know what he had really bought from Stanley Ballard’s estate. He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. Ballard and his sister kept after their own work and before they knew it the night slipped away. Bobby loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.
During all of this, Hennessey had not said a word. This is the kind of cop Neal is: he melts into the woodwork; he listens, he looks, he adds two and two, then stares at the number four to see if there’s any broken type. I didn’t notice when he’d stepped away: I found him on the front porch talking with a neighbor.
“Cliff, this is Mr. Greenwald. He and Mr. Ballard were friends for fifty years.”
We stood on Ballard’s front porch and Greenwald stood on his, and we talked easily across the hedge. Ballard was already living here when Greenwald moved in in 1937. They had a great mutual passion—books. In a very different way, they reminded me of Bobby Westfall and Jarvis Jackson—two lonely guys held together by honest affection and one or two deep common denominators. Ballard was an old bachelor: Greenwald’s wife had died in 1975, and the two men took their dinners together at a place they liked, a few blocks away.
Greenwald was a leathery old man, bald with white fringe hair and a white mustache. I could see his books through the window. They had belonged to the book clubs together, Greenwald said: every month they’d get half a dozen books, read them and discuss them. They weren’t collectors in the real sense, though both had accumulated a lot of titles over fifty years. It was a comfort, Greenwald said, to see a copy of a book you loved on the shelf. It didn’t have to be a fine expensive edition. This was how they both felt: books were meant to be read, not hoarded. Both of them gave a lot of books away—to nursing homes, library sales, and other worthy charities. “What’s the use of having a book that’s too good to read?” he said. “Half the fun is giving the books away.”
I could see his point, though I hadn’t agreed with it for years. “Did Mr. Ballard ever have anything that might be called valuable?”
Greenwald looked away and shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t imagine. We didn’t do it for that reason.”
“Still, sometimes people pick up things, sometimes by accident.”
Greenwald shrugged again.
“Did Mr. Ballard ever go to estate sales or junk stores looking for books? Maybe he found something that way.”
“Never, and I can tell you that with absolute certainty. He wasn’t a book hunter, he was a book buyer. He never went to used bookstores. He bought them when they were new and read them all. He was in the Book-of-the-Month for as long as I knew him, maybe longer. I think he started soon after the clubs came in, in the early thirties. You can check on that—he kept all his records from the clubs, all the way back to when he started.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. He kept all the flyers and bulletins…I know you’ll find them there in his den, in that big filing cabinet. He used to keep the club flyers and write his notes in the margins. He’d never write in a book, of course, but he’d mark up those advance flyers they sent every month, little notes to himself—which books to buy, which ones to keep, which to give away. I do the same thing, but it’s a habit I picked up from him. I’ve only been doing it about twenty years. His files go back much further.”
“May I come over, sir, and see your books?”
“Certainly.”
We walked across and went into Greenwald’s house. It was like a branch library: row upon row, bookcase after bookcase, all cheap editions of great books. The two old men had fine taste. Anyone could see that.
“We had a lot to talk about, Stan and I. We had been around the world together many times, without ever leaving this block, if you know what I mean.”
“I sure do,” I said. “It’s a wonderful hobby.”
“Oh, it is. It’s harder today, though. You can’t find the good books, like you once could. People don’t read anymore, or when they do read they read things that couldn’t have been published in the old days. I don’t know: my days are all in the past. Everyone I knew is dead, and no one is writing anything worth reading. This is a different world from when I was a boy. I can’t read the stuff they publish today, can you?”
“Some of it,” I said. “Every once in a while it still happens, Mr. Greenwald. I don’t know how it happens, or why, but it still does. Sometimes a great book not only gets published but read, by one helluva lot of people.”
“Stan would’ve liked you,” Greenwald said. “He liked everybody who read and appreciated good things. He was an old gentleman, I’ll tell you that. Not like those two next door, squabbling with their silly silent feud over every last dime. Stan’s turning over in his grave this very minute. Money never came first with Stan. Honor, trust, friendship, those were the qualities he believed in. A great old man. His like will not come this way again.”
We went back to Ballard’s house. I told Judith I would have to see her uncle’s files. The two of them followed us into the den and watched while I went through a great old filing cabinet. It was all there as Greenwald had promised—the entire record of Stan Ballard’s love affair with the Book-of-the-Month Club: receipts, billing statements, flyers so annotated and footnoted that I groaned at the thought of wading through it. But Ballard came from a generation that was taught penmanship: his writing was small but precise and, in the final analysis, beautiful. It looked to me like the old man had kept the economy of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, going strong since March 1931. He had bought the main selection and six other titles that month. The average price was around a dollar: not much in today’s world of the $20 novel, but in 1931 there were men working a sixty-hour week for less money than Stan Ballard was spending per month on books.
“What did your uncle do for a living?” I asked.
“He was a stockbroker,” Judith said.
“He got into the book club in 1931. That couldn’t‘ve been much of a year for stockbrokers, but he seemed to have plenty of money to spend on books… even in the Depression.”
“He inherited money,” Judith said. “I don’t know how much; he sure didn’t leave much cash in his estate. He probably spent it all on books. It didn’t matter how the times were, he always had money for that.”
I thumbed through the papers. “I’ll have to take these files.”
They didn’t like that. They were on guard now, full of new suspicion. I could almost hear the wheels turning in their heads. Maybe the old man had kept his cash hidden somewhere. Maybe there was a big, juicy stack of thousand-dollar bills tucked into the book file—book money unspent.
“I don’t think you should just walk out of here with that stuff,” Ballard said.
“I can get a court order if I have to, and I think you know that,” I said. “Why don’t we make it easy on ourselves?”
“What is this stuff?” Judith said. “Is there anything in there worth any money?”
“I’d be amazed if there was. You can look for yourself while we pack it up. I’ll give you a receipt and after this is over you’ll get it all back.”
“Who’ll get it back?” Ballard said.
“Whoever the hell wants it.”
We started packing the files. I could see it was going to take some time, because Ballard and Judith wanted to examine each file microscopically as we went.
“This could take all night,” I said. “Let’s try to cut to the chase. Where’s the original copy of that appraisal he had done?”
“The executor has it,” Judith said. “A lawyer named Walter Drey fuss. I think he and Stan were soldiers together in the Revolutionary War.”
“One of us ought to go see him,” I said to Hennessey.
“I’ll go. I’ll have to take a cab.”
“Good. If you hurry you might make it before his office closes. I’ll call and tell him you’re coming.”
It was dark before I was finished at Ballard’s. We packed all the contents of Stanley Ballard’s filing cabinet into six big cardboard boxes and I loaded them into my car. Neither Ballard nor Judith offered to help. I thanked them and left them to their awful job. I hope I never hate anyone the way they hate each other, I thought as I drove downtown to fetch Hennessey. Then I thought of Jackie Newton, and the world was a darker place again.
Hennessey was waiting for me on 17th Street. Under his arm he had a single folder, which contained Stanley Ballard’s will and a copy of the appraisal. He had made no attempt to read the will—Walter Dreyfuss had given him a verbal summary—but he had looked the book appraisal over.
“What’s it say?”
“Book club fiction, almost without exception. Worthless.”
“W’ho did the appraisal?”
“That dame up in Evergreen. Rita McKinley.”
I grunted.
“So where does this leave us?” Hennessey said.
“Right back where we started. It was something small, and Bobby had to buy the whole damn library to get it; something so tiny you could carry it in your pocket, but so potent it makes the hair stand up on my neck just thinking about it.”
“How’re we gonna find it?”
“I’m gonna dig. I’m gonna comb through every piece of paper in this state if I have to.”
I dropped Hennessey at Ruby’s store, where he had parked his car, and I started back to my apartment for what I thought would be another long night’s work.
Then something happened that changed my life for all time.
15
I was full of nervous energy: I wanted something to break that would engage me fully and keep me going through the night. I had two possibilities, either of which ought to do it. I took the Ballard files up to my place, but when I started to work I decided to run down the U-Haul lead.
There are almost fifty places in Denver that rent U-Hauls. A lot of gas stations are subagents and rent them out of their back yards. I sat at the phone with a Yellow Pages and began to work. I did it the same way we had found the church, beginning at Bobby’s place and working in a widening circle between there and Madison Street. This is what police work is all about: your trigger finger always gets more action on the telephone than in any gunplay. I hummed “Body and Soul” between calls, trying to get a hint of the way Coleman Hawkins used to play it. “Dah-dah de dah-dah dumm.” It didn’t work. Nothing worked. I gave them Bobby’s name on the insane chance that someone somewhere might’ve had soup for brains and rented a $25,000 truck to a guy with no driver’s license. You never can tell. Lacking a file on Westfall, they would have to look through all their receipts for the night of June 10. I waited through interminable delays. Most of the little places had no extra help—the guy who rented the U-Hauls was the guy who pumped your gas. Customers came and went while I dangled on the phone. One place took almost thirty minutes, and it turned out that they hadn’t rented any trucks on the night in question.
The truck outlets themselves were, if anything, slower than the corner gas stations. Those places are all on computer now. This is supposed to make finding information faster and easier, but in real life it doesn’t turn out that way. Have you noticed how much longer you have to wait in bank lines, and at Target and Sears stores, since the computer came in? I hate computers, though I know that without them police work would be like toiling in a medieval zoo. After three hours of being told that the computer was down, that there were no such rentals, that they’d have to check and call me back, I was ready to adjourn to my favorite beanery. I couldn’t raise Carol, but when I’m that hungry I don’t mind eating alone.
Before I could get out of there, the phone rang.
It was Barbara Crowell. Her voice was quaking, terrified.
“Janeway! My God, I can’t believe you finally got off that phone!”
“Hello, Barbara,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Can you come over here?”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s… him.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I know he’s out there.”
“Out where?”
“Somewhere outside. I saw him.”
“When did you see him?”
She breathed at me for fifteen seconds. Then she said, “I think I’m losing my mind. 1 see him everywhere. I don’t know what to do. Everywhere I look I see his face. Then I look again and he’s gone. Then he’s there again. I hear a sudden noise and I freak out. I’m afraid of the dark. The telephone rings and I jump out of my skin. I answer it and there’s no one there. I know it’s him. All of a sudden I’m afraid of the goddamn dark. I’ve never been afraid of anything and now I see shadows everywhere.”
“All right, calm down. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”
I parked a block away from her place and walked over. I came up carefully, keeping in shadow. For a long time I stood across the street and watched her apartment, and nothing happened. Her light was a steady beacon at the top. I walked down the street and around the corner and came up from the back. There was no one around: I could see quite clearly. I skirted the house and went in through the front, and I stood in the dark hall and watched the street. It was quiet: people were settling in for the night.
I climbed the three flights to the top and knocked on her door.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
She clawed at the locks and ripped the door open.
“Jesus, what took you so long?”
“I wanted to walk around and look the place over.”
“Did you see him?”
“Barbara, there’s nobody there.”
She closed her eyes and collapsed against me. I held her with one arm and closed the door with the other. Eventually I got her to the sofa and sat her down. Then I went through it all again, the same routine we’d done before: the coffee, the calming words, the lecture. She looked like a little girl, ready to explode in tears. I couldn’t help being angry and sorry for her at the same time.
“Jackie doesn’t need to torture you, honey,” I said. “You do a good enough job on yourself.”
“I know I saw him this morning. That’s what set me off.”
“Where did you see him?”
“I was on my way to work. I had stopped at a red light and he pulled up beside me. I could sense him there looking at me.”
“What do you mean you could sense him? What does that mean?”
“I couldn’t look at him.”
“It might’ve been the man in the moon sitting there for all we know.”
“It was him. I saw his car. There couldn’t be another car like that, so don’t tell me I’m imagining it. When the light turned green he pulled out ahead of me and turned the corner. I couldn’t be mistaken about that car.”
I left her alone for a while. I turned down the lights and went to the window and looked down in the empty street.
“While you’re scaring yourself to death, Jackie’s probably home watching TV,” I said. Or breaking in a new dog, I thought.
“He’s not home,” she said. “He’s out there somewhere.”
I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
“Call him up if you think he’s home,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Go ahead, call him and see. You’re not afraid of him; call him and see if he’s home. If he is, I won’t bother you anymore.”
“All right.”
I didn’t need to look up the number: I had known it for more than a year. I dialed it and waited. No one answered.
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Looks like Jackie’s hiding out there in the bushes, just waiting for you to show your face.”
She shivered and the goose bumps started.
“I guess you can go hide in the bedroom,” I said. “Tremble in the dark for the rest of your life.”
She cried at that. She cried a good deal. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t know how to push her off the dime. What was worse, I wasn’t sure anymore what Jackie was ca-pable of, or what I wanted Barbara Crowell to do about him.