Booked to die cj-1

by John Dunning

I had never stopped believing in that U-Haul lead. A two-ton truck doesn’t just materialize on Madison Street: someone somewhere rents it, buys it, or builds it from scratch in a back yard. I sat at my telephone with an open yellow pages and dialed one number after another. It didn’t take nearly as long when vou had a name. Peter Bonnema had rented a truck from an East Colfax gas station on the night of June 10: I had found the place on the sixth or seventh try; told the man I was Cameron of DPD and said I’d be over in a while to look at his records. Then I took a shower and lay down to rest. It was the first sleep I’d had in thirty-six hours.

  Eighty minutes later my alarm went off. I got up feeling worse than ever, dressed, threw enough clothes together for a short weekend, locked up, and left. I didn’t take any dress clothes or neckties—I wasn’t flying to Portland to keynote a national conference of Disgraced Ex-Cops of America.

  I pulled into the gas station with an hour to spare. The guy who had actually rented the truck to Peter didn’t work there anymore. He wouldn’t‘ve remembered anyway, the manager assured me. I thought it was also too much to expect that the same truck would still be on the lot, and it was. “That baby’s long gone,” the man said. “That went out on a one-way to Florida back in early August.” The truck had been rented out of this same station no less than eighteen times between Peter Bonnema and Tampa-Saint Pete: any physical evidence, unlikely under the best circumstances, would’ve disappeared a dozen times over, but I had to ask. “Do you people keep stuff that’s left in the trucks—papers, notes, anything like that?” The guy said yeah, sure, if it looked valuable or important. He showed me a box of junk. That’s all it was, junk: I combed through it and found nothing. I asked to see the original contract that Peter had signed. The original had been turned in to the U-Haul people, but the gas station kept a file of duplicates going back a year. “See, this-un went out without the proper paperwork,” the guy said. “That’s one of the reasons Jerry don’t work here no more, the bastard wouldn’t do what I told him. All these trucks are supposed to be backed up with credit cards. I don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ straight from the cross, if he wants to drive one of these babies out of here he’s got to have a card. I tell Jerry this fifteen times, and what’s he do? He rents the goddamn thing for cash and we got nothing but the guy’s driver’s license number on file. What good does that do us if he cracks it up?”

  I looked at the pink contract dupe. Peter had signed out at 4:18 on the afternoon of June 10. He had returned the truck in good shape at 2:56 p.m. the following day—at least, someone had returned it: there was no mention made as to whether the same guy had brought it in, but even if old Jerry had been on duty, he wouldn’t‘ve noticed. Old Jer wasn’t real quick on the uptake. The truck had been out twenty-two hours and change. A few blocks from here, Peter had pulled over and stopped. Bobby Westfall had taken the wheel and Peter had faded into the night. These were the things that weren’t noted on the dupe. Bobby had taken over and driven the truck into eternity. By five o’clock he had been at Buckley’s store, cocky and alone: by seven he had been at Ballard’s, again alone. He had worked alone all night and left in the morning. The obvious thing to do would’ve been to have Peter come along and help, but Bobby hadn’t done that. Bobby would far rather do all the work himself than let Peter in on his secret.

  Here was another important thing. On the contract dupe was a space for mileage. The truck had checked out with 39,523 miles on the odometer. It had come back with 39,597. Seventy-four miles. A guy could play with that in many ways, and none of it was certain. Bobby might’ve gone to Buckley’s and then straight to his real destination. Or he might’ve spent the entire early evening just cruising, full of restless energy. The whole seventy miles might be accounted for in drifting, waiting for the allotted hour for his appointment. Somehow I didn’t think so. Bobby had no driver’s license, and that meant that every minute he spent driving was a risk. If a cop pulled him for anything, he’d be in the soup. So he went to Buckley’s and killed time, and when Buckley closed the store he went to a cafe and sat over coffee to wait it out. That was my guess, and that meant he had taken Stanley Ballard’s books to some point that could be roughly calculated. Twenty-five to thirty-five miles, fifty to seventy there and back.

  Rita McKinley’s place, for instance, was just about thirty miles from where I stood.

  35

  My flight into Portland arrived at seven forty-six, Pacific time. I slept the whole way. Hertz didn’t tie me up too badly, and by eight-thirty I was driving south on Interstate 5 through subdivisions called Raleigh Hills, Metzger, and so on. Mumsy Bonnema wasn’t easy to find, even with an address. I had to backtrack a couple of times through sprawling suburbs, and it was nine o’clock before I found her. She lived on a rural stretch, far away from neighbors. A mailbox on a post said bonnema in faded, worn letters. One of the n‘s had peeled away, leaving its outline.

  I pulled into the driveway. Brace yourself, Mumsy. It wouldn’t be the first time I had broken bad news.

  The place was weedy and rough, full of untrimmed trees. In a sad way it reminded me of the Liberty place, where I had lived with my crazy mother for the first six years of my life. There were huge piles of junk about, and the house was in pretty shabby shape. I killed the lights, killed the engine, took a deep breath, and got out. A pale yellow light shone through the drawn shades. Somewhere deep in the house, a dog barked. I knocked and the dog went into a frenzy. I heard a voice, a woman shouting at the dog, which, amazingly, shut up. Steps came and the door opened a crack. An eye peeped out.

  “Mrs. Bonnema?”

  She just watched me: didn’t say a thing.

  “My name is Janeway. I’m a sergeant with the Denver Police Department. I have some bad news for you.”

  The door opened wider. I got a glimpse of cheek, of brittle hair and a wrinkled cheek. Her face was old and haggard, as pale as a vampire’s. She had deep red lipstick on. It smeared on her teeth and reminded me of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

  My hopes for a safe and sane trip tottered precariously.

  “Where’re you from?” The voice was brittle, like the hair.

  “Denver.”

  “A policeman.”

  I didn’t deny it and she didn’t ask for ID. In a small brassy voice that had begun to quake, she said, “Is this about Pete-sey?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Has Petesey been hurt?”

  “He’s dead, ma’am.”

  For almost a full minute she stood there, motionless and silent. Then a wail came up, a hideous inhuman cry that finally found its true pitch, somewhere around the scale of an air raid siren. The dog started howling and they blended flawlessly into two-part harmony. She disappeared from the doorway and the door creaked open. I could see her, collapsed in a chair. The wailing never stopped: she had unbelievable lung capacity and that dog, wherever he was, was pretty amazing too. It might have been comical if it hadn’t been about death.

  Eventually she had to stop. What she did then was equally enchanting: she began to destroy the room. She had done this on a regular basis, if the state of the house was any evidence. She began by hurling a heavy cut-glass ashtray through the front window. She ripped down the curtains and stomped them into the floor. She smashed and ripped and tore, and all the while the dog howled and howled and occasionally barked when Mumsy got winded and had to rest. She smashed a lamp and finished off a table that looked like it had somehow survived an earlier attack. This too had to pass. She sat on the floor, breathing heavily, muttering what sounded like medieval curses.

  I stepped in, but without much enthusiasm. The hospitality of crazy people has always left me cold.

  “That selfish little monster,” Mumsy said. “That ungrateful, spiteful, rotten child!”

  I didn’t know whether to sit down, help her up, or stand still and wait for Act Three. She looked up at me and in a voice that had no emotion whatever said, “Did you know Petesey?”

  “Yes ma�
��am.”

  “He was a selfish child, all his life. Didn’t you think so?”

  “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “A selfish child. Cared for no one but himself. I knew someday he’d go away and leave me alone. What am I supposed to do now? Who’s going to care for me? You, young man?”

  She leveled her eyes on me and I thought, I’d rather be with Peter. I managed to hold her gaze till she looked away. She grunted and got to her feet. Lit a long black cigarette: filled the place with smoke. Bustled around, picking things up, putting them down, muttering, talking to herself. “Hope he burns in hell for what he’s done to me,” she said. “Hope he burns, the selfish boy. It’s Dadsy he’ll have to answer to now, and we’ll see how he likes that. Dadsy knows how to handle errant little boys.”

  Yes, I had broken a lot of bad news as a cop, but it had never happened quite this way.

  You go to the scene, you break the news, you wait through the initial shock waves, the absolute heartbreak, and if you’re lucky and the survivors don’t collapse you might get to ask a few questions. Usually they had questions too: Did he suffer? Did he go easily? I realized suddenly that I was waiting for those questions that would never come. Mumsy Bonnema had no thoughts for Peter. Her world was herself. She was the center of the universe, and even her son was a prop for her amusement, convenience, or comfort. All I wanted at that moment was to put distance between myself and this clutching old bat.

  But there was business to do.

  “He sent you some books.” I said this as a matter of fact, my voice heavy with authority.

  “Books!” she shouted. “I’m going to burn those books!”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Like to see you stop me. Just you try it. Those books are the reason I’m alone here. They took him away from me. If it hadn’t been for books, Petesey would still be here.”

  “Let me try to explain something to you, Mrs. Bonnema—”

  “Get a job, I said. Go out and find work and take care of your mother like any self-respecting boy should do. But no, would he do that? All his life, all he cared about was books!”

  “Where are the books, Mrs. Bonnema?”

  She gave a wicked little smile. “That’s for me to know.”

  “You can’t destroy them. They’re not your property.”

  “Who says they’re not? Didn’t Petesey send them to me?”

  “They weren’t Petesey’s to send. Those books are evidence in a murder case. If you try to keep them, or if you destroy them, you can be prosecuted.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, but she did care. The key to Mumsy was simple: hit her where she lives.

  “You could go to jail, Mrs. Bonnema.”

  “I don’t care. My life is over anyway. Everyone I loved has left me. I hope Dadsy punishes that boy.”

  I walked around and looked in her face. What the hell, I thought.

  “Mrs. Bonnema,” I said. “I’d hate to have to arrest you.”

  “You dare talk to me like that. Take them. Take the dirty things and get them out of my house. I never wanted them anyway.”

  “Where are the books?”

  “In the garage, where do you think?”

  I started through the house toward the back door.

  “It’s all junk,” she cried. “I’m telling you that right now, there’s nothing there but junk.” I heard her footsteps: she was following me through the dark house. “Petesey was always off chasing silly dreams,” she said. “Always scavenging, pawing through what other people threw out. It was shameful, my son picking through people’s trash. I cringe when I think of it, how that must’ve reflected on me’t He looked all his life and never found anything but junk. The world called it junk, but—oh no!—not him! He knew it all! Everybody else was wrong and he was right, that’s the way he saw it. Everything he found was worth its weight in gold. Hah! He goes all the way to Denver, and what does he send me back? More junk! Can you beat that, Mr. Policeman? Can you beat that? Are you listening to me?”

  I groped through the kitchen. The dog growled, very near, and I skirted the sound and felt for the door. I could still hear her yelling: her voice followed me through the yard and into the underbrush. She had turned into a book expert. “A book’s gotta be old to be worth anything, everybody knows that. Gotta be old, but does he find old books? No, he picks up junk that anyone could find and then tries to tell me it’s valuable. Same silly thing he’s said all his life… ” At last she faded: her screeching blended with the crickets and the breeze and maybe she finally gave up. I saw the garage: it was forty yards from the house along a dark path. I pushed open the door and blundered along the wall in search of a light. The light I found was dim, but it was enough. Stacked against the far wall were eight cartons of books, most unopened, all with Denver postmarks. I cut open the tops and looked inside. There were twenty books, give or take, in each box. I took a quick inventory.

  One hundred sixty-four titles. Flawless first editions from the period 1927 to 1955.

  Retail value? My guess was as good as any.

  I called it twenty grand, and started putting the boxes together again.

  36

  The earliest flight I could get back to Denver was the 6:47. I checked in an hour early and fought the ticket people at the Portland airport. There was a luggage limit and I was over it: even by paying excess freight charges, I couldn’t get more than five boxes on board without special permission. I battled my way up the bureaucratic chain, telling them I was a Denver detective working undercover on a case involving a major book theft ring. I didn’t have any identification, I said, because undercover cops never carry any, but my story could be verified by Detective Hennessey at DPD. Of course, before they could reach Hennessey, my plane would be gone, I said with the proper degree of helplessness. The man in charge at five-thirty in the morning was a suspicious bird: damned if he didn’t call Denver.

  “They do verify that a Detective Hennessey is employed with the Denver police,” he said to the ticket people. He looked at me severely. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Cameron.”

  He looked at my ticket. “It says Janeway here.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m traveling undercover,” I said with just the right edge of strained patience.

  “Is there a Detective Cameron on the Denver police force?” he asked the telephone. He nodded and hung up. “Let him through,” he said to the ticket people.

  God bless United Air Lines.

  I slept all the way home.

  At Stapleton, the chores of the day arranged themselves in my mind. The first order of business was to secure the books.

  I drove to a storage locker I knew, rented a small unit, stacked the boxes two high on pallets off the floor, locked the unit, and went home.

  I took a shower, shaved, and ate breakfast. A pot of coffee, double strength, brought me almost back to life, and I sat at the phone and lined up the day’s work.

  Hennessey. The Ballards. Rita McKinley.

  I wanted to know what the cops had found when they had gone into Rita’s place yesterday. I wanted to see the artist’s sketch, if they had made one, from the description Neff had supplied. Hennessey was the best avenue to that information. But then I looked at the calendar and saw that my entire afternoon was blocked out: today I was scheduled to give my deposition on the Jackie Newton lawsuit. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I said a few other things, fought back a temptation to throw my coffee cup through the wall, then settled down and called my lawyer.

  Robert Moses wasn’t handling my case gratis, but he might as well’ve been. A long time ago, when I was in uniform, I saved his child from a pervert—strictly my good luck, and the little girl’s, that I was four blocks away when the stupid ass snatched the kid in broad daylight. A neighbor had seen it all, had called the cops, and a vehicle description was on the radio in less than two minutes. The dispatcher was still reading it when the car came speeding past the lit
tle greasy spoon where I sometimes stopped for coffee. I nailed the guy, and though I was only doing my job, Mose had been in my debt ever since. So he thought, and those are the only kinds of debts that matter. You couldn’t put the man off: he owed me a big one, and when Jackie Newton went after my hide, Mose offered his legal services free. We argued over money and finally resolved it this way: he would give me his best shot and I would pay him what I could, when I could pay it. I wondered how he liked making janitor’s wages.

  “Where the hell’ve you been?” he said. “I’ve been trying to get you ever since I saw the paper this morning.”

  “Been up in Oregon communing with nature. What’s the story this afternoon?”

  “I dunno, what do you want it to be? I can get it put off, given what happened in your store yesterday. What the hell was that all about?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I could sure use the time this afternoon. How long is this likely to take?”

  “They’re gonna try to sweat you. Levin’s a mean little prick; if he thinks you’re in a hurry, you’d better pack your supper and bring your toothbrush. That’s all this is, you know: he’s just trying to run up your legal fees.”

  “Little does he know,” I said.

  “This is just the opening salvo, my friend. My guess is they’ll try to bring you in again in a few weeks. Levin’ll conveniently forget to ask a fairly crucial question, and he’ll ask the court for a new deposition. Then there’ll be a flood of interrogatories and if we’re lucky we might get to trial sometime in 1994. My advice is this. Give ‘em a stiff upper lip. Don’t let the bastards rattle you. Be there today, right on time if you can. Let him take all night if he wants to. I’ll be with you, pal.”

  “I know you will.”

  “Our turn comes next week. I can’t wait to get that Crowell dame up here. I’m gonna nip this baby right in the bud. See, she’s never been deposed before, she don’t know what it’s all about. If she thinks Jackie Newton frightens her, I’m gonna scare what’s left of her into an early grave.”