Booked to Die (14 page)

Ruby seals and
Emery Neff were working late, still pricing books from their big score.

They hadn’t been listening to the radio. The newspaper accounts were still twelve hours away, but the TV and radio guys already had it.

I wanted to buy something I couldn’t begin to afford.

“What’s the best piece of fiction in the store?” I asked.

Ruby showed me a
Catcher in the Rye
, crisp, lovely in its first-state jacket. I stared into the impenetrable eyes of J. D. Salinger and bought it.

Four hundred dollars, a steal.

“What else’ve you got?”

Ruby looked at Neff and Neff looked back at Ruby. They cleared their throats and went to work.

“Got some King, but I know you don’t care about that,” Neff said.

“Which ones?”

“
Carrie, The Stand
, and that book of stories…ah,
Night Shift
.”

“I’ll buy ‘em if you want to wholesale ’em,” I said.

“We’d consider that,” said Ruby, his face a wall of dignity. “Yes sir, I believe we would. We bought these right, didn’t we, Em? 1 think we could do a little wholesaling and still come out on top.”

I gave a little laugh. “I’ll bet you could.”

“Screwed a little old lady out of her life savings, kicked her shins and took her books away,” Ruby said.

“Now 1 don’t feel so bad, offering you three-fifty for the three of ‘em.”

“We’ll take it,” Ruby said in a heartbeat.

“Not so goddamn fast,” Neff said. “Ruby, these books don’t just walk in here every day.”

“Do I need to remind you again that the Greeks are at the gate?” Ruby said. “That’s not a wooden horse they’re knocking with, that’s a battering ram. And that’s not Helen of fucking Troy I hear calling my name.”

Neff just stared.

“Sold to American,” Ruby said. “Now, Dr. J, since you’re in such a buying mood, take a look at these.” He pushed a
Lie Down in Darkness
at me, the most beautiful copy I’ve ever seen of the only salable Styron. There was an
Out of Africa
in the same condition, and a great copy of Pynchon’s
V
.

“God damn it, you’re wholesaling the heart of this goddamn collection,” Neff said.

“There’ll be another collection, but not if we don’t get the sheriff paid. This gentleman is gonna help us get well again.”

“Oh, we’re never gonna get well,” Neff groaned.

“That’s because you guys’ve got too many bad habits,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ruby said, “we like to eat.”

I took the Styron, the Dinesen, the Pynchon. I took the Kings, too, and wrote them a check for $1,000.

“Don’t it feel great to buy good books?” Ruby said.

“Yeah,” I said, and it did.

“So when are you opening your place?” Neff said suddenly.

“Why the hell would I do that? Maybe I’ll stake somebody, just to get my hand in.”

“You want to stake somebody, stake us,” Ruby said. “We are, after all, the most knowledgeable sons of bitches we know. Besides, I know where there’s twenty thousand good books just waiting to be picked up for pin money.”

“What kind of pin money?”

“Twenty-five grand. You might even get ‘em for a buck a book, cash money.”

Twenty thousand dollars was just about all 1 had in savings. Such a coincidence.

“Why don’t you tell me where those books are, Ruby? You know, for old time’s sake.”

Ruby grinned through his beard and waved at me with his most prominent finger.

Neff, from on high, said, “The books are in a very safe place, Mr. Janeway. They’ll be there when we’ve got the means to go get them.”

“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” 1 said. “Who knows when somebody else will come along with twenty grand?”

“Not… very… likely.” Neff peered through his glasses at a cracked hinge he was gluing, then smiled at me without much humor.

“Not where these books are hidden,” Ruby said. “You couldn’t root out these babies if you had the Lost Dutchman himself to lead you there.”

“Must be in Arizona,” I said. “You know… Lost Dutchman… Arizona?”

“Dammit, Ruby, don’t screw around with this,” Neff said. “This man is a detective, for Christ’s sake.”

But Ruby was enjoying the game. “Arizona’s a big state.”

“With not much going on in the empty spaces,” I said. “There can’t be many places to hide twenty thousand books in the Petrified Forest, so we must be talking about… ah, Phoenix.”

Ruby chuckled.

“Tucson,” 1 said, watching his eyes. “Tucson, Phoenix…or Flagstaff.”

“Guess,” Ruby said.

“Tucson.”

Neff sighed with disgust.

“Your eyes moved when I said Tucson,” I said. “Just a little, but it was enough.”

“They’re sittin‘ in a Tucson warehouse where they’ve been the last twenty years. There’s nothing startling in there, just new blood; fresh faces that people in Denver haven’t seen over and over for the past hundred years. Damn good stockers that you’d price in the seven-to-ten-buck range. Biography, his-tory, some scholarly religion, some anthropology. I’ve known about ’em since the day they were put in there and never had the money to do anything about it. If you can spring those books, Dr. J, more power to you.”

“I think I’ll quit this business and take up something easy, like rolling queers in the park,” Neff said.

“Em, it just don’t make any difference. You see us
ever
having twenty grand? Why shouldn’t somebody make use of those books, and why shouldn’t it be a good guy we both like? I hate to see good books sit. And I think Dr. J would treat us right. Hell, I know an honest cop when I see one.”

Neff’s mind was shifting to that place where Ruby’s had already gone. “I suppose we could release any claim we’d have on first dibs,” he said, “for a finder’s fee.”

“What would you want?” I asked. “Assuming I’d be interested and the books could be sprung.”

“Oh, I think a thousand dollars would be fair.”

Ruby brightened suddenly. “I got a great idea. You go down there, Dr. J, and take me with you. Let me do all the talking. This is a weird bird that’s got these books and you gotta stroke him. I’ll get those books for fifteen grand, sixteen tops. You give me a two-grand finder’s fee and let me pull out fifty books. You get out for eighteen and I get a new lease on life.”

“Until next month,” Neff said with a sigh.

“And what do I do with twenty thousand books?” I said, knowing the answer so thoroughly it seemed I’d always known it.

“I don’t think I have to tell you that,” Ruby said.

“We’ve seen it coming, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “We know all the signs. You’re hooked, you just don’t know it yet.”

“We’ve got a bet going, if you want to know the truth,” Ruby said. “Em’s betting you’ll go this year. Me, I think you’ll spend your whole life dreaming about it. A guy’d have to be crazy to give up your job—good money, prestige, interesting work, ten years already on the greasepole. And you’re gonna give up that for this?”

“Ruby jests, of course,” Neff said. “This is God’s own occupation and he knows it. What would you rather be, Rubes, a bookseller or a cop?”

“Rather be a stinkin‘ garbage man if it put a beefsteak on my table tonight.”

“Every day is like a treasure hunt,” Neff said. “You never know what might walk through that door five minutes from now.”

“Most likely it’ll be shit,” Ruby said. “Neff don’t tell you about that side of it—the jackoffs that come through your front door every day and grab off a piece of your life.”

“Are you talking about our beloved customers?” Neff said.

“My beloved ass. I’ll tell you what a customer is, my friend. That’s a guy who comes in here and knows what he’s doing. He knows as well as I do what the damn book’s worth, so I don’t have to waste my time justifying the seven lousy bucks I’m asking for it. If you don’t have a book he wants, he goes on about his business: he don’t stand in your face for two damn hours telling you about it—how his grandma read it to him when he was five years old, over and over till they were both brain-dead. On the other hand, there are the jackoffs. You got any idea how many jackoffs you see in the book business on a given day, Dr. J?”

“This man is trying to win a bet, that’s all there is to it,” Neff said. “Trust me: he wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything else.”

The door opened suddenly and a ragged man in jeans came in.

“Hiya, Peter,” Ruby said.

“You buyin‘ books?”

“Does a cat have an ass? You ever known me when I wasn’t buying?”

The bookscout opened his bag. I knew enough about bookstore etiquette to move away while they did their business. Their voices dropped to a dim hum. I heard Neff say, “Where’d you get this book?” Then the bookscout said something, then they were all talking at once, the scout lost in the flanking din between Seals and Neff. It turned angry. Ruby cursed and walked away. Neff continued to negotiate with the scout, who quietly stood his ground. “It don’t matter where it came from,” the bookscout said. “I didn’t steal it, but I don’t have to tell you my sources either.” Ruby came back to where I stood, shook his head, rolled his eyes, turned, and walked back into battle. The fray went on for some time. At last it was quiet, but I could still hear them breathing up there.

“Dr. J?”

I came up from the shadows.

“Wanna buy a book?”

“I just bought a bunch of books, Ruby.”

“Wholesale, man. All of a sudden Peter here don’t trust our check.”

“I need the cash,” Peter said stubbornly.

“The hell with it,” Ruby said. “You guys are all alike. I’m tired of the bunch of you. Maybe this gentleman will buy your book for cash money.”

I looked. The book on the counter was a fine American first of Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
.

I wasn’t sure what to pay for it. But when I looked up, Ruby had moved behind Peter and was holding up two fingers, pointing with his other hand to the ceiling. The signal seemed to mean two hundred, high retail. I had two bills in my wallet, a hundred and a ten. Peter took the hundred gratefully.

When he had gone, Ruby said, “You paid him too much. You don’t want to go over forty percent when it’s a wholesale deal. Eighty bucks you shoulda paid. You’re still thinking like a customer. You gotta be mean and lean if you’re gonna make it in the book biz.”

Neffs hand trembled as he picked up the book. “On the other hand,” he said in a dull voice, “this is such a nice copy, I think I’d mark it three.”

“Two seventy-five, that’s the perfect price for it,” Ruby-said.

1 looked at the book, and at the seven others I had bought. “There sure are a lot of good books showing up all of a sudden.”

“It goes like that,” Neff said. “You get a run, then it peters out. When that happens, you can’t find a goddamn Dr. Atkins diet book.”

“Millie Farmer found the Kings,” Ruby said. “She’s gonna be a good bookscout yet. I told you we’d get our seven bucks back.”

I nudged the Golding. “This one’s yours. Your store, your book, I’ll take your check, if you want it for a hundred.”

Ruby had already started reaching for the checkbook. Neff said, “Can’t do it.”

“The hell we can’t.”

Neff reached across the counter and snatched the checkbook away. Ruby bristled and for a moment I thought a fight was coming. The moment passed and Ruby laughed it off, though his face was still flushed with anger.

“Everybody in this business is crazy, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “That probably includes me. But I’m not so crazy that I’ll let my partner write a hot check to a cop. You keep the book.”

“I’ll tear up my check,” I offered. “Write you one for a hundred less.”

Neff sighed. “We need every dime of that check, Mr. Jane-way.”

“I just remembered something,” Ruby said. “I just plain forgot about it in the heat of battle. That’s Peter the Book-scout… you wanted to talk to him about Bobby, remember? If you hurry, maybe you can catch him before he gets to the bus stop.”

We went outside, but Peter was gone.

I guess we all had a lot on our minds that day.

“When he comes back, tell him to call Hennessey,” I said. I packed my books carefully in a small box and again opened the door.

“I’m not on that case anymore,” I said.

The press was
ugly. You could avoid radio and TV, but those newspaper headlines, when they came, were everywhere.

I had made the decision to go light on myself. I would read each paper once, to know what I was up against: then I’d forget it.

The
Denver Post
was simple and sweet: cop charged with brutality, it said. Beneath that, in a smaller headline: handcuffed and beaten, jeffco man alleges.

The
Rocky Mountain News
wanted me shot at sunrise:
cop’s badge demanded in wake of brutal attack
was what
News
readers read over their morning coffee. Nice objective slant.

I had made top headlines in both daily rags.

They were, as usual, about ten hours behind the tubes. The later developments, I knew, would help keep the story on the front pages for another day.

I had been summoned to Internal Affairs to give my statement on the charges of John Randolph Newton. I told it to two steely cops I barely knew, and they took it down without comment and asked only a couple of questions at the end.

It all sounded silly and unjustified a day later. I must seem like a character out of a 1945 movie: a cop with an Alan Ladd complex. And that was according to
my
version, which was supposed to make me look good. Jackie’s version was another story. In that, I had beaten him with his hands cuffed behind him. He had the scars for evidence—the chafed wrists, the broken nose, the hamburger face. And he had a witness, Ms. Barbara Crowell, who was prepared to back up his version in court.

Let no one doubt that this was going to court. Even as I gave my statement to Internal Affairs, Jackie and his lawyer— a tough New Yorker named Rudy Levin—were still in the building raising hell.

Boone Steed, chief of detectives, was not happy. Boone was a tough cop who knew the ropes. He told me what to expect, what I already knew. Jackie would sue. He would sue us all, but it was me he really wanted. He would break me if he could. The department would do what it could for me, but I had acted illegally and that gave our insurance a loophole. I might end up having to mount my own defense, at my own expense. Goddamn lawyers and insurance companies, Steed said. I could run up a $20,000 legal tab in no time. And the weights of the system were all on Newton’s side: they were always on the side of the guy with the dough. Newton would drag me over every bump in the courts: he’d stall and prolong it so that he could drain my account of its last dime.