Booked to Die (22 page)

Harkness too had
been out on a major buy late yesterday. His place reeked of fresh Stephen King. There were King books scattered across the counter and stacked on the floor. He had gotten the call two days ago and had closed early yesterday to go look at the stuff. The buy was in Boulder, thirty miles away. He had closed the store around one-thirty. He had walked up to my place and had stood talking with Miss Pride for about ten minutes. She had mentioned in passing that she would be closing alone—Mr. Janeway had made her tell him that, she explained with a frown—but he had told her he’d be gone at closing time so she should call Seals & Neff and let them know. She had rolled her eyes and said, “You men!” and that was the last time he had seen her. He looked to be on the verge of tears.

I asked what time he had come in last night. “It was almost eight,” he said. “By the time I got to Boulder it was quarter to three. The buy didn’t take long. King stuff never does. You know what it goes for and so do they: the only question is, can you get it from them for any kind of a decent price, or do they want to make all the money? Usually they want full pop, but this one was reasonable. I only had to pay sixty-five percent.”

“Man, that sounds high,” I said.

Harkness didn’t react at all. He said, “It is, for anything but King. I’ll put it away and in a year it’ll look cheap, what I paid for it. What the hell difference does it make? What difference does anything make?”

“Yeah,” I said.

The Kings had been owned by a woman. Her husband was the collector but he had died and she was trying to figure out the rest of her life. King didn’t figure in it, but she could get a fair start with the money he would bring her. “It cost me plenty,” Harkness said, “every damn dime I had in the bank, but look at what I got.” It was all there, the entire King output: the five major Doubleday firsts, variant jackets on the two
Salem’s Lots
, all the signed limiteds. Harkness didn’t seem to care.

“I was done with it by four o’clock,” he said. “I should’ve come back. If I had, maybe she’d still be alive. I’d‘ve got back here before five and taken her to dinner and she’d still be here.”

“What did you do instead?”

“Went out to eat alone. Some burger joint near the campus. I sat there for an hour thinking about it.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Her.”

He looked at me with sad eyes that had aged immeasurably since the last time I had seen him. He said, “I know what you think, Janeway, but you’re wrong. She was a kid. I knew that. But there was something about her that got me down deep. I couldn’t shake her. You know what that feels like?”

I thought of Rita McKinley, but I didn’t say anything.

“I knew it was all wrong… man my age, screwing around with a girl her age. But what can you do? When they get you they get you. So I ate a cheap supper and walked around killing time, just thinking about it. Then I came back here. Unloaded my stuff. Worked here till ten o’clock. Went home.”

“You didn’t see anything?”

“What was to see by then?”

Clyde Fix, as usual, was no help. He had not seen Peter in months. He didn’t like the son of a bitch. Peter wasn’t welcome in his store. I asked Fix if he’d seen anyone resembling the man Emery Neff had described. He hadn’t seen anyone and wouldn’t tell me if he had. I wasn’t a cop anymore: he knew that. He didn’t have to tell me anything.

I sat in
my store and called Motor Vehicles: told them I was Detective Cameron and needed a rundown on a murder victim. Impersonating a cop is against the law and, strictly speaking, it wasn’t necessary. Motor vehicle records are open to everybody, but being a cop speeds the process. Current driver’s licenses had been issued to two Peter Bonnemas in Denver. One lived in Cherry Hills Village, a posh country club neigh-borhood, the other in a rooming house on the fringe of Five Points. It wasn’t hard to choose: ten minutes later I pulled up at a rambling old brick tenement near 22nd and Arapahoe. I took a small pouch of tools out of my trunk, slipped it into my coat, and went inside. It wasn’t the Brown Palace: there was no security door and some of the mailboxes in the stale-smelling foyer looked like they had never borne a name. Peter’s name had been scrawled in pencil on a small white card and Scotchtaped to the mailbox for apartment 310. There was a letter inside. I took out my pouch and got a tool and picked open the box. It was really no lock at all, just a simple latch. I lifted the slim envelope out and closed the mailbox. It was handwritten and postmarked Portland, Oregon. The return address said “Mrs. Peter Bonnema, 12335 SW 123rd, Portland.” I took it without a second thought, slipped it into my coat, and went upstairs.

The lock on Peter’s door was almost as simple as the one on the mailbox. It’s a real wonder more of these guys don’t get murdered, I thought as I went in. I let out a long breath. Bobby Westfall’s so-called apartment had been a cradle of luxury compared with this. There was a dank smell about it, like curdled milk. The bed was a rollaway, layered with old dirt that had worn itself slick: there was no sign that the bed had ever worn a sheet. I saw empty cans on the floor, rat droppings in the corner, and everywhere, of course, the inevitable books. There were two small rooms and a toilet, and books were piled in every crack and corner. There were books on the sills of both windows and piled high in the middle of the floor. I knew I had little time; Cameron and Hennessey would be here before the day was done. I pulled on a pair of gloves and went to work. I handled the books carefully, so as not to destroy any prints, and it was the same as before— almost one hundred percent junk. It was so much like Westfall that I wasn’t surprised when I found, pushed away in the back of a closet, a two-foot stack of good books.

Very good books.

It was about the equivalent of the stack I had found at Bobby’s: great titles, all modern lit, first editions, perfect condition, a healthy mix of mainstream and genre. I didn’t bother making a list this time—I knew at once that when I walked out, these were going with me. I looked at the mysteries and actually felt my mouth water, like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Early Rex Stout… Ross Macdonald… Cornell Woolrich in his real name and both pseudonyms: a nice little stack adding up to at least four grand retail. I didn’t know yet how to assess it, didn’t know what to do with it, but I wasn’t leaving it here. Rats eat books, you know.

There was nothing else of any possible value: I was finished here as a bookman and now I went through the place with the eyes of a cop. The main room was depressingly bare, a bleak testament to the way some people live today. There was no desk where papers might be stored, no cabinet, no table with drawers. There were some trinkets, some Indian turquoise, probably mid-twenties Navajo that Peter had scouted at a flea market. I pushed it aside and left it there. Under the bed I found a bundle of letters held together by a rubber band. They looked like the same cheap stationery as the one from the mailbox. I thumbed through them and noticed the obvious common denominators. All were signed “Mumsy.” Each began with the same line: “Your big box of books arrived today.” There had been one letter every two weeks for the last three months. Mumsy was a lean, sparse writer: she got right to the point and didn’t linger over flowery sunsets. There was no return address inside because Peter would undoubtedly know it. She had put a return address on the envelope in case the letter, for some reason, had to be returned. Mumsy was a practical soul who didn’t write extra words and Peter didn’t save envelopes. I had probably fished the only Mumsy envelope in existence out of the mailbox. It had probably been delivered only this morning.

I didn’t open it till I got home. It was just like all the others. “Your big box of books arrived today and I put it with all the others.” Not much chitchat. “Went over to Dadsy’s grave today… Your friend Junie Sykes is expecting again, this makes six she’s had with five different men. I said at the time and I say again, you are well out of that. You can’t eat your heart out forever… Why don’t you come home?” A sudden image of Peter wafted up, a vision of the bleak and solitary road he had chosen becoming so clear in the half-dark room. A young man then with little verbal ability, crushed by love. Junie Sykes had eaten him alive and sent him on his way, banished to this. Getting by on fifty-cent books and bummed cigarettes, still carrying the faint hope of the Big Score, the $10 million map found in a Salvation Army store for six bucks. In his mind, Peter Bonnema drove home to Portland in a solid gold Cadillac and snatched Junie Sykes from all that. He would come on like Gary Cooper, tall and lean and silent, infinitely ready to forgive. Life was sooooo good, in that dream, and it was only one… god… damn… score… away! Just that moment in time when something wonderful was put out by someone stupid, and he was there. He’d go home vindicated,
king
of the bookscouts!

I opened the drapes and read again through all the letters. It never varied. Mumsy acknowledged the books, wrote a line or two about Dadsy or Dadsy’s grave or what Dadsy would think of the world today, and slipped in a stinger about Junie Sykes. It was always “your friend Junie Sykes,” slapped on the page like an indictment. Mumsy’s apron strings snaked across the country, dooming her son to the life he led, sealing him in squalor.

Mumsy probably hadn’t been informed yet. The cops would still be in the early stages of investigating Peter’s next of kin, and without the Mumsy letters it might be days before they found her. I picked up the phone and called United Air Lines, got the next flight to Portland charged to my credit card. I called Hertz and had a rental car arranged on the other end.

If Jackie Newton wanted my money, he’d have to hurry. If I kept on this way, there wouldn’t be much left.

I had five hours to kill and I killed them well.

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.