Booked to Die (31 page)

“And then he died.”

“Yeah. The first thing I thought was, now it’ll get out. Somebody’ll go in there and find it and it’ll make a major story. The AB’ll carry it, it’s that big. Imagine my surprise when nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it when those two idiots started to put it in an estate sale. I actually stood outside in the rain one night and watched them through the window. And I went wild with hope. My God, I went crazy. I had to get it, but it had to be done in such a way that it would never be tied to me. I knew there’d be trouble if it became known later that I had bought it. The courts are very consistent on this. They always return valuables to an original owner if someone with specialized knowledge buys it too cheap. And Christ, we were talking less than pennies on the dollar. We were talking nothing!”

“So you hired Bobby to do it.”

“The books needed to simply disappear. I needed for them to be swallowed up by someone anonymous. I thought he could keep his mouth shut…he seemed perfect.”

“Except for one thing. He had no driver’s license.”

“Two things,” Neff said. “I didn’t count on him getting so bitter about it. I thought he’d be happy with a few hundred for a hard night’s work. But right from the beginning we were bickering, and after a while there was a threat implied in everything he said to me. That one night he just pushed it too far. I picked up the crowbar and before I knew it he was on the floor at my feet. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I wrapped him in an old blanket and dumped him downtown. Then I burned the blanket. And of course, you’re right, the son of a bitch never did tell me he had no license.”

“Of course not. Why would he want to screw things for himself? By then Bobby smelled a big score too. He went to a friend of his, Peter, and got him to rent the truck. By then Peter smelled a score. He followed Bobby to Ballard’s house and waited up the block while Bobby carried out the books. In the morning he followed Bobby again, and Bobby led him straight here. Then Bobby was killed and Peter put two and two together and started bleeding you for the books. He sucked your blood out, first book by book, then by the box.”

“It took me months to find out who he was. He was so careful—made me box them up and leave them at a place in the country, and he’d go pick them up later, when he knew I wasn’t watching. I might never’ve found out, but he got too cocky. He sold you a book from Ballard’s and I saw it in your store and knew where it had come from…“

“…and you started following him.”

“I was in the gas station across from the DAV. Didn’t think he could see me there but the bastard had eyes like a hawk. I thought then it was all over; I thought he’d tell you right there on the street.”

“He was too scared—too scared to think.”

“Yeah, but that wouldn’t last. Once he had time to think, I knew he’d be back. I had to get him before that happened.”

“He tried to call me that night, in fact, but luck was still breaking your way. He got my recording. He tried the next day too, but I was up in the mountains, at McKinley’s place. Finally he had to make a choice: hole up, leave town, or come to me. He knew I was always there at closing time. If he arrived exactly at five, got off the bus right at the store and came straight inside, he’d be fine. He figured I’d protect him. So he called Pinky and told her he was coming in. A few minutes later I called Pinky and told her I wouldn’t be there. At that point we didn’t know what he wanted or how to reach him: I just assumed he needed money, and I told Pinky to give it to him. I also told her to let you boys know she’d be closing alone, so you could watch out for her. She followed my orders after all, and got herself killed for it. She told you, didn’t she? Didn’t she, Neff?”

He stared at his hands and said nothing.

“She told you her silly boss was worried about her, but it would probably be okay because Peter was coming in. Peter would be there at five. That’s when you knew you had to do it: that’s when the whole bloody mess got planned. Peter got there at five, and instead of finding me waiting for him, he found you. You came in right on his heels. What vou didn’t know was that Pinky was talking to Rita McKinley’s recorder. And what she said puts it all on you, as clearly as if she’d told us your name. She said, ‘Hi, everything’s okay.’ I thought about that for a long time after the lab boys got it out of the recording. Why would she say that? It didn’t make any sense. She was in the middle of saying good-bye: she was telling me someone had just come in and she’d have to call me back. Why would she suddenly say, ‘Hi, everything’s okay,’ in the middle of hanging up? The only thing that makes sense is that she was talking to the guy who had just walked in. Couldn’t be anybody but Harkness, Ruby, or you. Pinky still thought she was talking to a friend, the nice man from the store up the street who had come in to check on her at closing. It’s okay, she was saying, Peter’s here, I’m not alone. But Peter was already screaming. He knew what was happening. A minute later, so did she.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say: nothing except, for me, the most important thing.

“I’ve actually come to hate those books,” Neff said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take ‘em off your hands.”

“Yeah.”

I held my breath, afraid to ask, scared silly of what the answer would bring.

“Who was the woman, Neff?”

He looked at me and didn’t answer.

“I need to know that. Was it Rita?”

His lip curled up in a sneer. “Rita,” he said. “The big-time book dealer. The biggest thief of all.”

“What’re you talking about? What’s that supposed to mean?”

He smiled and reached into his shirt pocket. I cocked the gun but he only laughed in that faint, sad way. When he opened his fist, he had two tiny capsules in his hand.

“What’s that stuff?”

“Guess.”

We looked at each other: a long, searching moment. Barbara Crowell flitted through my mind, along with a hundred suicides and suicide attempts I had known over the years.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

But he popped them into his mouth and swallowed.

“I knew you’d get me,” he said. “Knew it that first day, when they put you on Bobby’s case. So I had these ready.

He doubled up and fell out of the chair.

“Neff,” I said weakly.

I looked for the phone, but you can’t do much with cyanide. It works in a minute.

He went into the shakes and groaned, a long cry of agony.

His pulse slowed, and I could almost see his heart giving up.

I got down beside him and opened his shirt.

Biggest mistake I ever made.

He moved like a snake. I didn’t know what had hit me. Suddenly I was down and he was up and through the haze I knew he had kicked me in the head. He had caught me in the temple with the point of his shoe: the hardest kick he could muster. I spun around and he was on my back. He had a rope: I don’t know where it came from, but he was a magician and there it was, twisted around my neck. He cut my windpipe, and the next twenty seconds were so desperate that I couldn’t think of anything but my heaving lungs. I know the gun fell: it skittered across the floor and slammed into the wall. I was up on one knee with this thing on my back, and I couldn’t shake it and if I didn’t shake it I was going to die.

I tried to buck him and couldn’t. We slammed into the wall. He held on, stuck to me like we’d been born that way, grotesque Siamese twins bent on killing each other. The world turned red. I was losing consciousness…

I heard a scream, then a shot, and the rope went slack.

God, I could breathe again!

But I still had to struggle for it, and for at least a minute 1 had the heaves.

When the world cleared, I saw Rita standing over Neff’s body. She was staring at the mess she’d made, clutching my gun with both hands.

I found the
key to the storage locker in Neff’s hip pocket. It was the only lock-it-yourself place in Longmont.

We drove the four miles from Neff’s house in what seemed like total silence. Only when we reached the storage yard did I realize that the radio was still playing.

Benny Goodman. “It Had to Be You.”

I drove to unit 254, opened the door, and walked in. It was like walking into King Solomon’s Mines.

He had shelved the locker and some of the books were out on open display. Yes, they were wonderful things.

But I was tired of looking. If you get too much new blood, you begin to drown in it.

Rita had lingered but now she came in. She didn’t touch anything, just walked along and looked at the spines.

“Well, this is it,” I said wearily. “This is what people kill for.”

She was just standing, staring at nothing. She looked older in the dim light.

On a worktable in a corner, I found some papers. The name Rita McKinley caught my eye and I leafed through them.

“Looks like a copy of your appraisal,” I said. “You want to tell me about this?”

She shook her head and said, “I have no idea.”

And that’s how the case ended: with a stalemate, a standoff between someone I loved and everything I believed in. With a dead man and a treasure, a lack of faith, a beautiful girl, and the big question still unanswered.

But no:

It really ended on another day six weeks later. Emery Neff was in his grave and the Ballard heirs were embroiled in a battle of books that seemed certain to end up in court. Ruby was in business alone. Rita McKinley had been set free by the Boulder County DA, who had pronounced the shooting justified: she had gone somewhere and had left nothing, not even the damned recording, to tell people where she’d gone or when she might come home.

I saw Barbara Crowell every couple of weeks. Mose had found a way to handle her case, as a favor to me. They had me billed as her star witness, and things weren’t looking too bad for her when all the mitigating factors were taken into account.

Jackie, after all, hadn’t died. He couldn’t feed himself or talk quite right: he’d have to be carried to the potty from now on, but he was alive. Doctors think he might live that way for another thirty years. It doesn’t sound like much, but the alternative is nothing at all.

As for me, I was going through the old familiar symptoms of acute burnout. The book business, which had been so fresh and exciting just three months ago, was suddenly old, and I was growing old with it. I dreaded opening the store: I let it slide as long as I could; then I went in and painted the bathroom and opened for business. I had been off for a month: I had spent a lot of money and my rent was due, and it was time to get going again.

But in the end I was back where I’d been in the police department. The days were long and uneventful: the nights were worse. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’ve never been one to languish. I knew I was in some vast personal transition, but only the past was spread out, clear and ugly. The future was still a void.

I closed on the Ballard house. The paperwork was done by the first of December and I was ready to move in. I had planned to be out of the store for three days during the move, and Ruby had promised to bring me someone reliable to run it. That morning, when he came in, the woman with him looked vaguely like someone I had once known. It took me a long moment to recognize her.

I pointed to her face and snapped my fingers. “Millie Farmer, the teaching bookscout.”

“Just bookscout, dad. I’m out of teaching forever. If I’m not going to make any money anyway, I might as well have fun doing it.”

“You’ve come to the right place,” I said.

I broke her in: walked her through the store and showed her what was what and how to find it. I gave her Miss Pride’s key to the front door and said I’d be in each day at four o’clock to be with her when she closed. There seemed to be nothing more to discuss, yet we all knew better. Painful, unfinished business lay between us. There had been a strain between Ruby and me, and now it extended to her. We had never talked about Neff. It made Ruby squirm, as if somehow he had shared the blame for what had happened. Emery Neff had touched us all in some basic, primal way, and none of us had been able to throw off his ghost.

Even now, getting into it wasn’t easy.

“Wonder what’s gonna happen to those books,” I said.

Ruby gave a fidgety shrug and looked out into the street.

“We’ll never see another collection like that.”

“Probably not,” he said.

I looked from one to the other. They said nothing.

“Hey, you want a job full-time?” I said to Millie.

“Hell yes.”

“You’re hired. Doesn’t pay much. Six an hour and all your books at twenty percent off.”

“Dad, I just died and went to heaven,” she said to Ruby.

I made another try at knocking down some walls. “The thing that beats me is how those books changed from club books to firsts. If I could get the answer to that, I’d die a happy man.”

“They never were club books,” Ruby said.

“It’s not that easy, Ruby. If it were just McKinley’s appraisal it would be simple. But I saw all the invoices, all the club flyers. On most of them he had written what he’d ordered and the date. Those damn books are there, the same books he ordered, only they’re first editions, not club copies. He was the most compulsive record-keeper you ever saw. When the books came in from the club, he wrote down the dates. Then he wrote what he thought of them after he’d read them. It’s all there, in Ballard’s own handwriting. Only somehow between now and then a genie got in his house and waved a wand and turned those books into gold.”

I could see Ruby wanted to leave but he couldn’t find an exit cue.

“What’s your answer?” I asked.

“Ain’t got no answer. Hell, Dr. J, I don’t know. I don’t even think it’s very interesting. Where the old man got his eye for books—that’s where the real mystery is. If we knew that we’d all be rich in no time. How do guys like old man Ballard start from scratch and build a library that just knocks people for a loop? I don’t know. Somehow they’re plugged into the universe in this queer kinda way. They know what’ll be valued, not just now but years from now.”

“And they don’t even think of value in terms of money,” I said. “They have a totally different agenda. And I guess it was a lot easier to build a library then, when the average cost of a book was two bucks.”

“It’s all relative. You of all people ought to know that. A book has always cost about what a meal in a good restaurant costs. Did then, still does. I get sick of hearing how expensive books are. Which would you rather have, a good book or a tender steak? I know what I’d take, seven days a week.”

He moved to the door: he was about to leave.

“That was a good move, hiring this lady,” he said. “She’ll be good for your business, just like the other one. She’s got a sassy mouth but you can handle her. Just give her the back of your hand two or three times a day.”

Millie stuck out her tongue.

“You need to unshackle your legs, get free again,” Ruby said. “You’re going through something, I can see it written all over you. It’s a growth spurt. All of a sudden you’re tired of retail. You’re starting to see where the real fun is in the book business. Usually it takes five years: you’ve gone through it all in three months. You came into this business almost whole, and now you’re ready to move on. The Zen Buddhists have a word for it.
Satori
. It means sudden enlightenment.”

“I don’t feel suddenly enlightened. I feel as dense as ever. I don’t think I’ll be able to rest till I know the answers to those two questions.”

“What questions?” Millie said.

“How did those books change into fine firsts… and who was the woman?”

“What woman?”

“The day Peter and Miss Pride were killed, a woman called and asked for Neff. Ruby talked to her.”

Millie Farmer blinked.

“Hell,” she said; “I believe that was me.”