The Dirty Book Murder

The young women disappeared, each after the other, a week apart. One had been an all-state basketball player, another placed in the high jump at the Kansas Relays, and the third was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. The pictures of them that appeared on television revealed well-scrubbed midwestern coeds blessed with the silk-haired, snub-nosed beauty of unsoiled youth, their eyes alight with hope and steady resolve.

Six months later, the initial media frenzy had run its course without any significant leads, the grief-stricken parents were left to handle their agonies alone, and the bewildered investigating team was reduced by half due to ongoing budget concerns. I went back to reading the classifieds first.

Most weekend mornings I sit on my back porch, sipping Irish coffee and checking the newspaper for upcoming estate sales. This is followed by a glance at the sports headlines and, if I have time, the Metro section. The sequence has more to do with the nature of my job as owner of Riverrun Books than a lack of curiosity regarding the news, although the disappearance of those local college girls at the beginning of the year had altered my weekend reading habits for a while.

Normally, I’ll pay two or three dollars for common novels and nonfiction, then price them for my shop or on the Internet for ten. Rare and important works are a different story, of course. That’s when being a bookman can get interesting.

Consider, for example, two advertisements that caught my eye one such morning in June. While each piqued my interest for different reasons, both contributed to the strange business that is this story.

The first was an item in the auction column.

I ordinarily avoid such sales. Not only are they time-consuming, they tend to be depressing affairs where bankrupts desperately seek to unload tractors and restaurant tables for a tenth of their value to Bubbas in bib overalls partial to spitting tobacco juice on other people’s shoes.

Nonetheless, in the midst of the listing for restaurant equipment, I spotted a bit of gold among the dross. Possibly fool’s gold, but one never knows.

“… bar stools,”
it proclaimed,
“tables, electric can opener (industrial), lots of
erotic books (includes Shakee Hen), towel dispensers …”

Whoa. I might have passed the “erotic books” with a smirk if there had been no parenthetical addendum, picturing nothing more than a mildewed collection of girlie magazines and yellowed paperbacks with selected pages stuck together by some unspeakable substance.

But the parentheses held the promise of something else. Did the words Shakee Hen in the advertisement actually refer to a sample of Shoku-hon, also known as Shunga, the erotic art of Japan?

These woodblock prints, when produced by feudal Japan’s greatest graphic artists like Utamaro and Hokusai, conveyed the sexual practices and conventions of a lively, uninhibited society in the most intimate detail. I recalled enough art history to know that when these prints first reached Europe in the waning days of the nineteenth century they influenced the post-Impressionist movement and Western art was never the same.

The auction was scheduled to begin the following Saturday afternoon at a warehouse on Eighth and Main in the River Market area. It meant missing a Royals baseball game, but that hasn’t meant much to me since George Brett hung up his glove in 1993.

I turned to the second classified advertisement, reading it with amusement dimmed by concern that Anne, my twenty-year-old daughter, might have seen a similar notice posted on the bulletin board at the University of Colorado’s drama department.

It was an invitation guaranteed to keep dozens of starry-eyed western Missourians up all night working on their “brief background” letters. I must confess that for an unguarded moment I, too, felt the siren call.

After all, the entertainment channel was buzzing with rumors that the movie was to be directed by the great Robert Langston. No motion picture actor had gone as far or fallen as low as “Long Bob” in his thirty-year career. Who wouldn’t want to be part of Langston’s heroic comeback? Who, indeed?

Anne, an aspiring director and theater major who admired Langston’s early work, before drugs, booze, and three disastrous marriages destroyed his career, would be first in line to associate with this Hollywood legend, no matter how faded his star. I was all for my daughter getting practical experience, but she, who in her first two years at school had
shown a far greater affinity for parties and skiing than Molière and Arthur Miller, could ill afford to cut any more classes. At mid-semester she had informed me I’d be getting a bill for a summer of make-up classes she intended to take.

Somewhat comforted by this reminder of her renewed dedication to getting a degree in Colorado, I felt reasonably assured she wasn’t aware of the casting call. So I relaxed, poured a cup of coffee, and imagined what my own response to “Box 32” would say:

As I folded the newspaper, the telephone rang. It was Anne calling from Boulder. Collect, of course.

“I’m coming home for a few months to work on the Jesse James movie as a gaffer or something.”

“What about school?”

“I’m taking a sabbatical from my studies.”

“Honey,” I said, “only tenured professors and disgraced CEOs are allowed to do that.”

“Really, Father! This is a onetime chance to be involved in a major motion picture and I’m not going to let it pass.”

I had learned long ago not to argue with Anne once she had made up her mind. “How’d you get the job?”

She didn’t respond, so I asked again.

“I know someone on the picture,” she answered grudgingly.

“Really?” I said with a chuckle. “Let me guess. Is it Long Bob Langston?”

Fifteen seconds of silence followed.

I laughed again, but it was an uneasy “Please God, don’t let this be happening” kind of laugh.

“Why, yes,” she said, somewhat surprised. “I’ve been seeing Bob for several months. You didn’t read about this in the tabs, did you?”

Something started doing cartwheels in my gut, but my native wit came to the fore.

“Afraid not. Can’t believe I let my subscription to the
National Enquirer
expire.”

Silence again answered my sarcasm, but this time for a mere ten seconds.

“If you must know, we met last September in Telluride. I was volunteering at the Nugget during the film festival when he came up to my table and said he was an old friend of yours.”

“What!”

“My reaction as well. It took a minute or two listening to him talk about ‘ramblin’ with Roddy in Edinburgh’ before I realized he’d mistaken me for Rod Stewart’s daughter. Kimberly was at the Fest and we
do
rather look alike. My British accent must have also reinforced his first impression. Anyway, he was very apologetic when he realized his mistake and invited me for dinner at the New Sheridan. He was very sweet and, well, one thing led to another.”

“Annie, the guy is thirty years older than you.”

“I grew up, Father. You just didn’t notice.”

“Right,” I said, resisting the urge to hurl the telephone through the front window. “I’ll have your room ready at the house.”

“Fine.”

“We need to catch up on a few things. Now, about school—”

“Try to be nice to Bob,” she interrupted. “It’s extremely important for him that things go well on this movie.”

“Nice, huh? ‘Nice’ like I’m happy about this or ‘nice’ like I really don’t care? No can do either way.”

“I’m only asking you to be civil. Please. We’ll be in next week.”

“All right,” I said, but not before clearing my throat four or five times. “I’ll try to channel my inner Oprah.”

After slamming the telephone down, I wondered why humans are the only creatures who bother to have anything to do with their half-grown offspring.

Steam rising from the tar-papered warehouse roof matched my mood as I pulled my jeep Cherokee between twin pickup trucks in the graveled parking lot. I hadn’t spoken to Anne since her telephone call the previous Sunday and if she and her aged Lothario had arrived in town, they hadn’t bothered to let me know.

Inside the overly lit auction hall at the River Market, a battalion of bargain hunters inspected the flea-market junk that passes for antiques in the Midwest: round oak tables, rocking chairs with cane-webbed seats, colored-glass globes, milk cans topped by seat cushions, iron plows, wagon wheels, graphite telephones, and hundreds of “rare” Depression glass bowls.

The auctioneer wore a wide-brimmed Stetson hat tilted precariously on the back of his head. Pink suspenders held up a pair of lime green pants. Over the left breast pocket of his denim shirt a plastic name tag announced “Colonel Herl Bender.” An empty holster hung on his waistband.

A hundred or more hopeful entrepreneurs, woefully short of meaningful lines of credit, shifted impatiently in the stifling atmosphere for the lots of bar stools, cash registers, and commercial dishwashers to come up.

Finally, the colonel, after solemnly instructing the audience to keep their bidding cards close at hand, waddled over to where a dozen barroom signs hung and proceeded to talk them up as if they were the Elgin Marbles.

“This fine example of the Mr. Peanut character is made of one hundred percent molded plastic …”