The Dirty Book Murder (12 page)

I began to ask what the hell was going on when she turned to me and said, “It’s my noon appointment. He’ll hush if we don’t pay him attention.”

She returned to her chair as if nothing strange had occurred and, after putting the key in her lap, proceeded to answer my earlier question.

“A pair of vultures swooped in within hours after my husband’s funeral offering saccharine condolences and obsequious pleas to look at the books.”

“Who were they?” I asked, trying to ignore the bleating voice in the other room.

“The first to call was an odiferous fellow with course manners and an accent that could only have come from the slag heaps of south Wales.”

“Gareth Hughes.”

“That sounds right. Since I wasn’t aware at the time that my husband had left me practically destitute, I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t interested in his money.”

“And the other dealer?” I shouted over the hysterics emerging from the adjacent room.

Beatrice hesitated, played with the tassel, and frowned vaguely. She stood up, walked to the closed door, and tapped on it until the noise softened to a whimper. Satisfied, she turned her attention back to me.

“Violet Trenche,” she answered with undisguised bitterness. “It was before her bookstore burned. For years she helped George build his collection.”

“Including the erotica?”

“Especially that! But don’t be naïve, dear boy. Books weren’t the only thing she helped him with.”

She lowered her chin. “I suppose you know her, being in the book trade?”

“Until now I thought I did. Violet works for me.”

She stared at me as if I had pissed on her Oriental rug. Just as quickly the coldness evaporated.

“You have my sympathies, Mr. Bevan. It goes without saying that I refused to sell that slattern my books at any price. After her store burned she couldn’t have paid for them anyway.”

The door behind her began to rattle.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to get back to work,” she said apologetically. “It’s the only means left for supplementing my income, you see.”

“I’ve just a few more questions, Mrs. Land. Please.”

“All right, but you’ll have to excuse me for a moment. I’ll be back in a jiff.”

She used the tasseled key to open the door and for an instant I glimpsed a pale-arsed elderly man skip across the room in full retreat, followed by the sound of several rapid swats against bare flesh. After a minute the moans ceased and in the ensuing silence Beatrice Land returned, softly closing the door behind her. She held in her left hand a supple leather cord, no more than twenty inches long, to which small black beads were attached on the end.

If the man had been a collie I would have congratulated my host on her training methods, but suggested that a dog biscuit might do just as well next time.

Instead, I just sat there with my jaw hanging against my chest like an unemployed marionette and prayed there wasn’t going to be a second act.

“Please try not to be judgmental, Mr. Bevan,” she said, settling into the chair. “The gentleman has lost his sexual capabilities for the most part so it takes a bit of playfulness to bring him around. Now, you wished to question me further?”

She looked at me, all innocent anticipation, and, after quelling the urge to ask the name of the lunatic asylum I happened to have wandered into, I got on with the matter at hand.

“What sort of things did your husband jot in the books?”

“Varying methods of sexual acts that George gleaned from our participation in a rather unique social group. He would try a position described in the book and rate it according to the satisfaction he—always he—” she sighed, “derived from performing it. If there were other people involved he might include their names and level of performance. Sometimes he wrote their telephone numbers.”

“Why did he bother?”

“For future reference, silly boy. There were quite a few people involved, after all.”

“Are you referring to a particular sex club in Kansas City?”

Beatrice Land’s face flushed and her tongue flicked out to play with her lips. She put her tongue back in to smile at me and brushed her foot against my ankle.

Her eyelids fluttered, but remained open. “How would I know about such things? I’m over seventy years old, for God’s sake.”

I just smiled. If it hadn’t been for “dog boy” in the next room I might have retracted the question.

She returned my smile, confirming my suspicion.

“Many years ago, George accompanied me when I had a modeling assignment in Paris. One night we were invited to a dinner party by the president of the Société des Anciens Livres at his home on the Place d’Augustin. George’s reputation as a bibliophile was well known. He was quite handsome as well, and every bit as charming as our host. The other guests were the crème de la crème of Parisian society and we spent hours after dinner in scintillating conversations. At some point the party, I’m not sure how to this day, evolved into a daring group experience.”

“You mean an orgy?”

Beatrice shot me a pained look.

“I’m not boring you with this, am I?” she asked.

I gazed at a photo on the mantel of a handsome couple in their early forties and tried to imagine them locked in an acrobatic embrace with the Baron du Plessis, Madame Jourdan, and a supporting cast.

“No,” I said. “Please continue.”

“So delighted were we by our sexual awakening that we shared our experiences with friends when we got home. Most were so shocked they cut us off their Christmas lists. But two or three couples didn’t, and that became the nucleus of the New Moon Society. It eventually grew to fifty participants, give or take a few of the voyeur variety.”

“Why New Moon?”

“The double entendre was unintended, I assure you. George came up with the name one moonlit night during our first bacchanal. Apparently, he’d never heard of the disgusting college boys’ habit of sticking their bare bottoms out of car windows.

“No matter, the name stuck. Not everyone in the group played our games, but most did at one time or another. We were forced to retreat a bit in the eighties—too many younger folks wanting in on the act. Despite their lovely bodies, they were considerably freer with drugs and that simply wasn’t our style. Nor was the ghastly music they insisted on playing.”

“Was Martin Quist a member?”

Beatrice’s smile evaporated.

“Yes, he came along much later but I prefer to forget him. Not our kind at all. He was very young when we knew him and very uncouth.”

She hesitated. “No, uncouth isn’t quite accurate. I should say ‘pathologically deviant’ better fits his ilk. My husband considered him dangerous, and whenever Quist appeared at a party George always encouraged me to slip away by a side door. Eventually, I quit going to the functions entirely.”

“And George?”

“Unfortunately, he stayed in somewhat longer. Two years longer.”

“Why so long?”

“Why? For the varied experiences, of course. Different men and women. Wilder games. Sex is as addictive as any drug. When the prescribed doses get heavier, one gets hooked for more.”

“Did your husband ever talk about a more detailed list or photographs he might have kept?”

She stopped brushing my ankle with her foot. The tongue came out again, but it was as dry as her lips and, after a moment, it returned to where it belonged.

“Please, Mr. Bevan, tell me again that you are not a policeman. You don’t seem the type at all; not with such sensitive brown eyes.”

I told her again.

“What is it exactly that has landed you in trouble?”

“I was in the wrong place, wrong time.”

“Aren’t we all at times?”

“What about the names?”

“George kept a very detailed list. Actually, two of them; one labeled ‘A,’ the other ‘B.’ I think there were compromising Polaroid photos as well. The A team were high-society types who had money and influence. George wasn’t much interested in the B list as it consisted of lesser types—runaways and other vulnerable kids.”

“Why did your husband think he needed to document everything?”

“For leverage, of course. George planned to use it only in self-defense should anyone threaten his business interests. He was a highway contractor, among other things, and highly leveraged men like him are always magnets for litigation. Believe me, having that list paid off when competitors threatened to sue George’s company for price-fixing.”

“Do you know what happened to the lists?”

“They disappeared a long time ago,” she replied. “Some think the current district attorney has them and is using them for his own political purposes. He’s certainly venal enough to do it.”

“Denton Crowell?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“Vaguely.” I saw no need to mention that the senatorial candidate had successfully lobbied for my disbarment years earlier.

“At any rate,” she said, “that’s just speculation. I don’t know what became of them.”

“Could they have been hidden in one of the books presented at the auction?”

While pondering the question, she began twitching the leather cord in her left hand. The little black beads on the end of the thongs made subtle clacking noises indicating her patience had limits.

“Perhaps,” she said, stifling a yawn. “You see, I didn’t give the matter much thought after he died. I wasn’t interested in who did what to whom. They were George’s ‘pact with the devil’ kind of thing, not mine.”

“Do you recall—”

But my words were interrupted by new howls from the next room, bringing the interview to a close.

“Won’t you stay longer, Mr. Bevan?” she said as we both stood up. “I haven’t performed before an audience in quite a while and your presence has gotten me rather worked up.”

“Perhaps some other time,” I stammered.

“Oh,” she said sorrowfully, “all right then.”

She led me down the stairs and to the front entrance.

I was about to walk out when she said, “You were going to ask if I knew what book might have contained the lists.”

“I was.”

“My husband’s favorite novel was by a French hussy.”

“Colette?”

“Yes, that was the name. Does that help?”

“It does, Mrs. Land.”

“Please,” she said offering her cheek for a farewell kiss, “call me Beatrice.”

I left the Land property the way I entered. There were still plenty of hours of daylight and, despite his recent hightailing out of town, I decided to drop by Richard Chezik’s place to see if he’d left any hints as to whom he’d done the bidding for at the auction.

He lived on Strawberry Hill across the Kaw River in Kansas City, Kansas, in a carriage house behind his mother’s place. I’d met her in my shop before and, unlike Richard, she wasn’t a bad sort. I thought that even with Richard gone she wouldn’t object to allowing a fellow bookman to look at his stock.

On the way over, I mentally sorted through what Beatrice had said and tried to understand how it applied to my situation. Her late husband, George Land, had created and maintained a detailed list of a significant number of prominent persons’ sexual activities—information that could surely wreak havoc on the social structure of the city if it was to become public, let alone the reputations of all those involved.

There were photographs, too. George Land kept the documents close to his vest to protect himself, but in someone else’s hands—someone like Martin Quist—the sucker list would be blackmail gold.

I had handled the Colette only briefly, but, other than the revelations of Hemingway’s affair with Sylvia Beach, I had perceived nothing to indicate it contained any lists. On the other hand, I knew books could be a convenient and effective source for hiding things.

A portly man in his late sixties once brought in to Riverrun a second edition of an eighteenth-century aviary book by Cuvier with a lovely leather binding and a beautiful etching on the frontispiece. Without checking beyond the first few pages I offered $75, a sum that surprised and pleased him.

The next day an agitated woman on the sunny side of forty showed up demanding the return of the book. Immediately upon receiving it, she opened to a back chapter, where a two-inch square section in the center pages had been cut out with a razor. Nestled in the little makeshift box was a twenty-karat diamond that she had kept hidden from her husband.

“My insurance policy,” she explained as she popped the gem into her purse. “You can keep the book.”

So it was no stretch for me to believe the Colette hid something important within
it that had nothing to do with its literary value. Obviously, it couldn’t have contained a comprehensive list, let alone photographs. But it could easily hide a flat key within its bindings.

Quist was willing to pay $60,000 and possibly more for George Land’s books. For a knowledgeable collector with sufficient capital and foreknowledge of the legitimacy of the items listed, that was a more than reasonable figure. If the provenance proved accurate, just the two books Gareth had lifted were worth a cool half million. But my instinct was that Quist had no concept of the collection’s importance to the antiquarian trade.

He simply wanted whatever item that a book or books within the collection contained that would lead him to the lists and photographs. Had he known at the time of the auction that it was in the Colette, he would have instructed Kramm to bid only for it.

This was all speculation, however. The only things certain were that Gareth had been murdered with my hurling stick and the two books he had stolen at the auction were missing.

So what else was new?

After crossing the bridge on I-70, I drove up the hill past a row of boarded-up Catholic churches.

Poles, Croatians, Serbs, and Ukrainians had settled on Strawberry Hill at the tail-end of the nineteenth century when Eastern European immigrants were willing to take on work in the slaughterhouses that even the bog Irish refused to do. Men and women labored fifteen hours a day, six days a week in the alluvial valley between the Kaw and Missouri rivers known as the “West Bottoms.”

How they managed the time to have children, let alone raise them, is anyone’s guess. But they did, averaging eight or more to a family, and living long enough to see a great many of their grandchildren go on to college with the help of the G.I. Bill.