The Sign of the Book (6 page)

“There he is.”

McNamara squinted, but Lennie, or whatever it had been, had disappeared.

“My eyes ain't what they once were,” the old man said.

“He's gone now anyway.”

“You sure it was him?”

“Actually, no.”

McNamara said, “I'm gettin' damned tired of this,” and he turned toward the door. At that moment Lennie stepped out of the woods across the way and stood watching us with a rifle in his hands.

It was almost too dark to make him out: in another five minutes I wouldn't have seen him at all. McNamara got the door open and said, “Come on in,” but I stayed there watching Lennie watch me. Lennie lifted the rifle to his shoulder but I didn't move. We stood still, a pair of fools playing chicken, until he lowered the gun and stepped back into the trees. What was he trying to prove, that he could kill me? That he could do it from some vast distance and there was nothing I could do to stop it? That he was crazy enough? What does one fool ever prove to another?

“Come on in,” McNamara called out again, and I turned away and went into a dark front hall.

“Just so you know,” I said, “I saw Lennie across the way. This time there wasn't any doubt about it. He was pointing a rifle at us.”

McNamara turned and faced me. “Why in the
hell
would he do that?”

His face was a pale blur and I couldn't read the silence that followed. His voice had been incredulous, as if even Lennie couldn't be that crazy. What would the natural conclusion of such doubt be?… That
I
was the crazy one?

“He
must
be nuts,” he said, and I felt better.

He shook his head. “This really makes you wonder, doesn't it?”

He turned and walked ahead of me into the house, putting on lights as he went. The hall stretched straight on back through the house, past another hall that led, I assumed, to the bedrooms. Off to the right was a large room of some kind; to the left, another big room where the tragedy had happened.
The death room,
as the press would probably call it.

McNamara went left and turned on the lights. I came to the door and stood there for a moment looking at the carnage. The carpet had been a light tan—probably lighter than it now seemed, I thought: now the center of it was dominated by an ugly black bloodstain. How many death scenes had I seen like this in my years as a Denver cop? I didn't know what it would tell me this time; maybe nothing, but a cop always had to look, and in that moment I was a cop again. McNamara had gone across the room, stepping gingerly around the blood to stand near an old-style rinky-tink piano. Behind the piano was a pair of French doors, which were curtained with some flimsy lace stuff. I didn't move. McNamara watched me as if he'd seen me work in some past life and knew what to expect. My eyes roved around the room and finally came back to where the old man was.

“Ugly, isn't it?” he said.

“It always is, Parley.”

“What're you lookin' for?”

“No idea,” I said. “Maybe I'm just hoping the room will speak to me.”

“You cops are funny birds.”

“Yeah. Some of us are a riot.”

Eventually I came into the room, taking care not to touch anything. Yes, it had been three weeks. The sheriff had gone over it and he had had technicians out from the CBI, but to me it was a new scene. I could now see for myself what Parley had just told me: that this house, this cabin, had been built in pieces, with God knew how many add-ons over time, and this main room had probably been here for the full sixty years. There was nothing new-looking anywhere in sight. Straight across the room was a rustic rock fireplace. To the left of that, a glassed-in porch that in good weather would overlook the mountain range. But now darkness had spread beyond the glass, and with the lights on it seemed even darker, as if night had been upon us for hours.

“So what's it tell you?” Parley asked.

“Nothing yet.” I shrugged: I really didn't expect much. “It's cold.”

My eyes roved back to the left. There, near the fireplace, was a couch and a small circle of chairs with a coffee table in the center. Two floor lamps were placed behind the chairs, making it a cozy little reading circle when the fire was lit. In fact, a small stack of books was on the table and instinctively I moved across the room to see what they were. I looked down at
The Quality of Courage,
a recent book with Mickey Mantle's byline.

“Was Marshall a baseball fan?”

He shrugged. “I really didn't know him that well.”

I bent over and touched the book by the edge. “Can I borrow your gloves for a minute?”

“You think they'll fit you?”

“You got big hands, Parley. They'll be good enough.”

I pulled the right glove on. It was snug, not quite tight.

“What's the deal?” Parley said. “Sheriff said they were finished in here.”

“Maybe, but I don't see any residue on these books.”

“You mean fingerprint dust?”

I nodded. “Just call it an old cop's habit. I don't like to touch things where somebody's been killed.”

I picked off the Mantle book, holding it by the corners, and laid it flat on the table beside the others. Under it was a novel,
The Ballad of Cat Ballou,
and under that a thing called
How to Be a Bandleader,
by Paul Whiteman. Under that was
The Speeches of Adlai Stevenson,
and at the bottom was a cheap tattered paperback,
Gabby Hayes' Treasure Chest of Tall Tales.

McNamara seemed to sense my surprise. “Something wrong?”

“I don't know. This is just the strangest damned group of books I ever saw. Way too weird for anybody to be reading them.”

“Then why are they here?”

“Exactly.”

I looked at them again.

“Are they worth anything?” Parley asked.

“Not so you'd know it. The
Cat Ballou
's got a little sex appeal because of the film, but I don't think it's ever gonna be this century's answer to
War and Peace.
” I couldn't help laughing. Singsong, I said, “Adlai
Steven
son and
Ga
bby
Hayes
?”

“It does kinda blow your mind, doesn't it?”

“Best laugh I've had all day.”

But then my eyes wandered back to the bloodstain, and that was no laughing matter. We stood transfixed for another moment. A hundred thoughts ran through my head, none of them worth a damn on the face of it. I walked across to the piano, turned, and said, “I'm missing something somewhere.”

“Maybe you're trying too hard to make sense out of something that's just… you know, happenstance.”

“Maybe.”

A moment passed.

“It's not happenstance, Parley. Happenstance would be five disparate books, maybe an eclectic mix of fiction and non. But what does this little collection tell you? I mean, Paul
Whiteman
? A history of the Whiteman band maybe, but a book on how to be a bandleader? Were either of the Marshalls fans of band music?”

“You'll have to ask her.”

I touched the Mantle, opened the cover.

“It's signed.”

“What do you mean signed? Who signed it?”

“Mantle.”

“So what does that do for it?”

“Makes it ten times the value is all. It's probably a hundred dollars signed. Maybe a bit more now, I don't know, they keep going up. I haven't had one in a while.”

“Still, not exactly a motive for murder.”

“No.”

But I had a hunch now. I opened the Whiteman. It was signed in Whiteman's distinctive hand. The Gabby Hayes—signed, an uncommon signature from any perspective. I had never even seen one and I guessed it might be as high as two hundred.

“Look at this,” I said. “The
Cat Ballou
is signed by Nat King Cole and Lee Marvin from the film. I'll be damned.”

I opened the Stevenson. On the half title was a tiny signature, a hand I knew very well.

“John Steinbeck,” I said.

“What about Stevenson?”

I shook my head. “Stevenson doesn't matter: his signature's common as dirt and just about as cheap. Steinbeck's name on wallpaper's worth three hundred.”

“I don't understand. Why would John Steinbeck sign that?”

“Maybe he gave it to somebody. He admired Stevenson and he wrote the foreword to the paperback of this book.”

I looked around the room with a new eye. “Well, damn, Parley, I think we've found something here.”

“I'm not sure what. Maybe you should look in the library across the hall.”

It was one of those moments, wasn't it? Even before we went there I had a hunch what I'd find: a wall of books, and as I began taking them gingerly off the shelf and opening them, the hunch grew into a certainty. They were all signed, either by their authors or by well-known figures associated with their stories. Leonard Bernstein. Alfred Hitchcock. Wernher von Braun. Duke Ellington. Al Capp. John Wayne.

And on and on.

“Man, Parley, these are worth some money.”

“How much money?”

“I don't know. There's gotta be a thousand books here. If all of them are signed, even if the average is only—hell, I don't know, say two hundred—what've you got?”

“Two hundred grand.”

“And that's probably wholesale. John Wayne didn't sign many of his books. He's four hundred by himself.”

At that moment we heard a bump outside.

“Sounds like Lennie's come home to roost,” Parley said.

But when I went to the door, no one was there.

I walked out onto the porch. The night was full, the grounds dark as pitch. I went out to the steps and shouted at the mountains. “Hey, Lennie! You out here?”

He was there. I could feel the slimy bastard all around me.

Suddenly nervous, Parley said, “Come on inside.”

“Listen, you prick,” I said to the darkness. “If you ever point a gun at me again, I'll take it away from you and shove it and that badge up your ass. You got that?”

I stood there feeling naked. I felt vulnerable and alone, damn foolish, a silly cock framed like a bull's-eye in the door light, but unwilling to move.

“Come on in here,” Parley said from somewhere far behind me. “Come on, Janeway, you're giving me the creeps.”

Inside, I heard him take a deep breath. “What do you want to do now?”

I thought about it. “I don't know. This changes everything.”

“Does it?”

“Sure it does.” I thought about what might be done and how to proceed. “We've got to talk to Mrs. Marshall about these books.”

“Surely she knows what they are.”

“You'd think so, but if they were valuable, wouldn't she say that? This wouldn't be the first time somebody died and left a spouse in the dark.”

He didn't seem convinced. I said, “Well, look at it this way. She's sure not handling it like it means anything to her. I've got a feeling she hasn't got a clue what her books might be worth.”

I glanced back into the room. “Other than that, let's keep it quiet for now. These books are unprotected in a vacant house, far from anywhere. A book thief could clear this room in an hour, so nobody needs to know but her. That includes the sheriff and Lennie, no aspersions on either of those fine gents. Let 'em think these are just what they look like, a bunch of cheap books.”

I looked it all over again. “I wouldn't mind spending a day in here, just to go through it and see what she has. I could give her a loose appraisal if she wants it.”

“You can ask her in the morning.”

I could see he wanted to leave. Outside, the snow was piling up, but damn, I hated to leave those books like that.

“C'mon, Cliff, it's gettin' cold in here. We can't do anything else tonight.”

“One more thing. Just give me a few more minutes.”

I walked through the room making notes in my notebook. I wrote down where things were and put in my impressions. I jotted down some titles and where they were on the shelves. It wasn't much, just enough that, maybe, I'd know if someone had come in and disturbed them.

We were halfway back to town when suddenly Lennie pulled in behind us. He followed us on in as if he had been there all along, dropping off as we passed the sheriff's parking lot.