The Bookman's Wake (15 page)

I
walked under the freeway and up toward Sixth Avenue. I no
longer felt the rain. The specter of Pruitt dogged my
steps, spurring me along the deserted street. I saw his
face on storefront mannequins and felt his eyes watching me
from doorways. I heard his voice coming up from the drains
where the water ran down off the street. Then the heat
passed and I felt curiously calm. I had remembered
something that might be his undoing: I had a sense of
urgency but none of defeat. The night was young, the game
wasn’t over yet, I was more focused with each passing
block. I wasn’t going to sit in my room all night
knitting an afghan.

I had a pretty good idea what Pruitt would be thinking.
In the morning I would call the court, file a complaint,
and put the cops after him. This meant he’d be on the
move tomorrow but perhaps holed up tonight. As far as they
knew, I was a Denver knuckle-dragger who couldn’t
find my way around Seattle at midnight if the mayor
suddenly showed up and gave me his chauffeured limo. This
was good: this was what I wanted them to think.

By the time I was halfway up Sixth my juice was pumping.
I stopped at the Hilton, fetched my key, and let myself
into my room. I didn’t bother changing
clothes—this was just a pit stop, I’d be going
out again, I’d be on foot, and I was going to get
wet. I sat on the bed with the Seattle phone book and did
the obvious stuff first. There was no listing for a Ruel
Pruitt or an R. Pruitt in the white pages: nothing under
his name under
Detective Agencies
or
Investigators
in the yellow. In a strange way, this too was good: it
contributed to that sense of security that I hoped Pruitt
was counting on for tonight.

Now to find him.

I dug through my dirty clothes, and in the pocket of the
shirt I’d worn that first day, I found the scrap of
paper I had used to jot down his license number.

I called Denver.

A sleepy voice answered the phone. “
‘Lo?”

“Neal?”

“Yeah…who’s this?”

“Cliff Janeway.”

“Cliff…Jesus, what time is it?”

I looked at my watch. It was exactly 11:18. My plane for
Albuquerque was taking off even as we spoke.

“It’s after midnight back there. Listen,
I’m sorry, I know how hard you sleep. But I’m
lost in Seattle and I need one helluva big favor from an
old pal.”

I heard him stirring on the bed thirteen hundred miles
away. His wife asked who it was and he told her. She gave a
long-suffering sigh and I told him to give her my
regrets.

“Lemme move to the other phone,” he
said.

I waited, hoping that loyalty between old partners was
still alive and well in Denver.

“Yeah, Cliff?…What the hell’s
goin‘ on?”

“I need a big one, Neal.” I slipped into the
lie with a little dig from my conscience. Hennessey was too
straitlaced to hear the truth, and I’d make sure that
none of it ever came back to bite him. “I’m
supposed to meet a guy and we missed each other in the
night. All I’ve got is his plate number and I need an
address.”

There was silence on the line.

“This is important, Neal…I can’t tell
you how badly I need this. I thought there might be
something on NCIC…you could tap into that in twenty
seconds.”

“You got reason to suspect the guy’s car is
hot?”

“No, but those goddamn computers tell you
everything. If the guy’s even been late paying his
traffic tickets…”

“Cliff,” Hennessey said in that measured
tone I knew so well, “sometimes you’re a hard
guy to be friends with.”

“I’ll be singing your praises with my dying
breath.”

“Dammit, this information is not intended for this
kind of use.”

We both knew that. As always, I waited him out.

“I’ll make a call, but I’m promising
you nothing.

Call me back in half an hour, forty minutes.”

I knew it wouldn’t take that long: Hennessey would
have the information almost instantly, such was the power
of a cop in the age of computers. He would get the dope
through the DPD dispatcher, who would tap into the national
system, and then he’d brood for half an hour before
he decided to let me have it.

Meanwhile, I had some time on my hands.

I was walking again, on through the rain into the night.
I needed wheels, so I went to the gas station where Rigby
had had Eleanor’s car towed. It was still there, in a
fenced yard behind the rest rooms. I told the attendant I
was her brother and they had sent me over to fetch it for
her. He didn’t worry much: we weren’t exactly
dealing with a Lexus here, and he was anxious to get it off
his lot. “I rustled up four pretty fair used tires
with another eight, ten thousand in ‘em. Tab comes to
eighty-six dollars and ten cents. You wanna pay that
now?”

I said sure: I was well past the point of brooding over
money, so I handed him my sagging MasterCard.
“She’s all yours,” he said, slotting my
card through his machine. “Keys’re over the
visor.” I went back to the yard and opened the car
door. It squeaked on rusty hinges. The seats had worn
through, the windshield was cracked and a cold draft wafted
up from below. The odometer was playing it for
laughs—it showed 34,512, which could only be serious
if the meter was on its third trip around. I opened the
glove compartment. A small light came on, a pleasant
surprise. I saw some papers—registration, proof of
insurance, and a sheath of notes that looked to be tables
of current book valuations, handwritten on ledger paper in
ink. They were all Grayson Press books.

There were separate pages for each title. They were
fully described, with many variants noted, with prices and
the names of dealers who had sold them. These had been
taken from
Bookman’s Price Index
, with the volume numbers in the margins. She had sifted
the material as professionally as any book dealer, noting
the year of sale and the condition, along with her own
impression of whether the dealers tended to be high or low.
It was a ready reference on Grayson’s entire output.
The final sheet was marked
Poe/The Raven, 1949 edition
. Only three copies were listed for the past ten years. In
pencil she had noted that Russ Todd down in Arizona had
sold an uncataloged copy for $600. I knew Russ well enough
to call and ask if I needed to. Most interesting, I
thought, was the word
edition
, which appeared for this book only. It seemed to indicate
what I already knew—that some people believed there
had been another edition and Eleanor may have been one of
them.

I tucked everything back as it was. In a slipcase at the
side of the glove compartment I found her address book. It
fell open to the letter
G
, so often had that page been used. She had written some
names under the general heading
Grayson
. There were book dealers from coast to coast, several of
them known to me as specialists in fine-press books. There
was a local number for Allan Huggins, the Grayson
bibliographer, and at the bottom of the page were three
names in bold, fresh-looking ink.

Nola Jean Ryder.

Jonelle Jeffords.

Rodney Scofield.

Jonelle Jeffords I remembered as the name of the woman
in Taos whose house Eleanor had burglarized. There was a
phone number beginning with a 505 area code. The number for
Rodney Scofield was a 213 exchange, which I recognized as
Los Angeles. The space beside Nola Jean Ryder was
blank.

I sat behind the wheel, crossed my fingers, and turned
the ignition.

Yea, verily, it started.

I was back in business. I had wheels.

I stopped at the Hilton and called Hennessey. I knew by
the cautious sound of his voice that he had what I
wanted.

“I’ve got bad vibes about this.”

“Neal, it’s your nature to have bad vibes.
The time for you to really start worrying is when you
don’t have bad vibes.”

“Very funny. Someday you’ll get me fired,
I’ve got no doubt of that at all. No, don’t
tell me about it, please…you’re not gonna kill
this guy, are you?”

“Now why would you ask a thing like
that?”

“I don’t know. I just had a vision of the
beaches up there littered with cadavers, all of ‘em
named Pruitt. It doesn’t sit well at one
o’clock in the morning.”

“I’m just gonna pay him a friendly little
visit.”

“Like the Godfather, huh? You’ve got that
edge in your voice.”

There was nothing else to say: he’d either give or
he wouldn’t.

“Your plate’s registered to a Kelvin Ruel
Pruitt. He’s got half a dozen old unresolved legal
problems, all in Illinois. Careless driving, failure to
appear, a bad check never made good, stuff like that.
They’re not about to go after him in another state,
but if he ever gets stopped in Chicago, it’ll be an
expensive trip.”

He sighed and gave me Pruitt’s address.

“Bless you, Mr. Hennessey, you lovely old man. Now
go back to bed and make your wife happy.”

“She should be so lucky.”

I sat at the table and unfolded a Seattle street map.
Pruitt lived in a place called Lake City, north of town. I
marked the map, but I already had the routes memorized. As
a courtesy I called Taos and told them Rigby had escaped.
The lonely-sounding dispatcher took my message and managed
to convey his contempt across the vast expanse of mountains
and plains. I didn’t bother telling him that I was
going to find Rigby and bring her back to him. I
didn’t think he’d believe that anyway.

I
t was a fifteen-minute drive at that time of night. The
draft from the floorboards became a freezing gale, numbing
me in my wet clothes. The heater was only partly effective,
just beginning to get warm as I reached the Lake City
turnoff. I went east on 125th Street, zigzagging through
dark and narrow residential lanes until I found the street
where Pruitt lived. It was wrapped in wet murk, the sparse
streetlights as ineffective as candles. The rain kept
coming, beating down like a draconian water cure. The first
thing I saw as I turned into the block was the fat
man’s car, parked under a tree at Pruitt’s
address. I whipped around and pulled in behind him, then
sat for a few minutes with the heater running, recovering
from the cold drive. The house was draped by trees and
flanked by thick underbrush. None of it could be seen from
the street. There was also no sign of Pruitt’s
Pontiac, which was troubling but might be explained by a
garage out back. It was now 1:18 by my watch: almost three
hours since they’d snatched her off the street. I had
to assume the worst and go from here. Assume all three men
were in the house. Figure one of them would be posted as a
lookout. The fat man and the kid didn’t scare me
much: I had dealt with goons many times, and they always
fold when the game gets rough. Pruitt was the X-factor, the
unknown. You never know what a psycho will do, or what
you’ll have to do if you get him started.

I pulled my gun around to the front of my belt. Still I
sat, bothered by something I couldn’t pin down. Then
I saw that the fat man’s car door was open in the
rain, cracked about six inches. The interior light had come
on: this had run the battery down and cast the car in a
dim, unnatural glow. He took her in the house, I thought:
he had to carry her and never got his door closed, then he
forgot to come back out and shut it. I thought of Otto
Murdock’s store, pulling that connection out of the
rain, from God knew where. Things were left empty, open,
unattended. People went away and didn’t come back.
Nothing sinister about that, except my own nagging feeling
that somehow it shouldn’t be that way.

I’d have to move Eleanor’s car, I knew that.
Pruitt would know it on sight, and if he happened to drive
up, I’d lose my biggest advantage, surprise. I drove
around the block and parked in the dark behind a pickup
truck. Again I was walking in the rain. I approached the
fat man’s car cautiously. Walked around to the
driver’s side and looked in. His wallet lay open on
the seat. It was stuffed with money…five, six hundred
dollars. I fished out his driver’s license and stared
at his picture. William James Carmichael, it said. I wrote
down his name and address. I looked in the glove
compartment and found several letters addressed to Willie
Carmichael. I put them back, got out of the car, and walked
to the driveway that led back to the house.

It was heavily draped with trees. I could see lights off
in the distance, and a walk that skirted the drive. The
walk was shrubbed but too visible, I thought, from the
house. I came up the drive, dark as a load of coal,
planting each step firmly. It converged with the walk near
a flagstone approach to the front door. The only light came
from the front windows, dimmed by curtains and reflecting
off the slick stones of the walkway.

Three long strides brought me flat against the house. I
moved to the door, looking and listening. There was nothing
doing anywhere. The door was locked, hardly a surprise. I
put my head against it, listening for footsteps, movement,
anything that betrayed some living presence. There was
nothing.

Just…a faint strain of music.

I took my head away and the music stopped. I listened
again. The beat sounded tauntingly familiar, like something
I knew but couldn’t quite call up. The steady hiss of
the rain all but drowned it out. It quivered just outside
my senses, one of those half-remembered bits of business
that drives you crazy at two o’clock in the morning.
Other than that, the house was still, so quiet it gave me a
queasy feeling. I eased back into the brush and around to
the side. I saw a light in a window, dim and distant,
escaping from another room well back in the house. I pushed
through the undergrowth and looked through a small crack in
the curtain. I could see a piece of a drawing room, neat
and well-furnished with what looked to be antique chairs.
Somehow it didn’t fit what I knew about Pruitt, but
you never can tell about people: I really didn’t know
the man. I squinted through the crack and saw a doorway
that led off to a hall. The light came through from the
front, and nothing was going on back here.

I touched the glass and there it was again, that
rhythmic vibration, as much feeling as sound. I put my ear
against it, and on came that faraway melody, that staccato
tune that was right on the tip of my…

I froze, unable to believe what had just gone through my
head.

“Eleanor Rigby.”

Somewhere inside, someone was playing that song.

Over and over.

Loud enough to shake the walls.

At two o’clock in the morning.

I kept moving. Everything was the color of ink. I came
into the backyard, taking a step at a time. Around the edge
of a porch, groping, groping. I touched a screened door and
saw a long, dim, narrow crack of light. I pulled open the
door and moved toward it. It was the back door of the house
itself, cracked open like the fat man’s car. The
music seeped through it like some dammed-up thing that
couldn’t get through the crack fast enough. I had my
gun in my hand as I nudged the door with my shoulder. It
swung open and the music gushed out.

I was in a black kitchen, lit only by the glow from
another room. I could see the dim outlines of a range and
refrigerator, nothing more…then, straight ahead, a
table with chairs around it. I crossed the room, feeling my
way. The music was loud now: I had come into a hallway that
led to the front. I walked to the end, to the edge of the
parlor. It looked like some proper sitting room from
Victorian days. The light came down from above, where the
music was playing. I reached the stairs and started up.
There was a blip that sounded like a bomb, and the music
started again, a shock wave of sound.

I saw a smudge on the stair, a red smear ground into the
carpet…

Another one…

…and another one.

More at the top.

I heard a soft sigh. It was my own. The overhead light
at the top revealed a dark hallway. I could see a room at
the end of it, dimly lit as if by a night-light. I saw more
red marks on the carpet coming out of the hall. I moved
that way, the hall closing me in like a tunnel. There was a
door on each side halfway down, the one on the left open,
the room there dark. I kept flat against the wall,
breathing deeply, aware of the sudden silence again as the
record ended. The room smelled strongly of ashes. My mind
caught the smell but it didn’t hold: there was too
much going on. I reached inside and felt along the wall
with the palm of my hand, found the light, flipped it up,
and the flash turned the room the color of white gold. I
could see my reflection in a mirror across the room: I was
standing in a half-crouch with the gun in my hand, moving
it slowly from side to side. It was some kind of office.
There was a desk and a filing cabinet, with one drawer
hanging open and several files strewn across the floor. The
walls were painted a cream color: the only window was
covered by a dark curtain.

I turned and faced the room across the way. I could see
the thin line of light at the bottom of the door, and in
the light cast out from the office, more crusty red smears
on the floor. There, I thought: that’s where all the
blood’s coming from. I pivoted back on my heel and
flattened against the wall. Turned the knob, pushing the
door wide. And there he was, Fat Willie Carmichael, and I
didn’t need a medical degree to know he had done
Pruitt his last favor. The room looked like a
slaughterhouse, with blood on the bed and the floor and the
walls: splotches of it spewed as if by a high-pressure
pump. The fat man had fallen on his back and died there.
His head was wrenched back and I could see that his throat
had been cut. His fingers were rigid and clawlike,
clutching at nothing. I stood in the doorway, heartsick
with fear for Eleanor. My hand was trembling, I felt like a
rookie cop at his first bad murder scene. I had looked upon
more rooms like this one, streaked with red violence, than
I could ever add up and count, and now I shook like a kid.
There was still one room to check—the open door at
the end of the hall.

I reached the dim circle of light and the music came up
full as I peeped in. I almost laughed with relief—
nobody there! The record player squatted on a table near
the window, one of those old portables from the days before
stereo. A 45-rpm disc spun wildly. The set was fixed to the
automatic mode: the record would play like that forever,
till the power failed or the needle wore the grooves off.
It was starting again now, a concert from hell.

It was so loud I felt shattered by it. I had an urge,
almost a need, to rip out the plug. The night-light
flickered precariously, the bulb on its last legs. I found
the switch and turned on the overhead, washing the room in
light. It looked like a guest room: there was a single bed
in a corner facing a portable TV set, a telephone on a
table near the record player, a digital alarm clock. The
bed had been rumpled but not slept in. Someone had lain or
sat on top of the covering.

Handcuffed to the bed.

The cuffs were still there, one bracelet snapped tight
to the bedpost, the other lying open on the pillow. The key
had been left in the slot where it had been used to release
the prisoner from the bed. The cuffs were the same make and
style as the set Slater had given me. I came closer and
examined the bed, turning back the rumpled folds of the
blanket. There I found the book, no larger than a thumb
joint, Eleanor’s miniature Shakespeare, her good-luck
piece.

I fingered the soft suede leather, opened the cover, and
looked at the publisher’s name.
David Bryce and Son/Glasgow
.

I put it in my pocket and came back up the hall. Last
chance at the death scene, I thought. I was thinking like a
cop, and I was not a cop, this was not my town. In an hour
the room would be full of real cops. I stepped inside,
giving the body a wide berth. I looked at Fat Willie
Carmichael and thought,
Talk to me, baby
, but the fat man was keeping his last awful secret to
himself. He had been taken from the front, stuck in the
sternum with a weapon that was wicked and sharp, then
slashed deep across the neck. Either wound was probably
fatal, but the killer had hacked him up in other ways, as
if venting some raging fury or settling an old score. His
clothes were ripped apart: pocket change was scattered
around, and his keys were thrown against the wall. The
killer had been looking for the one key, I guessed, to
unshackle his prisoner in the next room. I looked around
the edges of the body: I could see his gun—he had
retrieved it from the car and it lay under his hip, still
in its holster. This indicated an attack of surprise: taken
from the front, but too quickly to react. Or done
unexpectedly, by someone he knew.

Time to call the cops, I thought. Out in the hallway, I
smelled again that faint whiff of ashes. The office across
the hall was thick with it. I looked into the room and saw
where it came from—a wastebasket, half-filled with
some burned thing, a bucket of ashes. I got down on the
floor and touched the can with the back of my hand. It was
still warm. I probed into it with my knife,
carefully…carefully, lifting one layer away from
another. Whatever it was, it had been thoroughly burned,
with only a few solid remnants left to show that it had
once been sheets of paper. Maybe a police lab could make
something out of it; I couldn’t. Then I saw a flash
of white—two pages fused together in heat, with small
fragments un-buraed. And as I leaned over it, I smelled
another odor, half-hidden under the ash but unmistakable if
you knew it. Ronsonol. The can and its contents had been
doused with lighter fluid to make sure the papers would
burn. Some of the fluid had soaked into the carpet but had
not burned because the fire had been confined to the inside
of the can. Lighter fluid was a smell I knew well. It is
one of the bookscout’s major tools, used for removing
stickers from book jackets safely and without a trace.
Paper can be soaked in it without getting stained,
wrinkled, or otherwise damaged, unless someone remembers
what lighter fluid’s really for and sets it on
fire.

I sniffed around the can and again probed it with the
knife. I worked the point between the two pages and jiggled
them apart. The words
still
and
whisp
stood out on the unburned fragment, the two words arranged
one over the other, at a slight angle, with the paper
charred close around them. The lettering was striking and
quaint: the typeface lovely. Here was the
Raven
, I thought. It might not make sense, but it looked as if
Pruitt had it all along, lost his mind, whacked Willie
Carmichael, and burned the damn thing. It didn’t make
sense, I thought again. I parted the ashes and went deeper.
There was only one other scrap with unburned letters:
ange
, it said. I took this piece, to have a sample of the
typeface, and left the other segment for the cops.

I nudged off the light with my elbow and left the room
as I’d found it. I stood for a moment in the hall,
listening. But the record had numbed my senses, and now I
had to concentrate just to hear the song.

I moved through the hall to the stairs. Looked down into
the drawing room.