The Bookman's Wake (16 page)

Something was different. I waited and listened and
waited some more, but I saw and heard nothing.

It was my life that had changed. My dilemma. The
universe.

I took a solid grip on the gun and went down quickly.
Everything was turned around, like a house of mirrors at a
carnival. There were two doors: I looked through the other
rooms with that same sense of dread and found nothing: then
went back through the hall the way I had come. I
didn’t know what was eating me until I got to the
kitchen. There’s more, I thought: I’ve missed
something, I haven’t seen it all yet. I nudged open
the swinging door, groped for a light, found it, flipped
it, and saw what it was that I had missed.

The woman was sprawled in a lake of blood by the table.
I had walked past her in the dark, so close I
might’ve stepped on her hand. Like Fat Willie
Carmi-chael, she had died by the knife—throat cut,
body ripped and torn. I moved closer and looked at her
platinum blond hair. I didn’t want to look at her
face, but I did. It was Pruitt’s girlfriend,
Olga.

Then I saw the footprints, my own, and, oh, Christ, I
had walked through her blood coming in. It was like looking
down and seeing your crotch covered with leeches: your skin
shimmies up your tailbone and your gut knots up and you
just want them gone. I didn’t even stop to think
about it—the whole fifteen years I’d spent with
DPD was so much jackshit, and I went to the roll of paper
towels near the range and ripped some off, wet them in hot
water at the tap, and washed out the prints. And in that
moment, while I played footsie with the killer, I became
part of his crime.

Call the cops, I thought: call them now, before
you’re in this any deeper.

I rolled the bloody wet towels into a tight ball,
wrapped it in two fresh ones, and stuffed it in my pocket.
Everything till then had been blind reflex. Again I thought
about the cops, but even then I was smearing the water tap
with my handkerchief, where I’d touched it wetting
the towels.

Stupid, stupid…

I left the record playing: give the cops that much, I
owed it to Eleanor, even if I had to pay the price.

I was lucky on one count—the heavy underbrush made
it unlikely that neighbors would see me coming or going.
Almost too late, I remembered that I had gone through Fat
Willie’s wallet: I went back to his car and smeared
it with my handkerchief. I walked around the block and sat
in Eleanor’s car with my feet dangling in the rain. I
took off my shoes, knowing that human blood can linger in
cracks longer than most killers could imagine, and I turned
them bottoms-up on the floor.

I drifted downtown, my conscience heavy and
troubled.

I was at least five miles away when I called them. I
stood in a doorless phone booth outside an all-night gas
station and talked to a dispatcher through my handkerchief.
Told her there were two dead people, gave her the
address.

I knew I was being taped, that police calls today can be
traced almost instantly. When the dispatcher asked my name,
I hung up.

I stopped at Denny’s, put on my shoes, and went
inside for a shot of coffee. It was 3:05 a.m. I sat at the
fountain and had a second cup. I thought of Eleanor and
that record blaring, of Slater and Pruitt, of Crystal and
Rigby and the Gray son boys. I wished for two
things—a shot of bourbon and the wisdom to have done
it differently. But I was in the wrong place for the one
and it was too late for the other.

I
found what I needed over my third coffee. It always
happens, I don’t know how. When life goes in the
tank, I bottom out in the ruins and come up with purpose,
direction, strength.

I knew what I had to do. It was too late now to do it
the right way, so the same thing had to happen from a
different starting point.

I sat at the counter looking at her card.

I made the call.

She caught it on the first ring, as if she’d been
sitting there all night waiting for me.

“Hello.”

“Trish?”

“Yup.”

“Janeway.”

“Hi.”

She didn’t sound surprised: she didn’t sound
thrilled. She sounded wide-awake at four o’clock in
the morning.

“You said if I’d like to talk…well,
I’d like to talk.”

“When and where?”

“As soon as possible. You say where.”

“My office, half an hour. Do you know where the
Seattle Times
is?”

“I’ll find it.”

“I’ll tell you, it’ll save time. Go to
the corner of Fairview and John. You’ll see a big
square building that looks like all newspaper buildings
everywhere. You’ll know you’re there by the
clock on the Fairview side—the time on it’s
always wrong. Turn into John, park in the fenced lot on the
left, come across the street and in through the John Street
door. The guard will call me and I’ll come down and
get you.”

The clock on the building said 11:23, but it was an hour
before dawn when I got there. The rain was coming down in
sheets. I parked in a visitor’s slot and made the
sixty-yard dash in eight seconds, still not fast enough to
keep from getting soaked again. I pushed into the little
vestibule and faced a middle-aged man in a guard’s
uniform. I asked for Miss Aandahl: he didn’t think
Miss Aandahl was in. He made a call, shook his head, and I
sat on a bench to wait. Water trickled down my crotch and I
felt the first raw tingle of what would probably be a
raging case of red-ass. I squirmed in my wet pants and
thought, I
hate
this goddamn town.

She came in about ten minutes later. She was wearing a
red raincoat and hood. She was brisk, getting me quickly
past the formalities with the guard. He looked at me
suspiciously as I disappeared with her into the building.
We went past a receptionist’s booth, empty now, then
through a door to the right and up a set of stairs. We came
out on the second floor, in a corridor that led past a
string of offices. There was a bookcase filled with review
copies, overflow from the book editor, with a sign to the
effect that the staff could buy them (the money to go to
charity) at $3 a copy. In a quick flyby, I saw some hot
young authors—David Brin, Dan Simmons, Sharyn
McCrumb—whose newest books, with author photos and
publicity pap laid in, could already command cover price
plus 50 percent in a catalog. That’s the trouble with
review books; they tend to be wasted on book editors. I
wanted to clear out the case, buy them all.

She was standing about thirty feet away, waiting. I
joined her at the edge of the newsroom, a huge chamber
quiet in the off-hours. It gave the impression that news
happened on its timetable, at its command.
Let there be news
, the keeper of the key would shout at eight o’clock,
and fifty reporters would materialize at their computers,
clicking furiously. On the far wall was a full-length mural
of the world, with clocks showing times in various places.
The world looked as peaceful as the newsroom, which only
proved how little the world knew.

She hung up her raincoat, then led me into a narrow
place defined on both sides by tall filing cabinets. It was
crowded with desks, maybe a dozen of them packed into a
space the size of a medium-sized living room. It was like
walking into a canyon: it was part of the newsroom yet it
wasn’t, because an editor couldn’t see in there
without getting up and making the grand effort. I
didn’t have to be a reporter to know what a coveted
spot it was…out of sight, out of mind. Her desk was
far back in the corner, as secluded as you could get
without moving up in management, getting yourself glassed
in and becoming a different breed of cat.

She sat and motioned me to a chair. She looked different
somehow from the image I had retained from our one meeting
in the courthouse cafeteria. She looked harder and tougher,
more of the world. Then she smiled, like the child looking
up at Frankenstein’s monster, and I felt good
again.

“Nice racket you’ve got,” I said.
“You people must get some great poker games going
back here.”

“We call it the Dead Zone. They’ll have to
kill me to get this desk.”

“Are they trying?”

“So they say.”

She didn’t push me. If I wanted to small-talk and
break the ice, she could do that. She was looking straight
in my eyes.

“You look miserable…tired, wet, and
hungry.”

I nodded. “Your city has not treated me
well.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and managed to
look it. “You’ve come in the rainy
season.”

“Oh. How long does that last?”

“Almost all year.”

She offered coffee but I had had enough. We looked at
each other across her desk.

“I came here from Miami,” she said.
“My first month was a killer. It rained twenty-eight
out of thirty days. I was a basket case. I was ready to go
anywhere. If the newspaper in Grand Island, Nebraska, had
offered me a job covering the grasshopper beat,
I’d‘ve been on the next bus out of here. Then
it cleared up and I learned what a sensational place this
is.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for
that.”

“There’re two secrets to living here.
You’ve got to dress for weather and you can’t
let it get you down.”

“That’s two for two I missed.”

“Now the only thing that bothers me is the
traffic. This town has got to be the worst bottleneck in
the United States. It’s great as long as you
don’t need to drive, or if you do need to drive, you
don’t need to park.”

“It sounds better by the minute.”

“I guess I’m here for the long haul. I
can’t imagine going anywhere else. What’s
Denver like?”

“I had forgotten what rain looks like till I came
here.”

“Sun city, huh?”

“Somebody once said that Denver has more sun and
sons of bitches than any other city in the
country.”

She smiled and said, “I’ll stay with the
rain. I bought a boat last year, I’m a pretty fair
sailor now. Sometimes I just take off on Friday and drift
up the coast. I put in at some warm-looking marina and
spend the weekend exploring. If I’ve got a difficult
piece to write, I do it there, out on deck if the
weather’s nice.”

“Is that where you wrote your book?”

“Would have, if I’d had it then. Have you
read it?”

“Not yet, but it’s high on my list. I just
picked up a copy.”

“Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you
read.”

I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard
a reporter say. She shrugged and said, “It’s a
good book, I’m not apologizing for it; if I had it to
do over again, I’m sure it’d come out mostly
the same. A little better, maybe. That’s the curse of
being a writer, you never want to look back at what you did
last year because the trip’s too painful. You see
stuff you should’ve done better, but now it’s
set in stone.”

“What would you change?”

“A thousand little things…and of course
I’d write a new ending.”

“Of course?”

“The ending leaves the impression that the
Graysons died in an accident. Just some tragic twist of
fate.”

“Which is…?”

“Not true.”

“They were murdered, you said.”

“Read the book, then talk to me again. Just keep
in mind that the last chapter wasn’t what I
would’ve done, then or now.”

“If you didn’t do it, who did?”

“It was sanitized by an editor in New York. The
problem was, I had produced this monster-sized book and it
was ending with more questions than it answered. They
didn’t like that, they felt it would not be
satisfying for a reader to go through seven hundred and
fifty pages and come out with the kind of questions I was
asking. Especially when the experts seemed to agree that it
was an accident and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t.
The book really didn’t need to end with any
unanswered questions at all. They died. That was the end of
it.”

“But not for you.”

“I still keep my finger in it. As you can
see.”

“You must have something in mind.”

She smiled into the sudden pause that stretched between
us. “I’ve been doing some fiction lately.
I’m finding a voice, as the literati say. I’ve
had three or four pieces in the literary reviews and
I’m working on a novel. Maybe that’s how
I’ll finally get rid of the Graysons. I read
somewhere that fiction’s the only way you can really
tell the truth. I never even understood that when I was
learning the ropes, but I sure believe it now.”

She gave me a look that said,
Hey, I’m not pushing you, but why the hell are we
here
?

I said, “I’ve got a deal for you.”

“I already own the Space Needle, I bought it last
year. I never could resist a deal.” She got up and
came around the desk, patting me on the shoulder.
“Let’s go get some breakfast. I don’t
think I want to hear this on an empty stomach.”

I
t was a lick and a promise, all I had time for. My reading
on her would have to be the abridged version, once over
lightly. This is your life, Trish Aandahl, a tour of the
high spots. From that I’d decide: move on alone or
bring her to the party.

Conventions and courtesies, five minutes. She had grown
up in Ohio, her parents simple people who lived for the
moment. Life was what it was: you worked at it every day
and got up the next day and did it again. Her father had
worked for wages in Cincinnati; her mom found jobs in
restaurants, dime stores, car washes, wherever there was
women’s work that demanded no special skills. They
had produced a child unlike either of them, a daughter who
didn’t believe in women’s work and grew up
thinking she could do most anything. At least the parents
had had the wisdom to indulge her differences.

She beat the clock with a minute to spare. She knew I
was fishing, but she had tapped into my growing sense of
urgency and was willing to give me some rope.

Personal color, three minutes. Trish was her real name,
listed that way on her birth certificate. Her mother had
named her after a best friend and had never known that the
name was a diminutive of Patricia.

She was alone in the world. Her parents were dead and
there were no other children. If there was a man in her
life, it wasn’t readily apparent. She wore no rings,
but that doesn’t mean as much as it once did.

She was amused now, wondering how far I’d go into
this Dick-and-Jane style personal Baedeker. I wondered
about her gripes and dislikes and gave her one minute for
that.

She didn’t need it. Phonies, stuffed shirts,
chiselers, and liars. Her code was much like mine, her hate
list virtually identical.

Extra bit of business, thirty seconds. She was a chronic
insomniac, able to sleep undisturbed only about one night
in four. That’s why she had been sitting there by the
telephone, reading a novel, when I called.

I knew everything about her by the time the waitress
brought our breakfasts. What more do you need to know about
anyone, until the chips are down and you discover that you
never knew anything at all?

“I’m ready to tell you about Slater,”
I said.

“Why the change of heart?”

“Because the circumstances have changed and I want
something back from you. Isn’t that how life
works?”

“If it’s an even trade, sure. Is the Slater
story worth anything?”

“I think you’ll find it interesting. The
entertaining part is trying to figure out where it’s
heading. It’s still unfolding, as you newsies might
put it.”

“The terminology is
breaking
. I don’t do breaking stories anymore.”

“I think you’ll do this one.”

“So what do you want for it?”

“A lot less than you paid for the Space Needle.
Are we off the record yet?”

“If that’s how you want it.”

I threw in a zinger, to test her dedication to the code.
“Don’t take offense at this, but how do I know
your word is good?”

She did take offense: she bristled in her chair, and for
a moment I thought she might pick up and walk out.
“I’ll tell you the answer to that, but
you’re only allowed to ask it once. You can check me
out with a phone call. I worked in Miami for four years. I
went to jail down there over just this kind of
stuff.”

“Really?” I said in my most-interested
voice. “How long were you in?”

“It was only ten days. My paper made it a
frontpage embarrassment for them and they were glad enough
to see me go. I might still be there, though, if they
hadn’t gotten their information from someone
else.”

“That’s okay, ten days is long enough. At
least you know the taste of it.”

“The taste, the smell, the color. It colors your
whole life. But I’ll go back again before I let them
make me betray…even you.”

“Hey, I believe you. In a funny way, though, it
makes what I’m trying to do more
difficult.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not quite ready to go on the record
yet. But I can’t even explain the situation to you
off the record without handing you a piece of my legal
jam.”

“What kind of legal jam?”

“There was a crime done tonight. A bad
one.”

“Did you do it?”

“No, ma’am, I did not.”

“Then…”

“I did some other stuff, stupid stuff that will
not make them love me. If the cops don’t love you,
you need something in your corner besides a motive, the
means, and no alibi. You’d look good in my comer. But
you need to know the risks.”

Warily, she said, “Can you tell me in general
terms what happened?”

“Generally speaking, two people got killed.
I’ve been busy all night destroying evidence and
obstructing justice. They’ll almost certainly charge
me with that, but at least I can bail out on it.
That’s my magic word right now,
bail
. I have this compelling need to be out. I’ve got to
be out.” I let a long pause emphasize that point for
me, then I said, “But over the last two hours
I’ve come to realize that the magnitude of my fuckup
may make that impossible. I’ve got a growing hunch
they might start taking my measurement for the murder
rap.”

She let out her breath slowly, through her nose. I saw a
slight shiver work its way across her shoulders.

“That’s it in a nutshell,” I said.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to handle
it. I need to do that before I can get into the story or
tell you what I want from you.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem.
I’m not legally obligated to tell the police what you
tell me.”

“I can see a situation, though, where they’d
call you in and ask some questions you’d rather not
answer.”

“I’ll claim privilege.”

“And end up in jail again.”

“Maybe I’ll take that chance, if the
story’s worth it.”

“The story’s worth it. But between the two
of us, we may still have to dig for the end of
it.”

She looked out into the rainy street, just now awash
with the palest light of morning. I floated a hint of what
I hoped she could do for me.

“I’m hoping you know a great cop in this
town, or a DA with a real head on his shoulders. The closer
you’d be to such an animal the better.”

“I’m not sleeping with anybody right
now,” she snapped. “If I was, I sure
wouldn’t use him that way.”

“You’re touchy as hell at five o’clock
in the morning, aren’t you? You should learn to sleep
better.”

“Janeway, listen to me. You and I may become the
best of pals, but we won’t get to first base if you
keep dropping insults on my head.”

“And we’ll never get anywhere if
you’re one of those politically correct types who
takes offense at everything. I’m no good at walking
on eggs. Do you want to hear what I meant or sit there and
be pissed off?”

“Tell me what you meant, maybe I’ll
apologize later.”

“I may need to turn myself in. If I do, all this
is a moot point, you can do anything you want with it. But
I’d at least like to be talking to my kind of cop,
not one of those tight-asses who thinks the first mistake I
made happened way back in Denver, when I quit the
brotherhood.”

She didn’t say anything.

“The Rigby girl’s gone. I have good reason
to believe that the killer may have taken her. I want to be
out looking for her: I
need
to be looking, I really can’t overstate that. I will
come totally unzipped sitting in a jail cell. All humility
aside, I’m still the best cop I know. I’m not
saying Seattle will give her a fast shuffle, but I know how
it is in these big departments, I know how many cases those
boys have to clear. I’m here, I’m focused,
I’m looking for Eleanor, and I’ll open all the
doors.”

I took a deep breath, which became a sigh. “But
I’m far from home, I’m being slowly driven
crazy by this rain, and I know nobody here but you. The cop
in me wants to tear up this town looking for her, but
I’m not even sure yet where the doors are. And if
that kid winds up dead and the real cops could’ve
prevented it while I’m out playing
policeman…”

We looked at each other.

“I’ll tell ya, Trish, I’d find that
damn near impossible to live with.”

She answered my sigh with one of her own, but it was a
long time coming. “You want it both ways. It
can’t be done.”

“If it can’t be done, I go in—no
arguments, no questions. Her welfare is the first
priority.”

“Maybe you should go in. Can you really do her any
good out here by yourself?”

“I might surprise you. I really was a decent cop.
With me looking too, her chances would have to go up. I
don’t know, I’ve got to try. But there
isn’t much time.”

I droned on, summarizing the immediate problem. The cops
had to be told about Rigby now, this morning, before they
closed down the scene. In a homicide investigation, every
minute wasted on the front end is critical. I looked at my
watch: I had already blown three hours.

“Let’s make it very clear, then, what you
want from me and what kind of restraints I’m
under,” she said. “As it stands now, I
can’t even ask the cops an intelligent
question.”

“That’s why I was hoping you knew
somebody.”

“That I was sleeping with the chief of police, you
mean. Sorry, Janeway, no such luck. I don’t drink
with them or eat lunch with them, I don’t backslap or
schmooze or let them tell me dirty jokes. My relationship
with these guys is respectable but distant. It’s
extremely professional and I’ve taken some pains to
keep it that way.”

“Do you know anybody on the paper who does
schmooze with them?”

“Nobody I’d trust, and I’d be wary of
any cop such a guy might bring me. I don’t like
reporters who party with people they write
about.”

We thought it through another stretch of quiet.

She said, “I feel like I’m playing pin the
tail on the donkey, or a card game with half a
deck.”

“You want to hear the story, I’ll tell you
the story.”

“Sure I want to hear it, isn’t that why
we’re here? I’ll take it any way you want to
tell it, on the record or off.”

I told it to her with no more clarification than that. I
took her from Slater’s arrival in my bookstore
through my hasty retreat from Pruitt’s house three
hours ago. She asked nothing and made no judgments until it
was finished. Her eyes darted back and forth as if
she’d been replaying parts of it in her head.

“God, I’ve got more questions now than I had
at the beginning. I know who Slater is, but who is Pruitt?
Is this really about a Grayson book or is something else at
the bottom of it? What happened to the kid who was tagging
along with the fat man? And you…oh, Janeway, what on
earth possessed you and what’re you thinking now? Do
you think Pruitt lost his mind, killed his friends, and
took off with Rigby? Does that make sense to
you?”

“All I know for sure is there were five people,
counting Eleanor. Only two are accounted for and
they’re dead.”

“And what about that record playing? What do you
make of that?”

“She was being stalked and harassed on the phone.
It had to’ve been Pruitt, that’s obvious now.
He was her darkman, her worst nightmare.”

“But why leave the record playing, at home, with a
dead man there?”

The check came. I made a stab at it but she was quicker.
She looked through her purse and fished out a twenty.

“I’m going on up to the scene,” she
said. “At least then we’ll know what cops are
working it. Maybe I can take them off the record and get
them to tell me something.”

We walked out in the rain. I stood beside her car,
getting wet again, and talked to her through the narrow
crack at the top of her window.

“I’ll be holed up in my room at the Hilton.
You call me.”

“As soon as I can.”

“Sooner than that. Remember, I am not calm,
I’m not taking this in my stride. I am very
nervous.”

“I hear you.”

“You call me, Trish. The minute you can get the
smell of it and break away, you get on that
phone.”

“I’ll call, but don’t get your hopes
up. I think you’re gonna have to go in to get what
you want. And the cops won’t be naming you citizen of
the year.”