The Bookman's Wake (33 page)

“That year I began buying books from Morrice and
Murdock in Seattle,” Scofield said. “My
dealings were all with Murdock, who was then considered
the country’s leading dealer in Grayson
books.”

It was the year of the Morrice and Murdock breakup,
when Murdock stumbled out on his own in an alcoholic
stupor. “He still had a lot of books,”
Scofield said, “things he had hoarded over the
years. But he was cagey, difficult. He knew Grayson was
on an upward spiral, but the books were his ace in the
hole. He also knew that I was the market: if I happened
to die or lose interest, it would stabilize and Grayson
would settle into his natural level, still upward bound
but at a much slower rate. Murdock wanted to make all he
could on every book, but even then he was afraid of
selling. No matter what I paid him, he seemed to go
through it at an unbelievable clip.

“He was the kind of man who would promise the
moon and give you just enough real moonbeams that you
couldn’t help believing him. He talked of fabulous
things, hidden in places only he knew about, and all that
time he dribbled out his books one or two at a time. I
bought everything he showed me and paid what he asked. I
knew the day was coming when he’d get down to brass
tacks and I’d see what he really had. I’ve
had experience with alcoholics. Eventually they lose
everything.”

In the fourth year the big break came. Murdock called,
claiming to have a client who owned the only copy of
Darryl Grayson’s last book.

But the deal had to be handled with tenterhooks. The
woman was extremely nervous. She would only meet with
Scofield under mysterious conditions, in a place of her
choosing, with her identity fully protected.

“Did you ever find out,” I asked,
“why this was?”

“It was fairly obvious to me,” Scofield
said, “but Murdock explained it later. His client
knew Darryl Grayson personally. They had had an intimate
relationship. She had been a married woman then, still
was, and if any of this came out, her marriage might be
jeopardized.”

“Did you buy that?”

“Why not, it was perfectly feasible. Have you
read the Aandahl biography on the Graysons?”

I nodded.

“Then you know how Grayson was with women. The
fact that a pretty young woman was married to someone
else wouldn’t have slowed him up much. She
wouldn’t have been the first woman to have carried
on with Grayson while she was married to someone else.
And Grayson was known to have given his women
presents—books, notes, charts…mementos of
completed projects. It was part of the pleasure he took
in his work, to give out valuable pieces of it after the
main work was finished. Once a project was done, Grayson
wasn’t much for keeping the records or hanging on
to his dummy copies. For years it’s been assumed
that these were all destroyed, but I’ve never been
convinced of that.”

“So what happened?”

“We flew to Seattle.”

“Who is we?” I looked at Kenney.
“You?”

Kenney shook his head. “I hadn’t been
hired yet.”

“I took Mr. Pruitt,” Scofield said.

“Surely not,” I said in real dismay.

“There was no reason to doubt him
then.”

“But what purpose did he serve?”

“He was what he always was: a bodyguard. I
learned long ago that it pays to have such men with you.
When you’ve got money, and that fact is generally
known, you get accosted by all kinds of
people.”

“But you had nobody with you to function as an
expert…nobody like Kenney?”

“Murdock was my expert. He had already had one
meeting with this woman and had examined the book
himself. There was no doubt in his mind what it
was.”

I didn’t point out that the ax Murdock was
grinding would’ve given Paul Bunyan a hernia. It
wouldn’t help to beat that horse now.

“So you took Pruitt,” I said. “What
happened when you got there?”

“Murdock met us at the airport and took us
straight to the meeting place. I wasn’t at my best:
I’m prone to colds and flu, and I felt I was coming
down with something. The weather was bad: I remember it
was raining.”

“What else does it ever do in this
town?”

“We went to the place she had picked out, a
restaurant downtown. She wanted to meet in a public
place, probably for her own protection. Murdock had
reserved a table in a far corner, where she’d told
him to go. It was dark back there, but that’s how
she wanted it. We did it her way…everything, her
way.”

He sipped his drink, gave a little cough. “She
was late. We waited half an hour, maybe more. Murdock and
I had little to talk about. It seemed like a very long
wait, and I was not feeling well.”

“Where was Pruitt all this time?”

“Posted at the door, up front.”

“So when she finally did get
there…”

“She had to walk right past him.”

“And he’d have seen her.”

“But not to recognize. She wore a
veil…black coat, black hat…and a deep red
dress. The veil did a good job. I never saw her face and
neither did Murdock. With the veil, and the darkness at
that table, she could’ve been anyone.”

“Did she bring the book?”

“Oh, yes.” He trembled at the memory of
it. “It was
superb…magnificent…completely lovely. Beyond
any doubt, Grayson’s masterpiece.”

“You could tell all this in the dark?”

“Murdock had come prepared. He had a small
penlight and we examined the book with that. You
can’t be sure under conditions like that, but there
we were. I still didn’t know what she wanted. She
didn’t seem to know either. She seemed in dire
financial need one moment and unconcerned the next, as if
her two greatest fears were selling the book and losing
the deal we had come there to make. The ball was in my
court: I felt I had to do something or risk losing it. I
had brought some cash—not much, about twenty
thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. I offered her
this for the opportunity to examine the book for one
week. The money would be hers to keep regardless of what
we finally decided to do. We would sign a paper to that
effect, handwritten by me and witnessed by Murdock. In
exactly one week we’d meet back at that same
restaurant. If the book passed muster, she would be paid
an additional fifty thousand. Her reaction was palpable:
it was more than she’d dreamed…she took it,
and I felt I was home free.”

The room was quiet. Kenney stood back like a piece of
furniture. Amy sat on the edge of her chair. I held fast
to Scofleld’s pale eyes.

“So you had the book,” I said. “Then
what?”

“We flew back to Los Angeles with it. I wrote
Murdock a check for his work, and at that point I decided
to have some independent appraisers fly in and look at
it. I called Harold Brenner in New York.”

He looked at me expectantly. I had heard the name, had
seen Brenner’s ads in
AB
, but I had never had any dealings with the man. Kenney
said, “Brenner’s one of the best men in the
country on modern small-press books.”

“But Brenner couldn’t come out till the
end of the week,” said Scofield. “This would
still leave us time to have the book examined and get
back to Seattle for our meeting with the woman in red,
early the following week. Then I got sick—whatever
I had caught in Seattle got dangerously worse, and on my
second day home I was hospitalized as a precaution. That
night my house was burglarized. My choice Grayson pieces
were taken.”

“Including
The Raven
, I’m sure,” I said. “How long did it
take you to realize that Pruitt was behind it?”

“The police were surprisingly efficient. Pruitt
had been out playing cards that night: four other men
would swear that the game had gone on till dawn and
he’d only left the room once or twice to use the
facility. But from the start, one of the detectives knew
it was an inside job. How could it be anything
else?…Who else would know how to defeat the system
and get in so easily? The big problem was proving
it…they had to catch the perpetrator and make him
talk. Within forty-eight hours they had questioned
everyone remotely connected with the installation of the
security system, including all of Pruitt’s local
cronies. Early on the third day they made an arrest, a
petty hoodlum named Larson, who had known Pruitt for
years. When he was picked up, he still had one of the
break-in tools in his possession.”

I gave a dry little laugh. Even after my long police
career, the stupidity of some criminals amazes me. This
is why the jails are full.

“It was a screwdriver,” Scofield said.
“One of those extra blades that comes on a utility
knife, you know, a six-tools-in-one instrument. He had
used it to break open the bookshelf locks. This was easy:
once he’d gotten into the house, then into the
library, breaking open the cabinets themselves was
relatively simple— he just wedged his screwdriver
into the metal lock and pried it open. But it left a
scrape mark, which was identical to the sample police
made later with the same tool. He also left a partial
heelprint in the garden outside the house. His heel fit
it perfectly. We had just fertilized that flowerbed, and
a chemical residue was found in the nail holes of his
heels. I was getting that fertilizer from Germany, it
wasn’t yet widely available in the United States,
so the odds of finding that precise mix of ingredients in
any other garden would have been quite long. We
didn’t even have the analysis back from the crime
lab yet, but Mr. Larson—and more to the point, Mr.
Pruitt—must have known what it would show. Larson
was a two-time loser who was looking at a long trip up
the river. His incentive to deal was getting better by
the hour.”

“To give them Pruitt’s head on a
platter.”

“You could put it that way.”

“I can almost guess the rest.”

He nodded. “Suddenly my attorney got a call from
Larson’s lawyer…Larson’s
new
lawyer. We were told that full restitution might be made
if the case could be discreetly dropped.”

“I’ll bet the cops loved you for
that.”

“The detective who had made this case was not
thrilled, to say the least. He fumed and yelled and said
this was not my call to make.”

“But he soon learned better, didn’t he?
Grease runs the world in L.A. too.”

“You’ve got to understand something. This
was never said, but there was a strong implication that
if I didn’t agree right then, on the spot, my books
might end up in the Pacific Ocean. What was I supposed to
do? I agreed to have the case dropped, and on Monday
morning a note was delivered to my office. If I showed up
at a certain corner at a certain time, a taxi would
arrive and the driver would have my books in two big
boxes. And that’s what I did. I never saw Pruitt
again until just this morning. End of story.”

“Not quite, Mr. Scofield. You left the woman in
red hanging from a cliff.”

“I flew back to Seattle that same night. There
wasn’t time to have the book examined by Brenner or
anyone else. I went on my gut, as they say, not the first
time I’ve done that in my life. I was still weak
from my illness, and the stress of having lost the book
for the better part of a week had also taken its toll. I
went against my doctor’s orders, had to be helped
to my chair in the restaurant. She was already there when
I arrived. She seemed quite nervous, unsure. But even
then I had no idea anything was wrong. We chatted for
perhaps three minutes. I had the money all ready for her,
in a small valise, just as I brought it to Pruitt this
morning. The book and the valise were there on the table
between us. I felt so sure…and
then…”

“What?”

“I remember I had a coughing attack…a bad
one. And it was almost as if that was what finally made
her balk and call the deal off. She reached out and
picked up the book, not the money, and for a minute I
still didn’t realize what it meant. Then she
apologized and said she just couldn’t sell it after
all. I tried to persuade her…if it was more money
she needed…but no, it was more
like…”

I waited, my eyes on his.

“I don’t know how to put it
exactly…an act of conscience maybe. I guess
that’s it, she was overcome by conscience and
guilt. She reached in her purse and brought out the money
I’d given her. I made her keep it. I thought maybe
it would give me a claim on the book if the day ever came
when she’d change her mind again.”

He looked around from face to face. “Then she
walked out. We never heard from her again.”

No one said anything for a long moment.

“Just like Dillinger,” I said.

None of them seemed to know what I was talking
about.

“You and John Dillinger,” I said.
“Both laid low by a woman in red.”

I
left them there, Kenney and Scofield to their work and
Amy watching them from a chair near the door. I drove
into North Bend alone. I had fish to fry. This is where
it all happens, I thought: it doesn’t have anything
to do with Baltimore or Phoenix or even Seattle except
that those cases all spun out of here. I was thinking of
Grayson, doing the work he loved without having to
compete with his own fame and glory. We do get older:
sometimes we even get wiser. Fame and glory don’t
mean as much when we’re fifty, when they’re
finally within reach, as they did when we could only
dream about them at twenty.

The gate was locked at the Rigby place so I went on
past to Snoqualmie. Fingers of sunlight led the way,
beaming down through pockets of mist that wafted across
both towns. The area bustled with commerce in the middle
of the afternoon. Tourists drifted along the avenue,
going or coming to or from the waterfall. A mailman moved
along the block, stopping in each store. Near a corner a
team of glaziers was busy replacing a broken
storefront.

I drove past Smoky Joe’s Tavern and turned a
corner, pulling up at the curb. Archie Moon’s
print-shop was dark and locked. I got out and went to the
door, cupped my hands, and peeped through the glass.
Somewhere back in the shop a faint light shone, but I
rapped on the glass and no one came.

“I think she’s gone for the day,” a
voice said.

I turned and said hello to the mailman.

“If you’re looking for Carrie, she usually
takes half a day off on Tuesdays,” he said.

“Actually, I’m looking for
Archie.”

“Carrie can tell you where he’s at: she
rides herd on him like a mother hen. But you’ll
have to catch her tomorrow.”

I thanked him and got back in the car. I watched him
sort some mail and drop it through the frontdoor slot.
Then he moved on down the street and I drove out of town,
on to Selena Harper’s house.

Things were soon looking up. Trish was sitting on the
front porch steps when I turned into the yard.

“I figured you’d turn up here,” she
said. “The only hard part was finding this place.
And psyching myself up for a long wait.”

I wanted to hear all about the other theaters of war,
about Pruitt and the cops and all that had happened since
I’d seen her five hours ago. But her mood was cool,
almost hostile as she watched me come toward her.

“Sorry I had to run out on you like that. Things
got kinda hectic.”

“Didn’t they though,” she said,
unforgiving. “You’re quite an act, Janeway.
But I can’t say I wasn’t warned.”

She cocked her head to one side, showing a long bruise
under her left eye. “Pretty, huh?”

“What happened to you?”

“Think about it a minute. You’re a bright
boy, you’ll figure it out.”

I thought about it and came up with nothing.

“You were trying to turn Pruitt into next
week’s dog food. I grabbed you around the neck.
Next thing I knew I was flat on my back in the
mud.”

“Wait a minute, hold it. Play that back
again.”

“You slugged me, you son of a bitch.”

I was, for once in my life, speechless.

“Wanna hear it again?”

“No…I really don’t think I
do.”

“Do you know what I did to the last man who
tried to raise a hand to me?”

“I’ve got a feeling I’m about to
find out.”

“Think of a hot-oil enema and maybe you can
relate to it.”

“Ayee.” Beyond that I didn’t dare
laugh. I tried to reach out to her, but she looked at my
hand the way you’d look at a spittoon.

“Come on, Trish.”

She stared off at the graying sky.

“Come on.”

She didn’t move.

“Come on. Please.”

“Please what?”

“Get up, tell me it’s okay, and
let’s get on with it.”

“Is that the full and complete text of your
apology? Now I know why you’re so successful with
women.”

“I am sorry. I really am.”

She didn’t respond, so I said it again.
“I’m sorry.”

“How sorry are you?”

“I don’t know. How sorry do you want me to
be?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

I didn’t say anything. I seemed to know what she
wanted.

She gripped my wrist and I pulled her up. She smoothed
her skirt with her free hand and said, “I want you
to go in and talk to Quintana.”

I moved on past her to the top of the porch.

“I’m serious about that,” she said,
losing no ground behind me.

I turned and she was right there, so close we bumped
together.

“He’s gonna treat you right. But
you’ve got to do it now.”

I unlocked the front door and stood aside so she could
go in first. The house smelled musty and looked golden
and gray. A light rain had begun, with the sun still
shining off to the west, the dark places broken by
splashes of streaky sunlight. She came in reluctantly,
like an infidel desecrating a holy place, and I followed
her on through the front room toward the kitchen. She
stopped for a moment, seemed to be listening for
something, then turned and looked at me across a shaft of
watery yellow haze. “Am I imagining this,”
she said, “or is something happening between
us?” The question was sudden and improbable,
infusing the air with erotic tension. I thought of the
midnight supper we had had and how easily she had done
the impossible, taken Rita’s place at the other end
of the table. “It does seem to be,” I said.
But I didn’t yet know the shape it might take or
where it might go from here. She lived in Seattle and I
lived in Denver, and neither of us had had time to give
it much thought.

She looked away, into the clutter of the kitchen. I
came up behind her, close enough to touch. But she was
not a woman you did that to until you were very sure.

She sensed me there behind her, took a half-step back,
and pressed herself lightly against me.

I put an arm around her, then the other. She leaned
her head back and I hugged her a little tighter.

“Something’s certainly happening,”
she said. “I know
that
s not my imagination.”

“In Rome they had a term for it.”

“
Lustus profundus
,” she said, stealing it.

“The next best thing to a chariot
race.”

She laughed and pulled herself away, moving across the
room. “God, I don’t know what to do with you.
I wish I knew.”

“Whatever you want. It’s not that
complicated. I don’t come with a Japanese
instructional booklet.”

She took a long breath. “I’ve been
celibate almost two years.”

“I can’t imagine why. It can only be by
choice.”

“I got hurt. I mean really burned. I swore off
men. And meant it, too, until…”

She blushed. Her skin looked hot.

“I don’t know what I want to do,”
she said.

“But, see, you don’t have to know. You can
figure it out in your own good time. Nobody’s
pushing you.”

“Now that I’m over here,” she said,
and we both laughed.

She asked where the Grayson stuff was and I led her
back to the stairs and up to the loft. I crawled up into
the room and reached back for her. We clasped hands and I
helped her up. It was all as I’d left it, the two
remaining rows separated by a three-foot gap and draped
by a sheet of clear polyethylene. I walked out on the
plastic and held up my hands like Moses going through the
Red Sea.

Behind me, she said, “Who the hell am I
kidding?”

When I turned, she had pulled her blouse out of her
skirt and had taken loose the top buttons.

“So what do you think?” she said brightly.
“Is that plastic cold?”