The Bookman's Wake (4 page)

His next novel, though, was something else. Richard had
taken a page from Harold Robbins and had produced a thing
called
Warriors of Love
. He had abandoned Dutton and signed with Doubleday, the
sprawling giant of the publishing world. The book was a
lurid mix of sex and violence, a roaring success in the
marketplace with eighty thousand copies sold in the first
three weeks. The critics who had loved him were dismayed:
the man at the
Times
drew the inevitable comparison with Robbins, recalling how
in his first two books Robbins had seemed like a writer of
some worth and how later he had callously sold out his
talent for money. The only critic in Richard’s eyes
was his brother, though he’d never admit it or ask
for Grayson’s judgment. It was clear, from a few
surviving pieces of correspondence, that Grayson had had
nothing to say beyond a general observation that
whoring—a noble and worthy calling in
itself—ought to be confined to the bed and never
practiced at the typewriter.

Richard never wrote another book. His big book continued
making money throughout his life. It was filmed in 1960,
and a new paperback release again sold in vast numbers,
making an encore visit up the bestseller charts. Huggins
viewed Richard as a tragic literary figure, lonely and
sensitive and often mean, ever seeking and never finding
some distant personal El Dorado. He continued to live in
North Bend: had a house built on the property for his wife,
who soon left him for another man. But there were long
periods when he disappeared, absorbed into the decadent
life of Seattle and Los Angeles and New York. In North Bend
he filled his nights with classical music, so loud it
rocked the timbers. Often he would drift down to the
printshop, where he sat up all night composing poems and
bits of odd prose for nothing more than his own amusement.
Sometimes he would set these pieces in type, striking off
one or two or half a dozen copies before dismantling the
layout and staggering to bed at dawn. Old acquaintances
might receive these in the mail, lyrical reminders of a
time long past. One poem, containing four stanzas and
lovingly printed on separate folio sheets in
Grayson’s newest typeface, was fished out of the
garbage by a neighbor. It remains, today, the only known
copy. An occasional piece might be sent to a childhood
friend in Atlanta, a girl he once knew in Hollywood, an old
enemy in Reno who, inexplicably, kept it, only to learn
later that it was worth real money. These would arrive out
of the blue, the North Bend postmark the only hint of a
return address. In an apologia, Huggins described the
bibliographer’s nightmare of trying to include it
all—there was simply no telling how many had been
done and completely destroyed, and new scraps were turning
up all the time. At least one Grayson collector had
assembled more than two hundred unpublished poems and bits
of prose, set in type by Richard in his odd moments. There
had been talk of getting these writings published, if
rights could be determined and the heirs could ever agree.
A dual biography had been published three years ago: titled
Crossfire
with the subtitle
The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard
Grayson
, it had been written by a woman named Trish Aandahl and
brought out by the Viking Press. The Graysons died together
in a fire that destroyed the printshop on October 14, 1969.
Both had been drinking and apparently never knew what
happened to them. Aandahl was cited by Huggins as the chief
source of information on Grayson’s final project,
which had been destroyed in the fire. It had engaged him
for years, off and on around other work. Reportedly he had
designed two intricate, separate-though-compatible
alphabets for the two parts, English and French. Based on a
few surviving letters and the recollections of people who
knew him, Huggins was able to pinpoint the French volume as
Baudelaire’s
Flowers of Evil
.

I remembered that Baudelaire had been one of Poe’s
biggest fans in his lifetime. In fact, Baudelaire had
translated Poe’s works into French.

I
flew to Seattle the same afternoon. The job was a piece of
cake, Slater said at the airport. The kid had no priors and
had offered no resistance to the deputy who arrested her in
the woods. No weapon had been found, either in
Rigby’s possession or in a search of the vicinity.
The shooting was believed to be an act of panic, and Rigby
had ditched the gun immediately afterward. At the bond
hearing her lip had described her as a sweet kid committed
to nonviolence. She was either Mother Teresa or Belle
Starr, take your pick. I took my gun along for the ride. I
wasn’t about to shoot the kid, but when you’ve
been a cop as long as I was, you don’t leave home
without it. I cleared it through the airline and tucked it
in my bag, which I checked through luggage. I was also
carrying a certified copy of the bench warrant and an
affidavit describing in detail the Rigby woman’s
crime. I read it all through again on a bumpy two-hour
flight.

Slater had arranged everything. I had a car waiting and
a room at the Hilton downtown. My plan was short and sweet:
I would bust the Rigby woman, park her for safekeeping in
the Seattle jail, cut a swath through the Seattle
bookstores tomorrow, and deliver her to New Mexico tomorrow
night. The ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire were my companions,
but I shook them off. I was not going to get into that, I
promised myself. Poe sat beside me as the plane circled
Seattle: the gaunt little son of a bitch just
wouldn’t go away. The hell with you, I thought:
I’m taking this woman back to New Mexico. Poe gave a
crooked little smile and fastened his seat belt, and the
plane dropped into the dense cloud cover and rumbled its
way downward.

My contact was a guy named Ruel Pruitt. Slater had used
him on several cases with Seattle angles and found him to
be “a good guy at what he does. He hates the
world,” Slater said, “but he’s like the
damn invisible man, and there’s nobody better at this
cloak-and-dagger shit.” I was to check into my hotel
and wait in my room until Pruitt called, then go pick up
the girl. After that I was on my own. I had never done any
bounty-hunter work, but I knew the routine because I had
cooperated with enough of them when I was a Denver cop.
Some were okay, highly professional: then there were the
goofballs right out of a Chuck Norris movie. All I needed
for this job, Slater assured me, was a sturdy pair of
handcuffs, and he had given me a set of good ones from the
trunk of his car.

I got into Seattle at three-thirty Pacific time. Of
course it was raining. Perry Como might think the bluest
skies you ever saw were in Seattle, but all I’ve ever
seen there is rain. I almost missed the hotel—the
Seattle Hilton has its check-in lobby on the ninth floor,
and only a garage entrance and elevator at street level. By
four-thirty I was settled in my room, on the seventeenth
floor with a window into rain-swept Sixth Avenue. At 5:05
the telephone rang. A velvety voice said,
“Janeway?” and I said, “Yeah,” and
he said, “I’m in a bar near the
Kingdome.” He gave me an address and said he’d
be outside in a blue Pontiac. He read off his plate number
and I got it down the first time. “Don’t let
the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” he said.
“I got no idea how long this little dyke’s
gonna sit still.”

Wonderful, I thought, listening to the dead
connection—just the kind of charmer I’d expect
to find working for Slater. I slipped the cuffs into my
jacket pocket and ten minutes later I pulled up behind the
Pontiac on First Avenue. The plate matched the number
he’d given me, and I could see two people sitting
inside. One of them, I thought, was a woman. The bar
nestled at the foot of an elevated double-decker viaduct,
looking like a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde. It was
triangular, squeezed in where the street slashed through on
a kitty-corner layout. The rain was heavy now. I sat
waiting for a break, but the rain in Seattle isn’t
like the rain in Denver: a guy could grow a long white
beard waiting for it to slack off here. At 5:45 by the
digital in my car, I decided to run for it. I flicked up my
parking lights, got his attention, hopped out, and ran to
his car. The doors were locked. Pruitt and his ladyfriend
sat smoking, chatting as if I weren’t there. I rapped
on the backseat doorglass and Pruitt looked around,
annoyed, and pointed to his custom seatcovers. I stood with
water running down my nose and looked at them through the
glass, said, “Son of a bitch,” and hoped they
could read my lips. Eventually he got the message: he
leaned over the seat, found an old blanket, and spread it
over his seatcovers. By the time he was ready to open the
door, I was drenched.

I pushed the blanket roughly out of the way and flopped
down on the backseat.

“Hey, cowboy,” Pruitt said, “are you
trying to piss me off?”

The woman giggled and we all looked at each other.
Pruitt was an ugly pockmarked man. His face had been badly
pitted long ago, the way you used to see on smallpox
victims, and it gave him a look of rank decay. He smelled
of cedarwood aftershave and peppermint, which on him had a
faintly sickening effect.

He was in his late forties: his girlfriend was younger,
a brassy-looking blonde. But it was Pruitt who commanded
the attention. His coat was open so I could see the gun he
wore. He was an intimidator, I knew the type well, it had
crossed my path often enough when I was a cop in Denver.
Give him an inch and he’ll walk all over you.
He’ll bully and embarrass you and make life
miserable. I never give guys like him an inch, not even
when I could see, like now, the eyes of a killer.

“Where the hell did Slater dig you up?” he
said.

“He used to date my mother. I hear he found you
the same way.”

The blonde gave a small gasp: one didn’t, I was
supposed to believe, talk to the man in that tone of voice.
Pruitt’s eyes burned holes in my head.
“We’ve got a real smart-ass here, Olga. Ten
thousand guys in Denver and Slater sends me a
smart-ass.”

“Tell you what,” I said evenly.
“Let’s start over. I’ll go back to my
hotel and dry out, -have a drink, get a good dinner, maybe
find myself a friend of the opposite sex to help me pass
the time. You sit here in the rain, follow Slater’s
girl, and call me when you want to pass the torch. How does
two weeks from tomorrow sound?”

“A real smart-ass. You’re getting water all
over my car, for Christ’s sake, didn’t your
fucking mother teach you anything? Where were you raised,
in a back alley behind some Denver whorehouse?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. I seem to’ve
missed all the advantages Mrs. Hitler gave you.”

He burned me with his killer eyes. The blonde seemed to
be holding her breath, waiting for him to crawl over the
seat and kill me.

“Just for the record,” I said pleasantly,
“I’m about this close to pushing what’s
left of your face right through that windshield. Do we
understand each other yet, Gertrude?…or do I have to
take that gun away from you and empty it up your
ass?”

We sat and stared. I was ready for him if he came, and I
thought he might. The rage simmered in the car and fogged
up the windshield. In the end, he had a higher priority
than teaching a cowboy from Denver who was boss.

“You want to tell me about this woman?” I
said.

“You’ve got her picture. She’s in
there, it’s your job now.”

“I’ll tell you when it’s my job. If I
have any more trouble with you, I’m out of here, and
you and Slater can figure it out by yourselves.”

“Shit.”

I couldn’t improve on that, so I let it ride. We
sat in the car for a few minutes without talking. “Go
inside,” he said to Olga as if I weren’t there.
“See if our pigeon’s getting lonely.” She
got out and ran through the rain, disappearing into the
bar. Pruitt sat in silence, his collar turned up to his
ears, his eyes riveted on the neon lights in the window. He
lit a cigarette but put it out without comment when I
cracked the window and the rain came in on his seats.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said.
He got out in the rain and walked to the bar. I trailed
along behind him. He tapped the hood of an old roadster
parked at the front door—Rigby’s, I was left to
conclude. It was a true jalopy, with current Washington
plates and bad tires. We went inside. Pruitt didn’t
want to go past the dark aisle that led into the barroom.
We stood there a moment in the pitch, trying to adjust our
eyes. It was still early, but already the bar was crowded
with happy-hour zombies and refugees from various wars.
Music was playing loudly on the jukebox: “Sea of
Love.” Maybe thirty people were at the bar and at
tables scattered around it. The bartender was a fat man who
looked like Jackie Gleason. Olga sat on a stool at the far
end. Two stools away was Eleanor Rigby.

“There she is,” Pruitt said.

We stood for another moment.

“Is it your job yet, or am I supposed to stand
here all night?”

“Go on, blow.”

He motioned to Olga, who left an untouched beer and came
toward us. “I’ll probably meet you again
sometime,” he said to me. “The circumstances
will be different.”

“I’m in the Denver phone book, if you ever
get out that way.”

“Maybe I’ll make a point of it.”

Asshole
, I said, not entirely under my breath.

I ambled to the bar and sat on the only empty stool,
directly across from Rigby. The bartender came; I ordered a
beer and sucked the foam off. Ten yards away, Eleanor Rigby
had another of whatever she was drinking. I watched her
without looking. I looked at two guys having a Seahawks
argument and I watched her with peripheral vision. I
watched the bartender polishing glasses and I looked at
her. She looked bone weary, as if she might fall asleep at
the bar. I stole a frontal look. There wasn’t much
danger in it, she was just another good-looking girl in a
bar and I was a lonely, horny guy. She’d be used to
gawkers, she must get them all the time. She was
twenty-one, I guessed, with thick hair pinned back and up.
“Eleanor Rigby.” I shook my head and tried to
clear away the Victorian spinster the song conjured up. I
wondered what it does to people, being named after
something like that and having to carry that baggage all
your life.

I was in it now, committed to the deed. I told myself
she was nothing more than a cool five grand, waiting to be
picked up. I wasn’t sure yet how to take
her—probably later, on the street. I didn’t
like the smell of the crowd in the bar. It was a
blue-collar crowd, a sports crowd, and there’s always
some ditz ready to rise up out of a crowd like that and
defend a pretty woman’s honor no matter what. Never
mind my court papers, never mind the cheap-looking ID
Slater had given me as I left. The ID identified me as an
operative of CS Investigations of Denver, but there was no
picture of me on it and it gave me no authority beyond what
Slater had, what anybody has. What I could use right now
was a state-issued license with my kisser plastered all
over it. But the state of Colorado doesn’t require
its private detectives or its psychotherapists to have
special licenses: all a bozo needs is an eight-by-twelve
office, the gift of gab, and the power of positive
thinking. I was making what amounted to a citizen’s
arrest, and I had the law on my side because she had jumped
bail and was now a fugitive. But if you have to explain
that to a crowd in a bar, you’re already in
trouble.

I nursed my beer and waited. She sat across the
waterhole, a gazelle unaware of the lion’s approach.
The stool had opened to her immediate left. I was tempted,
but a shark moved in and filled it. Story of my damn life:
the studs make the moves while I sit still and consider the
universe, and I go home to a cold and lonely bed. I thought
about Rita McKinley and wondered where she was and what she
was doing with herself. In a way that was difficult to
explain, Eleanor Rigby looked a little like Rita, like a
younger model. Actually, she looked nothing like Rita at
all. The stud to her left was already hitting on her. In
happier times she might’ve been thrilled, but now she
just looked tired and bored. The bartender drifted down and
asked if I wanted another brew. I said I was okay,
I’d send up a flare when the need became great. At
the front table the Seahawks flap was still raging, a
real-life commercial for Miller Lite. Across the way, Mr.
America said something and gestured to her drink. She shook
her head and tried to go on with her life, but he remained
doggedly in her face. She swished her ice and sipped the
watery remains while her hero worked his way through the
first twelve chapters of his life story. He was one of
those loud farts, the kind you can’t insult: he
probably couldn’t be killed, except with a silver
bullet. He was halfway to his first million and nobody to
share it with. I couldn’t imagine any interesting
woman falling for that line, but interesting probably
wasn’t what he was after. The guy was a moron, either
that or I was. I didn’t have time to dwell on it
because just then Eleanor Rigby got up and left him flat,
halfway between the big deal he had just pulled off and all
the bigger ones coming down the pike.

I liked her for that. In a way it was a shame I was
going to have to bust her. I left two bills on the bar and
followed her down the hall to the Johns. She disappeared
into the ladies‘. I checked to make sure there was no
other way out, then I drifted back into the bar and took up
a position where I couldn’t miss her. I was standing
near the only window, which looked out into the street.
Heavy black drapes were closed over it, but I parted them
slightly so I could see out. I was staring at her car, my
hand suspended between the curtains. Someone was sitting
behind the wheel. I saw a light, very faint: he was looking
for something, rummaging through the glove compartment. He
put on his hat and got out in the rain. Pruitt. He stood
for a moment, oblivious to the rain that had bothered him
so much before. He gave her door a vicious kick, leaving a
dent six inches across. I saw the snap of a blade, a wicked
stiletto, and he bent over and poked a hole in her tire.
Then he walked away and I watched the car go flat.