The Dirty Book Murder (13 page)

Three generations later, the stockyards had moved to western Kansas towns such as Garden City and Dodge, and the only people willing to work in what were now euphemistically called “meat-processing plants” were Mexican immigrants.

That left the Bottoms a hollowed out no-man’s-land of weed-patched fields and decaying buildings, and the once-vibrant hill above it an urban wasteland. The great-grandchildren of the original Eastern Europeans had used their college degrees to flee Strawberry Hill for the suburban cupcake land of Johnson County, but Mrs. Chezik and her son weren’t part of that migration.

She was pulling weeds in her front yard when I pulled up in the jeep. A tiny figure, she wore a plain housedress, white cotton socks, and old combat boots. There was
no indication that she had ever been an attractive woman. Her auburn hair had turned a mottled gray and her dark eyes, sunk deeply into her gaunt face, seemed locked in a perpetual squint. The skin sagged over her entire body as if she had once weighed considerably more. She had a hard little mouth that tried to smile when I approached her.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Chezik.”

“Howdy, Mr. Bevan. I told ya on the phone that Dicky’s gone away on the bus.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was wondering, though, if I might look at his stock. He’d told me he had some local history stuff I’d be interested in.”

“Can’t it wait ’til he comes back?”

“That depends. I’m not always in the mood to buy. Do you expect him soon?”

“Dicky didn’t say where he was going or when he’d be back.”

“He hasn’t called you?”

“He only left a note.”

“I’d really like to see some of those books he mentioned. Obviously, I’d expect you to come in with me.”

She dropped her weeding tools and pulled out her key chain. “No need for that. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to look around.”

I followed her through a gate into a tire-strewn backyard and to the carriage house where her son lived and stored his inventory. She unlocked the door for me, then returned to her weeds.

It was a clammy fifteen degrees warmer inside than in the fresh air. An air conditioner was lodged in the window but it didn’t show signs of ever having worked. An old Apple computer sat on a desk cluttered with notebooks and pens. A musty odor filled the room.

Some people not familiar with the care of books think that smell is charming, but it means the inventory suffers from mildew, rendering it valueless. If not tossed out, it eventually contaminates the rest of the stock.

The walls of the room, including the window spaces, were covered with cheap floor-to-ceiling bookshelves whose one-by-ten-inch pine planks sagged in the center under the weight of the volumes. Catalogs and journals spread out everywhere—on shelves, crammed in niches, piled in boxes on the floor. There was order in some sections, chaos in others where books piled in stacks several feet high had toppled over.

It seemed hopeless that I was going to find a hint as to where Richard had gone or for whom he had bid at the auction.

I went through the items on his desk, but found only notes he intended to copy onto the computer for listing with the Web services. I turned my attention to the shelves.

Richard was no different than most booksellers in one respect. He found it hard to throw any book away, no matter how common. Some important titles were mixed among the majority of negligible ones. He had three shelves devoted to the works of Jack London, but they were not in particularly good condition.

I noticed another area dominated by British Isles subjects and pulled out a slender book of a play titled
Cathleen ni Houlihan
by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. I moved it closer to the lamp on the table and confirmed what I’d suspected for a long time.

My original pencil code marking of #4114 had been erased but the indentation was still visible. He’d obviously stolen it from Riverrun along with a number of other Irish literary volumes. They were lined up together: Yeats, Seán O’Casey, Oliver St. John Gogarty, John Millington Synge, a fourth edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. None of them firsts, but six personal favorites that I’d kept in my shop, bought long ago on my rugby trip to Ireland before I ever thought of owning a bookstore.

I pulled them from the shelf and placed them in a stack on the desk next to the computer. Then I wrote a note for Richard and put it in one of his envelopes.

Continuing my search toward the rear of the house, I smelled something sweet, but not flower sweet. A rotten tomato lay next to a half-eaten ham sandwich on a paper plate set on a windowsill. Flies buzzed over and on the mess. Close to the window was a half-open door, behind which ascended a narrow staircase.

“Dicky lives up there.”

I jumped a half a foot in the air, startled by Mrs. Chezik’s sudden return.

Before I could say anything she said, “I don’t think he’d care for you pokin’ around his private place. It’s time you git. You been here longer than a quarter hour.”

“I understand,” I said, following her back to the desk.

“You gonna buy these?” she asked, pointing to the pile of my Irish books.

“These are rightfully mine, Mrs. Chezik.” I handed her the envelope. “The note explains to Richard that I retrieved them in your presence.”

She stepped forward so that her eyes were just under my chin. “Are you accusing my Dicky of being a crook?”

“Take it how you want,” I said, stepping past her and gathering the books in my arms. “They left my store without being paid for. I suspect there are a few more that Richard has been keeping in trust for me and other dealers. I’ll want to discuss it with him when he returns.”

“You people think you can walk all over him, just because he’s missing an arm and never had your advantages. He’s nobody’s fool, my Dicky. He’ll get you for taking
advantage of me and stealing his books.”

“Just make sure he gets my message,” I said over my shoulder as I headed for the door.

The late afternoon breezes coming off the junction of the two rivers cooled the clammy sweat on my forehead, but it couldn’t erase that cloying sweet smell I’d picked up by the staircase.

*  *  *

Back at my house, I saw the light of my answer machine blinking. The recording belonged to Tim Winter.

“The meeting with Detective Higgins is confirmed for tomorrow morning,”
the message said.
“Please try to come up with a meaningful alibi by then.”

The next morning I avoided the fourteen traffic lights on Main by taking Gillham Road, cruised past Children’s Mercy Hospital, and turned on Grand Boulevard into the heart of the city where I got stuck in traffic behind a slow-moving cement truck.

Kansas City’s once shabby and lifeless downtown had changed dramatically for the better in the past decade. The Sprint Center and the equally sparkling Power & Light entertainment district of bars and restaurants had brought new life to the area, while the iconic Performing Arts Center designed by Moshe Safdie reaffirmed the city’s longstanding commitment to culture.

But the police station at Twelfth and Locust, a ten-story concrete slab erected in the 1930s during the reign of Boss Tom Pendergast, looked like the boil on the face of a pretty lady. I knew the place well enough from my lawyer days, but never cottoned to that kind of environment where even the bantering between cops, bail bondsmen, and attorneys seemed as hard and sharp as the furniture.

I parked in the underground lot and took the steps to the second floor. Once there, I passed a stark waiting room where witnesses and victims sat for hours before being interviewed. All too often, these already nervous citizens found themselves crossing paths with the suspects they were helping to indict.

Displayed on the dull wood paneling outside the room were photographic portraits of Kansas City’s police chiefs dating back to the days when the Mooney brothers, Bat Masterson, and Cole Younger roamed the city’s streets. With the progression of time, the handlebar mustaches of the lawmen had given way to trimmed beards and finally to clean-shaved faces, but the steely-eyed glares that brooked no nonsense remained constant.

I took a moment to study my grandfather’s severe, chiseled face that hung four frames from the end. His salt-and-pepper hair that dipped in a widow’s peak above bushy eyebrows was clipped in the flattop style of the fifties.

He had rescued me when I was a frightened mess of an adolescent and I came to trust everything he had to say, especially his dictum to respect one’s self. Most of my good qualities came from that man. Now, remembering that Beatrice Land knew him,
perhaps a few of my ornerier ones as well.

After touching his picture for luck, I walked on, passing the forensics lab with its earnest, mostly female minions and the bail bond area where sullen clerks listlessly stamped subpoenas and stuffed them into envelopes. In the marble hallway while waiting for an elevator, a formerly petite and bouncy court reporter who had put on thirty pounds remembered me fondly from the old days. She asked if I had seen the previous night’s
American Idol
contest.

I took the ancient lift to the seventh floor, feeling twenty years older than I had before entering the building.

The doors opened to a noisy room filled with fresh arrests and stale lawyers. The walls were stained by decades of cigarette smoke. I nodded at a couple of familiar faces as I made my way to the desk sergeant’s counter, which was manned by a hefty female with a face hard and brown as a walnut.

“Good to see you, Aretta.”

In response to my greeting, the sergeant blew her nose on a frayed cotton handkerchief that might have been white once.

“We almost went looking for you, baby,” she said, putting away the rag and reaching into a two-pound plastic jar of Tootsie Rolls. “Sign right here and don’t think of goin’ anywhere. You’re already five minutes late.”

I scrawled my name on the desk blotter while she popped the chocolate into her mouth before ringing Higgins.

“Okay,” she said, fishing for another one. “First office down the hall on the right.”

“I expect my lawyer will be arriving soon.”

“Mr. Winter’s already there.”

The linoleum corridor smelled of bug spray and liniment. At a door marked 704 I knocked and let myself in. Higgins, his huge hands clasped behind his head, leaned backward in a swivel chair behind a steel desk that was old when Kennedy was president. He didn’t bother to get up.

“Howdy, Bevan,” the lieutenant said in a surprisingly soft baritone. “How’d your run go yesterday?”

“I’ve had better, but not many as interesting.”

“I’ll say. Have a seat, brother.”

I took the chair he pointed at and nodded at Tim Winter, who stood in a corner between two filing cabinets. My lawyer had taken his jacket off and it lay in the crook of his right arm. He returned my greeting with a silent nod then went back to studying the Venetian blinds.

Higgins’s office was probably the only one in the building that didn’t have a computer. Doodles of airplanes and motorboats covered a calendar desk pad. An electric Olivetti typewriter sat on top of a cardboard box next to a windowsill. Beyond the window was a fine view of the county jail.

The air-conditioning was turned up full blast, causing the window shades to rattle, but Higgins still found it necessary to dab his brow with a blue bandanna. The only decoration consisted of three citations for bravery framed in black plastic on the wall and, on the desk, a signed photo of Charlton Heston shaking Higgins’s hand at an NRA convention.

“You both know the Miranda rule better ’n me,” the detective began. “Want me to read it?”

“Get on with it, Buford,” Winter answered. “What do you have?”

Higgins’s country smile faded. He didn’t like familiarity on the job and he didn’t like Tim Winter.

I’m not sure how he felt about me. I’d been pretty rough on him when I had him on the witness stand in years gone by, but my questions had always been direct and I’d never gone out of my way to embarrass him. Once, during the Corretti trial, he accomplished that feat all by himself when he positively identified an undercover cop as my defendant.

For whatever reason, he seemed uncomfortable. Maybe it was because his normally pale skin was badly sunburned from the previous morning’s work on Brush Creek.

“I’m the one who asks the questions in this office, Mr. Winter. If you prefer, we can go down to the interrogation room, turn on the tape recorder, and Sergeant Reeder will assist me in questioning your client for ten billable hours. I don’t give a rat’s ass if he pleads the Fifth to every question.”

“Certainly, Detective,” Tim said, calming down. “My client will be happy to cooperate. But it would help if you explained why we are here.”

After a moment’s silence, Higgins leaned forward, spreading his hands on the desk. A manila file disappeared under them.

“All right,” he said slowly to me, studiously ignoring my advocate. “You probably know this much since you came upon us pulling the body from the creek. Hughes was unconscious when he went into the water. He drowned as a result, but not before someone took his wallet and keys. We have plenty of folks who witnessed your altercation with him in Fitzpatrick’s. A lot of bad words were exchanged, he tried to belt you, you smacked him, and the two of you were thrown out. As far as we know, you were
the last person to be seen with him.”

“Lots of people stroll between the Plaza and Brush Creek,” Tim said. “Without corroborating evidence to place Mike near the water Saturday night you don’t have enough to book him.”

Higgins rubbed his hog jaw of a chin. He scratched his ear, investigated a hangnail, and adjusted his necktie, a flowery thing four inches wide clamped to his shirt by a gold-plated tie clasp in the form of an M14 rifle. Then he reached down and, from under the desk, brought up the hurling stick. It was wrapped in plastic with a yellow exhibit tag stapled to it.

His gunmetal eyes studied me as he put the thing on top of his desk so that the etched words
Cross Keys GAC
stared up at me.