The Dirty Book Murder (6 page)

“You got to take better care of yourself, Captain Mike. Don’t want to be a mudhead.”

“Right. Don’t want to be a mudhead. Last thing in the world I’d want to be accused of.”

Sometimes it was best to humor Weston when he began to spout nautical terms harkening back to another century.

“You sure you don’t need me? Vic and Karen are goin’ to miss their coffee fix tonight. They always land at four bells.”

“Leave a pot for them to pour themselves.”

“But Vic expects his latte and Karen a cappuccino.”

“Go, Weston. Please.”

Two hours after Weston left I had yet to close the shop. Vic and Karen had come and gone, deeply disappointed. Near the poetry section in a quiet corner two customers lingered, reading lines of Keats to each other.

I pulled a fifth of Jameson’s from under the counter, poured half a glass, and worked on some bookkeeping.

It hadn’t been a bad week for the business. Our efforts to list first editions on Advanced Book Exchange and Alibris were starting to pay off. We recorded twenty sales
for the week from those sites on the Internet. They included two from England, one from France, and another from Japan.

To top it off, I’d taken in a fine dust-jacketed first edition of
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy from a scout who either didn’t realize the value of the book or was desperate for cash. I paid his asking price of $30 and sold it through Alibris two days later for $800. The rush I felt making that quick $770 felt as satisfying as any big personal injury settlement from my old days practicing law.

With things going so well in my life after years of courting disaster, I asked myself, why did Anne have to get involved with that Hollywood character?

It wasn’t just her hooking up with Bob Langston. I couldn’t get over the feeling that she was rejecting me for another father figure, someone against whom I felt unable to compete, and I felt the cold winds of disaster beginning to blow again.

Violet was doubly wrong about Anne. She wasn’t tough and she lacked good sense. Her years in London had given her a superficial strength that comes with good schooling, but the upper-class Sloane Ranger facade hid a frightened, emotionally stunted girl. I was certain of it.

For all her proud nature, she was capable of self-destructive acts. I knew enough about drugs to suspect that cocaine or something worse was behind the bizarre behavior reported by her housemother that went beyond normal college hijinks.

But who was I to judge?

I’d had a pretty rough childhood until my grandparents took over parental duties. If there was any advantage to having a schizophrenic mother and a father who could be bear-trap mean when drunk, it was to discover that outside their grasp the world could actually be quite nice.

I played football on scholarship at Iowa University and followed that with law school where I served as Notes Editor on Law Review. Four years as a judge advocate in the Marine Corps, including a tour in Iraq, added some extra confidence.

I seemed to have everything in those early years after my discharge from the Corps—a wife as intelligent as she was lovely, a darling little girl, and partnership in an up-and-coming law firm. But there was something in me that had refused to grow up.

Until a man reaches thirty, he is often a self-centered idiot. Looking back, all my self-important posturing—the screwing around with other women, the blackouts—was an attempt to recapture a time that never was; a mythical place where Mother set a decent table and a sober father was there to tuck me in at bedtime. Despite outward appearances, I was just a bunch of molecules without a clue as to who I was.

The law firm of Winter & Bevan, LLC, had done remarkably well almost from
the day we put up our shingle. We focused on trial work, Tim Winter representing clients in personal injury cases while I defended business owners that bluestocking firms wouldn’t go near—payday lenders, trash haulers, and after-hours bar owners.

Most of my clients wore suits, attended Mass, and enjoyed Sunday dinners with their families, but that didn’t prevent them from employing others to do some very dirty business on their behalfs.

In my defense, I fancied myself a champion of the First Amendment. If that meant a large part of my income came from keeping strip clubs open and modern-day shylocks rich, I was still able to sleep at night. It was lucrative and, with Supreme Court precedent on my side, not very difficult. It was also plentiful, there always being some civic do-gooder or politician trying to outlaw their idea of lewd and lascivious behavior.

The trouble started when I began to accept certain fringe benefits associated with the juice bar trade. At first it was free booze, then women, and inevitably, cocaine. Plenty of cocaine.

Carol saw what was happening and threatened divorce more than once. I made a few feeble efforts to get out, but always came up with an excuse to be pulled back in. Representing vice was, after all, the money train that paid for our country club membership, ski vacations to Aspen, and other perks deemed necessary by the upwardly mobile.

Tim Winter attempted to help by referring some of his personal injury cases to me. But medical malpractice and product liability lawsuits required the kind of patience I no longer had. Word got out about my late-night activities and my law license was suspended for six months.

During the period of my suspension, I kept off drugs and focused on saving my marriage. Although barred from appearing in court, I earned my keep assisting Tim prepare his cases for trial.

At the end of the six months, I found myself ready to take my career in a new direction. Carol stuck by me with unending patience. I took time off and we visited her parents in England. On a summer evening while on a hill in the Lake District, we rededicated our lives and love for each other. But happiness isn’t something you decree to yourself; it’s not a thread you can pick up when you feel like it, any more than you can choose your parents.

One of the healthier aspects of my life at that time involved rediscovering a rugged game I had learned in the Marines and played at an international level for a time.

Rugby kept me fit, and my teammates on the Kansas City Blues, a wholesome cross-section of hardworking cops, bartenders, postgrad students, and a trio of Samoan
Mormons, were in direct contrast to my clients.

Not long after my reinstatement to the bar, Carol and I traveled to a tournament in Tulsa. I hadn’t meant to play on the “A” side, but a lock forward had been injured so I borrowed his boots and went in for him. I played well despite being the oldest man on the pitch and afterward insisted to Carol that we attend the post-tournament party. As the daughter of a former British rugby player, she knew full well what that might entail, but she reluctantly agreed.

After consuming four or five beers, I gave in to her demand that we return home that night and that she would do the driving.

The car shot off the highway somewhere past Fort Scott while I dozed in the back seat. The trooper’s report concluded that Carol, who had not been drinking, must have fallen asleep at the wheel as there was no evidence of skid marks. My wife died of head injuries before the Life Flight helicopter landed. Unhurt except for a three-inch gash on my forehead, I was left to grieve with our then five-year-old daughter, who had been left at home with a babysitter.

Friends said I did the right thing by not driving while intoxicated. Carol’s parents, bless their hearts, even told me at the funeral it was God’s will. I’ve been told a lot of things. But it comes down to this: My irresponsibility killed the love of my life, the mother of my child.

I hung in there for three months, maintaining a semblance of sobriety and struggling to show up at the firm each day before ten
A.M.

Isn’t that what you do, particularly when you have a five-year-old motherless child depending on you?

Well, I couldn’t do it. The man whom Carol had so carefully brought back from one abyss couldn’t handle her loss. One night I went out drinking, leaving Anne home alone without a babysitter. The next morning, after realizing what I had done, I bought an airline ticket and sent her to live with her grandparents in London.

I managed to get by at the firm for another year, but the loss of Carol, accentuated by unrelenting guilt at her death and relinquishing my parental duties, sent me spiraling downward in a haze of drugs and booze.

My law career came to an abrupt end when I was disbarred at the instigation of a hotshot assistant district attorney named Denton Crowell for commingling a client’s funds with my own. It was unintentional neglect, but that didn’t matter. I had frittered away a once-promising career long before that. I was in no shape to defend myself.

In the following decade Crowell became the Jackson County DA and went on to become the white knight of Missouri’s moral majority, attacking sin wherever he deemed
it lurked. That not only included my former clients’ establishments, but birth control clinics as well. He was incapable of stopping the proliferation of gangs and meth labs in our county, but he made national headlines when he filed criminal charges against teenage girls who failed to disclose the names of doctors who had prescribed birth control pills for them.

Now he was his party’s front-runner for the United States Senate and looking for another cause to emblazon his name among the electorate. I wondered if he had found that cause in my case.

It took the disbarment and a kick in the ass from my British father-in-law to get me thinking halfway clearly again. I swore off drugs, reduced my drinking, and, six years ago, thanks to a generous loan from Tim Winter, opened Riverrun Books.

Since then, my profits from the shop have been enough to feed myself and make house payments on time. The rest of the income goes for a modest social life spent mostly in neighborhood bars, traveling to book fairs, and covering my daughter’s fees at the University of Colorado.

Such parental tithing had not brought with it redemption, however. Nor had it brought respect, love, or forgiveness from Anne.

It was nearing seven-thirty and I was putting the day’s receipts away when I noticed her walking across the street looking as if she had just stepped off a Grecian urn.

Strands of her silken hair streamed in the light wind and the setting sun gave her skin a golden glow. A simple dress, soft and gentle in cut, hung loosely on her tall, slender figure. Despite my frustration and anger at what she was doing with her life, I couldn’t help feeling proud that she was my daughter. She really did have the looks and style of a movie star. No wonder Bob Langston was making a fool of himself over her.

A boy, seven or eight years old, swept around the corner on a skateboard. Anne moved to avoid him, but he panicked and collided with her so that both fell hard onto the concrete. Anne picked herself up, oblivious to the debris embedded in her forearm, and leaned over the boy, who was trying unsuccessfully not to cry. She put one hand on his back to comfort him and with the other gently wiped gravel and dirt from his skinned knees. She helped him to stand and, with arms entwined, they limped across the street to my store like two veterans of trench warfare.

I had the first-aid kit out by the time they entered. After dressing their wounds, I added a couple of cookies and soft drinks to aid the healing process. His tears dried, the boy soon jumped back on his board in search of new sidewalk victims.

“Thanks,” Anne said.

“No problem. I’m proud of you.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think it’s worth mentioning.”

“Still, I’m proud of you for a lot of other things as well.”

“You don’t have to elaborate,” she said, as if sensing a lecture. “I was coming to see you. I didn’t drop in for medical treatment.”

“I’m glad you’re here for whatever reason.”

“Well, you always say that we ought to talk. I’m here to talk.”

“But not to listen?”

She looked away, then back again. “Are you jealous of Robert?”

“That’s a strange way of putting it. I’m your father. I don’t want you to be hurt.”

“Don’t try to protect me. It’s not as if I were in some kind of danger.”

“Aren’t you? A guy like that, so much older than you, for all his charm and glamour, will toss you aside when he gets tired of …”

“Of what? Bob is doing more for me than you ever did. He believes in me and doesn’t treat me like a child. While you blew a lucrative career to become a used-book salesman, he’s fighting to get back on top. You have no right to prevent me from loving him.”

“I’m entitled to share my opinion. For one thing, I’m still in financial bondage to Sallie Mae on your behalf.”

She pretended not to hear.

“Have you ever thought why he might be attracted to you? Aside from your beauty and tender age, of course.”

Her response was to pick up a book from the new arrival table. It was a National Geographic photography book about bees. She had never shown any interest in bees before that moment, although she could be about as unpredictable as a swarm of them.

I waited for her to put down the book and answer me. When it seemed as if she would read the whole thing, I changed tactics.

“How about joining me for dinner? It’s closing time.”

The couple who had been reciting Keats to each other hovered near the counter, an audience to our test of wills.

“I’m not hungry,” Anne finally said.

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point then, Father?”

“What’s this formal ‘Father’ stuff?”

“It’s the most proper word I can think of, given the way I feel about you. Or would you prefer I call you something else? Something more appropriate to your status. ‘Loser,’ perhaps? ‘Barfly’? Less charitable names come to mind as well.”

The customers put down their poetry and silently left by the back door. Not knowing whether there were others lurking in the stacks, I moved closer to her.

“Try to understand my concern,” I whispered. “Langston’s been rode hard and put away wet a hundred times. He’s about as stable as a hand grenade with a pulled pin. It’s in your best interests, if not as a matter of respect to me, that you listen.”