The Sign of the Book (2 page)

She didn't want to, by now that was almost painfully clear. “Take your time,” I said soothingly. “I've got nothing on my plate, we could sit here for days.”

“The defendant's name…” She swallowed hard, as if the name alone could hurt. “Laura Marshall. Her name is Laura. She's accused of killing her husband. She wants me to defend her, but I've got two cases coming up back-to-back. Even if I took her on, which is far from certain anyway, I couldn't get out there until sometime next month. That's it in a nutshell.”

“I thought you said she had an attorney.”

“He's her attorney of the moment. He sounds very competent, but he's never done a case like this.”

She gave me a look that said,
That's it, Janeway, that's all there is.

“Well,” I said cautiously, “can we break open that nutshell just a little?”

I waited and finally I gave her my stupid look. “What is it you want me to
do,
Erin? This isn't just an appraisal job. I get the feeling it's something else.”

“Maybe you could talk to her while you're there. Take a look at her case.”

“I could do that. I'm sure you don't want me to advise her. The last time I looked, my law degree was damned near nonexistent.”

“Go down, talk to her, report back to me. You don't need a law degree for that. Just lots of attitude.”

“That, I can muster. In fact I'm getting some right now. So tell me more.”

“I'd rather have you discover it as you go along.”

A long, ripe moment followed that declaration.

“She'll tell you the details,” Erin said. “And by the way, I pay top rates.”

“So now you're bribing me. Is this what we've come to?” I gave her a small headshake. “Something's going on here. This isn't just some yahoo case that dropped on your head. It's more than that.”

She stonewalled me across the table.

“Isn't it?” I said.

“She was my best friend in college. In fact, we go back to childhood.”

“And…?”

“We haven't seen each other in years…”

“Because…?”

“That's irrelevant.”

“No, Counselor, what that is, is bad-lawyer bafflegab. Tommyrot, bushwa, caca, bunkum, and a cheap oil change. Not to mention piffle and baloney.”

She stared.

“Old oil sludge,” I said. “Remember those ads? Dirty sludge, gummy rings, sticky valves, blackie carbon. And a bad Roadrunner burrito.”

She laughed. “Are you all through?”

“Hell no I'm not through. Help me out just a little here. Make at least some sorry stab at giving me a straight answer.”

“Marshall was the first great love of my life. Is that straight enough for you?”

“Ah,” I said, mildly crushed. My pain was slightly mitigated by the word
first.

“He can't compare to you,” she said. “Never could've, never would've, though I had no way of knowing that back then. Remember two years ago just after we met? I told you then I had known another guy long ago who collected books. I guess I've always been attracted to book people. I couldn't imagine I'd wind up with Tarzan of the Bookmen, swinging from one bookstore to another on vines attached to telephone poles.”

“It was written in the stars.”

“I'm not complaining. But that was then, this is now. He was my first real love and she was my best friend. More than that. She was closer than a sister to me, we marched to the same heartbeat. I would have trusted either of them with my life. And they had an affair behind my back.”

I said “Ah” again and I squeezed her hand. “Jesus, why would
any
body do that to you?”

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“And people do things,” I ventured.

“Not things like that.”

“So how'd you find out about it? He break down and tell you?”

“She did. Her conscience was killing her and she had to make it right between us.”

I took another guess. “So when did you find it in your heart to forgive her?”

“You're assuming facts not in evidence, Janeway.” She looked at me across the table, and out of that superserious moment came the steely voice I knew so well. “I'll never forgive her.”

“Then why…”

“Why doesn't matter. Look, will you do this for me or not?”

I really didn't need to think about it. The answer would have been the same with or without the particulars. All I needed to know was that it was important to her.

“Sure,” I said.

I left my bookstore in the hands of Millie, my gal Friday, and by dawn the next morning I was well out on the road to Fairplay. I heard reports of scattered snow in the mountains as I headed west, but they didn't bother me much. People who worry about scattered snow are afraid of everything.

I figured I'd stop at the Fairplay Griddle to eat, gas up, and take a leak: one short pit stop and straight through from there. Paradise is in a tiny, out-of-the-way county, in the mountains just west of the Continental Divide. This is almost as remote as a traveler can safely go without backpacks and mules. You don't just stumble into Paradise: you go there only with a purpose. There are two or three small, unincorporated towns and then, at the end of the one paved road, Paradise, the county seat. A dirt road does go south from there, which, I had heard was a helluva spectacular ride. In a Jeep, a truck, or with lots of moxie in a car, you can eventually hook up with U.S. Highway 160, the main east-west route across southern Colorado. But you must go over some of the state's most rugged mountains and it's closed in the winter anyway. Practically speaking, the road to Paradise is also the only way out, a hundred-mile round-trip from anywhere.

It was nearly a six-hour drive from Denver, giving me time to brood over my life with Erin and the questions she had raised about my life in books. “The problem is you, sweetheart,” she had said on another occasion. “You're letting yourself become too static in your book world. But I'll make you a deal: I promise I'll be happy if you will.”

She had sensed my drift toward boredom long before I put it into words. “It's not the books,” I told her then, “it's what money and greed are doing to them. The books are still what they always were, some of them are wonderful, exciting, spectacular, and on the good days I believe I could do this forever. But soon all the best ones will be in the hands of Whoopi Goldberg and a few rich men, who will pay too much because they can. They'll drive the market upward till they chase out everybody else.”

I cocked my head back and forth and said, “I don't know if I want to do that.”

I had seen this coming. The book trade was then just beginning to peek into the computer world; what has since become an indispensable part of the business was getting itself timidly into gear, and I knew almost chapter and verse how it would turn out. I am certainly no clairvoyant: sometimes, in fact, I can be incredibly dense, but that day I saw the demise of the open bookshop. I saw the downturn at book fairs. Wiser heads scoffed—the trade had always weathered storms, they said—but I feared that soon we'd be in a time when all anyone would need to reach the higher levels of the book world was enough money. Erin had brought money into my business, but my commitment continued to lag. I told her about it one night and she had understood it at once. I said, “When you take the best parts of any business away from the masses and hand it over to the rich, you can't be too surprised when it starts dying on the inside.” There had been a time, just a year or two earlier, when this had all seemed so exciting. The thought of dealing in books worth $50,000, of flying off to book fairs here and abroad, had been thrilling as hell. The trade offered unlimited opportunity for growth, so I thought, but one night in a dream I saw where it would end. “I don't think I want to do that,” I told her again.

The next day I made some bold predictions.

In a few years much of the romance would disappear from the book trade forever.

The burgeoning Internet, as it would later be called, would bring in sweeping change. There would be incredible ease, instant knowledge available to everyone: even those who have no idea how to use it would become “experts.” Books would become just another word for money, and that would bring out the hucksters and fast-buck artists.

No bookseller would own anything outright in this brave new book world. One incredibly expensive book would have half a dozen dealers in partnership, with the money divvied six ways or more when it sold. “I might as well be selling cars,” I said.

Strangely, I still loved the nickel-and-dime stuff. But that would change as well as bookstores closed and people became more cautious about what they were willing to sell. The ability to buy huge libraries would diminish and then disappear. Moving to a higher level would mean bigger headaches. The computer would tell us where all the great books were, and the thrill of the hunt would quickly diminish.

That's when Erin first floated her PI idea. “You know what you need to do?” she said. “You need to find the bad people of the book world and put them in jail.”

I laughed at the thought. A detective agency specializing in book fraud? There was no way anyone could take such a thing seriously. But then fate took a hand.
The Boston Globe
had covered my first major acquisition, a mysteriously signed copy of the most famous work by Richard Francis Burton, and that story had been sent everywhere in an AP rewrite. Luck, pure luck. But it had led me to two book shysters in Texas, and another case had sent me to Florida. The trade press had taken note and suddenly in the world of rare books I had a name. I didn't need to hang out a shingle, didn't run even one advertisement. Today more than ever, books are money. When the inevitable disputes arose, people came to me, and now I was more inclined to listen. When some unwashed schlemiel called from afar and said, “Are you the book cop?” I said yes and resisted the urge to laugh in his face. Yeah, I was the book cop. As far as I knew, no one else could make that claim.

 

My original plan with Erin had been a fifty-fifty partnership. Almost forty days after the Burton affair she had called and we had had a hot, sweaty tumble, our first, on the cot in the back room of my bookstore. We laughed and shared a postcoital pizza on the front counter. Everything seemed poised for a great new beginning, but even that first night Erin could sense my growing discontent. “You need to get out more,” she said. “I get the feeling that the book business is not treating you as well as it once did.” I leaned down and kissed her hand and said, “Hey, I'm fine, the book business is great,” but that didn't count because she didn't believe it. “I think under the circumstances,” she mused a few weeks later, “we'd better put our active partnership on hold.” She still wanted in: she anted thirty thousand to make that point and said there was more where that came from. For now she'd be a silent partner and go back to practicing law to keep off the streets.

She joined a new law firm on Seventeenth Street, a dream job she said, if she had to have a job. “It dropped in my lap all of a sudden, it gives me everything I always thought I wanted. What's really great is how much
they
wanted
me.
” Why wouldn't they be enthused, I asked: she had been a brilliant student in law school and a tireless workhorse at Waterford, Brownwell; she had worked on two big water rights cases as part of a team and had won three murder cases on her own. She had built a splendid reputation for herself, there had never been any doubt of her ability to get back into law on the fast track whenever and if ever she wanted, so why wouldn't they jump at the chance to hire her?

We went out to lunch that week. She took me to a fine lawyers' hangout not far from her new office downtown. I shoehorned myself into a jacket and tie and we walked up the street together, chitchatting our way along. The waiter remembered her well from her days at Waterford. “Ms. D'Angelo, how nice to see you again…yes, I have your table ready,” he said, and we were ushered past the gathering crowd to what looked like the best table in the place. It was set up far away from everything, in a dark world of its own, framed by indoor trees with our own private Ansel Adams nightscape on the wall between us. “So tell me,” she said, “was I right or wrong to take this job?”

“I don't know, Erin. How does it feel?”

“I'm a hired gun again. But listen and believe this: I am totally at your beck and call. Say the secret word and I shall give notice that same day and join you in whatever comes of your book world.”

“God, what power I have over you.”

“Yep. You could join the Antiquarian Booksellers Association and travel to real book fairs everywhere. I'd go along, of course, as your apprentice and eager sex slave.”

“I like the sound of that. Especially the last part.”

“I would reply with sarcasm, except I remember who raped whom that night.”

“I think we were concurrent rapes, as you legal types like to say. We each had a simultaneous leap at the other.”

“I had half my clothes off by the time you got the front door open.”

“Really? I never noticed. Which half did you leave on the street?”

“Panties in the gutter, bra tossed over the fireplug. Stockings, shoes, and other accessories strewn down the sidewalk.”

“
That's
why I never noticed. You blended right into the habitat.”

“And now here we are.”

Impulsively she kissed my hand. “Nothing is forever,” she said. “I don't know where I'll be in two years, or five, but somehow I don't think I'll be practicing law. Right now it's my strength, it's what I know. And I'm making good money at it.”

“Then it's good.”

“For now it'll do.”

 

Snow began to fall just before I reached Fairplay. The Griddle was a typical country place, full of smoke and packed with locals talking about winter, politics, and the hunting season. I lingered over coffee and the
Rocky Mountain News
I had brought from Denver. Outside, through a dingy storefront, I could see the snow beginning to stick, and a swirl of it danced across the road like a white dust devil and disappeared into nothing. I watched the gaunt old faces hunched over their ham and eggs and I wondered what it would be like to live here. I thought about Erin and the young woman, still faceless, who awaited my arrival in Paradise.

I left the paper unread and headed on south. The snow thickened, but I got past Poncha Springs, over Monarch Pass and the Continental Divide, and the worst seemed to be behind me. The snow stopped and I came into one of those spectacular midmorning sun-showers that made me glad I live in Colorado, and beyond that was nothing but blue skies and sunshine. A good omen, I thought, knowing better. In this business, in matters of life and death, there are no good omens.

Highway 50 took me straight into Gunnison. It was still only half past ten, and Paradise was due south. I got out of the car and walked the streets till I found a drugstore. If the Marshall case had made the Denver papers, I hadn't seen it, but I imagined to the local weekly press it was a much bigger deal. I stopped at the newspaper office and looked back two issues. On the front page, just below the fold, were two pictures of Laura Marshall, and suddenly the lady without a face had one. The headline said
WOMAN CHARGED IN HUSBAND'S MURDER
. In the first picture she looked like any other felony suspect: grim, lonely, guilty as hell. She was in handcuffs, being led by some gruff-looking lawman through a rainstorm into what was probably the county jail. Her hair streamed down across her face and her eyes were the only memorable features. The arresting officer was identified as sheriff's deputy Lennie Walsh. I wrote that down in my notebook, and I also noted the tiny agate name of the photographer under the cutline.
Photo by Hugh Gilstrap.

The second picture was a posed head shot, obviously taken under more favorable conditions. Again I was drawn to her eyes. Just a bunch of dots on newsprint, but as I pulled back from it, a woman appeared. She smiled slightly, looking warm and innocent. In fact, she looked a little like Erin. At some point Erin herself had said that. They were the same age, they grew up together, they might have been sisters. I sat over coffee in the first café I found and read the story twice. It was more headline than substance: a few paragraphs below and around the bold type did tell me somewhat more than I already knew, mainly because what I knew was almost nothing.

This was the story. On Monday three weeks ago, Robert Charles Marshall, thirty-three, of Paradise, had been shot dead in his home. His wife, Laura, thirty-two, had called the sheriff's office and reported his death. The sheriff's deputy, after investigating at the home and interviewing the widow, had concluded that enough evidence existed to charge Mrs. Marshall with murder. There was nothing in the paper about the evidence—no indication whether Mrs. Marshall had said something incriminating or had been Mirandized or when—but newspapers don't usually have information like that. It did say that the Marshalls' three children were now in the care of the victim's parents, who had arrived in Paradise at the end of the week. Marshall and his wife had lived in the area for eight years, moving there from Denver, where they had met. They had been somewhat reclusive and apparently had few friends. The suspect had been arraigned and the preliminary hearing had been scheduled Friday—today—at 1:30
P
.
M
. before District Judge Harold Adamson.

I looked at the clock on the wall: it was 10:43.

I got in my car and headed south. Ninety minutes later I arrived in Paradise.