The Bookman's Wake

Also by John Dunning

The Holland Suggestions

Looking for Ginger North

Denver

Deadline

Booked to Die

The Bookman’s Wake

Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

Tune in Yesterday

On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PA Pocket Star Book, published by POCKET BOOKS, a
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Copyright © 1995 by John Dunning

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To Jack Kisling of Hairline Press, who navigates

with a steady hand the eddies and shoals

of the printshop.

Again, prices on actual books discussed by
characters in the story may be a year or two out-of-date.
In a time of madness, when a new novel can bring ten times
its cover price a year after publication, prices become
obsolete almost as they’re published. Janeway remains
a cynic when people pay too much too soon and glorify the
trendy. But he is an equal-opportunity cynic who saves his
deepest skepticism for me, when he and I are alone at
four-thirty in the morning.

Another tip of the hat to Warwick Downing,
who bullied me for three years. To George Fowler for
turning me left and right in the Seattle rain. To Pat
McGuire for long friendship and a kick in the duff when I
needed it. And a kind word for the small-press publishers
of today. Some still struggle valiantly in the great lost
cause.

T
he man in St. Louis died sometime during the afternoon, as
near as the coroner could figure it. It happened long ago,
and today it is only half-remembered even by old-timers who
follow crime news. The victim was eccentric and rich: that,
combined with the inability of the police to identify
either a motive or a suspect, kept it on front pages for a
week. Then the press lost interest. Reporters had been
charmed by the puzzle, and by the colorful background of
the deceased, but they could only sell that for a few days
and then something new had to happen. It
didn’t—the case slipped off the front pages and
became history, perhaps to be resurrected periodically in
anniversary pieces or in magazine accounts of unsolved
mysteries. On the news desk at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, an editor ripped and read an AP squib about a triple
murder in Phoenix, fifteen hundred miles to the southwest
and thought—not for the first time—that the
world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people. He
considered using it as a two-graph filler on page eight:
then he thought, Christ, we’ve got enough crazy
people of our own, and the Phoenix murders got bumped by a
UPI account of a squabble along the Chinese-Russian border.
In Phoenix, that day and for the rest of the week, the case
was front-page news. The cops didn’t have a clue. If
murder had to happen, said the cop in charge of the

Phoenix case, it should at least be logical. It’s
not the garden-variety passion killer we find scary, the
cop said, it’s the guy who kills for no good reason
and then disappears into the night. The police hardly ever
catch him because he strikes without reason and has no
motive. The trouble with random murder is that all the
common denominators are superficial. The killer may break
in the same way, he may use the same weapon, but there is
never anything that hints of a motive because there
isn’t any. Give me a motive, other than craziness,
said the cop, and I’ll clear this case. That cop
didn’t know, because it didn’t make the papers
in Phoenix and was one among many brutal homicides on the
national teletype as the long weekend began, that a
Baltimore man had just been killed in much the same way.
This time there was a survivor—his wife, blind from
birth and left babbling madly in the killer’s wake.
She was useless as a witness and was soon committed to a
state institution, but perhaps even then she might have had
something to tell an investigator with knowledge of Phoenix
and St. Louis and the perspective to see them all as a
single case. But computers weren’t yet in broad
general use: communities separated by vast distances
weren’t linked as they are today; murders
weren’t grouped electronically by such factors as
weaponry, forensic matching, and killer profiles. There was
the teletype, with its all-points bulletins advising that
murders had been committed, but what else was new? The term
serial killer
had not yet entered the common lexicon, and to most people
it was inconceivable that a killer might strike in St.
Louis on Monday, Phoenix on Wednesday, and in a Baltimore
suburb on Friday night. On Sunday there was a double murder
in Idaho—a rancher and his wife killed just as they
were sitting down to dinner. This was big news in Boise,
but it made hardly a ripple in St. Louis, Phoenix, or
Baltimore. On the ninth day the killer struck for the last
time—an elderly woman living alone in New Orleans.
This time he set fire to the house, hoping, police
theorized, to cover up his crime. In each of the five
cities teams of detectives worked their local angles and
found nothing. They sifted false clues, chased down rumors,
and slowly over the weeks watched their final leads
disappear into the big blank wall. The one common
denominator remained hidden by the vast expanse of
geography and by the often cryptic methods of police
teletyping.

No one knew it then, but in each of the death houses
lived a book collector.

That’s how I got into it, more than twenty years
later.

S
later wasn’t my kind of cop. Even in the old days,
when we were both working the right side of the
good-and-evil beat, I had been well able to take Mr. Slater
or leave him alone. He had played such a small part in my
life that, for a moment, I didn’t know who he was. I
was working in my office, a small room in the rear of the
used-and-rare bookstore I owned in Denver, writing up books
for my first catalog, when Millie buzzed me from the front.
“There’s a Mr. Slater here to see you,”
she said, and the last person I would’ve thought
about—did think about—was Clydell. This was
annoying. My work was going slowly: I was an absolute
novice at bibliography, and even with modern books there
are pitfalls everywhere. Open on the table before me was a
copy of
Nickel Mountain
, by John Gardner, as fresh and crisp as the day it was
born in 1973. Gardner had signed it on the half title, a
nice little touch, since he won’t be signing any
more, that almost doubled its value. It’s not yet an
expensive book—about $25-40 unsigned, in fine first
edition—the kind of book that should be a snap to
describe and price. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, who
not only puts out fine books but also gives you the
straight bibliographical poop. He’s not like
Lippincott, who states
first edition
most of the time, or McGraw-Hill, who states it when the
guy in the back shop feels like putting it on: if Knopf
says it’s a first edition, you can take it to the
bank and cash it…although I do remember one or two
Willa Cathers that might or might not follow tradition.
Let’s face it, all these houses are dotted with land
mines. William Morrow was a model of consistency, but on
one pricey little Harry Crews title, instead of noting
second printing
as always before, he put two tiny dots at the bottom of the
copyright page. Cute, Morrow. That little piece of
camouflage cost me $40 for a spectacular nonfirst last
year. Doubleday always, and I mean
always
, puts the words
first edition
on his copyright page and takes it off for later printings.
But on one John Barth he didn’t: he put no
designation whatever, instead hiding a code in the gutter
of the last two pages. The code must say H-18—not
H-38 or H-Is-for-Homicide or H-anything-else—or
it’s not a first. Harper and Row was as reliable as
Knopf over the years, except in one five-year period, circa
1968— 73, when for reasons known only to Messrs.
Harper and Row in that great bookstore in the sky, they
started putting a chain of numbers on the
last
page, for Christ’s sake, in addition to saying
first edition
up front. Figure that out. The only way I can figure it out
is that people who publish books must hate and plot against
people who cherish them, make collectibles of them, and
sell them. I can just see old Harper and Row, rubbing their
translucent hands together and cackling wildly as some poor
slob shells out his rent money, $700, for a
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, only to discover that he’s got a later state, worth
$40 tops. Harper really outdid himself on this title: in
addition to hiding the chain of numbers (the first printing
of which begins with “1”), he also published a
state that has no numbers at all. This is widely believed
to be the true first, though there can still be found a few
keen and knowledgeable dealers who would beg to differ. The
one certainty is that on any Harper title for that era, the
back pages must be checked. Thus concealed are points on
early Tony Hillermans in the $750-and-up range, some Dick
Francis American firsts (the numbers on one of which seems
to begin with “2,” as no “1” has
ever been seen), a good Gardner title, and, of course,
Solitude
, a fall-on-your-sword blunder if you make it, the
rent’s due, and the guy who sold it to you has gone
south for the winter.

So I was stuck on
Nickel Mountain
, with a guy I didn’t want to see storming my gates
up front. I was stuck because I seemed to remember that
there were two states to this particular book, A. A. Knopf
notwithstanding. I had read somewhere that they had stopped
the presses in the middle of the first printing and changed
the color on the title page. God or the old man or someone
high in the scheme of things didn’t like the hue, so
they changed it from a deep orange to a paler one.
Technically they are both first editions, but the orange
one is a first-first, thus more desirable. It’s no
big deal, but this was my first catalog and I wanted it to
be right. The title page looked pretty damn orange to me,
but hot is hot only when you have cold to compare it with.
Go away, Slater, I thought.

I took an index card out of my desk, wrote
check the color
, and stuck it in the book. I told Millie to send the
bastard back, and I got ready to blow him off fast if he
turned out to be a dealer in snake oil or a pitchman for a
lightbulb company. Even when he came in, for a moment I
didn’t know him. He was wearing a toupee and
he’d had his front teeth pulled. The dentures were
perfect: you couldn’t tell the hairpiece from the
real thing, unless you’d known him in the days when
the tide was going out. His clothes were casual but
expensive. He wore alligator shoes and the briefcase he
carried looked like the hide of some equally endangered
animal. His shirt was open and of course he wore a
neckchain. The only missing effect was the diamond in the
pierced ear, but I knew it was only a matter of time before
he’d get to that too.

“You fuckhead,” he said. “Lookitcha,
sittin‘ there on your damn dead ass with no time to
talk to an old comrade-in-arms.”

“Hello, Clydell,” I said without warmth.
“I almost didn’t know you.”

He put his thumbs in his lapels and did the strut. On
him it was no joke. “Not bad, huh? My gal Tina says I
look twenty years younger.”

Tina, yet. An instant picture formed in my mind—
young, achingly beautiful, and so totally without brains
that she just missed being classified as a new species in
the animal kingdom.

“You’re the last guy I’d ever expect
to see in a bookstore, Clydell,” I said, trying to
keep it friendly.

“I am a doer, not a reader. It’s good of you
to remember.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said, sidestepping the
gentle dig.

“My deeds of daring have become legends among the
boys in blue. I’m still one of their favorite topics
of conversation, I hear. So are you, Janeway.”

“I guess I can die now, then. Everything from now
on will just be downhill.”

He pretended to browse my shelves. “So how’s
the book biz?”

I really didn’t want to talk books with a guy
who— you could bet the farm on
it—couldn’t care less. “Have a
seat,” I said reluctantly, “and tell me
what’s on your mind.”

“Listen to ‘im,” he said to some
attendant god. “Same old fuckin’ Janeway. No
time for bullshit, eh, Cliffie? One of these days
they’ll make a movie about your life, old buddy, and
that’s what they’ll call it:
No Time for Bullshit
.”

It was all coming back now, all the stuff I’d
always found tedious about Slater. His habit of calling
people old buddy. The swagger, the arrogance, the tough-guy
front. The false hair on the chest, as some critic—
probably Max Eastman—had once said about Hemingway.
The glitz, the shoes, the bad taste of wearing animal hides
and buying them for his wife. Then bragging about it, as if
going deep in hock on a cop’s salary for a $4,000
mink was right up there on a scale with winning the Medal
of Honor for bravery. Some of us thought it was poetic
justice when the Missus took the mink and a fair piece of
Slater’s hide and dumped him for a doctor. But there
was still light in the world: now there was Tina.

“It’s just that I’m pretty sure you
didn’t come in here for a book,” I said.
“We sold our last issue of
Whips and Chains
an hour ago.”

“You kill me, Janeway. Jesus, a guy can’t
even stop by for old times’ sake without getting the
sarcasm jacked up his ass.”

“To be brutally honest, you and I never ran with
the same crowd.”

“I always admired you, though. I really did,
Janeway. You were the toughest damn cop I ever
knew.”

“I still am,” I said, keeping him at
bay.

He made dead-on eye contact. “Present company
excepted.”

I just looked at him and let it pass for the moment.

“Hey, you know what we should do?—go a
coupla rounds sometime. Go over to my gym, I’ll give
you a few pointers and kick your ass around the ring a
little.”

“You wouldn’t last thirty seconds,” I
said, finally unable to resist the truth.

“You prick,” Slater said in that universal
tone of male camaraderie that allows insults up to a point.
“Keep talking and one day you’ll really believe
that shit.” He decided to take my offer of a chair.
“Hey, just between us old warriors, don’tcha
ever get a hankering to get back to it?”

“You must be out of your mind. No way on this
earth, Clydell.”

He looked unconvinced. “Tell the truth.
You’d still be there if it wasn’t for that
Jackie Newton mess. You’d go back in a heartbeat if
you could.”

“The truth?…Well, what I really miss are the
Saturday nights. I hardly ever got through a whole shift
without having to wade through guts and pick up the pieces
of dead children. It’s pretty hard for something like
this”—I made the big gesture with my arms,
taking in the whole infinite and unfathomable range of my
present world—“to take the place of something
like that.”

We looked at each other with no trace of humor or
affection. Here, I thought: this’s the first honest
moment in this whole bullshit
conversation—we’ve got nothing to say to each
other. But the fact remained: Slater hadn’t come
waltzing in here to show off his togs and tell me about
Tina.

He lit a cigarette and looked at the bookshelves
critically, the way a scientist might look at a bug under a
microscope.

“Is there any money in this racket?”

I shook my head. “But it’s so much fun we
don’t care.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he said dryly.

I felt my temperature rising. Slater had about twenty
seconds left on his ticket and he must’ve known it.
Abruptly, he switched directions.

“Y’know, there are some jobs where you can
have fun and still make a buck or two. Maybe you’ve
heard.”

I think I knew what he was going to say in that half
second before he said it. It was crazy, but I was almost
ready for him when he said, “I could use a good man
if you’re ever inclined to get back in the real
world.”

I let the full impact of what he was saying settle
between us. He raised his eyebrows and turned up his palms,
pushing the sincere look. It probably worked like a charm
on children and widows and one-celled organisms like
Tina.

“Let me get this straight,
Clydell…you’re offering me a job?”

“More than a job, Clime…a lot more than
that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t jump too fast, old buddy, till you
hear me out.” He took a long drag and blew smoke into
the air. “Last year I paid tax on a quarter of a
million dollars.”

“Somebody’s gotta pay for those
two-hundred-dollar toilet seats the Pentagon keeps
buying.”

“Listen, you asshole, just shut up and listen. The
best thing I ever did was take early retirement and go out
on my own. Right now I’m the hottest thing
Denver’s ever seen. I may branch out into radio. I
was on two shows last week and the program director at KOA
says I took to it like nobody she ever saw. Are you
listening to me, Janeway? I could make a second career out
of this if I wanted to. It’s so easy it oughta be
against the law. None of those guys work more than two or
three hours a day, and I’m just gettin‘ warmed
up then. It’s all bullshit. I can bullshit my way out
of anything, and that’s all you need in radio. I
found that out after the first five minutes. It ain’t
what you know, it’s what you got between your legs.
You hear what I’m saying?”

“Clydell, what’s this got to do with
me?”

“Keep your pants on, I’m getting to it. This
is all by way of saying that your old buddy is leading a
very full life. They invite me on to talk about the
detective business and find out I can hold my own on
anything. I’m filling in for the morning drive-time
host next week.
Denver Magazine
is doing a piece on me, a fullblown profile. They’re
picking me as one of Denver’s ten sexiest men over
fifty. Can you dig that?”

I could dig it. Any magazine that would come up with a
horse’s-ass idea like that deserved Slater and would
leave no stone unturned in the big effort to find him. I
hoped they’d shoot their pictures in the morning,
before the town’s sexiest man got his hair off the
hat rack and his teeth out of the water glass.

Slater said, “On radio they’re thinking of
billing me as the talking dick.”

“This also figures.”

“I can talk about any damn thing.
Politics?…Hell, I’m a walking statistical
abstract. Ask me something. Go ahead, ask me a
question…about anything, I don’t
care.”

“Oh, hell,” I said wearily.

“
I’ve
got an answer for everything and
you
can’t even come up with a fuckin‘
question.”

I looked at him numbly.

“Here’s something you didn’t know.
They skew those microphones in my favor. If I get any shit
from a caller, all I’ve gotta do is lean a little
closer and raise my voice and he just goes away.” He
gave me a grin and a palms-up gesture, like a magician
who’d just made the rabbit disappear.
“I’ll tell you, Cliff, I’m really hot as
a pistol right now. I’m at the top of my game.
There’s even talk about them doing one of my cases on
the network, on
Unsolved Mysteries
.”