W
ho was Slater? The question lingered through the night.
Why was I here?
In my mind I saw him working his scam, dancing his way
into my life with that cock-and-bull story about him and me
and our brilliant future together. I watched again as he
spread open that paper, where someone had written the
particulars of Grayson’s
Raven
so long ago that it was beginning to fall apart. It
wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about a bounty fee
on a skip, it might not even be about Eleanor except in an
incidental way. The real stuff had happened long ago,
probably before she was born.
But it didn’t matter now, did it? I was under a
court order, and I had to play according to Hoyle.
I sat up late reading a bad novel. I watched some bad
TV. At three o’clock in the morning I sat at my
window and looked down into the rainy Seattle street.
But I couldn’t forget Trish Aandahl, or that
parting shot she had given me.
I called the first travel agency that opened at
seven-thirty and told them to get me to Taos with a fellow
traveler ASAP. It was a heavy travel day. United had two
flights that would put us in Albuquerque early and late
that afternoon. From there I could rent a car or hook up
with a local airline that would jump us into Taos. But both
flights were packed. The agent could squeeze us in, but our
seats would be separated by the length of the plane. The
next viable flight was a red-eye special, leaving Sea-Tac
at 11:18 p.m., arriving in Albuquerque at 2:51 a.m.,
mountain time. I took the red-eye, told the agent to
deliver the tickets to the Hilton, and put the tariff on my
charge card. The tickets were $800 each, typical airline
piracy for last-minute bookings. I sucked it up and hoped
to God I could get some of it back from the good people of
New Mexico.
Then I called Slater and got my first surprise of a long
and surprising day.
“Mr. Slater’s not available,” said his
woman in Denver.
“When will he be available?”
“I’m not sure. He will be calling in. Who is
this, please?”
“My name’s Janeway. I’ve been working
a case for him. Something’s come up and I need to
talk to him.”
I heard her shuffling through some papers.
“I’m afraid I don’t know you.”
“Then I must not exist. I’ll bet if you tell
him I’m here, though, he’ll talk to me
anyway.”
I heard a spinning sound, like a roulette wheel in
Vegas. “Everyone who works for us is in this Rolodex.
Your name’s not here.”
“Then it’s Slater’s loss. Give him a
message, tell him I tried.”
“Wait a minute.”
I heard her talking to someone, but her hand had covered
the phone and I couldn’t make out the words.
“I could maybe have him call you back.”
“Won’t work. I’m heading out in about
five minutes.”
“Hold, please.” She punched the hold button:
elevator music filled my ear.
There was a click. Another woman said, “Mr.
Janeway?…I’m sorry for the hassle. It’s
just that we don’t know you and Mr. Slater’s
out of town.”
“How could he be out of town? He hired me because
he didn’t have time to go out of town. Where’s
he gone?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. I guess
I’ll have to take a message.”
“Tell him Janeway called, I’ve got the girl
and I’m taking her on to Taos myself.”
“Is that what he wanted you to do?”
“It doesn’t matter what he wanted me to do.
Tell him I’m not working for him anymore.”
I sat on my bed feeling the first faint gnawing of a
mighty hunch.
I placed another call to Denver.
“U.S. West.”
“Howard Farrell, please.”
I listened to the click of a connection, then a
woman’s voice said, “Mr. Farrell’s
office.”
“Mr. Farrell, please.”
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Cliff Janeway.”
Another click, followed by the familiar resonance of an
old and confidential source.
“Hey, Cliff! Where the hell’ve you
been?”
“Cruising down the river, you old son of a
bitch.”
“Jesus, I haven’t heard your voice for
what?…seems like a year now.”
“More like two. So how’re things at the good
old phone company?”
“Same old shit.”
“Howard, you need to start breaking in a new act.
But then what would guys like me do when they need a favor
out of old Ma Bell?”
“Uh-oh. You’re not official anymore, are
you?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Damn right it is. Just for old-time’s sake,
what do you want?”
“Clydell Slater.”
“My favorite cop. He still playing smashmouth with
Denver’s finest?”
“He does it on his own now.”
“What an asshole. Look, Cliff…this
isn’t likely to cause Mr. Slater any grief, is
it?”
“It might pinch his balls a little.”
“Then I’ll do it. Same ground rules as
always. Give me a number, I’ll call you right
back.”
Five minutes later Farrell called and, for my ears only,
gave me Slater’s home number.
I placed the call.
It was answered by a recording, a woman’s voice.
“Hi, this’s Tina. Me’n‘ Clyde are
out now. We’ll call ya back.”
I hung up on the beep.
I lingered over breakfast in a downtown cafe. Read the
high points in last night’s
Times
. Looked for her byline but it wasn’t there. Drank my
third cup of coffee over the local homicide page.
Went back to the hotel. Took a shower and went upstairs
to the lobby. My tickets had arrived. I slipped them into
my inside jacket pocket with my court papers and went to
the jail to see Eleanor.
It was still early, well before ten. They led her in and
we sat with glass between us, talking through a bitch
box.
“How’re you doing?” I said.
“Just wonderful.”
“I wanted to see you and say a few
things.”
“You don’t have to.”
“What are you now, a mind reader?”
“I know what you’re gonna say, I can see it
in your eyes. I know you’re bothered by all this.
Don’t be…you don’t owe me a
thing.”
“In a cold-blooded dog-eat-dog world, that would
be one way to look at it.”
“Well, isn’t that what it is?”
“Only sometimes.”
“I’ll bet this was your big failing as a
cop. People can look in your face and see what’s in
your heart.”
“Would you believe nobody’s ever said that
to me?…Not once. In some circles I’m known as a
helluva poker player, impossible to read.”
“Amazing.”
We looked at each other.
“If you’re waiting for absolution, you
already have it,” she said. “You were doing a
job. You’ve got a strange way of doing it, but
I’ve got no kick coming. If it makes you feel better,
you’ve got my unqualified permission to deliver me up
and get on with your life, forget I ever
existed.”
“That’s not going to happen, Eleanor.
That’s one promise I’m making you.”
“What can you do, tell me that…what can you
do?”
“I don’t know. Did you do the
burglary?”
“Yes, I did. So there you are.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Personal reasons.”
“Did you take a gun into the house?”
“Does it matter?”
“Does it matter? Hell, yes, it matters. It can be
the difference between a first-time offender asking for
probation and a gun moll doing heavy time.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You said something back in the restaurant when we
were talking about your stalker. The subject of a gun came
up. Do you remember what you said?”
She looked at me through the glass. “I’ve
never fired a gun in my life.”
“Did the cops do a gunshot residue
test?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“So I’ll ask you again. Did you take a gun
into that house?”
“No. Believe it or not.”
“Okay, I believe it. Did you get a gun while you
were in the house, maybe from the guy’s gun rack. Was
it you that did the shooting?”
“I never shot at anyone. I was the one shot at.
I’m lucky to be alive.”
“If we can prove that, you’ve got a fighting
chance. You were still wrong to be there. You broke in,
they had every right to shoot at you. But almost any judge
would wonder why they’d lie about it.”
“I guess they want me to go to jail.”
“For a long time, apparently.” I leaned
closer to the glass. “I’d still like to know
why you broke in, what you were looking for.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. But not
today; I don’t think I know you well enough to get
into the wired-up hell of my life with you. When do we
leave?”
“Late tonight. I’ll come for you around
seven-thirty.”
“Lots of dead time for you to fill. What’ll
you do, hit the bookstores?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the only part of this that really
surprises me. I never had a hint you were a book dealer.
You played that card very well.”
I tried to smile at her. “I’d better
go.” But something powerful held me there. Then, so
quickly that I didn’t know how it happened, I stepped
off the straight and narrow for the first time that day. I
stepped all the way off and said something that could never
be unsaid.
“How’d you like to get out of here?…go
with me?…be my guide through the Seattle book
jungle?”
She looked like a person half-drowned who had suddenly
been brought back to life. “Can you do
that?”
“Probably not. The jailer will look at my tickets
and wonder what the hell I’m doing taking you out ten
hours early. The judge’ll schedule a new hearing,
I’ll get drawn and quartered, and you’ll end up
riding back to Taos handcuffed to a deputy.”
I shrugged. “We could try.”
She reached out as if to touch my face. Her fingertips
flattened against the glass.
“You’ve got to promise to behave.” I
felt a sudden desperation, as if I’d taken a long
step into the dark. “I’m taking a big chance,
Eleanor. It’s my responsibility now. I’ll take
the chance because I like you. I owe you one for the big
lie. And it just occurs to me that you’d probably
rather spend the day in bookstores than chained by your
neck to the wall of some crummy jail cell. But you’ve
got to behave.”
“Absolutely. Who wouldn’t love a deal like
that?”
The jailer gave our tickets a cursory glance. He looked
at my papers, read the judge’s order, and at half
past ten Eleanor Rigby and I walked out into a drippy
Seattle day.
I
t was a day of magic. The two of us were charmed: Seattle
was our oyster and every stop coughed up a pearl. She took
me to a place called Gregor Books on Southwest California
Avenue. The books were crisp and fine and there were lots
of high-end goodies. You don’t steal books out of a
store like that—the owner is far too savvy ever to
get caught sleeping on a live one, but Rita
McKinley’s words echoed in my ear.
You can double the price on anything if it’s fine
enough
. Gregor had the finest copy of
Smoky
I had ever seen. Signed Will James material is becoming
scarce, and James had not only signed it but had drawn an
original sketch on the half title. Gregor was asking $600,
$480 after my dealer’s discount. I took it, figuring
I could push it to $800 or more on the sketch and the
world’s-best-copy assertion. I figured James was a
hotter property in the real West, Colorado, than here in
Seattle, and when the day came for me to go in the ground,
I could rest just fine if they threw this book in the hole
with me. Speaking of dying, Gregor had a dandy copy of
If I Die in a Combat Zone
, Tim O’Brien’s 1973 novel of the Vietnam War.
He had marked it $450, but I was making his day and he
bumped my discount to 25 percent for both items. I took it:
the O’Brien is so damn scarce that I thought it was
overdue for another price jump, and I left the store poorer
but happier. Eleanor directed me downtown. We stopped at
the Seattle Book Center, a lovely store on Second Avenue
with half a dozen rooms on two floors. I bought a Zane Grey
Thundering Herd
in an immaculate 1919 dust jacket for $160.1 was flying
high now. There were books everywhere we looked, and even
if the Seattle boys weren’t giving them away, I saw
decent margin in almost everything I touched. “This
is one of those days, isn’t it?” Eleanor said.
“I’ll bet if you went back there and flushed
the toilet, books would come pouring out.” We went to
a mystery specialist called Spade and Archer. It was in a
bank building downtown, in a fifth-floor office that old
Sam Spade himself might have occupied in the thirties. The
owner was a young blond woman whose credo seemed to be
“keep ‘em moving.” She had two of the
three Edgar Box mysteries at a hundred apiece, cost to me,
and I took them, figuring they’d be good $200 items
in the catalog I was planning. As mysteries they’re
just fair. But Gore Vidal had written them, hiding behind
the Edgar Box moniker when he was starting out in the early
fifties, and there’s always somebody for a curiosity
like that.
In another store I fingered a sharp copy of
White Fang
, amazed that the asking price was just $75. Eleanor warned
me off with a look. In the car she said, “It was a
second state, that’s why it was so cheap.” I
felt like amateur night in Harlem, but I asked her anyway,
what was the point of it, and this kid, this child, gave me
another lesson in fly-by-your pants bookscouting.
“There was a mistake on the title page. Macmillan
just sliced it out and glued a new one on the cancel
stub…You look perplexed, Mr. Jane way, like a man
who’s never heard the terminology. You don’t
know what a cancel stub is?…How long have you been in
the business?”
“Long enough to know a lot about a few things and
damn little about most of it.”
“Well, this kind of thing happened a lot in the
old days. The publisher would make a mistake in a line or
word, but by the time they noticed it, ten thousand copies
had been printed and maybe five thousand had been
distributed. If it was an important author, like Jack
London, they didn’t want to release any more with the
mistake, but they didn’t want to redo all those books
either. So Macmillan printed a new title page, in the case
of
White Fang
, then they sliced out the old ones on all those flawed
copies and just glued the new one right onto the
stub.”
“They just tipped it in.”
“Sure. Labor was cheap then, and even those
factory grunts could do a decent job of it. The average
book collector won’t even see it, but a bookman
can’t miss it unless it’s done with real
finesse. Just look down in the gutter and there it is, like
a man who had an arm cut off and sewn back on again. Doran
did the same thing with one of Winston Churchill’s
early books,
My African Journey
. They bought the remainder from the British publisher and
just slashed out the title page and put in their own on the
cancel stub. That’s why the first American edition
comes in a British casing, with Hodder and Stoughton on the
spine and a tipped-in Doran title page. It was one of
Doran’s first books, and he was lowballing to save
money.”
“Oh,” I said lamely.
We stopped for lunch. I wanted to talk about her case
but she wouldn’t get into it: it would only screw up
an otherwise pleasant day, she said. We drifted back toward
the Kingdome. Her car was gone: her father had picked it up
for her and had it towed to a gas station a few blocks
away. We drove past and saw it there in the lot. We were in
the neighborhood anyway, so we stopped in the big Goodwill
store on Dearborn. I don’t do thrift stores much
anymore— usually they are run by idiots who think
they are book dealers, without a lick of experience or a
grain of knowledge to back them up. In Denver the Goodwills
have become laughingstocks among dealers and scouts. They
have their silly little antique rooms where they put
everything that looks old—every ratty, worn-out
never-was that ever came out of the publishing industry.
They mark their prices in ink, destroying any value the
thing might have, and when you try to tell them that, they
stare at you with dull eyes and say they’ve got to do
it that way. The store in Seattle didn’t ink its
books to death, but it didn’t matter—they had
the same mentality when it came to pricing. The shelves
were clogged with common, crummy books, some still
available on Walden remainder tables for two dollars,
marked six and seven in this so-called thrift store.
Naturally, they missed the one good book. Eleanor found it
as she browsed one side while I worked the other. She
peeked around the corner with that
sad-little-girl-oh-so-lost look on her face. “Scuse
me, sir, could you loan me a dollar?…My
family’s destitute, my daddy broke his leg, my little
brother’s got muscular dystrophy, and my
mamma’s about to sell her virtue on First
Avenue.” I made a convulsive grab at my wallet.
“Damn, you
are
good!” I said with forced admiration.
“You’re breaking my damn heart.” She
grinned with all her teeth and held up a fine first of
Robert Traver’s wonderful
Anatomy of a Murder
. It was a nice scarce little piece, worth at least $100 I
guessed: a good sleeper because the Book of the Month
edition is exactly the same size and shape and so prolific
that even real bookpeople won’t bother to pick it up
and look. Goodwill wanted $4 for it. She paid with my
dollar and her nickels and dimes, then haggled with me in
the parking lot: “Gregor would give me at least forty
for this, and I’m waiting breathlessly to see if
you’re inclined to do the honorable thing.” I
gave her forty-five, but made a point of getting my dollar
back, and we both enjoyed my good-natured grumbling for the
next half hour.
After wading through the dreck, it was good to be back
in a real bookstore again. In a place downtown, she spent
most of her money on a miniature book, a suede-leather copy
of Shakespeare no larger than the tip of her thumb.
“I’m really a sucker for these things,”
she said. “I’ll buy them if there’s the
least bit of margin.” I knew almost nothing about the
miniature-book trade, only that, like every other
specialty, it has its high spots that are coveted and
cherished. Eleanor filled me in as we drove. “This
was published by David Bryce in Glasgow around the turn of
the century. Bryce did lots of miniatures, some of them
quite special. I once had a Bryce’s dictionary, which
they called the smallest dictionary in the world. It was
only about an inch square and it had about four hundred
pages, with a little metal slipcase and a foldout
magnifying glass. You could carry it on a key
ring.”
I held the Shakespeare between my thumb and forefinger.
“You think there’s any margin in
this?”
“I don’t care, I didn’t buy it to get
rich. Maybe I could double up wholesale, but I think
I’ll keep it for a while as a memento of this day.
It’ll be my good-luck piece. I think I’ll need
one, don’t you?”