Bookscouting gives you the same kind of thrills as
gambling. You flirt with the Lady in much the same way. You
get hot and the books won’t stop coming: you get cold
and you might as well be playing pinochle with your
mother-in-law. I was hot, and when Luck is running, she
flaunts all the odds of circumstance and coincidence. I
found two early-fifties Hopalong Cassidy books by a guy
Eleanor had never heard of, some cowboy named Tex Burns. I
savored the pleasure of telling her that Tex Burns was like
Edgar Box, a moniker…in another lifetime he had been
a young man named Louis L’Amour. Amazing to find two
such in a single day, but I take Luck where I find her.
These cost me $4 each and were worth around $250.1 razzed
Eleanor for not knowing. We headed north and I said, for at
least the fifth time, “I thought
everybody
knew about Tex Burns.” She crossed her eyes and
looked down her nose at me, a perfect picture of rank
stupidity.
It was the damnedest day, full of sorrow and joy and
undercut with that sweet slice of tension. I’ll blink
and she’ll be gone, I thought at least a dozen times:
I’ll turn my head for a second and when I look up,
she’ll be two blocks away, running like hell. But I
had set my course and the day was waning, and still there
had been nothing between us but the most cheerful
camaraderie. Out of the blue, in midafter-noon, she said,
“I guess it’s a good thing you turned into an
asshole when you did: I may’ve been on the verge of
falling in love with you and then where would we be?”
Coming from nowhere like that, it put me on the floor. It
also brought to a critical point a problem I had failed to
consider—I had to pee in the worst possible way. I
told her to stay put, disappeared into the rest room, and
found her still there, working the shelves, when I came
hustling out a minute later. I didn’t worry much
about her after that.
She took me to a place near the university called Half
Price Books. It nestled modestly on a street named
Roosevelt Way, a cornucopia of books on two floors. There
were no real high spots, but I could’ve spent two
hundred on stock, it was that kind of place. I bought only
what I couldn’t leave and got out for less than
eighty. We were going out the door when Eleanor spied a
copy of Trish Aandahl’s book on the Gray-sons.
“You oughta buy this,” she said.
“It’s a helluva read.”
She was a little curious at how fast I did buy it. I
still hadn’t told her about my interest in Grayson
and probably wouldn’t now until we were on the
airplane and well away from here. “You drive,”
I said, throwing her the keys. “I want to fondle my
stuff.” But all I did as she wove through the
crowded, narrow streets was browse through Aandahl. The
jacket was an art deco design, with elegant curlicues and
old-style fringe decorations. It was dominated by
black-and-white photographs of the Grayson brothers, a
little out of focus and solving none of the mystery of the
men. The art director had overlapped the pictures and then
pulled them apart, leaving parts of each infringed upon the
other, the ragged gulf between them suggesting disruption
and conflict. The title,
Crossfire
, stood out in red: under it, in black, the subtitle,
The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard
Grayson
. Richard’s resemblance to Leslie Howard was more
real than imagined: Darryl Grayson’s image was
darker, fuzzier, barely distinguishable. His was the face
on the barroom floor, and not because it had been painted
there. The jacket blurb on Trish Aandahl consisted of one
line, that the author was a reporter for the
Seattle Times
, and there was no photograph. If the lady wasn’t
interested in personal glory, she’d be the first
reporter I had ever known who felt that way. I thumbed the
index: my eye caught the name of Allan Huggins, the Grayson
bibliographer, mentioned half a dozen times in the text.
Gaston Rigby made his appearance on page 535, and there
were three mentions for Crystal Moon Rigby. Archie Moon was
prominent, entering the Grayson saga on page 15 and
appearing prolifically thereafter. A section of photographs
showed some of Grayson’s books, but, strangely, the
only photographs of the subjects themselves were the same
two of poor quality that had been used on the jacket. It
was 735 pages thick, almost as big as the Huggins
bibliography, and packed with what looked to be anecdotal
writing at its best.
The only negative was that it was a remainder copy,
savagely slashed across the top pages with a felt-tip
marker. I hated that: it’s a terrible way to
remainder books, and Viking is the worst offender in the
publishing industry. “Look at this,” I griped.
“These bastards must hire morons right off the street
with a spray can. I can’t believe they’d do
that to a book.”
“It’s just merchandise to them,” she
said. “Nobody cares, only freaks like you and me. It
is a fine-looking book, except for the remainder
mark.”
“I saw a woman once who would’ve been a
beauty queen, if you could just forget the fact that
somebody had shot her in the face with a .45.”
We were stopped at a red light about a block from the
freeway. She was looking at me in a different way now, as
if I had suddenly revealed a facet of my character that she
had been unable to guess before. “Are you interested
in the Graysons? If you are, I know a guy who used to have
the best collection of Grayson books in the universe. Maybe
he’s still got a few of them. His store’s not
far from here.”
“I think we’ve got time for that. Lead
on.”
Otto Murdock was an old-time Seattle book dealer who had
seen better days. Twenty years of hard drinking had reduced
him to this—a shabby-looking storefront in a
ramshackle building in a run-down section on the north
side. “This man used to be Seattle’s
finest,” Eleanor said, “till bad habits did him
in. For a long time he was partners with Gregory Morrice.
You ever hear of Morrice and Murdock?”
“Should I have?”
“If Seattle ever had an answer to Pepper and
Stern, they were it. Only the best of the best, you know
what I mean? But they had a falling-out years ago over
Otto’s drinking. Morrice does it alone
now—he’s got a book showplace down in Pioneer
Square, and Otto wound up here. I hear he ekes out a
living, but it can’t be much…he wholesales all
his good stuff. They call him In-and-Out Murdock now. A
good book means nothing but another bottle to
him.”
She pulled to the curb at the door of the grimiest
bookstore I had seen in a long time. The windows were caked
with dirt. Inside, I could see the ghostly outlines of
hundreds of books, stacked ends-out against the glass. The
lettering on the hand-painted sign had begun to flake,
leaving what had once said books now reading boo. The
interior was dark and getting darker by the moment. It was
a quarter to five, and already night was coming. A block
away, a streetlight flicked on.
“He looks closed for the night,” I said.
“He’s still got his open sign
out.”
I knew that didn’t mean much, especially with an
alcoholic who might not know at any given time what year it
was. We sat at the curb and the rain was a steady hum.
“I’ll check him out,” Eleanor said.
“No sense both of us getting wet.”
She jumped out and ran to the door. It pushed open at
her touch and she waved to me as she went inside. I came
along behind her, walking into a veritable cave of books.
There were no lights: it was even darker inside than it had
looked from the street, and for a moment I couldn’t
see Eleanor at all. Then I heard her voice: “Mr.
Murdock…Mr. Murdock…hey, Otto, you’ve got
customers out here.” She opened a door and a dim beam
of light fell out of a back room. “Mr.
Murdock?” she said softly.
I saw her in silhouette, moving toward me.
“That’s funny,” she said. “Looks
like he went away and left the store wide open.”
I groped along the wall and found a switch. It was dim
even with the lights on. I took my first long look at how
the mighty could fall. Murdock had tumbled all the way
down, hitting rock bottom in a rat’s nest of cheap,
worn, and tattered books. His bookshelves had long since
filled to overflowing, and the floor was his catchall.
Books were piled everywhere. The piles grew until they
collapsed, leaving the books scattered where they fell,
with new piles to grow from the rubble like a forest after
a fire. I walked along the back wall, looking for anything
of value. It was tough work—the fiction section was
almost uniformly book-club editions of authors who
aren’t collected anyway: Sidney Sheldon, Robert
Wilder, Arthur Hailey. A sign thumbtacked to the wall said
books for a buck. Cheap at half the price, I thought.
“You see anything?” Eleanor asked from the
far corner.
“Four computer books, two copies of
The Joy of Sex
, and five million Stephen King derivatives.”
She sighed. “Put ‘em all together and
what’ve you got?”
“Desk-top breeding by vampires.”
She gave a sharp laugh, tinged with sadness. “This
place gets worse every time I come here. I’m afraid
I’m wasting your time; it looks like Otto
hasn’t had a good book in at least a year.“
You never knew, though. This was the great thing about
books, that in any pile of dreck a rose might hide, and we
were drawn on through the junk in the search for the one
good piece. I had worked my way around the edge of the
front room and had reached the door to the back when I
heard Eleanor say, “Good grief, look at this.”
She had dropped to her hands and knees, out of sight from
where I stood. I asked what she had and she said,
“You’ll have to come look, you’ll never
believe it.” I found her near the door, holding a
near-perfect copy of
The Fountainhead
.
“It’s a whole bag of stuff,” she said.
“All Ayn Rand, all in this condition.”
There were two
Fountainhead
firsts, both binding states, red and green, in those lovely
crisp red jackets. There was an
Atlas Shrugged
, signed
Ayn
in old ink and inscribed with endearment as if to an old
friend. Finally there was the freshest copy of
We the Living
that I ever hoped to see in this lifetime. A Rand
specialist had once told me that there were probably only a
few hundred jacketed copies of
We the Living
in existence.
Six, seven grand retail, I thought. Sitting by the door
in an open bag, in an unattended store.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
Eleanor said.
I shook my head.
“If the door blew open, they’d get screwed
by the rain in a minute,” she said. “Jesus,
Otto must’ve really lost it.”
“Look, you know this guy—do you think
he’s so far gone that he wouldn’t know what he
could get for these?”
“I doubt that. Otto might not know about the new
guys—the Graftons, Paretskys, Burkes—but
he’d sure as hell know about Ayn Rand.”
We stood there for a minute and touched them.
“What’re you gonna do?” Eleanor
said.
“Damned if I know. I’m dying to buy these
from him.”
“What would you offer him?”
I pondered it. “Three grand. Thirty-five hundred
if I had to.”
“You could get them for less than that. There are
some guys in this town who’d pay him that kind of
money, but Otto’s burned his bridges here. I’ll
bet you could get ‘em for two.”
“I’d give him three in a
heartbeat.”
“Take ‘em, then. Leave him a note, make him
an offer like that, and you’ll be doing him the
biggest favor of the year. Tell him you’ll send the
books back if he doesn’t like it. I guarantee you
you’re doing him a favor, because nine out often
people would come in here and see those books and take
’em and run like hell. You know that’s true.
Take ‘em and leave him a note.”
“That’s probably against the law,” I
said, but I knew it probably wasn’t. In most states,
theft requires evil intent.
I put the books back in the bag, folded the top over
carefully, and tucked it under my arm. “What’s
in the back room?”
“Just more of the same,” she said.
We went on back. The room was cluttered with books and
trash. In a corner was an ancient rolltop desk half-buried
in junk books and old magazines.
“I see he still reads the
AB
,” I said.
“That’s probably how he sells most of his
books.” Eleanor looked along the shelves behind the
desk. She held up a thin canvas bag. “Here’s
his briefcase. He never goes anywhere without this. In the
old days, when he and Morrice were top dogs, you’d
see him at book fairs and stuff, and he’d always have
his two or three best pieces in this book bag. It was his
trademark: if he liked you, you’d get to look in the
bag; if he didn’t, you wouldn’t.”
She fiddled with the straps. “Wanna
look?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Reluctantly, she pushed the bag back to the corner of
the desk. “He probably hasn’t used it in ten
years, except to carry a bottle around.” She sighed.
“Not a Grayson book in sight. So much for my good
intentions.”
“That looks like another door over there.” I
walked across the room and opened it.
A set of steps disappeared into the dark upper
floor.
“Try calling him again,” Eleanor said.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted
Murdock’s name up the stairwell.
“He’s just not here,” she said.
“I don’t know. Something’s not
right.” I moved into the stairwell.
“Don’t go up there. That’s how people
get blown away.”
I turned and looked at her.
“Otto’s got a gun. I saw it once when I was
here last year.”
“Good argument.” I backed away from the
stairs.
“He’s gotta be up there sleeping one off.
He’ll wake up in a panic over those books, come
running down the stairs, and when he finds your note,
he’ll be so relieved he’ll drop dead right
there on the spot.”
I wavered.
“Goddammit, take the books,” she said.
“Don’t be a fool.”
She’s right, I thought. I went back and sat at
Otto’s desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and wrote
out my offer. I made it three thousand and signed it with
both my Denver phone numbers, then taped it to his canvas
bag where he’d be sure to find it.
In the car we sat fondling the merchandise, lost in that
rapture that comes too seldom these days, even in the book
business.
It was just six o’clock when I happened to glance
in the mirror and saw Pruitt watching from the far
corner.