H
e appeared like a single frame in a set of flash cards. You
blink and he’s gone, and you’re not quite sure
he was ever there at all. I was as sure as I needed to be:
I was suddenly tense, keyed up and ready to fight. We
headed down to the Hilton. I was driving now, handling the
freeway traffic with one eye on my mirror. If he was on my
tail as I swung into town, I didn’t see him. He was a
magician, good enough to make you doubt your eyes. The
invisible man, Slater had called him, the best tail in the
business, and he wasn’t keeping after me because he
liked my looks.
Who is Slater
? The voice of Trish Aandahl played in my head. I had a
hunch I was about to find out who Slater was and what he
wanted. He had just five hours to break the stalemate: if
Pruitt didn’t play Slater’s hand by then,
we’d be in the air and it would all be academic.
I parked in the hotel garage and took Eleanor to my
room. I poured us drinks, cutting hers slightly with water.
She asked if she could use the shower and I said sure. I
sat on the bed at the telephone, happy for a few minutes
alone.
I punched up Slater’s number in Denver.
A woman answered. “Yeah?”
The lovely Tina, no doubt.
I tried to sound like someone from their social set, a
cross between George Foreman and Bugs Moran: “I need
Slater.”
“So who’re you?”
“I’m the man with the money.”
“I’m not followin‘ ya,
Jack.”
“Just put Slater on the phone, he’ll be glad
you did. Tell him it’s the man with the
money.”
“Clyde’s not here.”
“So where’s he at?”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a bagful of money, sweetheart,
and I’ll tell ya what, if I don’t get to give
it to him pretty damn quick, I’m out of here. Slater
can fly to Jacksonville and pick it up himself.”
“I don’t know anything about
this.”
“That’s how you want to keep it, hon.
Let’s just say Slater did a little job for me and
this is the bonus I promised him.”
“Well, damn.”
“Oh, let’s not agonize over it. If you
don’t wanna tell me where the man is, it’s no
skin off my nose.”
She was breathing in my ear. “Is
it…”
I waited.
“…is it a
lot
of money?”
I couldn’t help laughing: I had played her just
right. “Let’s say there’s a good reason
he wanted it in cash.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll give ya a
number.”
I could hear her fumbling around. “Call him at
area code two oh six. It’s six two four, oh five
hundred. Ask for seventeen twelve.”
I sat staring at the phone. Slowly I straightened up and
looked at the far wall.
Slater was in the room next door.
And I knew I might as well have him in my lap.
Eleanor came out of the bathroom in a swirl of steam.
She sat at the mirror sipping her drink and combing out her
incredible hair. I thought she was lovely, alive with the
sparkle of youth in spite of her trouble. She wanted to
talk. Our short mutual history was the topic of the moment,
to which was added her general assessment that we were a
damned exceptional book-hunting team. “Today was
special,” she said, “a real toot.” I
looked at the far wall, where Slater was, and told her the
pleasure was all mine. To her way of thinking, it was the
perfect day, one she’d remember: “This is how
I’d live my life, every day of the year, if I had my
way. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, some good
books…”
She looked at me with open affection in the glass.
“And you.”
She tugged at a place where her hair had knotted up.
“We wouldn’t even need much money,” she
said. “Money just takes the edge off. You need to be
a little hungry to get that rush that comes with finding a
really good one.”
Again she amazed me, this kid barely out of her
teens.
“It’s not-having money that keeps you on
your toes,” she said, meeting my eyes in the
mirror.
I told her we were probably the most on-our-toes pair
since Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and she laughed.
“Why couldn’t I’ve found you a year
ago,” she mused. “Why-o-why-o-why?”
“It wouldn’t‘ve done much good,”
I said absently, “since we’ve already got it
well established that I’m old enough to be your
father.”
She scoffed at this. “Yeah, if you’d started
hiking up skirts when you were thirteen, maybe.” She
looked at me in the mirror and said, blushing fiercely,
“You’re probably not up to a little seduction
right now, I’ll bet.”
I thought long and hard about how to respond, the words
to use. The ones I picked were clumsy and inadequate.
“Under the circumstances, you know, this is not the
best idea you’ve had all day.”
“Well, it was just a thought.”
I told her it was a lovely thought, I was flattered. In
another time, maybe…in another place…
“In another life,” she said, closing the
book on it.
I decided to hang out here until just before our flight
left. The certainty of Slater’s listening in on us I
accepted as the lesser of two evils: here I could keep my
back to the wall until the last possible moment. I looked
at the wall but it told me nothing. I knew what I needed to
know. Detectives today can punch a hole the size of a pin
through a concrete wall, run a wire into bed with a
cheating housewife, record her ecstasy with the other guy
in eight-track stereo, and add a Michael Jackson sound
track for the entertainment of the office staff. I told
Eleanor none of this: no sense waving a red flag just yet.
I called out and ordered a pizza delivered. She kept up a
running chatter while we ate—her way, I guessed, of
relieving her own building tension. She talked about all
the great books she had found that had been screwed up by
one anal-obsessive chucklehead or another. I laughed as
only a fellow traveler can: I too knew that peculiar
heartache. You find a grand copy of an old Ross Macdonald
and open it to see that some fool has written all over it,
destroying half its value and all of its factory-fresh
desirability. Why is a book the only gift that the giver
feels free and often compelled to deface before giving? Who
would give a shirt or a blouse and write, in ink,
Happy birthday from Bozo
all over the front of it? Even worse than the scribblers,
Eleanor said, were the name embossers. “When I become
the queen of hell, I’m going to parade all those
embosser freaks past me in a long naked line. I’ll
have an embosser with the word IDIOT on it, smothered in
hot coals, and I’ll emboss
them
, sir, in the tenderest place that
you
can imagine.” That punishment sounded pretty sexist
to me, which was exactly her point. “Have you ever
seen an embossermark with a woman’s name on
it…ever?” I had, but only once and it probably
didn’t count—a sadistic dominatrix whose murder
I had investigated long ago. “Women write in the
spirit of giving,” Eleanor said. “Men emboss
like they’re branding cattle, to possess.” For
the books, we sadly agreed, the result was the same.
I hoped Slater was getting an earful. I looked at the
clock: the plane took off in three hours, I was almost home
free. The day was ending on a wave of nickel-and-dime
bookstuff. I asked her to define anal-obsessive
chucklehead, please, and tell me how that particular
characteristic expresses itself. She laughed and slapped my
hand and said, “Get out of here, you damn
fool,” and the night wound down. We drank a toast to
the defilers of good books—scribblers, embossers, and
the remainder goons at the Viking Press—may their
conversion to the cause be swift and permanent. At
eight-thirty she asked if she could mail a letter. She sat
at the table and scratched out a few lines on hotel
stationery: then she turned away, shielding the letter with
her body so I couldn’t see it. I knew she had taken
something out of her purse and dropped it in the envelope
with the letter. I was riddled with second thoughts, but
there wasn’t anything to be done about it: I could
either be her jailer or her friend. She licked the
envelope, sealed it, and called for a bellhop to mail it.
And I sat mute, her friend, and watched it disappear.
I was a bit curt with her after that. She asked when we
should leave and I told her not to worry about it,
I’d let her know. I had decided to linger here until
exactly seventy minutes before takeoff, then haul ass for
Sea-Tac in a cloud of smoke. I hoped the TV would cover our
sudden retreat. I’d let Slater listen to the
Tonight Show
until reality began to dawn: if I was lucky, we’d be
halfway to the airport before he knew it. Out on the street
I’d have only Pruitt to deal with.
Duck soup, I thought, an even-money standoff.
I always bet on me with odds like that. I had forgotten
that line from Burns about the best-laid schemes of mice
and men. I should read more poetry.
A
t 9:35 the telephone rang. We looked at each other and
neither of us moved. I let it ring and after a while it
stopped. Now we’d see, I thought: if it had been a
test, somebody would be over to see if we were still
here.
At 9:43 it rang again. By then I had rethought the
strategy of silence, and I picked it up.
“It’s me.” Slater’s voice
sounded puffy, distant.
“So it is,” I said flatly, with a faint W.
C. Fields undertone.
“We need to talk.”
“Send me a telegram.”
“Don’t get cute, Janeway, your time’s
running out.”
I gave a doubtful grunt.
“We need to talk now. I’m doing you a favor
if you’ve got the sense to listen.”
I listened.
“Come out in the hall.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m in the room next door.” His voice
was raspy, urgent. “I need you to come out in the
hall so we can talk.”
Then I got a break I couldn’t have bought. Eleanor
got up and went to the bathroom.
“You must think I was born yesterday,” I
said as soon as she closed the door.
“This is on the level. I know you’re on the
eleven-eighteen. I’m giving you fair warning,
you’re never gonna make it.”
“Try and stop me and you’re a dead man,
Slater. That’s fair warning for both of
you.”
“It’s not me that’s gonna stop you,
stupid. Goddammit, are you coming out or not?”
I thought about it for five seconds. “Yeah.”
I hung up.
I opened my bag and got out my gun. Strapped it on under
my coat and waited till Eleanor came out of the
bathroom.
“Just a little problem with my bill, no big
deal,” I told her. “I’ve got to go
upstairs and straighten it out. You sit right there,
we’ll leave as soon as I get back.”
She didn’t say anything but I could see she
wasn’t buying it. She sat where I told her and
clasped her hands primly in her lap, her face a mask of
sudden tension.
I opened the door and eased my way out into the hall. I
had my thumb hooked over my belt, two inches from the
gun.
Slater was down at the end of the hall, looking at the
wall. I pulled the door shut and he turned. I think I was
ready for anything but what I saw. His face had been beaten
into watermelon. His left eye was battered shut, his nose
pounded flat against his face. His right eye was open wide,
a grotesque effect like something from an old Lon Chaney
film.
“What happened to you?”
I had flattened against the wall so I could see both
ways. Slater came toward me, shuffling in pain. His leg was
stiff and he held his arm in a frozen crook, suspended as
if by an invisible sling.
“Pruitt,” he rasped, livid. “Fucking
bastard Pruitt.”
I just looked at him, unable to imagine what might have
gone down between them. He came closer and I saw what had
caused that pufnness in his voice. His dentures were
gone—smashed, I guessed, along with the rest of
him—and he talked like a toothless old man.
“Goddammit, I’ll rip that fucker’s
guts out.”
“What happened?” I said again.
“Bastard son of a bitch sapped me, damn near took
my head off. I went down and he did the rest of it with his
feet.”
He did it well, I thought.
“He’ll pay, though, he’ll pay for this
in ways I haven’t even thought up yet. Even if he
doesn’t know it was me, I’ll know, and
that’ll be enough.” He took a little step to
the side and held on to the wall for support. “And it
starts today. I’m gonna tell you something, Janeway,
and then it’s your baby. Pruitt will kill you if he
has to.”
“He should play the lottery, his odds are
better.”
“Don’t you underestimate that fucker,
that’s what I’m telling you.”
“I’m reading that. Now why don’t you
tell me what he wants.”
“The book, stupid, haven’t you figured that
out yet? He’s been after it for years.”
“Tell me something real. Grayson couldn’t
make a book worth this much trouble if he used uncut sheets
of thousand-dollar bills for endpapers.”
“That’s what you think. Forget what you
thought you knew and maybe you’ll learn something.
Your little friend in there’s got the answer, and
Pruitt’s gonna take her away from you and get it out
of her if he’s got to tear out her
fingernails.”
“Say something that makes sense. Pruitt had her
and you two handed her to me. Now he’s ready to kill
me to get her back?”
He started to say something but a click in the hall
brought him up short. We both tensed. I gripped the gun
under my coat.
The door swung in and Eleanor peeped into the hall.
She didn’t say anything. She was looking past me,
at Slater, and he was looking at her. Her face was ashen,
her eyes wide with fright.
“Eleanor,” I said, “go back in the
room and sit down.”
She backed away and closed the door.
“She knows you,” I said to Slater.
“She recognized you just then.”
He tried to move past me. I stepped out and blocked his
way.
“What do you want from me, Janeway? I’m
doing you a favor here, maybe you should remember that. I
didn’t have to tell you anything.”
“You haven’t told me anything yet. Pick up
where you left off. Make it make sense.”
“Goddammit, I’m hurting, I need to lie
down.”
“Talk to me. Give me the short version, then you
can lie down.”
He grimaced and held his side. But I wasn’t going
to let him pass until he told me what I wanted to know.
“Me and Pruitt grew up together. Southside
Chicago, early fifties. You want my life story?”
“The short version, Slater. We haven’t got
all night here, I’ve got a plane to catch.”
They were kids together, birds of a feather. Nobody
could stand either of them, I thought, so they hung
together.
“He called me for a few favors when I was a cop.
We’d have a beer or two whenever he passed through
Denver. Four years ago, on one of his trips through, he
told me about this book.”
He coughed. “He’d been chasing it for a long
time even then. He was trying to track down a woman he was
sure had taken it, but he never could find her. He’d
run every lead up a blind alley.”
“What’s the big attraction?”
“Pruitt knows where he can sell it. For more money
than any of us ever saw.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Then fuck you. Do you want to hear this or
not?…I can’t stand up in this hall forever.
I’ll tell you this, he convinced the hell out of me.
That night I wrote out the stuff he told me on that paper
you read, but nothing ever came of it…until last
month. Then I get a call from Seattle and it’s
Pruitt. It’s all hitting the fan over this book
he’s after. There’s a woman named Rigby in the
Taos jail and Pruitt thinks she’s got it.”
“Why didn’t he go down himself?”
“Later on he did: he had some Seattle angles to
work out first. He thought the girl’s parents might
know about it, might even know where she’d hidden it;
maybe she’d even mailed it to ‘em. So he sent
me to Taos to nose around, see what was what. I’d
barely got there when she came up for bail. Pruitt came in
the next day.”
“And did what?”
“Made her wish she’d never been born. That
was just the beginning of what he had up his sleeve for
her. The book’s been like a monkey on his back, I
could see it driving him closer to the edge every day. I
started thinking he might even kill her for it. But she
wouldn’t give it up.”
“Probably because she didn’t have
it.”
“But she went back to get it, didn’t
she?”
“She went back for something. Weren’t you
boys on her tail?”
“You’re not gonna believe this, Janeway. She
slipped us.”
I just stared at him.
“She’s cute, all right, a little too cute
for her own damn good. The next thing we knew she’d
skipped the state. Pruitt went nuclear.”
“This must be when you got the bright idea of
dragging me into it.”
“Our time was running out. She could be picked up
by the cops anywhere and we’d be up the creek. Pruitt
thought she’d head for Seattle: he put out some
people he knew to watch her haunts. And it didn’t
take long to spot her: she turned up in North Bend a few
days later. I didn’t know what to do. I sure
didn’t want to let it go. Pruitt had promised me a
piece of it, if I helped him reel it in. I’m talking
about more money than you’ll believe, so don’t
even ask.”
“I thought money didn’t matter to you,
Clydell. What about the radio job? What about
Denver
magazine?“
“All bullshit. I owe more federal income tax than
I’ve got coming in. I do a weekend gig on radio, not
enough to pay my water bill. The magazine piece’ll be
lining birdcages before the ink’s even dry. Business
sucks; I’m almost broke. What more do you need to
know? And besides all that, I really was afraid of what
he’d do to that kid.”
He took a long, painful breath. “So if
you’re looking for a good guy in this, it’s
probably me. That same night I told Pruitt about you. I
thought I could tempt you with the bail money, it was easy
to get the papers from the bondsman; hell, he doesn’t
care who brings her in. But the bail was just bait. I knew
you’d never bust Rigby for that bail money, not once
you had that book in your mind.”
He touched his face. “I really thought you might
get the book from her. You might have, too, if the cops
hadn’t busted her and messed everything up. I sold
you to Pruitt as a bookhunter. He didn’t like it but
I talked hard and late that night he decided to try
it.”
“And that’s what finally got your face
kicked in. Pruitt didn’t like the way it turned
out.”
“I had to try something. She knows us both on
sight, and Pruitt’s her worst nightmare. She’s
right to be scared of him: he’s over the edge now.
He’s your problem, you and that poor kid in there.
Me, I’m out of it, I’ve had enough. I’m
goin‘ back to Denver.”
He pushed his way past. Stopped at his door; looked back
at me. “I’ll give you two free pieces of
advice. Pruitt didn’t get to be called the invisible
man for nothing. He can fade into a crowd and you
can’t see him even when you know he’s there.
He’s great with makeup—wigs, beards,
glasses—he can make himself over while you’re
scratching your ass wonder-ing where he went. And
he’s always got people around him, scumbags who owe
him favors. One of’em’s a fat man, but there
may be others. Don’t trust anybody. Don’t let
‘em get close and sucker punch you.”
He opened his door. “You didn’t hear any of
this from me, okay? I’ll figure out my own ways of
paying Pruitt back, and I don’t want him sticking a
knife in my ass before I’ve got it worked out. So
here’s your second hot tip. Pruitt fucked up your
car. If you’re counting on that to get you to the
airport, think again.”
He looked at his watch. “You cut it pretty short,
old buddy. You got one hour to get her there. Stay clear of
old ladies and fat men, Janeway. If you ever get back to
Denver, call me, we’ll have lunch. Maybe I’ll
have a job for you.”