I
reread the last chapter, which told of the fire. The facts
rolled out like an epilogue. On the night of October 14,
1969, the shop had caught fire and gone up like a torch. A
fire investigator had come out from Seattle, poking through
the ashes for days before calling it, officially, an
accident. But I knew from my own experience that these
things are often vague. At least one hundred thousand fires
a year are written off to unknown causes, Aandahl pointed
out, and the presumption in law is that these are
accidents. Arson must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt:
a fireman’s suspicion, however strong, doesn’t
cut it. An old-fashioned printshop like Grayson’s was
a firebomb waiting to go off.
In the first place, there is paper everywhere. There are
rags, often soaked with solvents or ink. The printer must
work with fine papers and keep them in pristine condition,
but he also works with ink, which gets on his hands, under
his fingernails, and on his tools. Everything must be
washed, many times a day. A working printer might go
through 150 gallons of solvents a year. Kerosene was the
stuff of choice for many shops. Grayson liked gasoline
because it was harder and faster. He kept it in a
fifty-gallon drum behind the shop. The drum sat upright in
a wooden frame, with a spigot at the bottom where the
squirt guns could be filled.
The fire broke out in the main part of the shop—
the fire investigator was able to figure that out by the
pattern of the wood charring. It had quickly consumed that
room, spread up to the loft, then to the little storeroom
in back. By the time it was seen from the road, flames had
broken through the ceiling and back wall. The gas drum
caught on fire and exploded, sending a fireball a hundred
feet in the air. The remains of Richard Grayson were found
in the shop: he had been drinking and had apparently passed
out in a chair. His brother was in the back room. He too
was drunk, and the fireman theorized that he had gone back
to lie down on a cot that was kept there for just that
purpose, when he’d had too much booze to walk himself
back up the dark path to the main house.
Gaston Rigby had gone to town. It was for him a rare
night out. He had taken his girl, Crystal, to dinner in
Seattle and arrived home at midnight to find his world in
ruins.
I was standing at the door when the library opened. It
didn’t take long to dope out Rodney Scofield. I
looked through periodical and newspaper indexes, and in
half an hour I had come up with all the applicable
buzzwords.
Oilman…manufacturer…eccentric…
Billionaire, with a
b
.
Recluse. Twenty years ago, when Scofield was in his late
forties, he had taken a page from Howard Hughes and
disappeared from the public eye. He had been written about
but seldom seen since 1970. His business deals were
conducted and closed by the battalion of toadies and grunts
who worked for him. Nowhere in the general press was his
hobby, books, given a line.
I went to
AB/Bookman’s Weekly
, which publishes its own yearly index.
I found nothing on Scofield, but Leith Kenney was
prominent in the magazine’s index of advertisers. He
had been a bookseller, with a store in San Francisco.
He had been a notable bookseller, with membership in the
Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. This is not
an easy group for flakes and fly-by-nights to get into.
They nose around in your credit, they check your bank
references and take a long look at your stock before
admitting you to the club. People who bounce checks and
cheat little old ladies get a quick brush-off from
ABAA.
Kenney was a past president. His field was fine-press
books.
But he had not run an ad in the magazine since 1986. I
found out why in that year’s December issue, in a
news column headlined “Kenney to Close S.F.
Bookstore.” No, he laughed, he was not going broke.
He had been offered a job that was simply too lucrative and
challenging to pass up. He was going to create a
world-class library on the career of Darryl Grayson. He
would be looking for anything that pertained to the
man’s life or work—ephemera, photographs,
correspondence, business records, and, of course, the
books, in any quantity. Multiple copies were eagerly
sought. The work of Richard Grayson was also of interest,
Kenney said, but it was clear from the tone that he was
considered an association figure. As far as posterity was
concerned, there was only one Grayson.
I didn’t want to park in the Hilton garage: my
rust bucket was a little too prominent for a class hotel
like that. I put on my raincoat and carried my bag, leaving
the car parked on the street.
I rode up the elevator to the lobby on the ninth floor.
Paid cash for two nights and told them I might be longer. I
asked for a quiet room on a high floor, where I could see
the city.
The clerk had rooms on fifteen, seventeen, and
twenty.
Seventeen would be fine, I said. I was given a key to
1715.
I rode the elevator up and walked along the hall. The
door to my old room was open. I walked past and looked
in.
Two men were there, going through the wastebas-ket. The
big one with the pale olive skin stood up and turned as I
came by. I turned as he did, letting him see the back of my
tired gray head.
I opened the door and went into my new room.
Couldn’t help gloating just a little as my door
clicked shut.
Score one for old dad in the game of guts football.
Up yours, supercop.
I
sat on the bed and called Leith Kenney in Los Angeles. This
time I had no trouble getting through to him.
He had had a dozen hours to think about it and decide
how he wanted to handle it. He gave me the direct frontal
approach, which I liked. We were two bookmen talking the
same language, even if only one of us knew it.
If the material was genuine, he wanted it. If there were
questions of ownership or provenance, he would still pay
top money for possession and would hash out the legality
when the thing went to court. This to him was a foregone
conclusion. We were talking about a substantial sum of
money, and people tend to bicker when money arises. At the
same time, Kenney had no doubt where
The Raven
would end up, where it
should
end up. He was prepared to top any offer, many times over.
He was prepared to fly to Seattle at a moment’s
notice or fly me to Los Angeles in Scofield’s private
jet. He was prepared for just about anything.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said.
“If you’ve got something you even
think
might be the genuine article, we want to see it and
we’ll pay you for that privilege no matter how it
turns out. We’ve been looking for this item for a
very long time.”
“That’s pretty good, for a book the
bibliographer swears was never made.”
“We know it was made. Mr. Scofield has seen it.
He’s held it in his hands. Maybe Allan Huggins
wouldn’t be quite so smug if he had done
that.”
Before I could ask, he said, “It was a long time
ago, and that’s all I want to say about it until I
know more about you. You’ve got to appreciate my
position, sir. I don’t even know your name. Mr.
Scofield may be the only man alive who has actually touched
this book, and we don’t want to be put in the
position of giving away what we know about it.”
That was fair enough. I didn’t like it, but I had
to live with it.
“Remember one thing,” Kenney said. “If
you do turn it up, people like Huggins will be all over
you. Don’t make any deals on it without giving us a
chance to top their bids. We
will
top them, you’ll be shocked at how much. And
you’ll be doing yourself or your client a terrible
disservice if you sell it anywhere else.”
At last we were down to bedrock. The big question.
“How much money are we really talking about here,
Mr. Kenney?”
“Whatever you’d like.”
I
didn’t move for a while: just sat on the bed
listening to my inner voice. It drew my mind back across
the hall to the room where Eleanor and I had spent our last
few hours together.
Homework’s finished, said the muse. One more phone
call, maybe two, and you can hit the street.
In the room across the hall, Eleanor had mailed a
letter. Against my better judgment, I had watched her write
it and then I had let her send it off.
What was it, who got it, where had it gone?
Questions with no answers, but sometimes the muse will
give you a hint. Her nearest and dearest was one obvious
call, a risky one I’d rather not make on this
telephone. Still the letter had to be chased—if it
deadended, at least it would lead up an alley that had to
be checked anyway.
And then there was Trish, a source of growing
discontent. I seemed to have lost her in the heat of the
moment. She faded to black while I scrambled around
covering my tracks, and now, suddenly, my need to hear her
voice was urgent.
The muse played it back to me.
Call me, she said. Don’t disappear, I have some
things to tell you.
Having said that, she herself had dropped off the
earth.
So the nightwork was there. Chase the letter, track down
Aandahl.
I called her home, wherever that was, but the telephone
still played to an empty house. I tried her desk at the
paper, without much hope. At the end of three rings there
was a half-ring, indicating a shift to another line.
A recording came on, a woman’s voice.
“Hi, this’s Judy Maples, I’ll be
running interference for Trish Aandahl for a few days. If
it’s vital, you can reach me through the main
switchboard, four six four, two one one one.”
I called it. The operator wouldn’t give me a
number for Maples, but did offer to patch me through to her
at home. The phone rang in some other place.
“Hello.”
“Judy, please.”
“This is she.”
“I’m a friend of Irish.”
“Aha. What friend would you be?”
“One who’s a little worried about
her.”
“She’s fine. Something came up suddenly and
she had to go out of town.”
“When will she be back?”
“Not sure, couple of days maybe.” There was
a kind of groping pause. “Trish left a package for a
friend, if you happen to be the one.”
“What’s in it?”
“Can’t tell, it’s sealed up in a
little Jiffy bag. Do you think it’s for
you?”
“Is there a name on it?”
“Initials.”
I took a long breath. “How about C.J.?”
“You got it. Trish didn’t know if
you’d get this far or not. For the record, I have no
idea what this is about. I’m just the messenger gal.
She told me to say that. It’s true. I left your
package with the guard at the paper. If you want to go pick
it up, I’ll call him and tell him to release it to
you.”
I said okay, though nothing about it felt okay.
I walked out past my old room. The cops were gone and
the place was closed tight. I rode the elevator down, drew
my raincoat tight, pulled my hat down to my eyebrows. The
day was going fast as I went out into the timeless, endless
rain. Everything in the world was gray, black, or dark
green.
I fetched my car, went to the
Times
, and got my package.
It was a cassette tape, wrapped in a single piece of
copy paper. A cryptic four-line note was handwritten on the
paper.
If you’d like to stay at my house, consider it
yours. I have no reason to believe you’d be unsafe
there. The key’s in the flowerpot. Don’t mind
the dogs, they’re both big babies.
Trish
A postscript told her address, on Ninetieth Avenue
Southeast, Mercer Island.
I put it back in the bag and slipped it under my seat,
then moved on to the main business of the evening.
I wanted to be well out of the downtown area when I made
this call. I drove south, got off the freeway near Boeing,
and looked for a telephone. Phones are like cops:
there’s never one when you need it.
At last I stood at a little lean-in booth and made the
call. It was a hard quarter to drop.
I heard it ring three times in North Bend.
“Hello.”
“Crystal?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Janeway.”
You could eat the silence, it was that heavy. I
didn’t know how to begin, so I began by telling her
that. But she already knew.
“The police were here. They’ve been here off
and on since noon.”
Good for the cops, I thought: good for them, not so hot
for me.
I was getting nervous. It already seemed I’d been
on that telephone a long time.
“Are the police there now?”
“No. They may come back tonight.”
The funny thing was, she never once stated the obvious:
she never said, “They’re looking for you, you
know,” or anything like that. Still, she wasn’t
going to give me what I needed unless I could move her that
way.
“I’m going to ask you for something. I
wouldn’t blame you if you told me to go to hell. I
haven’t done much right so far.”
She was listening.
“I guess I’m asking you to trust me.
I’d like you to believe that everything I’ve
done, at least after that first night, I’ve done for
Eleanor.”
She punished me with silence. I endured it till I
couldn’t anymore.
“Crystal”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“I’m trying io find your
daughter.”
“I guess I knew that. And I don’t know why,
but I do believe it.”
The wall between us crumbled. Whatever she’d been
telling herself with the logical part of her brain gave way
to instinct.
“Even when we were talking to the police, I kept
thinking of you,” she said. “Kind of like an
ace in the hole.”
“That’s what I am. It may not be
much…”
“I get feelings from people. Not psychic, nothing
like that, but people hit me either warm or cold. When I
hugged your neck on the porch that first night, I felt the
warm between us. Sometimes people just connect, you know
what I mean? I could see that between you and Ellie right
from the start. It was warm, but not the kinda thing a
mother needs to worry about…except maybe on her
side.”
She gave a little laugh. “That’s why I never
really gave up on it, even when it came out why you were
really here.”
“I’m going to find her if I can. I
don’t know how and I’m starting pretty far
back. I need your help.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Are the cops taping this call?”
“They talked about doing that. There was some
doubt about whether it’d be productive. Just a
minute.” She put the phone down and blew her nose.
Then she said, “They’re not exactly expecting a
ransom demand.”
“When will you know?”
“They may come back tonight and put it on. Or they
may not.”
“If they do and I call back, could you let me
know?”
“How?”
“Clear your throat when you answer the phone.
I’ll try to find a way to let you know if I’ve
got anything new.”
“Or you could call Archie. He wants what we all
want.” “A couple of questions. Do you know a
guy named Pruitt?“
“He’s the one the cops are looking for. They
think he took Ellie with him.”
“Had you ever had any contact or dealing with
Pruitt before this came up?”
She paused as if groping for words. “I knew who he
was.”
“Tell me about it.”
“A crazy man. He seemed to think we had
something…”
“A book.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he was talking
about. He wouldn’t go away, though, wouldn’t
leave me alone. I’d go to town and see him watching
from a car. Then he started bothering us on the telephone.
At night he’d call, play music. Just a few notes, but
we knew it was him.”
“He was stalking Eleanor too.”
She expelled a shivery breath.
“Listen, did you get a letter from Eleanor in
yesterday’s mail? It would’ve probably been on
Hilton Hotel stationery.”
“It never came here.”
“It may come tomorrow. What time is your mail
delivered?”
“Whenever he gets here. Early afternoon as often
as any.”
“I’ll try to call then.”
“What’s in the letter?”
“That’s what I need to find out. It might be
her laundry bill. For our purposes, think of it as some
dark secret she’d rather not tell the world. Is there
anybody else she might send something like that
to?”
“Amy Harper,” she said immediately.
“Nobody but Amy.”
I remembered the name. “Eleanor mentioned her
once. Said she’d gone to see Amy but Amy wasn’t
there.”
“Amy moved into Seattle, I coulda told her that.
Her life out here’d turned to hell the last six
months, especially after her mom died. I worry about that
child, don’t know what’s gonna become of her.
She’s made some wrong choices in the last few years.
But really a sweet kid. She and Ellie were like sisters all
through school.”
“I seem to remember there was some kind of rift
between them.”
“They had a falling-out over Coleman Willis.
That’s the fool Amy let knock her up when she was
still at Mt. Si High. Then she made it worse: married the
fool and quit school and had a second kid the next year.
The trouble between them was simple. Ellie had no use for
Coleman Willis, couldn’t be in the same room with the
man. Amy was still trying to make it work. You can see what
happened.”
“Sure.”
“But Amy’s no fool. There came a time when
even she’d had enough of Coleman and his bullshit,
and she took her kids and left him. She and Ellie got
together once or twice after that. I really think
they’d fixed things up between ‘em, I think
they were good as new.”
“Is there a phone number for Amy?”
“God, Amy can’t afford a telephone,
she’s lucky she’s got a roof over her head.
I’ve got an address if you want it…it’s a
rooming house on Wall Street. Are you familiar with the
section they call Belltown?”
I wasn’t.
“It’s easy, right off downtown. Just a
minute, I’ll get it for you.”