JOHN DUNNING
THE CRAVEN
A Tragic Tale of a God’s Downfall
Told in Verse by Richard Grayson,
A Witness
I took it all and went back to Aandahl’s and read
it. I read it many times. I was reading it again at
midnight when Trish came home.
S
he had returned almost a full day early. There was a click
and the dogs swarmed her at the front door.
She looked at me across the room, as if she hadn’t
expected me to be there and didn’t know whether to be
disappointed or relieved. “You’ve
changed,” she said, and I gave her an old man’s
grin. She threw her raincoat over a wicker basket, came
slowly around the couch, and sat facing me with an almost
schoolmarm-ish primness.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she
said. “Been running it through my head all the way
home from Albuquerque, trying to figure out what I ought to
do.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“I’m in it now.”
“I thought you always were.”
“It’s different now. I’m in it with
you.”
This was happy news. I felt a warm glow at the sound of
it.
She said, “Whatever happens, we go
together.”
We didn’t need to hash out the ground rules. When
you connect with someone, things like that are understood.
Suddenly we were like police partners, comparing notes,
poring over evidence. There was a lot to be done, and the
first commandment was the test of fire. You never hold out
on your partner.
We ate a late supper and talked into the morning. For
the first time in a long time I broke bread with a
good-looking woman without thinking of Rita.
S
he had covered a lot of ground in two days. She had flown
out of Sea-Tac at nine-forty Pacific time on Saturday
night. Her destination was St. Louis, where she arrived in
light snow at two-twelve in the morning. She had a room
reserved, but her old companion, insomnia, was along for
the ride. She filled the dead time reading. At nine a.m.
she was in the homicide room downtown, looking at
photographs and evidence from an old murder case. Stuff
that was once under tight wraps was shared with her, off
the record, by the man on duty Sunday morning. It had been
a long time, years, since anything exciting had been added
to the file, and they didn’t have much hope of
cracking it now. She had flown two thousand miles and that
impressed them. She had observed the proper protocol,
speaking first by telephone with the chief, and they let
her see the file.
The victim was Joseph Hockman, fifty-two, a bachelor.
She looked at the pictures, including the close-ups. It
didn’t bother her: she had been a reporter for a long
time and had seen it all many times.
The victim lay in a pool of blood in a library room.
Pictures had been taken from every angle, so she could see
the shelving and the arrangement of books on all four
walls. The black and whites were vivid and sharp, clear
enough that the titles could be read and the jacket formats
identified. Her eyes traveled along one row and she saw
some famous old books.
All the King’s Men.
Elmer Gantry.
Miss Lonelyhearts.
Manhattan Transfer
…
She began to make notes. Mr. Joseph Hockman collected
so-called serious fiction—no mysteries, no fantasy,
nothing that smacked of genre. He liked his literature
straight, no sugar, no cream. He did have a weak spot for
fine limiteds: a shot over the body toward the window wall
showed a good-sized section of books in slipcases. She
asked for a magnifying glass, and the detective,
fascinated, got her one from a desk drawer.
Grapes of Wrath
in two volumes.
Anthony Adverse
in three…
“Looks like Limited Editions Club,” she
said.
The detective said, “Oh,” the way people do
when they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Near the end of the shelf was a gap where some books had
been taken out but not returned.
“Looks like there’s fifteen or twenty books
missing here,” she said.
The detective, who had been reading the reports from the
original investigating officers, said, “There was
some discussion at the time about the possibility of theft
being the motive. They thought that was pretty weak,
though. Who’d kill a man that way just to steal a
bunch of books?”
“Any indication in the file whether the books ever
turned up?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Or what they were?”
“Nope. One of the officers pursued that thought as
far as he could take it, but the guy didn’t keep
records like that. He kept it all up here.” He tapped
his head.
“Somebody took those books and the officer knew
that—that’s why he pursued it,” she said.
“Look in this shot, you can see a book on the floor,
right under that empty place in the bookshelf. When he
pulled the books out, this one came out with it. But he
didn’t bother to pick it up.”
“What does that tell you?”
“It tells me he didn’t want that book, just
the ones that filled about this much shelf space.”
She held up her hands about two feet apart. “He
didn’t care about any of the others.”
She went book by book with the glass. Some of the titles
were unreadable, but there wasn’t a Grayson book that
could be identified as such anywhere in the room.
“That’s funny,” she said. “I
heard this guy had all the Grayson books.”
The detective said, “Oh,” again, as if he
hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he cared enough
to ask her who Grayson was. “They tossed the book
angle back and forth but it didn’t excite them much.
The feeling was, yeah, the perp might’ve taken a few
books, but that wasn’t the prime motive.”
“But they never found a motive.”
“Early in the investigation, the feeling was it
might’ve been personal.”
“Did Mr. Hockman have any enemies?”
“Looks like he’d had some words with people.
He was becoming a crusty old bastard. But, no, they never
got anything they could pin on anybody.”
“Did their thinking change later?”
“Like it always does with crimes like this that
you can’t solve. Some nutcase.” He flipped a
page and went on reading. “Here’s something
about a book.”
She looked up.
“They interviewd a woman named Carolyn Bondy, who
did secretarial work for Hockman. Once a week she’d
come over and take dictation, do his correspondence. The
week of the murder he sent a letter to a book publisher.
He’d gotten a book with a mistake in it and it seemed
to ruin his week.”
“Really?”
“Does that interest you?”
“Yeah, you bet.”
“Too bad they didn’t take it much further
than that.”
“They didn’t ask her what the book was or
who published it?”
“It just seemed to come up in the course of
things.”
“Or what the mistake might’ve
been?”
“Just that he was annoyed. He’d been looking
forward to this book…something special, I guess.
Nobody thought it was much of a motive for murder. The
woman did say Hockman was a good deal more annoyed than he
let on in his letter. The letter he wrote was pretty soft
and that surprised her. It was almost like Hockman was
apologizing for telling the guy he’d screwed
up.”
“Anything else?”
“Just this. The reason Hockman was annoyed was
because it was the same mistake the guy had made
before.”
“Is that what she said?…The same
mistake…”
“That’s what’s in here.”
“Is there an address or phone number for this
woman—what’s her name?”
“Carolyn Bondy.” The detective read off an
address and phone number. “Doubt if she still lives
there. It’s been twenty years.”
She looked through more evidence. She picked up a clear
plastic bag that was full of ashes.
“I’ll have to ask you not to open
that,” the detective said. “I mean, we do want
to cooperate, but, uh…”
“Hey, I appreciate anything you can do. May I just
move it around a little?”
“I don’t guess that’ll hurt
anything.”
She took the bag with both hands and made a rotating
motion like a miner panning gold. Slowly a fragment of
white paper rose through the charred silt on the top.
She peered through the filmy plastic and saw two
letters.
“Look at this…looks like a capital
F
…and a small r…part of the same
word.”
The detective leaned over her shoulder.
She looked up in his face. “Are you in the mood to
do me a huge favor?”
“I won’t kill ya for asking.”
“Is that a Xerox machine over
there?…”
She called Wilbur Simon, an assistant managing editor at
the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. As a young reporter from Miami, she had won a National
Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a year of study
and meditation at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Simon had been one of her teachers. They had had good
rapport and he had pursued her for his own paper ever
since.
She sat in the empty newsroom on Sunday afternoon,
reading the clip file on the Hockman case. She and Simon
had coffee in a diner not far away and talked about old
times, the rain in Seattle, and the Hockman case. Simon had
vivid recollections of Hockman. He had been the
paper’s news editor then and had done the layout on
the first-day story and on most of the follow pieces. It
stuck in his mind as the beginning of the crazy age. He had
said as much in a diary he had kept then and had dug out
and reviewed just after she had called him this morning. He
had written about life and work and his personal evolving
philosophy. The thing about Hockman was, you never thought
much about random killers before then and you were always
aware of them since. Suddenly you couldn’t pick up
hitchhikers without taking your life in your hands. The day
of the serial killer had come.
“I don’t think this was a serial killer,
Wilbur,” she said.
At least not the kind of serial killer people meant when
they used the term, she thought.
They parted with a hug and Simon offered her a job. She
smiled and said she was flattered, but it would take more
than rain to get her to give up Seattle for St. Louis.
She looked up Carolyn Bondy in the telephone book. There
was a George Bondy at that address. The man who answered
said Carolyn Bondy, his mother, had died just last
month.
She ate dinner alone in the city and caught a
ten-o’clock flight to Albuquerque.
She slept on the plane, just enough to keep her awake
the rest of the night. A rental car got her into Taos at
three o’clock in the morning, mountain time, thankful
that she had reserved a room and secured it with a credit
card. She had made photocopies of the
Post-Dispatch
clips, but it was that single sheet from homicide with the
shadowy image of the two con-nected letters shot through
plastic that she looked at now as she faced the new day.
She had done her homework: she knew that Charlie and
Jonelle Jeffords lived in the hills fifteen miles from
town. She had studied the maps and knew where to drive with
only occasional stops to refresh her memory. She bumped off
the highway and clattered along a washboard road, leaving a
plume of dust in her wake. The road twisted up a ridge and
skirted a valley. She saw patches of snow in the high
country as the road U-turned and dipped back into the
hills. There were washouts along the way, but each had been
repaired and the drive was easy. She reached the gate at
nine o’clock. A sign nailed to a post said
keep out
, and she thought that hospitality at Rancho Jeffords was
like the weather, chilly with a chance of sudden clouds.
She slipped the rope loop off the gate and drove in. The
house was a hundred yards away, shaded by trees and hidden
from the road by hilly terrain. It was a splitlevel
mountain home with a deck that faced west. There was no
sign of life. She pulled into the yard and decided to go
ahead with caution, remembering the inclination of the
cheerful Mr. Jeffords to greet trespassers with the
business end of a gun.
She walked out in the yard and stood in the sun.
Called out to whoever might hear.
“Hello!…Is anybody here?”
The hills soaked up her voice.
She tried again but got nothing for it.
She went up the walk and knocked on the door. There
wasn’t a sound inside.
It had been a gamble coming here without an appointment,
but she knew that when she booked the flight. She walked
along a flagstone path to the edge of the house. The path
led around to a garage, whose side door beckoned her
on.
She knocked on the door. “Anybody in
there?”
No one.
She touched the door and it swung open.
A workroom, long ago surrendered as the place for
cars.
There was clutter, but also a staleness in the air. It
was a shop set up for a working man but unused for some
time now. The walls gave off a feeling of dry rot and
musk.
She saw some equipment she recognized and it drew her
into the room. A heavy iron bookpress had been set up on
the edge of the bench. A much older bookpress, made of
wood, stood on a table behind it.
The tools of a bookbinder.
As she came deeper into the room, her impression of
disuse deepened. The place was deep in dust and heavily
cobwebbed. The chair at the bench was ringed with
spiderwebs.
She was nervous now but she came all the way in, wanting
to see it all with a quick look. Again she observed the
bookbinder’s tools: the rawhide hammer lying on the
floor where he’d dropped it long ago, covered with
dust; a steel hammer at the edge of the bench, a few feet
from the bookpress; balls of wax thread; needles; paper.
There was lots of paper, fine marbled stock for endsheets,
standard stock for the pages, colored papers and white
sheets and some with a light creamy peach tone. Against the
wall was a paper rack. And there were leathers, very fine
under the dust, and edging tools that looked like cookie
cutters and were used, she knew, for laying in the gilt on
a gold-trimmed leather book. There was a hot plate to heat
the edging tool on, and behind the hot plate was a row of
nasty-looking gluepots. She opened one and smelled PVA, the
bookbinder’s glue. A newspaper, open on the table,
was a year old.
She went outside and closed the door. The wind whistled
down from the hills. She walked back to her car, opened the
door, and sat with her feet dangling out, hoping
they’d come home soon.
An hour passed and the sun grew hot. The arroyo baked
under the glare of it and the chill melted away. Slowly she
became aware of a creepy sensation, like the feeling you
get driving on the freeway when the man in the next car
stares at you as he comes past.
She looked at the house and saw curtains flutter
upstairs. This might be nothing more than the temperature
control blowing air up the window, but her sense of
apprehension grew as she looked at it.
She wanted to leave but she couldn’t. She had come
a long way, and though the chance of failure had always
been strong, she had never failed at anything by
default.
The curtain moved again. No heating flue did that, she
thought.
She got out and walked across the yard. She went up the
path to the door and gave it another loud knock.
There was a bump somewhere. Her unease was now
acute.
She circled the house. Out back was a smaller deck with
steps leading up to a door. She went up and knocked.
Through a filmy curtain she saw movement, as if someone had
crossed from one room to another.
“Hey, people,” she called. “I’ve
come a long way to talk to you. Why don’t we hear
each other out?”
Nothing.
Not a sound now, but the presence behind the door was as
tangible as the purse slung over her shoulder. She had a
vision of something sexless and faceless, holding its
breath waiting for her to leave.
“It’s about the Rigby girl and the burglary
you had here.”
She could feel her voice soaking through the old wood
around the window sash. There wasn’t a chance of them
not hearing her.
“It’s about Darryl and Richard Grayson, and
the book Grayson was working on when he died.”
Even the house seemed to sigh. But the moment passed and
nothing happened, and in a while she wondered if the sound
had been in her mind.
“It’s about the Graysons and their
friends…you and the Rigbys.” She took a breath
and added, “And Nola Jean Ryder.”
As if she’d said a magic word, the door clicked
and swung inward. Someone…a man, she
thought…looked through a narrow crack.
“Mr. Jeffords?…Is that you?…I
can’t see you very well.”
“Who are you?”
It was the same voice she had heard on the telephone
recording—the same only different. The recording had
rippled with macho arrogance: this man sounded tired and
old and shaky.
“What do you want here?”
“I came down from Seattle to talk to you.
I’m a reporter for the
Seattle Times
.”
She told him her name, but he seemed not to hear.
Technically, ethically, it didn’t matter. The rules
only demanded that she give him fair warning. He was
talking to a reporter and they were now on the record. She
could use him if he said anything worth using.
But she had never played the game that way.
“I’m a reporter, Mr. Jeffords.” It still
meant nothing to him. He heard but did not hear. He
listened but his mind heard only words and blipped out
meanings. She had done too many interviews with people like
him, private souls who suddenly found themselves newsworthy
without understanding how or why it had happened. They were
always appalled when they opened their newspapers the next
morning and learned what they had said.
“Trish Aandahl,
Seattle Times
,” she said, loud and clear.
She still couldn’t see him. He stood just beyond
the doorway, a shadow filling up the crack, his face
reduced to an eye, a cheek, part of a nose.
“D’you think it would be possible for me to
come in and talk to you for just a minute? I promise I
won’t take up much of your time.”
He didn’t seem to hear that either. He leaned
closer to the door and in a voice barely louder than a
whisper said, “Did you say something about Nola
Jean?”
This was the key to him, the only reason he had opened
his door to her. Blow this and you lose him, she
thought.
“We can talk about Nola,” she said as if
she’d known the woman all her life.
He opened the door wide and let her in.