All this time we’ve had the wrong motive, I was
thinking. We’ve been thinking money, but that was
never it. All the specter of money had done was cloud it.
Only after Scofield had begun to collect Grayson and the
books had become so avidly sought and eagerly paid for
did money become a credible possibility. But this case
had begun long before that.
The clock pushed ten: the breakfast rush was over.
Scofield and Kenney had been inside more than two
hours.
“They must be getting discouraged by now,”
I said.
It was on that weary note that Pruitt arrived.
H
e was the invisible man, leaving footprints in the snow.
Watch out for old ladies
, Slater had said, but you still couldn’t see him
except that he was carrying Scofield’s suitcase.
The suitcase was like the snow in that old horror film:
it lit him up, made his tracks visible so you could pop
him as he ran across the yard. It danced of its own
volition, as if the arm clutching it against the gingham
dress had vanished. He had tried to cover it with a
shawl, which was too small. I sat up straight in the
seat, so suddenly that Trish jumped up with a jerk of her
own. “What’s going on?” she said, but I
was already out of the truck, splashing after the hooded
squaw who moved between cars and headed across the muddy
yard twenty yards to our right. He looked like old Mother
Bates in
Psycho
, walking with the sure and deadly gait of a man. I fell
in behind him and we headed out toward the row of cars
parked by the road. The wind whipped at his shawl and
clutched the corners of his hood. I got a glimpse of
cheek as he half-turned and tried to look back. But he
didn’t turn far enough: he was caught in the
Satchel Paige syndrome, afraid to look, afraid to see how
much trouble followed him. If he could make it to his car
without having to look upon his enemy, he’d be home
free.
He didn’t make it.
“Pruitt,” I said, and he spun on his heel
and locked in my eyes from a distance of six feet.
His free hand slipped down into the folds of his
dress. I danced in close and grabbed him. With the other
hand I ripped away the suitcase and made him fumble it.
It popped open on the ground and the wind sucked up the
money, a fluttery gale of greenbacks that blew back
across the yard toward the cafe. He cried out and tried
to dive down and save it. I met him coming down with a
knee to the jaw, flopping him back on his ass in the
mud.
It was all fast motion and unreal after that. I stood
over him and said, “Take out that gun and
I’ll kick your head off,” but I knew that
wouldn’t stop him. He cleared the dress with a
handful of iron and I drove my shoe under his armpit. He
grabbed at the sky, fired a round in the air, and I
nailed him hard with the other foot. He withered,
twisting in agony like a deflating balloon, rolling under
the wheels with a gaffing, hissing sound. I kicked his
gun and it spun off into a puddle. I knew I had hurt him,
maybe busted his ribs, but he wasn’t finished yet.
He still had the knife, and as I dragged him out, he
rolled into me with the blade leading the way. I caught
his wrist with a wet smack. For a few seconds we strained
against each other while the point of the knife quivered
like a seismograph that couldn’t tell if an
earthquake was coming. Then I knew I had him. I saw it
first in his eyes, that chink in the hard shell that
comes to all bullyboys when they play one hand too many.
He didn’t look mean anymore. He looked small and
tired and astonished.
“Now you are going to tell me where the girl
is.” I said this with the knife at my throat but
the tide turning fast. His arm collapsed and he let the
knife fall away as if surrender could save him. I hit him
hard with my fist so he’d know better, and I hit
him again, then again, then I lost track as I battered
his face back and forth. I could hear my voice pounding
at him as well, “Where is she…where is
she,” with every punch, and after a while he
stopped saying he didn’t know. I felt Trish on my
back, heard her screaming at me to for Christ’s
sake stop it, but for that long minute stopping was just
not possible. I had slipped over the edge and become
every bad cop who ever took up a rubber hose or swung a
billy club in anger.
Trish grabbed me around the neck. I shrugged her off
and went at Pruitt again.
Then I did stop. I lunged at him one more time, a
reflex, but I pulled back without letting that last fist
fall. I looked at him, bloody and cold, and I knew he
wouldn’t be telling anybody anything for a
while.
I got up and looked around. Trish was sitting in mud
ten feet away. Bowman was standing far back, watching as
if he couldn’t quite believe what had just
happened. Farther back, people were running out of the
diner as word spread that hundred-dollar bills were
falling out of the sky.
In the babble of the crowd I heard the word
police
. I had a few minutes on the long end to do what I had to
do and get out of there.
I dragged Pruitt around the car, took out
Slater’s handcuffs, and locked him to the door
handle. I didn’t see Irish when I looked for her
again: I didn’t know where she’d gone, but
Bowman was still there. I went over to him and said,
“Gimme the truck keys, Mickey,” and he looked
at me as if I was not a guy to argue with and he gave me
the keys. I handed him the keys to the cuffs and told him
to give them to Trish.
I headed toward the cafe. The crowd at the door pushed
back and gave me a wide berth.
I heard voices as I moved through. Again the word
police
. Somebody else said they were on the way. A woman asked
what the hell was going on and a man said, “Some
crazy guy beat up an old lady in the parking
lot.”
I pushed past the waiting area and saw Scofield and
Kenney sitting at the booth in the corner. They were
looking at something on the table between them, studying
it so intently they couldn’t even hear the
commotion up front.
I walked right over and pulled up a chair. Scofield
jerked back, as startled as if I’d attacked him. He
grabbed a book off the table and put, it out of sight on
his lap. Kenney looked at me with unruffled eyes and I
jumped into the breach as if we were all old friends.
“I’m glad to see you didn’t come all
this way for nothing.”
“Do I know you?” Kenney was wary now, but
in his manner I caught a glimmer of recognition.
“That’s a good ear you’ve got.
I’m the guy you’ve been talking to on the
phone.”
He didn’t say anything. I could see he was with
me but he tried to shrug it off. This was all a moot
point: they had what they’d come for.
“Before you go flying back to Tinseltown,”
I said, “I should tell you there’s a lot more
where that came from.”
“Lots more what?”
“I don’t have time to draw you a picture.
I’m talking sixty cartons of Grayson ephemera.
I’m talking notes, diaries, letters, sketches,
photographs. You name it, I got it.”
Kenney took the news like a world-class poker player.
But Scofield began to tremble.
“And, oh, yeah,” I said as an
afterthought: “I also happen to have picked up
Grayson’s original subscriber list along the
way…if something like that could be of any interest
to you.”
Scofield fumbled in his pocket and got out a vial of
pills. He took two with water. Kenney looked in my eyes
and said, “What do you want?”
“Right now just listen. You boys go on up to
Seattle and wait for me in your room at the Four Seasons.
I’ll either come to you or call you later today or
tonight. Don’t talk to anybody about this till I
get back to you. Are we all on the same page?”
They looked at each other.
“Yes,” Scofield said in a thin voice.
“We’ll be there.”
I got up and left them, pushing my way through the
crowd. Outside, the yard looked like a convention of
lunatics. People ran back and forth, crawled under cars
in the mud, screamed at each other. Two fistfights were
in progress off to the side, and in the distance I heard
a siren.
I didn’t see Bowman or Trish and didn’t
have time to look. I got in the truck and drove away.
I was well up the highway when I realized that
something was clinging to my windshield. It was a crisp
C-note. Franklin flapped madly against the glass as I
banked north into 1-5. I didn’t stop even for him.
In a while he lost his hold and blew away.
I
was waiting at a table in the Hilton coffee shop when
Huggins came in. He glanced around nervously, scanning
the room twice before he saw me. A flash of annoyance
crossed his face, but he chased it away and put on a
passive mask in its place. I didn’t move except to
raise my eyes slightly as he crossed the room in my
direction.
“Mr. Hodges,” he said, sitting down.
“My name isn’t Hodges, it’s Cliff
Janeway. I’m a book dealer from Denver.”
If this surprised him, he didn’t show it. His
eyes had found the bait that had lured him here, that
charred paper chip that had been haunting his dreams
since Saturday night. I had put it out on the table, on
top of the sheet Trish had brought back from St.
Louis.
He leaned over the table and looked at it. “May
I?”
“Carefully.”
He picked up the fragment and again gave it the long,
hard look through the eyepiece. His breath flared out
through his nostrils as he looked. When at last he put
the paper down, his eyes looked tired, as if he’d
just gone halfway round the world.
“What do you think?”
He grunted. “It’s hard to say.”
“Come on, Mr. Huggins, let’s not play
around. The day is going fast and I’ve got lots to
do.”
“I’m not sure what you want from
me.”
“Let’s start with this.” I shoved
the paper from St. Louis across the table and under his
nose. “That look like the same alphabet to
you?”
It pained him to look: you could see it in his eyes,
the sure knowledge that he had something here but
he’d never be able to keep it.
“Mr. Huggins?”
“Yes…I guess I’d have to say it
probably is.”
We looked at each other.
“So,” he said: “now you can go tell
Scofield and that’ll be that.”
I was finding it hard to argue with him. A part of me
knew where he was coming from and sympathized with his
viewpoint. As a bookman I was offended at the prospect of
Scofield buying up every remaining scrap of
Grayson’s work. But I had Amy Harper to consider.
This stuff was her future.
Suddenly Huggins was talking, one of his now-familiar
monologues. But the tone was different: his voice had
taken on the soft weariness of the defeated.
“Twenty years ago, Grayson was an incredibly
fertile field for a collector. He had just died and his
books could still be had at almost every auction of
fine-press items. I built my own collection piece by
piece, scrap by scrap. It was so satisfying. You carve
out your expertise, you shape and define it, and because
of your scholarship others come into it and find the same
pleasures and satisfactions you have. But you remain the
leader, the first one they think of when they’ve
taken it as far as they want to go with it and
they’re ready to sell. Then a man like Scofield
comes along and everything changes.”
He sipped his water and gave me a hard look. “I
haven’t been able to buy anything now for more than
seven years. Only isolated pieces here and there, things
that fall into my lap. You can forget the auction
houses…Scofield’s man is always there,
always. And you can’t outbid him, you’d have
to be Ross Perot…I don’t know, maybe
it’s time I donated what I’ve got to a
library and got out of the Grayson business. The trouble
is, I don’t know what else there is in life.
I’ve never known anything that can give me the
thrill of finding a Grayson variant…the thought of
not having that is almost more than I can bear. Now, with
my wife gone, the notion of clearing out my Grayson room
and giving it all away…and yet, I’ve always
been a practical man. When something’s over,
it’s over.”
“You could try taking pleasure in what you
have.”
He gave me a bitter smile. “I think you know
better than that. The thrill is in the hunt,
sir.”
“Of course it is. And I wish I could help
you.”
“But in the end you’re just what I feared
most…Scofield’s man.”
“Not quite that. I wasn’t lying to you, I
didn’t know who Scofield was.”
“But you do now, and that’s where
you’ll go. I don’t blame you, understand, but
I can’t help fretting over it and wishing money
didn’t rule the world.”
We seemed to be finished. Then he said, “How did
you find it? Was it Otto Murdock?”
I sat up straight. “What about
Murdock?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.
Obviously you know the name.”
“How does he figure into it?”
“The same way everyone else does. He’s
been chasing it.”
“You mean the Grayson
Raven
?”
“That, or anything else that’ll keep him
in potato water for the rest of his life.”
“I understand he was a pretty good Grayson man
once.”
“Second only to yours truly,” he said with
a sad little smile. “Otto really had the bug,
fifteen, twenty years ago.”
“And had a helluva collection to prove it,
I’ve been led to believe.”
“Until he started selling it off piece by bloody
piece to pay the whiskey man.”
“Where’d he sell it?”
He gave a little laugh. “That shouldn’t be
hard to guess.”
“You bought it.”
“As much of it as I could. Otto was going
through periods of trying to straighten himself out. Then
he’d fall off the wagon and have to sell something.
He sold all the minor stuff first. Then, just about the
time he was getting to the gold-star items, along came
Scofield with all the money in the world to buy them from
him. I was like a duck shot right out of the water.
Scofield paid him fifteen thousand dollars for a Ben-ton
Christmas Carol
that wouldn’t get fifteen hundred at auction. How
do you compete with somebody like that?”
I let a couple of heartbeats pass, then I said,
“Have you seen Murdock recently?”
“Hadn’t seen him for years, till about a
month ago.”
“What happened then?”
“He called me up one night and asked if I could
get some money together.”
“Was he trying to sell you something?”
“That’s what it sounded like. I never
could get him to be specific. All he’d say was that
he was working on the Grayson deal of a lifetime. Stuff
he’d known about for years but had never been able
to get at it. Whoever owned it was unapproachable. But
that person had died and now somebody else had come into
it, somebody who didn’t know as much or care as
much about it. He needed some money to approach her
with.”
“How much money?”
“He wasn’t sure. He had seen this person
once and he couldn’t tell if she was as naive as
she seemed or was just taking him for a ride. My
impression was, she wasn’t a heavyweight, but you
only get one shot at something like that. Misjudge her
and you lose it. Pay too little, lose it. Pay too much,
you still lose it. What he asked for was five
thousand.”
“He was going to try to steal it.”
“I figured as much. If he was going to pay five,
it had to be worth fifty. God knows what a madman like
Scofield would pay.”
“Why wouldn’t Murdock go to Scofield for
the money in the first place?”
“Who knows what Otto was thinking? If this
really was a once-in-a-lifetime Grayson score,
you’d want to try to buy it yourself and
then
sell it to Scofield. That’s how I’d do it, if
I was Otto and had a little larceny in my
heart.”
“So when he came to you for the five,
what’d you tell him?”
“What do you think I told him? I said I’d
need to know exactly what I’d be getting for my
money. You don’t just hand over five thousand
dollars to a man who’s fully capable of drinking it
up in a lost weekend.”
Now he wavered. “I made a mistake. I can see it
in your face.”
“You both did. He could’ve bought it all
for a hundred dollars. She might’ve given it to him
just for hauling it out of there.”
He looked ready to cry. He didn’t want to ask,
didn’t dare ask, but in the end he had to.
“What the hell are we talking about?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“No,” he said dryly. “I probably
don’t.”
“So Murdock came and went. Was that the last
time you saw him?”
“Saw him, yes.”
“But you heard from him again.”
“He called me about ten days ago. He had been
drinking, I could tell that immediately. He was
babbling.”
“About what?”
“He was raving about some limited series of
Grayson books that I had missed in my bibliography. He
seemed to think Grayson had made a special set, just a
few copies of each title, at least since the
midfifties.”
“What did you tell him?”
“To find a good hangover cure and go to
bed.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“They’re all dead. That’s what he
said, they’re all dead, all five of
‘em.”
“What did you make of that?”
“Nothing. He was hallucinating.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“Just about. He rambled on for a while longer.
Talked about getting himself together, becoming a real
bookman again. Said he was going to write the real story
of Darryl Grayson: said it had never been told but he was
going to tell it, and when he did, the book world would
sit up and take notice. It was all drunken
balderdash.”
He looked weary, suddenly older. “If you want to
chase down a drunk’s pink elephants, be my guest.
Archie Moon and the Rigbys might know something. Otto
said he’d gone out to North Bend and talked to them
about it.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t take any
more.”
He was ready to leave now. As he pushed back his
chair, I said, “By the way, did you know Murdock
was dead?”
He blinked once and said, “No, I didn’t
know that.”
“I’m sure it’s been on the news by
now.”
“I don’t read newspapers and I never watch
anything but network news on television. I can’t
stand these local fools.”
“Anyway, he’s dead.”
“How?…What happened?”
“Murder.”
He blinked again. “What the hell’s
happening here?”
“Good question, Mr. Huggins. I don’t know,
but I’m gonna find out.”