The Sign of the Book (19 page)

“You opened the windows?”

“Yes, just long enough to get the smell of kerosene out of there.”

“And that would be the last time that fireplace has been touched or looked at.”

“Yes, but I'm sure there couldn't be anything left.”

“And there'd be nothing else in there that could hurt your case.”

“No, how could there be?”

“Be very sure of that. The DA will probably have to be in on the discovery if we find anything. So if there's anything else in that grate…”

There was nothing, she said again.

After the arraignment we called Erin from Parley's house. Now we had a trial date: it would start in the last week of January. “Okay,” Erin said, “let's go look in the fireplace tomorrow. And she'd better be telling us the truth.”

The next morning Parley and I went up to the house and checked the grate in the back room. Parley stood back while I prodded gently among the ashes. “There's something,” he said, and I held it up with the poker: a significant piece of plaid shirt that had separated and dropped behind the grate. It had been hidden for weeks under the ash and had been thoroughly soaked, presumably in the victim's blood. We also found a photograph of Jerry wearing that shirt, framed on the mantel in the front room. It had been taken last June and still had the photo lab markings on it, including the date.

I called Erin from the telephone in the house and told her what was there.

“Are you sure there's nothing else in that grate?”

“I can't be absolutely sure without sifting through it and disturbing everything.”

“Don't do that. Give me your best guess.”

“If there's anything there, we can't see it.”

“Don't move anything. Leave the shirt fragment right where you found it, then call the DA and have them come up and get it.”

I arrived home with a week to spare before Burbank. I spent a day on a grand tour of my own turf. I hit every bookstore in Denver: I talked to people and no one had ever sold the Preacher a book or seen him in action. That night I took Erin out to eat and caught her up on everything that had happened. She had won her trial and was heading into another next week. After that she had a clear schedule and had already given notice that she would be out of town for a while. Her best estimate for joining us full-time was early December.

I caught up on business—researching and pricing books, returning overdue phone calls, paying bills, giving my employee some time off. On Monday I went out to Social Services to see what I could learn about the kids. I finally spoke to a woman in her fifties who knew about the case. She had a fairly complete report, including my own role in getting the kids away from the Marshalls. The nameplate on her desk said Rosemary Brenner.

“I can't tell you much of anything you don't already know,” she said. “The two young ones are in foster care here. They are in a good home and are doing well. The older boy is also here in Denver.”

“That sounds like they've been separated.”

“For the moment. Maybe you can tell me a few things about him.”

“I can't imagine but I'll try.”

“Do you know anything about his birth parents?”

“Not much. They didn't do him any favors in life.”

“I'm aware of the abuse. Right now I'm more interested in his ancestry.”

“Why does that matter? Do you think he's retarded?”

“I didn't say that.”

“No, but with a question like that, it figures.”

We each waited for the other to say something. She said, “We really haven't had him very long yet. It's hard to tell at such an early stage what he might be.”

“I can ask Laura, but I'm going out of town. I won't be seeing her again till next week.”

“I'm interested in who the parents were, where they went, who their parents might have been. Maybe I can find out on my own if I know the agency that handled the adoption.”

She smiled like someone who knows something and wants to say it, but can't because of rules and procedures. I said, “You probably know this. That kid may be a witness to the murder of his adoptive dad over in Paradise.”

“That's what I understand. And if that's true, it only adds to his problems. But I really can't tell you anything else at this point.”

“Not even whether he's retarded.”

Again the enigmatic smile, this time with a slight headshake. “From what we've seen so far, Mr. Janeway, that boy is far from retarded.”

She took note of my surprise and said, “That's really all I can tell you now.”

“Will he ever be able to talk?”

“Can't say yet.”

“Can I check back with you?”

“Call me next week if you want to. We'll see where we are then.”

The Burbank Book Fair was held twice a year in the Burbank Airport Hilton Hotel. Erin and I had done this fair ourselves a year ago, setting up our booth in the far corner of the sprawling room. That had been our year of discovery, traveling to book fairs and sales, sampling the life, meeting the people. A book fair resembles a book sale only in that books are sold at both; in other ways they are as different as a fine uptown bookshop is from a Goodwill store. At the vast Planned Parenthood sale in Des Moines, bookscouts begin gathering before dawn. They will wait all day, some bringing lunches and lounge chairs, decks of cards, dominoes, even miniature TV sets, to ward off boredom. They will travel hundreds of miles and wait more than eight hours just to get a thirty-second jump over the serious competition when the doors open. In that thirty seconds a good scout, if he's also lucky, can slurp up ten serious first editions at fifty cents each, stash them under a table, and toss his jacket over the pile, his eyes warning predators of split lips, severed arms, and death, while he scouts the tables again. When the doors open, it can resemble the Oklahoma land rush.

A book fair is a different animal. There's not much land-rush mentality here: everybody knows these books will all be priced more or less at retail. No $500 treasures will be lingering in some $2 pile of dreck: there are no $2 books anywhere on the book fair floor. Twenty dollars is about the lowest price, even for dreck. Occasionally there's a legitimate $500 title priced at $300, and if it hasn't already been sold to a dealer before the sale, chances are it'll still be there by the time the second or third wave of customers gets around to it. If the cheapskate customer comes back on Saturday and the book's still there—a chancier prospect—the dealer may be motivated to give a slight additional discount, and on Sunday, if the book has somehow slipped through all these cracks, the motivation may go up another notch. The cheapskate customer might not even have to ask: just fondling it lovingly might bring a comment, “I can do better than that if you need it.” A bookman who has not had a good fair may be willing to deal on Sunday, to help cover his overhead, for the costs of doing a book fair only begin with booth fees that seem to go up every year. For a major fair put on by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America the fee can be $4,000, and even for a smaller fair like Burbank it can run a grand. There is also transportation for the dealer and his help if he brings someone; there is airfare, often from one distant planet to another; there are lodgings and meals and, finally, the rental of glass cases for items held truly dear, for the oddly precious or the true sweetheart that, the dealer will be happy to tell you, is rarer than a chicken's lips. And the books are supposed to pay for it all, on markups that are often just double their cost, and sometimes, for expensive items, quite a bit less.

I didn't remember the Preacher from my earlier trip here and there wasn't much chance I'd have missed him, even in a hall with more than two hundred booths. A man like that stands out like a white buffalo, as Marshal Dillon once said, and I had visited every booth and talked to every dealer before the gates opened to the public. This is a large part of the book fair culture. People schmooze, they go out to dinner in crowds, they drink and talk. Dealers come to buy books as much as sell them, and I have known bookmen who happily break even on the fair circuit year after year and come for the buying opportunities. It is something of an open secret in the book trade: the most important hours of a book fair weekend are those before the fair opens to the unwashed public at four o'clock on Friday.

One incident last year had burned itself into my memory. I had set up my booth at 8
A
.
M
., as soon as the committee got the tables up and the tablecloths spread. The public may think it gets first dibs on books being displayed by dealers from all parts of the nation, but in fact by the time the gate opens, those books have voraciously been picked over by the other dealers for six or eight hours. From the moment the boxes are opened and the books come out on the tables, there is wheeling and dealing all across the floor.

I had drifted into a booth that day, where the dealer had just unloaded his boxes from the truck. Nothing had been put on display yet: just a sign propped against the table announcing the fellow as a specialist in modern first editions. As he opened his stash, a small crowd gathered. The first book out was a pristine copy of
Laura,
the 1943 mystery novel that had become such a memorable movie the following year. Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, and Vincent Price had lit up the screens for those wartime crowds, making the single name of the title a household word and giving the author, Vera Caspary, a brief day in the sun. As a mystery it wasn't a bad story, but its real story as a collectible book has been phenomenal. Two factors made the literary quality of the novel almost incidental. It had a reputation as a great film of its time, and the book was impossible to find, anywhere, at any price.

It was a book so scarce that no one in the crowd had ever seen one. No one in a roomful of fairly sophisticated book people had any idea what its value might be or what the demand was. There had been no recent pricing history, unheard of for such a modern book, and as I looked down at the pulpy jacket, I thought how unusual that was, for a major American house like Houghton Mifflin to have issued this and nothing was ever seen of it anywhere. They must've printed all of ten copies, I thought then. The book as I remember it was far from pretty: the jacket showed just the simple face of the heroine, who has allegedly been murdered as the story starts, painted against a bland background. I didn't know it then, but a few dealers with contacts to rich collectors had been searching for that book for years, keeping its name a deep secret in the hope that one would pop out of the woodwork.

I remember the stir that went around that circle as the book made its sudden appearance: not quite a sigh, certainly no more to give it away than the eyes of a cunning gambler might reveal in a high-stakes card game. It was a feeling I got, some invisible, inaudible chemistry that had spread from one man to the next. “What do you want for
Laura
?” said the man to my left. The dealer opened the cover and the boards creaked, it was so fresh. Tucked in was a review slip, sweetening the deal for whoever bought it. “How much for
Laura
?” the guy asked again, but it was clear by then that the dealer had heard him, he just didn't know what to put on it. “Six hundred,” he finally said, and in a heartbeat the guy said, “I'll take it,” and began writing his check. Six other guys stood by, suffering for their good manners.

The fellow picked up his book and walked out of the booth. A small trickle of dealers followed him and I went along for the ride. “What're you gonna sell that for?” someone asked, and the man turned and faced the little circle of colleagues. He pondered it a moment, said, “Fifteen,” and the second dealer wrote a check in the middle of the aisle, using a friend's back for a desk. A smaller group followed him into the next aisle, where again the book changed hands, this time for three grand. It traveled back the other way now, halfway across the hall, before the question was asked again. “Six thousand net to you, soldier,” the man said, and it sold again, for the fourth time, without ever reaching the booth that would finally handle it. I think of that book when sleep is elusive and the parade of books begins in my head. I am a bookman. When the hour is late, I count books, not sheep, and I learned something that day.

 

Another thing I had learned: Los Angeles had not been a regular pit stop for the Preacher and his boys. I had spent all day Thursday and Friday morning drifting across the vast LA bookscape in my rental car, and no one I met knew anything about a lanky bookseller and his two bellicose sidekicks. I had a hunch the Preacher was new, not only to Burbank but to Colorado and the West as well. His facility in Monte Vista had a temporary look to it, despite the thousands of books he had stored there.

I got out to the gate at three-thirty, half an hour before the doors opened. A line had already formed and was growing. Wherever there are books, there are early birds, but this was a much quieter bunch than I had seen in Des Moines. The line was sprinkled with lawyer types, doctors, stockbrokers: collectors looking for a perfect copy of a long-cherished book had a good chance to find it at a book fair. “On these three days,” one of the fair organizers was fond of saying, “this is the best bookstore in America.”

The doors opened at four sharp and I wandered up the aisle nearest the west wall, pausing to chat with people I knew and pick up a few things along the way. I bought a nice second-state Richard Burton for three grand net and a couple of early Steinbecks. I wavered on a Jim Cain and finally passed because of a slight problem with the jacket; then I found the same title,
Mildred Pierce,
in a booth not twenty yards away, a perfect copy that ended up costing me almost twice as much but made my good day better. I love to buy books I love, and I am in no hurry to sell them.

I talked to some people I knew from Santa Barbara and during a lull I described the Preacher and asked if they had seen such a man. “Yeah, he's over in the middle row, about halfway back,” my friend Jim Pepper said. “A really weird guy but he's got some interesting stuff.”

There were five long rows of booths, at least forty book and autograph dealers in each row. I knew it could take all night to work my way across that floor, but I wasn't in any hurry: the Preacher was here for the duration. In fact, there were moments when I almost forgot him as I strolled along chatting. But not many moments and not very long.

I was tempted by a nice mixed-state
Huckleberry Finn.
I should buy this and sit on it, I thought. In five years it'll double, and go up from there. But I passed.

I bought a lovely
In Cold Blood,
signed by Capote: not too common signed, thus slightly pricey in the here and now. I bought it for my futures shelf.

Enough, I thought. I left my stash under Pepper's table and moseyed over to the middle of the floor. It was well after six when I saw the Preacher looming above the crowd. I had no idea where this was going, but I had not made the trip only to view him from afar and turn away. I zigzagged my way across the aisle and back, looking in one booth after another, a picture I hoped of book-browsing nonchalance. Now I could see Wally Keeler in the corner of their booth, showing someone a book. I came closer, and some unseen force, maybe the same kind of thing in the gambler's steady eyes or the bookseller's bluff, drew the Preacher slightly, momentarily away from his customer.

He looked straight at me.

There were no nods between us: almost immediately he looked past me, as if he had missed the connection, as if I wouldn't know better. I turned in to a booth two down from his and browsed the merchandise. The books all blurred now: my mind had shifted into its cop mode, and my juice was flowing like sixty. In the end there was no way to plan this. As that great philosopher Doris Day would say, what will be will be.

I walked into their booth.

“Hi, guys.”

I didn't expect sudden warmth to break out from the Preacher: the man had none to give, but Wally's unfriendly face immediately told me something:
They know who I am.
It had been a stupid mistake, giving them my name. The Preacher turned away from his customer and a faint smile crossed his face. “What are you doing here, gambler?” he said. I went along with the charade, seeing how far it would go. “Came out for the racing season,” I said, lying affably. “How's the fair treating you?” He nodded and said it was early yet, things were just getting started. “Buying much?” I said casually, and I didn't need to wait for the answer that never came. These boys had come to sell books, not to buy them. I made a point of looking at Wally. “How you doing, Wally?” I said easily. “Where's your brother, still back in Colorado, trying to get that truck out of the hills?” He muttered something and turned away, and I thought,
Oh, yeah, they have learned a lot about my big stupid ass since I saw them last.

I looked over their books: a mix of things with some common stuff out front and the high spots on a shelf that had been set up at the back of the table. Some of their books were signed, some weren't. I picked up every one and looked them over, and the night waned while I stood in their booth. The hell with them, my cat was out of the bag now.

It was nearing eight when the real hostility began to show. The crowd had thinned in this part of the hall, and I could sense their rapt attention to whatever I was doing. I could feel their annoyance, especially Wally's. An old gentleman came into the booth and engaged the Preacher in conversation about a signed Robert Frost. While they were talking, Wally eased into the back of the booth and said in a low voice, “What the fuck do you want, Janeway? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I'm looking at books, Wally, what's it look like?”

“Yeah, well, why don't you do it somewhere else?”

“I like it here. You guys are so friendly and stuff. I like friendly people.”

“Lemme tell you something, pal. Don't fuck with us.”

I smiled. “Wally, I've fucked with guys who could tear your head off.”

He moved away and fiddled with some books in the opposite corner. I eased out closer to the Preacher and without being too obvious, I hoped, listened to his conversation with the Frost collector. It was a common, cheap book,
In the Clearing,
with a black state jacket with white lettering, issued in the last year of Frost's life. I heard the collector say, “The jacket's pretty rough on that,” and the Preacher said, “I'm not selling it as a pristine copy, friend. You know the signature's worth the seventy-five I've got on it, and if you want it pretty, you can find a jacket for that book anywhere.” The Preacher wasn't motivated to deal and the collector cluck-clucked and moved away. I watched over the top of a book as the Preacher reshelved it and turned his attention to someone at the front of the booth who seemed to be more serious. I moseyed over under Wally's watchful eyes and picked the Frost off the shelf. Then something happened that changed the course of everything. Wally came across and reached for the book. “That's not for sale.”