The Bookwoman's Last Fling (32 page)

Sometimes awareness comes slowly in a murder case; sometimes it rises up suddenly and knocks you flat. Sometimes you get an idea and you go with that; sometimes you're actually right. One of the biggest burdens on a working cop comes when he knows something in his gut and then must get the proof and do it by the rules. I didn't have that problem anymore, but the guesswork was the same. If you're wrong you do what I told Sharon many days ago, you drop back and punt. However it happens, the idea is the thing while it's hot, and it changes the complexion of everything. I hadn't had many moments of awareness in the Candice case: I had been too busy getting myself into the racetrack, staying there, surviving two attempts on my own life, and talking with old railbirds who remembered the days of Geiger. The key was finding out who had been close enough to tamper with her food and angry enough to do it. Awareness came slowly the next morning, almost before I was awake. I must have been running things through my mind in my sleep, because I woke up strongly believing two or three things that I had only held as possibles or probables before.

Baxter was crazy. His lunacy wasn't an act.

He was probably certifiable.

But he hadn't done it.

His explanation of what had happened seemed crazily consistent in the early morning. If I was right about that, Martha would be heartbroken.

I began to narrow it down in other ways. If not Bax, who? Somebody who had been much closer than the brothers, someone who was Candice's little secret: a fling almost unknown in her lifetime but a man known now, perhaps in a completely different context.

Somebody who's right under your stupid eyes, Janeway.

Maybe not her first real fling, but certainly her last.

A bookman, not a horseman.

But he had killed Candice for some personal reason, unrelated to books, and then, being the book freak he was, he had begun to plunder her library.

He had been getting Cameron to lift them when Cameron had access to the house. He himself had certainly been in that book room but never alone, not often enough or long enough to steal them on his own, or to do much more than remember certain titles and where they were. But he was a bookman, able to vividly remember and burn into his mind a few cherry things in a sea of things that might be far greater, able to reconstruct an accurate but scattered list of items to get.

Why leave the one when there's something of greater value right there on the same shelf?
That question rang again in my head and now I came up with two possible answers: Either he had been sucking up information so quickly he was almost drunk with it and hoped to hell he could remember it later—or he was truly a freaky, bizarre collector, after certain things because they had deep personal significance, probably from his childhood.

In either case he needed a cheap replacement for every book he had Cameron take—early printings, reprints with some age on them—that would look like real items to a casual browser.

He hadn't sold any of them publicly. These were memorable, unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime items, but neither Erin's checks nor my own had turned up any of Candice's books in bookstores anywhere. It was hardly a perfect check we had run, but if they had been sold to a dealer, even years ago, wasn't there at least a fair chance we'd have heard something?

Why
had he killed her? Murder is a drastic act, almost guaranteed to alter your outlook. Killing Candice pushed him on that road to madness.

Maybe she saw the madness there and she intended to leave him.

Not because of the books at all.

He didn't kill her for her books.

He couldn't have, because her death removed him from what little access he'd had.

The books were only what started it.

Sometimes an ordinary man turns psychotic by degrees. The first time he kills, the consequences are deep, profound, and on some people they have a spiraling effect. Time passes—in this case years. His crime works on him around the clock. He sees Candice everywhere. The bookwoman haunts his dreams and maybe his waking life as well.

By now he may believe he is out of danger, he'll never be caught, but the deed itself remains a crushing burden. If I really wanted to fantasize, I could picture a tortured man having conversations with Candice in his mind.

Suddenly he is threatened and the motive changes from greed to survival. He becomes frantic as he imagines his world unraveling.

Cameron threatens him. He kills Cameron.

I threaten him. He tries to kill me.

Tries again in a pitch-dark shedrow.

Whoever he is, he's got a lot to lose now.

The Mad Hatter, I thought without rhyme or reason.

There are people who would say catching him would be the best thing I could do for him. That's what he really wants, those people would say.

Uh-uh,
I thought in the darkness. To him, getting caught is unthinkable. Now he'll kill anybody, everybody, to avoid that.

And whoever he is, he's not Bax.

 

“We've got a new horse for you,” Ruth said. “Bax bought her yesterday from a trainer over in Barn 18. We had to get another stall, but we can pick her up this morning.”

The trainer's name was Bowden: the horse was Miss Fritzi. “I'll bed her stall if you want to go pick her up,” Ruth said.

I walked over with a lead shank and retrieved Miss Fritzi. I liked her right away. She had a personality like Pompeii Ruler's: easygoing, curious, affectionate. She was a brown filly, three years old with a white blaze on her head and two white feet. “Hey, sweetie,” I said to her, and I led her back through the stable area. Ruth had her new home ready when we arrived.

“Sandy's here. He just came looking for you.”

I told them it had been nice and thanked them for the experience.

“Come over and see us in the evenings if you want to,” Dulcie said.

“I'll teach you how to play the guitar,” Ruth said. “You can teach me how to sing.”

We laughed and I hugged them.

Sandy had arrived at one-thirty with two fully loaded rigs, and I pitched in with the unloading. They had brought three ginneys from Barbara's farm, and we started the horses around the tow ring to give them some movement after their long, confining truck trip. A quick walk for each: Now there was much work to do and no time to talk about what to do later. Sandy asked where Bob was and I told him only that he had to go away and I would explain when we had more time. That made him unhappy but Sandy was born to be unhappy and I didn't care. I wasn't about to tell him where Bob was, now or later.

For two hours we were all engaged with busywork: unloading tack, setting up the room that would be used as Sandy's office, staking out the rooms where we'd each sleep, bringing in the rollaway beds and the tables and chairs. There was no time yet even for meeting the crew. Sandy went looking for two more hands, a hot walker and another ginney, and he returned with the ginney, a sour-looking superior bastard who I guessed wouldn't be with us long. We put up a canvas cover on the front of the shedrow, which would keep our horses cool during the hot part of the day and keep our business private all the time. The canvas was done up with Barbara's colors, red and white, and a logo with her initials in big letters. By feeding time we had transformed my dead shedrow into a place bustling with life. I felt better already.

Barbara drove up at four in her year-old Cadillac. She parked at the end of the barn and walked along looking at her horses. We had fifteen head counting the filly Sandy had brought down from his own stable for Bob to rub. “I'll take her in Bob's place if you want,” I said. “You could hold his job open till we see what's what.” I could see he was frustrated and annoyed but Sandy was born frustrated, and annoyance was his copilot. We would have some things to discuss after we got up and running: maybe later tonight. We did have a tense, caustic conversation in his office.

“So you're rubbing horses now? Where'd you learn that?”

“I did a few for Bax before you got here, when I had nothing else to do.”

He didn't like that either. You get so you can tell with a guy, and I hadn't done much that was right in Sandy's eyes since I'd joined him at Golden Gate. He had gone from cold to lukewarm but now he was cold again, and I still had no illusions that I was becoming his main man. “I like new people to learn things my way,” he said. I told him I could still learn it his way, but at least for now I knew a cooler from a muck sack; for the moment I could take up some slack and rub four in a pinch. Later I'd tell him not to forget why I was really here.
So fire me, Sandy,
I thought:
I'll have another job with Baxter or somebody else by tomorrow morning.
I watched him walk away and I thought,
There goes a puzzlement, a helluva strange and moody guy.

I did up some horses: three ankles that Sandy wanted to brush with some solution and leave wrapped overnight. He came along and made me do it again, his way. He came around again and checked my progress, nodded curtly, and moved on, but if there was any difference between what he showed me and what I had learned from Ruth, I couldn't see it. I did it his way. Good judgment prevented me from breaking into the Sinatra song in full voice, there in my stall. Barbara walked up behind me and said, “Hey, Cliff, you're doing great,” and in the same moment I saw a shadow pass in the shedrow behind her. I looked up in time to see her husband go by. Charlie. Our eyes met for less than two seconds: Then he turned away and left us there.

If I didn't know better, he'd be a candidate.

Hell, I
didn't
know better.

Strange fellow. Another puzzlement. He talks but he doesn't talk. Never heard him speak. Why is that? What the hell's wrong with him? Apparently he talks to others, not to me.
Maybe it's a case of hate at first sight.

I decided to get right up in his face and say hi the next time I saw him. But he disappeared and I lost him in the crush of work. I didn't see Barbara leave at all; I just knew at some point that she had.

 

Now I focused on Charlie. He was the right age and he sure did seem like a cracked prism, a term that happened to fit him perfectly. I didn't know why but I thought it did. I didn't know where the hell he was going when he ran off like that, or what he did, why he was here, or what his business was. Maybe he was a high-class bookie selling insider stuff to some gambling syndicate. All I really knew was that he disappeared immediately whenever they arrived. Barbara always had to go hunt him down when she was ready to leave and she laughed about it good-naturedly, but I could see she was annoyed. On this particular day I heard her shout, “Charlie! Charlie, goddammit, where the hell is that man?” and one of her ginneys told her he had seen Charlie hurrying down the shedrow in the barn across the way. That had been two hours ago, time enough for Charlie to burrow into Fort Knox, steal the national gold supply, round up a herd of horses, and apply for Martha's old job in the racetrack kitchen.

I called Idaho after we got set up and I talked to Erin. “Everything's fine up here,” she said. “We're all getting along famously in your absence. How's your madman doing?”

I told her Bax was still a suspect but had been downgraded to lukewarm.

“So where does that leave you?”

“Scrounging for a new leading man. How about you, really? How's your mental health?”

“I may go back to Denver after all.”

“Mucking stalls isn't quite your cup of tea after all.”

“It's been good, grand actually, a real break from my daily grind, and I love Sharon. But somebody's got to make some money.”

I sensed growing discontent and I told her so. “What's up?” I said into the silence.

“I think we have some things to discuss.”

“Issues.”

She said nothing for a moment, but I had sensed as much. She had never been quite the same since we'd had that other brush with madness over in Paradise. She had come so
damned
near death and that kind of experience will change a person's mind-set. She still had buckets of nerve, but things were not working out quite as we had envisioned that first night when she came into my bookstore. “This is probably not something we want to do on the phone,” she said. “But we do need to talk.”

“Give me a hint, so my subconscious can be working on it till I see you again.”

“Oh, it's the same old stuff. We made some big and glorious plans for our life together in books. I still think it would be a great life, except for one tiny thing. You don't really want it. It took me a while to understand that.”

I didn't know what to say, probably because I was afraid she was right.

“I'm changing you, Cliff, not the other way around. You're becoming tentative, not the charge-into-hell, damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead rover boy you were when we met.”