The Bookman's Wake (40 page)

He turned up his palms. “You might as well be in
on the payoff if I can swing it. There’s just one
thing. You’ve got to teach me this bookscouting
stuff. Call it one you owe me.”

“I’ll give you the two-day crash course,
teach you all I know.”

“I’m a quick read. One day will do
it.”

In the morning he came to get me. Trish had a restless
night but was upgraded to fair. She was asking for me but
her doctors told her not yet, maybe tomorrow.

Quintana and I ate breakfast together and then did a
couple of bookstores. I watched him buy without comment,
and afterward we sat in a coffee shop and I told him what
he’d done wrong.

Never buy a bad copy of a good book. The better the
book, the more the flaws magnify.

Condition, condition, condition…

We drove to the jail and picked up Moon. He looked old
in his jail clothes, and he looked strangely small
sitting between the two deputies in the backseat.

We arrived at Rigby’s in brilliant sunshine.
Moon walked between us as we crossed the meadow. We went
along the path I had followed up from the house, dipped
into the trees, and stopped a hundred yards into the
woods.

An hour later, the deputies dug up the rug containing
the bones of Nola Jean Ryder.

I
n the spring they flew into Denver for Quintana’s
long-postponed book odyssey. Trish was looking good and I
was thrilled at the sight of her. We ate that night in a
Mexican place on a hill near Mile High Stadium, and in
the morning we lit out for Nebraska, Iowa, and points
east. The trouble with Denver is it’s a light-year
from everywhere, a hard day’s ride to any other
city with bookstores. The landscape is bleak, though
there are those who love the brown plains and the dry
vistas and the endless rolling roads. We filled the day
with shoptalk, of books and crime and the people who do
them. We laughed our way across Nebraska, drawn by the
Platte and bonded by the good companionship that makes
book-hunting so special and rich. We prowled in little
towns where thrift-store people are uncorrupted by the
greedy paranoia of the big-city stores. It was in such a
place that Quintana made the first good strike of the
trip, a sweet copy of Alan Le May’s
The Searchers
. It wasn’t
Shane
, but it was a solid C-note, which is not bad for
thirty-five cents.

We scouted Lincoln and found some gems at Blue-stem,
an oasis of books just off downtown; then we moved on to
Omaha. The weather was grand all the way, and we laughed
about it and Trish swore it had not rained a drop in
Seattle since I’d been there last October. Quintana
made a dubious cough but had to agree that the winter had
been unusually dry. We swung north into Minneapolis and
spent a day tramping around with Larry Dingman of
Dinkytown Books. I still had the picture of Eleanor that
Slater had given me long ago, and in every stop I showed
it to bookpeople in the hope that someone had seen
her.

In Chicago I saw a guy brazenly doctor a Stephen King
book, just the way Richard Grayson had done
The Raven
. He sat at his front counter and tipped a first-edition
title page—sliced out of a badly damaged and
worthless book—into a second printing. The book was
The Shining
, an easy deception because the second printings are so
much like the firsts in binding, jackets, and stock. The
only notable difference is on the title page verso, the
magic words first
edition
are at the bottom of a real one and missing from the
others. The entire operation took less than five minutes,
and when it was done, even a King guy would have a hard
time telling. The guy marked it $200. Quintana leaned
over his counter and called him a crook and a few other
things before Trish managed to pull him away and we
headed for Indianapolis.

I had a dream that night about the first Grayson
Raven
. In the dream Richard fixed that one too: changed two
letters of type after Grayson had quit work and gone to
the pub for the evening. It would’ve been easy
then, in 1949, when it was just the two brothers working
alone and a mistake was easy to miss. No glue, no tip-ins
to tell a tale years later: just switch the letters and
it would always be assumed, even by Grayson, they’d
been set that way. At breakfast in the morning I told
Trish and Quintana and none of us laughed. For a long
time we couldn’t shake the notion that the whole
Grayson tragedy had been for nothing.

We were out ten days, in all a great trip. They stayed
with me another three days in Denver, and the house felt
empty when I put them on the plane and watched them fly
away.

A year has come and gone. It’s winter in Denver,
late on a snow-swept Saturday night as I sit at my front
counter writing in the little diary that I’ve begun
keeping of my life in books. Far up the street a shrouded
figure comes out of the snow, battling a wicked wind that
howls in from the east, and I think of Eleanor Rigby. I
still have a delusion that one of these days she’s
going to walk into my bookstore and help me write a
fitting end to the Grayson case. Grayson was my turning
point as a bookman. I came home with enough of
Scofield’s money that, for now, I can buy just
about any collection of books that walks in my door. I
still have Grayson’s notebook: Amy gave it to me.
Kenney calls once a month and asks if I’m ready to
sell it. I should probably do that: the money
they’re throwing around is just too good to keep
turning it down. But Kenney understands when I laugh and
tell him how it would diminish the old man’s life
if suddenly he had that roadmap to everything.

Among the fallout from the Grayson papers were letters
indicating the real identity of Amy Harper’s
father. The name Paul Ricketts had been one of the
pseudonyms used by Richard Grayson in his early writings,
and the letters revealed an affair of many years’
duration between Richard and Selena Harper. “So
we’re first cousins,” Amy wrote of herself
and Eleanor. “Imagine that.” The news from
the Northwest gradually tapered off. I had to return the
Ayn Rand books to Murdock’s estate as his last two
relatives could never agree on anything. The best guess,
the one that seemed most likely to me, was that these
were the last of Murdock’s really good books,
gathered for a wholesale run so he could get some money
together to make Amy an offer. The cops found a big batch
of real Gray sons‘—all the lettered copies of
everything but the 1969
Ravens
—in the rafters above Rigby’s shop. He
couldn’t resist taking them, holy books made by the
hand of God, as he traveled through St. Louis, Phoenix,
Baltimore, Boise, and New Orleans. As for his own, they
are called the Rigby
Ravens
now and are widely admired by people who have seen them.
Scofield wants them but his woman in red doesn’t
seem to care so much about money anymore. The books will
belong to Eleanor, wherever she is.

The New Mexico case is still open. Charlie Jeffords
died not long ago and it remains to be seen who fired the
gun, if and when the cops find Eleanor. I’ve just
about decided that it’s too easy for people to
disappear into that street-level book subculture. I keep
showing her picture around when I’m on the road.
There’s a lot of money waiting for her and
Scofield’s not getting any younger.

It’s ten o’clock—time to get the
hell out of here and go home. The figure in the street
has reached my door, and in this moment, in less than an
instant, I think,
hey!…maybe
…
maybe
. At the edge of her hood I see the facial features of a
young woman. She turns her head, our eyes meet through
the plate glass and she smiles faintly. It’s the
neighborhood’s newest hooker, heading on up to the
Safeway after a hard day’s night. I give her a
friendly wave and turn off the lights fast. In the yard
behind the store I look at the black sky and wonder what
books tomorrow will bring.

John Dunning is the national and
New York Times
bestselling author of
Booked to Die
, which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe award,
The Bookman’s Wake
(a
New York Times
Notable Book of 1995), the Edgar Award-nominated
Deadline, The Holland Suggestions
, and
Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime
. An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the
Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. He is
also an expert on American radio history, authoring
On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio
. His latest Cliff Janeway novel,
The Bookman’s Promise
, is forthcoming in hardcover from Scribner. He lives in
Denver, Colorado.