“That was a long time ago, pardner,” Ruby said. “The cops busted him for no valid license, no insurance. He cracked up the car and ain’t had one since. I know damn well he didn’t have a license.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” Neff said.
“There was no driver’s license found on the body,” I said.
Neff shrugged. “Then I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” Ruby said.
“Why would one bookscout drive another one up to a sale?” I said. “It sounds like cutting your own throat to me.”
“That’s what makes me think maybe they were friends,” Ruby said. “At least as much as those guys get to be friends.”
I made a note in my book. “Any idea where I can find this Peter?”
“The only time I see him is when he comes by,” Ruby said.
“If he comes by again, tell him I want to see him.”
“Sure, Dr. J. You bet.”
I looked through my notes. There are many reasons why people get murdered, but ninety-nine percent fall into four broad motive categories: love, hate, greed, insanity. I had looked at two of these.
“Did Bobby have any girlfriends?” I said.
“Not that I ever saw,” Ruby said.
“He ever talk about women he knew, or might have known in the past?”
They shook their heads.
“Anybody you boys can think of who’d want to see Bobby dead?”
“Oh no,” Neff said.
“He was the easiest of ‘em all to deal with,” Ruby said.
“Who’d he sell most of his books to?”
“Us, as much as anybody,” Neff said.
“Not so much anymore, though,” Ruby said.
“Why not?”
Neff gave a little shrug. “We’ve been going through some lean times, Mr. Janeway. We’ve had a few setbacks.”
“Oh, let’s call a spade a bloody fucking shovel,” Ruby said. “We bounced a few checks on him. That’s no big deal, people do it all the time. We always made it good. But these book-scouts hate to take a check anyway. They go all the way down to the bank and the check’s no good. I know where they’re coming from. I understand why they get pissed off.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“You mean write a hot check? You know that, Dr. J, I know you do. It’s book fever. You’ve got it just like I have. You see a book you want, you do what you have to do to get it. My intentions are honorable, it’s my performance that lags a little.”
“Where else did he go to sell his stuff?”
“Might be any one of a dozen places. You know the scene, Dr. J: hell, there’s thirty bookstores in Denver. Probably half of ‘em pay well enough for bookscouts to be able to deal with ’em. Not many places will pay forty percent across the board, but some do. You could narrow it down that way, I guess. Start with the boys up the street, see if they know anything.”
I thought for a minute. Then I said, “Do either of you know where Bobby lived?”
“I do,” Ruby said. “I drove him home a couple of times.”
“You think you could show me where it’s at?”
“Sure. You want to go now?”
“In an hour. I want to talk to the boys up the street first.”
“I’ll be here whenever you say. You better let me sell you this Faulkner before you leave. It’s the world’s best copy and it won’t last long.”
“How much?”
“For you…Today?…Ninety-five bucks.”
Neff groaned as I reached for my checkbook. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “I get tired of selling Faulkner anyway.”
6
I walked up the street carrying Mr. William Faulkner under my arm. The next store along the row was Book Heaven, owned by Jerry Harkness.
Denver is a young man’s book town. In the old days there were only two dealers of note: Fred Rosenstock and Harley Bishop. Those boys died and the book trade fractured into twenty or thirty pieces. The new breed came in and the books changed as well. In Rosenstock’s day you could still find documents signed by Abraham Lincoln or the framers of the Constitution. The trouble was, you couldn’t get much for them. Forty years later, those papers and books are worth small fortunes but can’t be found. What can be found, and sold for good money, is modern lit. We live in a day when first editions by Stephen King outsell Mark Twain firsts ten to one, and at the same price. You explain it: I can’t. Maybe people today really do have more money than brains. Or maybe there’s something in the King craze that’s going over my head. I read Misery not long ago and thought it was a helluva book. I’d put it right up with The Collector as an example of the horror of abduction, and that’s a heavy compliment since I consider Fowles one of the greatest living novelists. Then I read Christine and it was like the book had been written by a different guy. A bigger crock has never been put between two covers. What the hell do I know? I sure can’t explain it when a book like Solent’s Lot goes from $10 to almost $1,000 in ten years. That’s half again what a near-perfect Grapes of Wrath will bring, if you need a point of reference. You can buy five copies of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea for that, or six copies of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. You can buy first editions signed by Rudyard Kipling or Jack London for less money. So the business has changed, no question about it, and the people in it have changed as well. The old guard is dead: long live the new guard. But I can still remember old Harley Bishop, in the year before he died, stubbornly selling King firsts at half the original cover price. The big leap in King books hadn’t yet happened, but even then The Shining was a $100 book. Bishop sold me a copy for $4. When I told him he should ask more, he gave me a furrowed look and said, “I don’t believe in Steffan King.”
Jerry Harkness most definitely did believe in Steffan King. He specialized in King and his followers—Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, et al, the little Kinglets. Behind every big ship you’ll find a dozen little ships atrailing. Most of their plots make absolutely no sense, but again, they stand tall where it really matters in today’s world, at the damn cash register. There’s something seriously wrong with a society when its best-selling writer of all time is Janet Dailey. Don’t ask me to prove it: it’s just something I know. I don’t mind a good scare story once in a while, but Jesus Christ, the junk that goes down! The stupidity of some of these plots that sell in the billions is the scariest thing about them. The Exorcist is a truly scary book because it only asks you to believe one thing—that Satan does exist. There are no talking dogs or curses lingering from antiquity: there’s no literary sleight of hand, no metaphorical bullshit. Accept the guy’s premise (and who can totally deny it?) and he’s got you where you live. All it takes after that is talent. The trouble today (do I begin to sound like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man when I get on one of these soap boxes?) is that show biz is often mistaken for talent. Get to the end, though, and ask yourself what it all meant, what was it all about? The answer’s usually nothing. Relieve the author from the obligation to make sense, and what’s there to be afraid of?
I have come to the conclusion that the people who buy these books don’t care much about books at all. You will seldom see a King guy or a Koontz guy browsing in a bookstore. I’ve been in Ruby’s store and watched the action myself. A guy opens the door. He doesn’t even come inside. He stands on the street with his head sticking in and asks his three questions. Got any King? got any Koontz? got any Barker? If the answer’s no, he’s gone. Ruby points him up the street, to Jerry Hark-ness, and later learns that the guy dropped two grand with Jerry. Unbelievable! What else can you say but absolute around-the-bend insanity? “All a guy needs to make it in this business,” Ruby says, “is an unlimited amount of Stephen King.”