Squeak.
“Take the lady who lives here,” I said. “There’s a certain asshole I know who won’t leave her alone. Tries to screw around with her head, make her wish she’d never been born. What do you think of a man who’d do something like that?”
Squeak-squeak.
“Some man, huh?”
Squeak.
“Tighten those things too tight and you’ll have a helluva time getting them off again.”
There was a sharp clang as he threw the lug wrench down on the street.
“Never know when you’ll have another flat.”
He came around and let the car’s weight jiggle down off the jack. Then he stood up tall and gave me a look. His face was a mess: blood had dripped onto his fine white shirt and his hair for once was tousled. He threw the tire and jack into the car and made ready to go.
“When this guy comes back again, he’s gonna pay a heavy price,” I said. “A real heavy price.”
He pulled up the door and stood there for a minute. I thought he might say something then but he didn’t. He ducked his head and got in his car, and I stood up and backed away under the shadows of the front porch. You never knew when a guy might have a piece hidden in the car, and if something serious started I wanted some cover.
But he drove away. Calmly. Like a man of reason. He didn’t even peal rubber.
A real scary guy, Jackie. A bad son of a bitch.
I knew an old man once who swore he saw a sailor beat the hell out of Gene Tunney in a barroom brawl. Tunney was at his peak then, the heavyweight champion of the world. Titles don’t mean much when you’re getting your lunch eaten.
The meanest son of a bitch in the world can only be the meanest while he’s at his absolute peak and the other guy hasn’t quite come up to his. Say a month on the long end, a few minutes on the short.
I know guys who could make Jackie Newton wish his mamma had never set eyes on his daddy. I grew up with one of them. Vincent Marranzino wrote the book on tough guys. I haven’t seen Vince in a long time: his life and mine have taken different paths and we both understand that. But Vince still owes me one—a certain fight with knives in a north Denver backlot when we were sixteen. I had taken his side against a pack of wolves and the two of us had kicked ass against great odds. Guys like Vince never forget something like that: they have a streak of loyalty that goes to bedrock.
A simple phone call was all it would take. Before morning, Jackie Newton’s anatomy would be rearranged.
Tempting, isn’t it?
A nice hole card, if the system couldn’t be made to work.
This was what I had meant when 1 told Barbara that there were things in life she’d be better off not knowing. The genie was out of the bottle, just a phone call away.
But of course I wouldn’t do it. Like Brutus, I am an honorable man.
9
I spent another futile hour with Barbara Crowell. There’s no way to talk common sense to someone who’s that scared, so there wasn’t much else to do but wait for the locksmith to come fix her door. While I waited, I made some calls on the Bobby Westfall case. I called Bobby’s apartment and talked to Hennessey. Our boys had been there for an hour and weren’t finding much. They had lifted some prints, probably the victim’s, and had arranged for the pound to come pick up the cats. They had sent Ruby Seals back to his bookstore in a police car. It didn’t look like the apartment was going to give us much. There were still piles of books to go through, but that would take a bookman’s eye—my job, and I’d be at it far into the night.
I tried Rita McKinley: same answering machine, same message.
I sat with the telephone book opened to “Book Dealers, Used and Rare,” and I went through the stores in my mind. Some eliminated themselves from my priority list—junk shops, paperback exchanges, dealers in comic books: these I’d get to, eventually, if something didn’t pan out higher up. I called Roland Goddard in Cherry Creek and told him I wanted to see him tomorrow about the murder of Bobby Westfall. There was no use pussyfooting around anymore. The book world is amazingly tight, and even now the word of Bobby’s death would be racing from one store to another. By tomorrow it would be all over town.
I called three or four other dealers who might have bought books from Bobby. All of them had. I told them I’d want to see them, and would try to stop in in the next couple of days.
This was going to be a long haul.
I tried calling Carol, to tell her I’d be late tonight. She was out on the streets and I didn’t want to leave a message. The only world tighter than the world of books is the world of cops.
The locksmith had fixed Barbara’s back door and was installing a deadbolt in the front. Nobody was coming through that door once that baby was put in, the locksmith said. I wasn’t too sure of that, but I didn’t say anything.
I went back to Bobby’s place. The boys were gone, all but Hennessey. We sat and talked the case out, as it stood to now. It didn’t stand anywhere. We had nothing: we were shooting in the dark. We might be dealing with something totally outside Bobby’s book-dealing activity, and in that case it might never be solved.
Hennessey had talked to the coroner, and the guesswork of last night had been confirmed. Bobby was killed somewhere else, then dumped in the alley. Time of death was sometime between eleven o’clock and midnight. This told us nothing, as we had been going on that assumption anyway. “Let’s forget about it till morning,” Hennessey said. “Come on home with me, we’re having a big pot roast tonight.” I took a rain check: I wanted to get started on Bobby’s things, and I knew that I wouldn’t stop till the last scrap of paper had been sifted to the watermark. This is just the way I work. It made Hennessey feel guilty, but that’s life. “I should stay here and help you, Cliff,” he said. “I’d probably just get in your way. I don’t know from Shinola about this stuff.” I agreed and told him to go home. It was getting dark outside. I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours, so I asked Marty Zimmers to call Domino’s and have a deep pan pizza and a bucket of swill sent over. Then I got to work.
It was a long, thankless job. You wouldn’t believe the crap that accumulates in a bookscout’s den. Book after book came down from the pile and went into another pile that I had labeled “Junk” in my mind. I thumbed each piece carefully, I went page by page to make sure a $50,000 pamphlet wasn’t hidden inside a $2 book. It wasn’t. There were some real heartbreakers—a fine little Faulkner poem, original 1932 issue, paper wraps, a $250 piece that Bobby could’ve sold to me on the spot except that someone had lost his supper on the title page… an early Steinbeck, nice, except that somebody had ripped out the title page… Robert Frost’s first book, inscribed by Frost on the half title, very quaint except that a kid had been at the book with crayons. There were so many books eaten by mold that I had to wash my hands after handling them. My pizza came and I washed my hands again. I went munching and sorting my way into the early night. At nine-thirty I seemed to be about half through. I went downstairs and called Carol, told her I’d be another two or three hours, and said she’d better not wait up.
I chugged my swill, burped, and went back to it.
I was resigned by then to coming up zero. I took a break at ten-thirty and let my eyes skim over the books as a lot. If there was anything worthwhile in that mess, I sure couldn’t see it. I started on the books in the toilet. Nothing. I was mucking it out pretty good now. There were a few papers in the closet and some books in the kitchenette. No great secrets were hidden there that I could see. Nothing the Russians would kill for: nothing anybody would kill for. Slowly the one natural motive—that Bobby had found something valuable—was dwindling before my eyes. Of course, the killer might’ve taken it away with him: I was going on the slim, bare hope that he had killed Bobby and had failed to find what he had killed for. But I was beginning to believe it was something as simple, and insane, as an old grudge, or a sudden fight between rivals.