“I’ll get it,” she said, reaching over me. “I’ll tell him you’ve died and the funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”
She picked up the phone. I heard her say hello and then there was a long silence. Without saying another word, she hung up.
“What’s that all about?”
“A guy trying to sell me a water softener.”
“At two o’clock in the morning?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I seem to’ve got myself a heavy breather. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. It started about eight o’clock and he’s been calling back every hour or two.”
“Does he say anything?”
“He whispered once.”
“What’d he say?”
“The usual stuff. Cunt, bitch, whore. Some other stuff.”
“Did he say anything personal… anything to indicate that he might know who you are?”
“Why would he know who I am? Those kinds of calls are mostly random, you know that.”
“I don’t think this one is.”
She sat up and turned on the light.
“What happened out there today?”
I told her about my day with Jackie. I could see it wasn’t convincing her that Jackie had taken up telephone harassment for revenge.
“I’m taking the phone off,” she said. “If you don’t get some sleep you’ll be a zombie tomorrow.”
The phone rang.
“Let it go,” she said. “He’ll get tired of it and hang up.”
But I picked it up. Didn’t say anything, just listened. He was there, listening too. This went on for almost a minute. Then I said, “You having fun, Newton?”
He hung up.
“It’s Newton,” I said. “He hung up when I called him by name.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“All right, then, I can smell the son of a bitch, okay?”
“Okay, Cliff. I’m sure not going to argue about it at two o’clock in the morning.”
“Listen,” I said sometime later. “Jackie and me, we shifted gears out there today. There never was any love lost between us, you know that. But it’s different now, it’s on a whole new plain.”
She had propped herself up on one arm, a silhouette against the window.
“He’ll do whatever he can to get at me. I don’t think it matters to him that I’m a cop, or that you are. I don’t think anything matters. It’s him and me.”
“Hatfields and McCoys.”
“Yeah. It’s gotten that deep. I may’ve given Barbara Crowell some very bad advice today.”
“Cliff, you need a vacation.”
“I need to get something on that weasel. That’s the only vacation I need. To get him good and make it stick.”
“You’re a classic type-A, you’ll die before you’re forty. You need to go and lie on a beach and listen to tropical breezes blowing through luscious palm trees.”
“And go crazy with boredom. That’s not what I need.”
“I’d go along too… try to keep you from getting too bored.”
More long minutes passed.
“I’ll do whatever I can,” Carol said.
“As a matter of fact, there is something you can do.”
“Just tell me.”
“Get the hell out of here.”
“Oh, Cliff, that’s not going to help anything.”
“I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since I gave Jackie the thirty-eight-caliber lollipop. Newton doesn’t know who you are. All he knows is, he called my place and a woman answered. Nobody knows about us. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to keep what’s ours private.”
She took a deep, long-suffering breath.
“Well? Will you do it?”
“Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “But God damn it, don’t ask me to like it.”
I patted her rump. “Good girl.”
“You sexist bastard.”
We laughed. At that moment I came as close to asking her the big question as I ever would.
It was a long time before we got to sleep. When I did sleep, I slept soundly, untroubled by dreams. In the morning we got her things together and I carried them down the back way and put them in her car. I watched the street for ten minutes before I let her come down and drive away.
She rolled down her window. “I’m not afraid, you know.”
“I know you’re not,” I said. “But I am.”
11
I called rita McKinley and got the same recording. This time I left a message, telling her who I was and that I needed to speak with her on official business regarding a homicide investigation. I left both numbers, home and office.
I called the AB in New Jersey. Also known as Bookman’s Weekly, the AB is the trade journal of the antiquarian book world. Each week it lists hundreds of books, sought and for sale by dealers everywhere. Thus can a total recluse operate effectively in the book business without ever seeing another human being: he buys and sells through the AB. In addition to the listings, which take up most of the magazine, there are a few articles each week on doings in the trade—obits, career profiles, book fair reports. Sometime during the past few years, I explained to the editor, a piece or pieces were run on Rita McKinley. He was a wise gentleman who knew his business, and he knew right away who McKinley was and about when the stories had run. He promised copies in the next mail.
I went to see Roland Goddard, in Cherry Creek. This is a neighborhood of high-class and expensive shops in east Denver. Nestled in the center of things was Roland Goddard’s Acushnet Rare Book Emporium. Goddard had a cool, austere manner, almost like Emery Neff only somehow different. You could break through with Neff, if you were patient enough and gave a damn: with Goddard, you never could. He had an icy, slightly superior attitude about books and his knowledge of them, and he could intimidate a customer or a bookscout before the first word was said. If he had friends, they were not in the book business: no one I had ever spoken to knew Goddard personally.
It would be hard to imagine two guys less alike than Goddard and Harkness. At least with Ruby Seals and Emery Neff, their differences seemed to complement each other: Harkness and Goddard were ill-suited for partnership in almost every way. It’s hard sometimes to look back over twenty years and know why the boys we were then did things so much at odds with the attitudes and philosophies of the men we had become. Goddard was fastidious: Harkness tended to be sloppy. Goddard disdained everything about the book business that Harkness found interesting. Oh, he’d sell you a Stephen King— whatever else you could say about Roland Goddard, he was a helluva bookman and he knew where the money came from—but you might leave his store feeling faintly like a moron.
Goddard dealt primarily in Truly Important Books—incunabula, sixteenth-century poetry, illuminated manuscripts, fine leather stuff. He had some great things. Even the name °f his store simmered in tradition. Acushnet was the whaler Melville served on in the 1840s. I liked his store and I loved his stock, though I never did much business there. When I marry one of the Rockefellers, Goddard will have a big payday, most of it from me.
Acushnet was one of only three bookstores in Denver that could afford full-time help. The man who worked there was Julian Lambert, a good bookman in his own right. Lambert bought and sold as freely as his boss did: Ruby, in fact, had told me once that bookscouts preferred dealing with Goddard because he paid them more. Goddard wasn’t in when I arrived, but I busied myself looking through the stock until I saw him come in through a back entrance. The morning rush had waned: he and Lambert sat behind the counter cataloging. I knew that Goddard issued catalogs a few times a year, though no one in Denver ever saw one. He had the best reference library in the state, but played it close to the vest when it came to sharing information.
Goddard and Lambert were surprised when I introduced myself. I knew they had seen me around—we had spoken a few times in passing—but until this moment they had not put my face together with the Detective Janeway who had called on the phone and asked to see them. I got right down to cases. When was the last time they had seen Bobby Westfall? The same questions, the same answers, with Goddard doing most of the talking. It had been almost two weeks since Bobby had been in. He had come in one day just about the time he was last seen on Book Row. “He had a couple of books he was trying to sell me,” Goddard said, “but they weren’t the kind of things I use.” I told him I had heard through the grapevine that he had been dealing with Bobby rather heavily. He frowned and said, “That must be Jerry Harkness talking, and as usual he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Westfall made one very lucky find about a year ago and I bought all the books he had on that particular day. I wouldn’t make any more out of it than that. He had some books and I bought them.”