“If it gets to be much more than that, it stops being wholesale and starts being fraud. Most honorable book dealers figure twenty-five to forty percent as a fair wholesale price. Twenty would be rock-bottom. But for a big-money piece, sometimes you have to go higher than forty percent. If you fall into a piece that’s worth a quarter mil, you might have to put up three-quarters, maybe even eighty percent. That’s still a lot of change for the book dealer.”
“If he can sell it.”
“On that level he can always sell it. The easiest thing in the world to sell is a truly rare book. The biggest problem would be getting the money to buy it.”
I still didn’t see where his mind was going. Hennessey tends to plod in his thinking—that’s why we were a good team. I tend to leapfrog, and sometimes it takes a guy with a more fundamental approach to rein me in and make me see what’s been in front of my face all along.
This time he didn’t seem to know where he was going. He was groping, trying to find a handle.
“You said something a minute ago,” he said. “That most honorable dealers figure such-and-such. How honorable do these guys tend to be?”
“As a group, they’re just like everybody else. There are some old gentlemen straight out of the last century. Fewer of those every day. There are egomaniacs… more of those every day. There are shysters, a few scumbags, a nut or two. There are some guys who’ll take your pants off if you don’t know anything. But I think as a group they have a pretty good standard of ethics. They’ll vary right up and down the scale.”
Hennessey nodded.
“Neal, I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”
He blinked and brought himself back to his premise. “Robbery. Bobby bought something and somebody brained him and took it away from him. That idea works, Cliff, if it was something small enough for him to carry it around with him. I think this is going to be a very stupid question, but does it sound feasible for something that small to cost so much money?”
“Hell yes. Why would you think otherwise?”
“It just seems like, for five g’s, you ought to get something more than a booklet.”
I told him the Tamerlane story—how some guy had found one in a bookstore for fifteen bucks and sold it at auction for two hundred grand.
“I hate to say it, but I don’t know what Tamerlane is.”
“Poe’s first book. Just a booklet, like you said, but some of the most expensive stuff in the world is very small. Broadsides, pamphlets, papers…”
“Stuff you could put in a pocket.”
“Sure. That’s the first thing a dealer or a bookscout has to learn. Always look at the little stuff.”
“So it’s not farfetched to think that the bookscout might have been carrying something that somebody would kill him for.”
“Not at all. Just imagine that somebody had found a little piece of scroll signed by Jesus Christ. A silly example—I don’t know who the hell they’d get to authenticate it—but for the sake of argument, okay? How much do you think something like that would be worth?”
“I get your point. And I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to pin down… a motive for robbery. Something so tiny he could carry it in his pocket, but worth big bucks. That’s what he was sent to buy, and somebody killed him and took it away from him.”
“If that’s true, it points back to the book trade. It wasn’t a sudden fight or an old enemy. The answer is in the money. Where did the money go, where did it come from? If we can follow the money, we’ll know a lot more than we know now.”
“There’s one more thing we could check,” Hennessey said. “How about the religion angle?”
I saw it suddenly, what Neal had been pushing around in his head all day.
“They say our boy was religious,” Hennessey said. “Found the Lord in prison a few years ago. That means he went to church somewhere. That means he had a life outside the book business. Maybe friends on a whole different level. Maybe a minister he’d confide in. You only see one side of him when you see him in a bookstore.”
I sat up straight in my chair. “How the hell could I miss something like that?”
“You’re too busy looking at the books,” Hennessey said.
13
The body of Bobby Westfall lay unclaimed in the morgue: if there was a church in Bobby’s life, it had not yet made its presence known. No one had stepped forward and offered Bobby a Decent Christian Burial. The coroner had done more for Bobby in death than most people had in life: his office had spent many man-hours on a long and fruitless search for next of kin. They had found a rumor of a sister living in Salt Lake City, but that had not checked out. Bobby had told people that his mother was dead and he never knew his father. He had mentioned Pennsylvania to several people, but that had not checked out. At seventeen, he had once said, he had been in the army: medical discharge, flat feet. Amazingly, that had not checked out. The army had no record of a Robert Westfall in its service at the time and place that Bobby would have been there. This was important, the coroner said, because if military service could be established Bobby would qualify for burial at Fort Logan. They still had a few leads to check: sometimes a body had to be kept on ice for weeks, until everything petered out. Lacking everything—church, service, next of kin—Bobby would go to an unmarked pauper’s grave at Riverside, and have the earth plowed over him by a bulldozer.
In the morning, I went back to the bookstore beat and Hennessey began checking churches around the neighborhood where Bobby lived. I visited some new stores and went back to the old ones with new questions. Did Bobby ever mention what church he attended? Did he ever mention any names of ministers or people he knew outside the book world? I talked to Ruby Seals, Emery Neff, Jerry Harkness, and Sean Buckley. I went back to Cherry Creek and talked to Roland God-dard and Julian Lambert. It was a wasted morning. Even two bookscouts in Ruby’s store didn’t know much about Bobby. One of them had seen him a few times with the scout called Peter, but no one knew where Peter lived or what his last name was. I wrote down some stuff in my notebook, but I had a feeling that none of it meant anything.
Meanwhile, Hennessey found the church before noon. We thought it likely that Bobby would go to church in his own neighborhood. He didn’t have a car, and probably wouldn’t want to spend Sundays doing what he did every other day of the week—walking or riding a bus. We looked closely at churches that would appeal to born-again types rather than older establishment religions. Ruby remembered that Bobby had once referred to Catholicism disparagingly—“not a true faith,” he had called it—so he wouldn’t like the Episcopal church any better. He probably wasn’t a Lutheran, and anything from the outer limits, such as Unitarianism, was unlikely. No, Bobby was probably caught up in some evangelical splinter group formed by a diploma mill preacher with a slick tongue and a ready supply of hellfire. It was easy: Hennessey found the church on the fifth try. It was one of those little chapels off University Boulevard, the Universal Church of God, it called itself. The preacher recognized Bobby’s picture at once. Yes, Bob was a regular: he seldom missed a Sunday and usually came to Bible studies on Wednesday nights as well. He always came with a fellow named Jefferson or Johnson, good friend of his. They were always together. Hennessey asked it they had come last Wednesday. As a matter of fact they had, the preacher said. Suddenly Jefferson or Johnson became the last known man, except Julian Lambert, to have seen Bobby Westfall alive.
The preacher got the man’s name from the church registry. Jarvis Jackson lived on Gaylord Street, just a few blocks away. The preacher didn’t know either Jackson or Bobby well. They kept to themselves and were quiet and reflective in church. The preacher looked a lot like those birds you see on TV Sunday mornings: sharp and cunning, and dressed in an expensive tailored suit. Hennessey didn’t like him much.