“Millie Farmer found the Kings,” Ruby said. “She’s gonna be a good bookscout yet. I told you we’d get our seven bucks back.”
I nudged the Golding. “This one’s yours. Your store, your book, I’ll take your check, if you want it for a hundred.”
Ruby had already started reaching for the checkbook. Neff said, “Can’t do it.”
“The hell we can’t.”
Neff reached across the counter and snatched the checkbook away. Ruby bristled and for a moment I thought a fight was coming. The moment passed and Ruby laughed it off, though his face was still flushed with anger.
“Everybody in this business is crazy, Mr. Janeway,” Neff said. “That probably includes me. But I’m not so crazy that I’ll let my partner write a hot check to a cop. You keep the book.”
“I’ll tear up my check,” I offered. “Write you one for a hundred less.”
Neff sighed. “We need every dime of that check, Mr. Jane-way.”
“I just remembered something,” Ruby said. “I just plain forgot about it in the heat of battle. That’s Peter the Book-scout… you wanted to talk to him about Bobby, remember? If you hurry, maybe you can catch him before he gets to the bus stop.”
We went outside, but Peter was gone.
I guess we all had a lot on our minds that day.
“When he comes back, tell him to call Hennessey,” I said. I packed my books carefully in a small box and again opened the door.
“I’m not on that case anymore,” I said.
17
The press was ugly. You could avoid radio and TV, but those newspaper headlines, when they came, were everywhere.
I had made the decision to go light on myself. I would read each paper once, to know what I was up against: then I’d forget it.
The Denver Post was simple and sweet: cop charged with brutality, it said. Beneath that, in a smaller headline: handcuffed and beaten, jeffco man alleges.
The Rocky Mountain News wanted me shot at sunrise: cop’s badge demanded in wake of brutal attack was what News readers read over their morning coffee. Nice objective slant.
I had made top headlines in both daily rags.
They were, as usual, about ten hours behind the tubes. The later developments, I knew, would help keep the story on the front pages for another day.
I had been summoned to Internal Affairs to give my statement on the charges of John Randolph Newton. I told it to two steely cops I barely knew, and they took it down without comment and asked only a couple of questions at the end.
It all sounded silly and unjustified a day later. I must seem like a character out of a 1945 movie: a cop with an Alan Ladd complex. And that was according to my version, which was supposed to make me look good. Jackie’s version was another story. In that, I had beaten him with his hands cuffed behind him. He had the scars for evidence—the chafed wrists, the broken nose, the hamburger face. And he had a witness, Ms. Barbara Crowell, who was prepared to back up his version in court.
Let no one doubt that this was going to court. Even as I gave my statement to Internal Affairs, Jackie and his lawyer— a tough New Yorker named Rudy Levin—were still in the building raising hell.
Boone Steed, chief of detectives, was not happy. Boone was a tough cop who knew the ropes. He told me what to expect, what I already knew. Jackie would sue. He would sue us all, but it was me he really wanted. He would break me if he could. The department would do what it could for me, but I had acted illegally and that gave our insurance a loophole. I might end up having to mount my own defense, at my own expense. Goddamn lawyers and insurance companies, Steed said. I could run up a $20,000 legal tab in no time. And the weights of the system were all on Newton’s side: they were always on the side of the guy with the dough. Newton would drag me over every bump in the courts: he’d stall and prolong it so that he could drain my account of its last dime.
I was called to Steed’s office again at the end of the day. I had been suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation by Internal Affairs.
That night I went out to Ruby’s and dropped another grand on books.
I bought wholesale, and I bought well.
By the time the second-day stories appeared I was hardened to it: cop suspended, they both said. There was a picture of Jackie, looking like the sole survivor of Nagasaki. There I was, too, plastered next to him, one mean-looking bastard. They had used my old mug shot, my killer pose. You’d never know from just a look which of these two guys is the real hood, 1 thought. Take a look and guess.
I didn’t get much comfort from my friends. I talked to Hennessey and that was okay—Neal never changes: he reminds me of a Saint Bernard dog, always there with a keg of cheer at exactly the right moment. Others in the department weren’t so hot. Somebody leaked the gory details of my long feud with Jackie, and the papers picked that up and ran with it. It looked like 1 had had a long vendetta against the guy, without a helluva lot in the proof department. All the times I had picked Jackie up were examined and dissected. It didn’t look good.
Finally there was Carol. We talked several times over the next few days and nothing came of it. She wanted to come over but somehow it didn’t happen. There was a coolness now, a distance between us. I thought I knew how that was going to turn out too.
18
In the middle of the third day, my phone rang.
“Dr. Janeway, I presume.”
“You got me.”
“Rubio here. That’s quite a beating you took in the papers this morning.”
“You should see the other guy.”
“I did, my friend. His nose looked like one of my legs flopping down between his eyes. But look, I didn’t call just to be sociable. I’ve got three questions for you. Ready?”
“Shoot.”
“Number one. You want to make a fast two bills on that Golding item?”
The book happened to be on the table before me. I looked at it and thought. No, hell no, I’ll never see another one this nice.
Ruby, catching my drift, said, “If you’re gonna deal books, Dr. J, you can’t fall in love with the bastards.”
“Sure,” I said, and my rite of passage began.
“Number two,” Ruby said. “Will you let me make a little money on it?”
“That seems fair.”
“All the right answers so far. Now for the big one. You ready to take the plunge?”
“I might be.”
“I thought you might after I read the papers. A lot of things started coming clear after that.”
“What’ve you got in mind?”
“Tell you when I see you. Meet me at the store in an hour, and bring the book.”
The client was a man in his fifties who had been looking for the Golding for a year. “Pickiest bastard you ever saw,” Ruby said. “He’ll pay top dollar, but it really has to be the world’s nicest copy.” He had seen and rejected half a dozen copies, Ruby said, and was primed for this one. Ruby had warned him that the tariff would be four hundred dollars.
The guy bought it without a whimper. He paid with a check to Seals & Neff and left a happy man.
I felt strangely elated, inexplicably confident. In that moment, every book I had was for sale.
“Mr. Janeway, it looks like you’re a book dealer after all,” Emery Neff said. “All you need now is a place to hang your shingle and the guts to take the leap.”
“Which brings us back to that third question,” Ruby said. “The place on the far corner has been empty about six months. It used to be a Greek restaurant and nobody thinks of it any other way. But man-oh-man, what a great bookstore that’d be. Plenty of room, lots of atmosphere—I’d rent it myself if I had the money and wasn’t tied in here with a five-million-year lease.”