Ruby draped himself in a drop cloth and stood with his paintbrush pointing up. “Send us your tired, your wretched, your bookscouts,” he said, and we got a good laugh out of that.
We finished up one night ten days later. The place looked like new; it looked truly marvelous. Miss Pride went over it with a vacuum while Ruby packed his tools for the last time. I just walked from room to room, unable to remember when I’d last felt such peace and satisfaction.
Now came the books. I emptied out my apartment and brought in everything from storage. Ruby was astounded at what I had. “I’m tellin‘ you right now, Dr. J, this fiction section is gonna be the most important one in the West. Good God, look at the Milagros! I can’t believe it. John Nichols hasn’t got this many.” I told him I thought I’d make a pyramid of Milagros in the glass case, but he shook his head. You put these out one at a time, he said: in a rare book section, you never put more than one copy out, it would undercut the illusion of scarcity. You wanted that feeling of urgency to always be a customer’s companion, the notion that he must act now, today, else it be gone forever. The three of us sat up all night pricing. Miss Pride priced the common stock using the standard ratio: she’d look it up in Books in Print, and if ours was a perfect copy she priced it half of the in-print tariff. Ruby and I priced the collectibles, arguing incessantly about high retail and low, scarcity, demand, and, always, condition. “Remember, Ruby, I don’t want to be high,” I would say, and Ruby would look at me with great disgust. “You still haven’t learned anything,” he would say. “You still don’t know that it’s easier to sell a good book high than low. Dammit, people like to think that what they’re buying is worthwhile. Price it too low and it looks like you don’t value your own stuff.” He would hold a book against his head and close his eyes as if the book could speak. When it spoke to him, he would make his pronouncement, “Seventy-five bucks,” he’d say, and I would argue, and he’d throw up his hands. “Seventy-five dollars, Dr. J, you can’t sell the son of a bitch for less than that. Do you want to look like a fool?”
And so it went, till well after dawn. The night had passed in a wink and suddenly it was over. “It’s always that way when you’re lookin‘ at books,” Ruby said. “An hour goes by in a minute: you don’t know where the hell the time went. It’s like making love to a woman… the most hypnotic business a man can do.”
Then they were gone. Ruby went home for a few hours’ sleep and Miss Pride went to her room. I walked through the store and only then did it hit me—what I had taken on, what I’d left behind, how drastically my life had changed in only one month. I took a deep breath. The place smelled of paint fumes and sawdust. It smelled like a new car, though the actual odor was nothing like that. It was real, it was alive, and it was mine. It was sweet and exciting. I had a sense of proprietorship, of direction. I had a lifetime of work ahead of me, and it was very good.
21
That was all some time ago.
We had a sensational opening week. I sold two signed Mil-agros the first day, and did almost $1,000 before the day was out. The three Stephen Kings flew out the door on the second day. By the end of the week I had taken in $3,000. I started a beard, shaved it, started it again and shaved it. I never, ever, wore a necktie. People said I was in danger of becoming a bohemian.
Jackie Newton sued me for $10 million. It looked like something that would drag on for years. I had a lawyer who was also a friend, and he said not to worry, we’d work it out.
I didn’t worry. I had one or two regrets: occasionally I dreamed about Bobby Westfall and his unknown killer, but I told myself I was out of the worrying business forever.
Today it seems as if my years as a cop were all part of another lifetime. I never hear sirens in my sleep, and even a report of a gunfight in progress between police and drug deal-ers leaves me strangely detached. I’ve gone to a few funerals since I quit the department, but as time goes by I’m treated more and more like an outsider. I still run. I keep in good shape because it makes good sense. I keep my gun because that makes good sense too, but I’ve got a permit now, just like any other law-abiding citizen.
I see a few old friends a few times a year. I never see Carol. I hear she’s living with a sergeant over on the west side. Hennessey’s the same old buffalo. We sit and drink beer and talk about old cases, old times.
I get the feeling he doesn’t try as hard these days. He never did talk to Peter. He never found Rita McKinley. The U-Haul lead fizzled and went out.
The cops weren’t about to solve the Westfall case. As it turned out, I had to do that.
BOOK TWO
22
My days settled into a glorious routine. I was up at seven; I ate breakfast in a cafe a few blocks from my apartment, I read the paper, had my coffee, and was on the streets by nine. I left the opening of the store to Miss Pride. She had her own apartment now, still within walking distance; she was there faithfully by nine-thirty, leaving me free for, as Ruby put it, the hunt. From the beginning I was amazed by the stuff I found. In the old days I had gone into thrift stores and junk shops occasionally and never found anything. From the moment I became a book dealer, good things began to happen. Suddenly there were real books on the shelves of those dust palaces where there’d been only dogs before. I know two things now that I didn’t know then. Then I had been looking with a much narrower eye, seeking out titles in my area of interest only. Now I bought a medical book on eye surgery, a fat doorstop with color plates, circa 1903, that I never would’ve touched in olden times. It cost me $1: I lowballed it to an out-of-town medical specialist for $100. I bought a two-volume set on farming from the early 1800s, very technical, for $10; I think $125 would be very reasonable for it in a store. The second thing I learned is that books are seldom found on a hit-or-miss basis. The hunt is not a random process. I had to be where the books were, and I had to be there all the time. A good book placed in the open for a small price could be expected to last only hours, maybe minutes—then a bookscout would come along and pick it off. I tried to be there first, and I was, a fair number of times. I drifted across town and sucked them up like a vacuum.
I bought extensively and well in my chosen field, first edition lit and detective fiction. I read the trades and saw trends coming. I got on the Sue Grafton bandwagon, though I don’t care much for her stuff, at just the right time. Her first book, A Is for Alibi, has been going crazy in the used book world, appreciating at around a hundred percent a year until now people are asking $300 to $400 for a fine first. Grafton is breezy and readable, entertaining but never challenging. Her father, C. W. Grafton, once wrote one of the cleverest, most gripping novels in the literature. His book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is by most accounts a cornerstone, but if I want to sell it I have to do it on her popularity. I put one away for a more enlightened time. I discovered Thomas Harris when people were still selling Black Sunday for $6.50. His Red Dragon put me on the floor, even if he did make a sophomoric break-and-enter mistake with a glass cutter in the early going. You can’t break into a house that way, you might as well use a hammer and knock the glass out, but writers and the movies keep the myth going anyway. Gimme my glass cutter, doc. I’ll just cut a little hole in this here glass case and pluck the Hope diamond out. Uh-huh. Try it sometime. Somehow it didn’t matter. Red Dragon was such a good book that Harris could’ve fed me the untreated discharge from the Metro Denver Sewer Plant and I’d‘ve been standing there like little Ollie Twist with my gruel-bucket in my hand, begging for more. More? You want MORE! Even then he was putting the polish on that big riveting pisser of a book, Silence of the Lambs, simply the best thriller I’ve read in five years. I thought of old Mr. Greenwald all the time I was reading it and I wondered if he’d like it. It proves, I think, the point I was trying to make that day, that wonderful things can come from anywhere, even the best-seller list. Thomas Harris. All he is is a talent of the first rank. I hope the bastard lives forever, but in case he doesn’t, I’ve been squirreling him away. Collectors are starting to find him now: in recent catalogs I see that Black Sunday is inching toward the $100 mark, and I’ve got six perfect copies hidden in a safe place.