Maybe I’d been dreaming. I hadn’t had the Jackie Newton dream in months. Maybe that had come back and I just couldn’t remember.
Then it came to me.
It was that sourness I had noticed when I’d first opened the door. It was stronger now, ripe and distinct, almost sweet in a sickening kind of way. When you’ve been in Homicide as long as I was, that’s one thing you never forget.
The smell of death.
I got up and went toward the back. The smell got stronger.
Oh boy, I thought.
I opened the door to the office. I turned on the light. Nothing looked wrong. It was just as Ruby had said: everything shipshape.
But the smell was stronger.
There was one place Ruby couldn’t have seen—the bathroom across the hall. That room had no windows, nothing but a skylight, no way for anyone to look in.
I opened the door. Miss Pride stared up at me with glassy eyes. Peter sprawled across her, facedown.
Each had been shot once through the head.
30
The killer had come in just after closing time. Miss Pride had not yet locked the front door.
He had come for a single purpose. No money was missing. No books were missing. He had come to kill. By the time I tried returning Miss Pride’s call, at five-twenty-five, she and Peter had probably been dead ten minutes.
He had come through the front door. We keep the back door locked. He had forced Miss Pride to lock up—her keys were still clutched tight in her fingers—and afterward he had used the back door to escape. Unlike the front door, which must be locked with a key, the back door had a latch lock that could be slam-locked from the outside.
The weapon was probably a .38. Ballistics would tell us more.
Miss Pride had been shot first. The shot had hit her in the front of the head, exactly between the eyes: she had fallen over on her back, her head twisted grotesquely against the wall.
Peter had been a more difficult target. In his panic he had done a great deal of scrambling. One slug had missed and gone through the wall. The second one got him.
The killer, of course, had taken the gun away with him.
He had probably worn gloves. There were no fingerprints on the back door latch or on the door itself. There were many prints on the front door, from customers who had come and gone all day long. Most of these would never be identified.
He had come, done his job, and left. The whole thing had probably taken no more than two minutes.
Everything else was speculation. My guess was that Peter had known who killed Bobby Westfall. He had come to the store to tell me about it but the killer got there first. Miss
Pride had simply been unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As always, there were more questions than answers. If this tied back into the Westfall case, why had Peter waited all these months to tell me about it? How had the killer suddenly learned that Peter was a threat? Why had it happened now, and what had caused it to suddenly come on? Had there been something in the Ballard library so valuable that someone would kill for it, then kill twice more? Was it the Ballard library at all, and if so, how could Rita have overlooked it? Something small—so small that no one could see it, yet Bobby Westfall had had to take the entire library to be sure of getting it. Look at the little things, Dr. J. I heard Ruby’s voice telling me that. It’s the one lesson that even a good bookman finds hardest to learn. Look at the little stuff—pamphlets, broadsides, tiny books with no lettering on their spines—and remember that one little weatherworn piece could bring more money than an entire library done up in glamour leather.
Something small. Something you know is there but you’re not sure where. If you’re Bobby Westfall, you have to take every book: tear them apart if necessary, go page by page if necessary, slit the cloth and strip away the bindings if necessary, rip the hinges asunder and shred the pieces through a sieve if necessary. Kill or be killed if necessary. Something small and hidden, it had to be, had to, because if it were small and unhidden it would be too easy to steal. Rita McKinley could easily drop it down her dress while old man Ballard went for coffee; Bobby Westfall could’ve dropped it in his pocket, the Lord be damned, while he wandered among the stacks and ostensibly tried to make up his mind.
It all came back to money. That’s what fueled Bobby and Peter and all the guys like them. Money was the one thing they never had enough of: it was the driving force in their lives. Bobby wanted to be respected as a book dealer, not joked about as a bookscout. It took money to do that. It took other things—knowledge, taste, a keen eye, good juice, a gam-bler’s blood, and a hustler’s imagination—but without money you just couldn’t get started.
The scene at my place was like a hundred murder scenes I’d been to. Cops. Photographers. Sketchmen. The coroner.
It was the same, only different. This was me on the receiving end. That dead girl was one of mine.
From the moment I found her, I was a cop again.
A cop without a badge.
Hennessey had arrived with his new partner before dawn. Teaming Neal with Lester Cameron had been the final ironic fallout of the Jackie Newton affair, but Boone Steed worked in mysterious ways. Cameron and I had never liked each other: he was too trigger-happy and hot-collared for my taste, though I’d heard it said more than once that Cameron in action reminded people of me. I didn’t like that much, though I did respect Cameron in a professional way. I thought he was a good cop, I just didn’t like him as a man. He had a head on his shoulders and a block of ice where his heart was supposed to be. He had a take-charge demeanor that was a turnoff, but his record with DPI) was a good one. He and I had been in the same class at the police academy, long ago. We had never been bosom buddies, even then. For most of an hour, Hennessey, Cameron, and I sat in the front room talking. We were three old pros: I knew what they needed and gave them what I could. Cameron sat on one of my stools like a grand high inquisitor and fired off the inevitable questions, and I answered them like clockwork. I knew the questions before they were asked. I told him about Miss Pride, where she’d come from, when and why. I told him about Peter, and his friendship with Bobby Westfall, who had also been murdered. Hennessey stood apart as I related this. He looked out into the dark street, and even when he looked at me, he avoided my eyes. I guess he knew what I was thinking, that you can’t ever drag your feet on a murder case, can’t ever assume that the victim isn’t important enough to warrant the balls-out effort. You never know when a killer might come back for an encore.
We talked about Miss Pride. She had no enemies on this earth, I said, unless she had a dark side that I simply couldn’t imagine. I told them what I thought: that it tied into Westfall, and Miss Pride was the innocent victim. I told them how skittish Peter had been the last two days, how frantic he’d been when he tried to reach me at Rita McKinley’s. I told them about Rita, too, all the facts, all the rumors. As an afterthought, I told them that Jackie Newton had been hanging around.
“I don’t know,” I said. “This doesn’t smell like Jackie.”
“You sure thought it was before,” Hennessey said, looking out the window.
“That was then, this is now.”
“What’s so different?” Cameron said. “You boys kiss and make up?”
“It doesn’t fit Jackie. The first one did: go look up the M.O. yourself if you want to see what I’m talking about. There’s a random nature to all of Jackie’s old business. This wasn’t random. Jackie doesn’t come advertising before he kills somebody. That’s my opinion.”
“Opinions are like assholes,” Cameron said. “Everybody’s got one.”