“Sure… I’ll tell you… What’ve I got to lose?”
I thought about it, and wavered. The evidence was slippery, fragmentary. I feared for its life in a court of law. I had proceeded without regard for its welfare and now I had a strange, almost chilly reaction, talking about it calmly with the killer. Neff gave a little smile and the chill settled in. I didn’t need him, I thought: I’d find the books anyway, sooner or later.
But I was a bookman, not a cop, and I wanted to see them now. I had the fever, the bookseller’s madness, and I wanted to see what had driven an otherwise sane man to murder.
How do you figure it out? You think about it all the time. How does a sculptor carve an elephant out of a block of wood? Takes a block of wood and carves away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. When you’re sleeping your mind’s working on it. When you drive through a snowstorm, dead people whisper in your ear. You even think about it when you’re making love and it’s then, in fact, that the first glimmer comes working through the haze. Writers and sculptors work that way, why can’t cops? Books have been written about the creative process: tens of thousands of words from dusty academics about the writer’s vision. The funny thing is, I’ve always worked that way as a cop, but nobody writes books about that.
You get a vision—not necessarily what is, but what might be.
I was making love with Rita and suddenly I heard Ruby’s voice. It’s the most hypnotic business, he said, and just like that I had broken Neff’s alibi. Try to use that in a courtroom. You couldn’t, but baby, I saw the vision. At last I put it into words. “I just kept digging, kept after it. It’s a process of elimination as much as anything. Judith didn’t do it. Ballard didn’t do it. There wasn’t any turtle-faced man, Neff: it was just a cover you made up on the spot. Once I saw that it might’ve happened that way, I started remembering things. They all added up to you.
“Here’s what happened. Stop me if I go wrong. You walked in a minute or two before five. You threw a bunch of cream puffs down in front of Ruby, knowing he’d go into an instant trance. Then you went back to the crapper, only you didn’t stop there. You went on out into the back yard, around the building, and up the street. Your timing had to be perfect. Any little thing could’ve messed you up: any glitch between one place and the other. A customer who lingered past closing time… somebody who saw you go into my store just after five… any one of a dozen things, and all of them broke your way. You must’ve been desperate, Neff, to’ve tried something like that, and it damn near worked.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what desperation is…”
“But it all worked. It was already dark: there was nobody on the street; luck was riding on your wagon all the way. It took you what… thirty seconds to cover the ground from your back door to my place. You forced Miss Pride to lock the door, then you herded them into the back room and shot them. You were back in your own place in no time, surely less than five minutes. You came through the back and stashed the gun—it was probably still there, somewhere behind the shelves, when I talked to you the next day—and when you came up front, Ruby was right where you’d left him, thinking no time at all had passed. You couldn’t‘ve done a better job on him if you’d hypnotized him. In a way it was better than hypnosis.
“The flu was also a fake, a cover for the shakes you had after killing three people. Once I realized that, I started seeing other pieces everywhere. I remembered Ruby once telling me how you protect your privacy. I remembered him talking about the farm you’d inherited. Longmont’s just thirty miles from Denver: the truck Bobby used had seventy-four miles on the odometer when he brought it back. I thought how strange it was that you gave your phone number to no one. Even your partner didn’t have it. Ruby had laughed about that one night when we were working late in my store—how you didn’t want to be called at home no matter what. There was something wrong with that, Neff; it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I remembered. Hell, I had seen your phone number: I’d seen it written down somewhere. Then I remembered where. It was in Bobby Westfall’s little address book.“
He laughed sadly and shook his head. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
“It’s there in his book,” I said. “We can dig it out of the evidence room and I can show it to you. I’m surprised it took me so long to remember it. So why would you give your number to a bookscout, Neff? There is no bigger pest on this earth than a hungry bookscout, yet you give him your private number when even your partner can’t get it. That doesn’t make sense… unless you and Bobby have something going together. Then it makes all the sense in the world. And that’s what happened. You had something going with Bobby. Something more important than your partner or your business or anything else in your life.
“Then there was the matter of the driver’s license. Bobby didn’t have one but you didn’t know that. Ruby knew it, but not you. You still didn’t know it, even after you killed Bobby. You never understood how Peter Bonnema got involved in it, because you always assumed that you and Bobby were in it alone. The one thing I never could figure was how you found out about old man Ballard and his books.”
“I’ve known about them for years. Known about… thought about them…”
“How’d you know?”
“I had a little bookstore on Eighth Avenue. This was long ago, before Ruby and I even knew each other. It was on Eighth near Ogden. That’s not far, you know, from where Mr. Ballard lived. One day he came in. We got to talking. He said he had a lot of books. One thing led to another, and I said I’d like to come see them. He was very cordial. So I went to his house…I went to his house. The man was… simply incredible. He had the best eye for books…I can’t imagine how he so consistently managed to pick up these things and save them… things that appreciated—I don’t know how else to say it—beyond belief. And he’d been doing this for forty years. In some cases he had two or three copies of a single title, untouched copies pushed back behind the ones you could see on the shelf. They were all first editions, every one… the most immaculate collection I have ever seen, and, Mr. Jane-way, I have looked at a lot of books. And the damndest thing… the rarest thing…he didn’t care about them at all for that purpose. It was like he had no idea or interest in how much they might be worth. Here was the big score everybody dreams about, and there was no way I could buy them, I could just never get the money together. But the old man… God, he was so naive. I thought maybe if I threw some money at him—not too much but enough, I could get them away from him. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t check any further and for a few grand I’d pull off the heist of a lifetime. I was actually… trembling…as I tried to assess it. Started to throw out a figure and called it back. Didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t make it too high or low. You know how it is—go too low and he figures, hell, he might as well keep them; go too high and he begins to suspect what they’re really worth. You know how it goes—you play people in this business as much as books. I looked around. He didn’t live in luxury, didn’t look rich. Five thousand dollars, I thought: that’d really make a difference to this old man. So that’s what I said, and he smiled like a gentleman and said that was most generous but he wasn’t interested in selling them at that point. Maybe someday, he said. That was ten, twelve years ago, and I want to tell you something, there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about that stuff. I’ve dreamed about it…it comes to me a dozen times a day, when I look out the window or see the shit the scouts bring in…when I realize how hopelessly I’ve mired myself in the workaday crap.”