52
I found the key to the storage locker in Neff’s hip pocket. It was the only lock-it-yourself place in Longmont.
We drove the four miles from Neff’s house in what seemed like total silence. Only when we reached the storage yard did I realize that the radio was still playing.
Benny Goodman. “It Had to Be You.”
I drove to unit 254, opened the door, and walked in. It was like walking into King Solomon’s Mines.
He had shelved the locker and some of the books were out on open display. Yes, they were wonderful things.
But I was tired of looking. If you get too much new blood, you begin to drown in it.
Rita had lingered but now she came in. She didn’t touch anything, just walked along and looked at the spines.
“Well, this is it,” I said wearily. “This is what people kill for.”
She was just standing, staring at nothing. She looked older in the dim light.
On a worktable in a corner, I found some papers. The name Rita McKinley caught my eye and I leafed through them.
“Looks like a copy of your appraisal,” I said. “You want to tell me about this?”
She shook her head and said, “I have no idea.”
And that’s how the case ended: with a stalemate, a standoff between someone I loved and everything I believed in. With a dead man and a treasure, a lack of faith, a beautiful girl, and the big question still unanswered.
53
But no:
It really ended on another day six weeks later. Emery Neff was in his grave and the Ballard heirs were embroiled in a battle of books that seemed certain to end up in court. Ruby was in business alone. Rita McKinley had been set free by the Boulder County DA, who had pronounced the shooting justified: she had gone somewhere and had left nothing, not even the damned recording, to tell people where she’d gone or when she might come home.
I saw Barbara Crowell every couple of weeks. Mose had found a way to handle her case, as a favor to me. They had me billed as her star witness, and things weren’t looking too bad for her when all the mitigating factors were taken into account.
Jackie, after all, hadn’t died. He couldn’t feed himself or talk quite right: he’d have to be carried to the potty from now on, but he was alive. Doctors think he might live that way for another thirty years. It doesn’t sound like much, but the alternative is nothing at all.
As for me, I was going through the old familiar symptoms of acute burnout. The book business, which had been so fresh and exciting just three months ago, was suddenly old, and I was growing old with it. I dreaded opening the store: I let it slide as long as I could; then I went in and painted the bathroom and opened for business. I had been off for a month: I had spent a lot of money and my rent was due, and it was time to get going again.
But in the end I was back where I’d been in the police department. The days were long and uneventfuclass="underline" the nights were worse. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’ve never been one to languish. I knew I was in some vast personal transition, but only the past was spread out, clear and ugly. The future was still a void.
I closed on the Ballard house. The paperwork was done by the first of December and I was ready to move in. I had planned to be out of the store for three days during the move, and Ruby had promised to bring me someone reliable to run it. That morning, when he came in, the woman with him looked vaguely like someone I had once known. It took me a long moment to recognize her.
I pointed to her face and snapped my fingers. “Millie Farmer, the teaching bookscout.”
“Just bookscout, dad. I’m out of teaching forever. If I’m not going to make any money anyway, I might as well have fun doing it.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” I said.
I broke her in: walked her through the store and showed her what was what and how to find it. I gave her Miss Pride’s key to the front door and said I’d be in each day at four o’clock to be with her when she closed. There seemed to be nothing more to discuss, yet we all knew better. Painful, unfinished business lay between us. There had been a strain between Ruby and me, and now it extended to her. We had never talked about Neff. It made Ruby squirm, as if somehow he had shared the blame for what had happened. Emery Neff had touched us all in some basic, primal way, and none of us had been able to throw off his ghost.
Even now, getting into it wasn’t easy.
“Wonder what’s gonna happen to those books,” I said.
Ruby gave a fidgety shrug and looked out into the street.
“We’ll never see another collection like that.”
“Probably not,” he said.
I looked from one to the other. They said nothing.
“Hey, you want a job full-time?” I said to Millie.
“Hell yes.”
“You’re hired. Doesn’t pay much. Six an hour and all your books at twenty percent off.”
“Dad, I just died and went to heaven,” she said to Ruby.
I made another try at knocking down some walls. “The thing that beats me is how those books changed from club books to firsts. If I could get the answer to that, I’d die a happy man.”
“They never were club books,” Ruby said.
“It’s not that easy, Ruby. If it were just McKinley’s appraisal it would be simple. But I saw all the invoices, all the club flyers. On most of them he had written what he’d ordered and the date. Those damn books are there, the same books he ordered, only they’re first editions, not club copies. He was the most compulsive record-keeper you ever saw. When the books came in from the club, he wrote down the dates. Then he wrote what he thought of them after he’d read them. It’s all there, in Ballard’s own handwriting. Only somehow between now and then a genie got in his house and waved a wand and turned those books into gold.”
I could see Ruby wanted to leave but he couldn’t find an exit cue.
“What’s your answer?” I asked.
“Ain’t got no answer. Hell, Dr. J, I don’t know. I don’t even think it’s very interesting. Where the old man got his eye for books—that’s where the real mystery is. If we knew that we’d all be rich in no time. How do guys like old man Ballard start from scratch and build a library that just knocks people for a loop? I don’t know. Somehow they’re plugged into the universe in this queer kinda way. They know what’ll be valued, not just now but years from now.”
“And they don’t even think of value in terms of money,” I said. “They have a totally different agenda. And I guess it was a lot easier to build a library then, when the average cost of a book was two bucks.”
“It’s all relative. You of all people ought to know that. A book has always cost about what a meal in a good restaurant costs. Did then, still does. I get sick of hearing how expensive books are. Which would you rather have, a good book or a tender steak? I know what I’d take, seven days a week.”
He moved to the door: he was about to leave.
“That was a good move, hiring this lady,” he said. “She’ll be good for your business, just like the other one. She’s got a sassy mouth but you can handle her. Just give her the back of your hand two or three times a day.”
Millie stuck out her tongue.
“You need to unshackle your legs, get free again,” Ruby said. “You’re going through something, I can see it written all over you. It’s a growth spurt. All of a sudden you’re tired of retail. You’re starting to see where the real fun is in the book business. Usually it takes five years: you’ve gone through it all in three months. You came into this business almost whole, and now you’re ready to move on. The Zen Buddhists have a word for it. Satori. It means sudden enlightenment.”