My apartment, as always, was the great healer. I stripped off my sweats, turned on a light, and sat surrounded by treas-ures. I looked for a while at an old AB: my fascination in the life of the bookman was almost as acute as my interest in books, and I had been a faithful subscriber to the bookseller’s trade journal for almost five years. I thumbed through Wyeth’s Helga pictures, lingering on that lovely scene in the barn. Carol Pfeiffer, of course, had long gone: she had been gone when I had come in earlier and changed for my run. I took a cold shower and dressed slowly, planning my day. Barbara Crowell’s statement seemed to alibi Jackie Newton nicely, which meant I had to start from scratch. It never occurred to me to call Hennessey, or to check downtown and see if we’d been assigned to the case. Hennessey would just be turning over for his second forty winks, and downtown they’d know we were on it. They knew all about my work habits.
I drove out Sixth to Colorado Boulevard, went north to Colfax, then east to the bookstores. This was my turf: I was as much at home along Book Row as I was in the world of hookers and pimps that surrounded it. Colfax is a strange street. It used to be known as the longest street in the world: people with more imagination than I have used to say, in the days before interstate highways, that it ran from Kansas City to the Great Salt Lake. Its actual length is about twenty miles, beginning on the plains east of Denver and dwindling away in the mountains to the west. Just about every foot of it is commercial space. About twenty years ago, urban renewal came in and ripped out old Larimer Street, and the whores and bums who lived there landed on Broadway south and Colfax east. Lots of whoring goes on on East Colfax Avenue. It starts at the statehouse, where they know how to do it without ever getting in a bed, and works its way through the porno shops between Broadway and Colorado Boulevard. From Colorado east, for about thirty or forty blocks, the street goes respectable in a chain of mom-and-pop businesses of every imaginable type. Here you’ll find produce stands, garages, video rentals, fortune-tellers, antique dealers, 7-Elevens, liquor stores, and, of course, Book Row.
More than ten years ago, an old-time book dealer and his wife hung their shingle on an East Colfax hole-in-the-wall. Those people are gone now—the old man died and the wife lives in another state. Their store has passed along to a succession of younger bookmen: it has spawned other bookstores until, today, the area has become known as Book Row. This is the honey-draws-flies concept of bookselling: put two bookstores in one block, the theory goes, and business doubles for everybody. It seems to work: the stores have all stabilized where business was lean for one before. As a book collector, I did Book Row at least twice a month. A couple of the dealers knew me well enough to call me at home if something came in with my name on it; the others knew me too, though some of them were a little shy about calling a cop. Book dealers are like everyone else: they come in all sizes and shapes and have the same hangups that you see in a squad room or on an assembly line. If you picture a wizened academic with thick spectacles, forget it. Once they get in the business, they have little time to read. They are usually a cut or two smarter than the average Joe. I’ve never met a stupid book dealer who was able to make it pay. Some of them, though, are definitely crazy. There are a few horse’s asses, a few sow’s ears, but today’s bookseller is just as likely to be an ex-hippie ex-boozer ex-junkie streetfighter like Ruby Seals.
I liked Ruby: I admired the old bastard for his savvy and grit. He had pulled himself out of the gutter the hard way, cold turkey and alone. He was a bottle-a-day drunk and he’d kicked that; he had been on cocaine and later heroin and had kicked that. He had been busted for possession, beginning in the days when, in Colorado, you could get two years for having a leaf of grass in your car. Ruby had served a year on that bust, another year for speed, and two years of a seven-year rap for heroin. By then the laws had been liberalized or he might still be languishing at Canon City. I had known him all this time because I was into books, and Ruby, when he was straight, was one of the keenest book dealers in town. A lot of what I knew I had learned watching Ruby work. “I’ll tell you something, Dr. J,” he had said to me long ago. “Learn books and you’ll never go hungry. You can walk into any town with more than two bookstores and in two hours you’re in business.”
You did it the same way the scouts did, only on a higher level. While the scouts looked for $2 books that could be turned for $10, you looked for the $100 piece that would fetch a McKinley. You bought from guys who didn’t know and sold to guys who did. If nobody in town knew, you wholesaled to people on the coast. You worked the AB when you could afford the price of it; you put a little bankroll together and before you knew it, you had three or four thousand books. Ruby had done this more times than he could remember.
Seals & Neff was the last store on the block, but I went there first. It was in their store, about a month ago, that I had last seen Bobby Westfall. I vaguely remembered it now: Bobby had come in to sell something, and there had been a dispute over how much and in what manner Ruby would pay for it. I hadn’t paid much attention then: I was wavering on the price of a nice little Steinbeck item. There wasn’t much to the argument anyway, as I remembered it: Bobby didn’t want to take a check and Ruby didn’t have the cash, so Bobby had left with the book. But that was the last time I had seen him and it seemed like a good starting place.
Ruby and his partner, Emery Neff, were sorting books from a new buy when I came in: they were hunkered over with their asses facing the door and didn’t see me for a moment. The stuff looked pretty good: lots of fine modern firsts, some detective novels, a Faulkner or two. My eye caught the dark blue jacket of Intruder in the Dust. Carol’s birthday was coming up: maybe I’d buy it for her, see how she liked it when she actually owned a book like that. A $100 bill flitted through my mind. That’s what the book was worth, though I expected a good deal of preamble before we got to that point. I didn’t like haggling. I wasn’t one of those cheapskates always trying to pry a book away from a dealer for half its value, but I didn’t want to pay twice retail either. I knew how Seals & Neff operated. They tended to go high with stuff they’d just bought. That sometimes worked with pigeons and sucker books. But then the rent would come due or the sheriff would call for the sales tax, many months delinquent, and they’d scramble around, wholesaling their best books for pennies on the dollar in a mad effort to keep from being thrown out or padlocked.
Ruby was dressed in his usual country club attire: jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. He wore a heavy black beard that was streaked with gray. His partner was neater. Emery Neff had blond hair and a mustache. Taken together, they were a strange pair of boys. Ruby was gritty, down-to-earth, real; Neff put on airs, oozed arrogance, and, until you passed muster, seemed aloof and cold. Ruby could sell birth control to a nun; Neff seemed reluctant to sell you a book, even at high retail. Neff wasn’t quite a horse’s ass, but he was close: I guess it was his deep well of knowledge that saved him. He really was a remarkable bookman, and I seemed to like him in spite of himself.