“Any idea who this Warren fellow was?”
“Not a clue. He’s not mentioned in any of the Burton biographies.”
“You would agree, though, that that’s an unusually intimate inscription.”
I did agree, but I was no expert. The man said, “So we have a mystery here as well as a valuable book,” and it all began then. Its roots went back to another time, when Richard Francis Burton met his greatest admirer and then set off on a secret journey, deep into the troubled American South. Because of that trip a friend of mine died. An old woman found peace, a good man lost everything, and I rediscovered myself on my continuing journey across the timeless, infinite world of books.
BOOK 1 - DENVER
CHAPTER 1
If I wanted to be arbitrary, I could say it began anywhere. That radio show moved it out of the dim past to here and now, but Burton’s story had been there forever, waiting for me to find it.
I found it in 1987, late in my thirty-seventh year. I had come home from Seattle with a big wad of money from the Grayson affair. My 10 percent finder’s fee had come to almost fifty thousand dollars, a career payday for almost any bookman and certainly, so far, for me. All I knew at that point was that I was going to buy a book with it. Not half a million books riddled with vast pockets of moldy corruption. Not a million bad books or a thousand good books, not even a hundred fine books. Just one book. One great, hellacious, killer book: just to see how it felt, owning such a thing.
So I thought, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to change directions in my book life. I was sick of critics and hucksters screaming about the genius of every new one-book wonder. I was ready for less hype and more tradition, and almost as soon as I fell into this seek-and-ye-shall-find mode, I found Richard Burton.
I had gone to a dinner party in East Denver, at the Park Hill home of Judge Leighton Huxley. Lee and I had known each other for years, cautiously at first, later on a warmer level of mutual interest, finally as friends. I had first appeared in his courtroom in 1978, when I was a very young cop testifying in a cut-and-dried murder case and he was a relatively young newcomer to the Denver bench. That gulf of professional distance between us was natural then: Lee was far outside my rather small circle of police cronies, and I could not have imagined myself rubbing elbows with his much larger crowd of legal eagles.
Age was a factor, though not a major one. I was in my late twenties; Lee was in his mid-forties, already gray around the temples and beginning to look like the distinguished man of the world that I would never be. He was by all accounts an excellent judge. He was extremely fair yet sure in his decisions, and he had never been overturned.
I saw him only twice in the first few years after my appearance in his court: once we had nodded in the courthouse cafeteria, briefly indicating that we remembered each other, and a year later I had been invited to a Christmas party in the mountain home of a mutual friend. That night we said our first few words outside the halls of justice. “I hear you’re a book collector,” he had said in that deep, rich baritone. I admitted my guilt and he said, “So am I: we should compare notes sometime.” But nothing had come of it then for the same obvious reasons—I was still a cop, there was always a chance I would find myself on his witness stand again, and he liked to avoid potential conflicts of interest before they came up. I didn’t think much about it: I figured he had just been passing time with me, being polite. That was always the thing about Lee Huxley: he had a reputation for good manners, in court and out.
A year later he was appointed to the U.S. District Court and it was then, removed from the likelihood of professional conflict, that our friendship had its cautious, tentative beginning. Out of the blue I got a call from Miranda, his wife, inviting me, as she put it, to “a small, informal dinner party for some book lovers.” There were actually a dozen people there that first night, and I was paired with Miranda’s younger sister Hope, who was visiting from somewhere back East. The house was just off East Seventeenth Avenue, a redbrick turn-of-the-century three-story with chandeliers and glistening hardwood everywhere you looked. It was already ablaze with lights and alive with laughter when I arrived, and Miranda was a blonde knockout at the front door in her blue evening dress. She looked no older than thirty but was elegant and interesting in her own right, not just a pretty face at Lee’s side. The judge’s friends were also considerate and refined, and I fought back my natural instincts for reverse snobbery and liked them all. They were rich book collectors and I was still on a cop’s salary, but there wasn’t a hint of condescension to any of them. If they saw a $5,000 book they wanted, they just bought that sucker and paid the price, and my kind of nickel-and-dime bookscouting was fascinating to them, something they couldn’t have imagined until I told them about it.
Miranda was a superb hostess. The next day, as I was composing a thank-you note, I got a call from her thanking me for coming. “You really livened things up over here, Cliff,” she said. “I hope we’re going to see lots more of each other.”
And we had. I hadn’t done much rubbernecking that first night, but the judge’s library later turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be. It was a large room shelved on all four walls and full of wonderful books, all the modern American greats in superb dust jackets. At one point Lee said, “I’ve got some older things downstairs,” but years had passed before I saw what they were.
From the beginning there were differences to their most recent dinner party. For one thing I was no longer a cop, and the manner of my departure from the Denver Police Department might have chilled my relationship with any judge. I had roughed up a brutal thug, and the press dredged up my distant past, a childhood riddled with violent street fighting and close ties to people like Vince Marranzino, who later became one of Denver’s most feared mobsters. Never mind that Vince and I had only been within speaking distance once in almost twenty years; never mind that I had lived all that down and become, if I do say so, a crackerjack homicide cop—once you’ve been tarred by that brush it’s always there waiting to tar you again. By then there were rumors that Lee was on a short list of possibles for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, and though it was hard to picture Lee and Ronald Reagan as political bedfellows, I had no real idea what Lee’s politics were. All I knew was this: if there was even a chance for him in the big teepee, the last thing I wanted was to mess that up. I had been front-page news, none of it good, for most of a week, but if Lee worried about his own image and the company he kept, I never saw any sign of it. He called and asked for my version of what had happened, I told him the truth, and he accepted that. “Not the best judgment you’ve ever shown, Cliff, but this too shall pass,” he said. “I’m sure you’re busy right now keeping the wolves at bay. As soon as this settles down, we’ll get together.”
But then I was gone to Seattle, and suddenly several months had passed since I’d seen them. I came home with a big stash, my Indian money; I book-hunted across the midwest with Seattle friends, and when I returned to Denver one of my first calls was from Miranda.
“Mr. Janeway.” Her icy tone sounded put-on but not completely. “Are you avoiding us for some reason? Have we done something to offend you?”