“Did you ever find out,” I asked, “why this was?”
“It was fairly obvious to me,” Scofield said, “but Murdock explained it later. His client knew Darryl Grayson personally. They had had an intimate relationship. She had been a married woman then, still was, and if any of this came out, her marriage might be jeopardized.”
“Did you buy that?”
“Why not, it was perfectly feasible. Have you read the Aandahl biography on the Graysons?”
I nodded.
“Then you know how Grayson was with women. The fact that a pretty young woman was married to someone else wouldn’t have slowed him up much. She wouldn’t have been the first woman to have carried on with Grayson while she was married to someone else. And Grayson was known to have given his women presents—books, notes, charts…mementos of completed projects. It was part of the pleasure he took in his work, to give out valuable pieces of it after the main work was finished. Once a project was done, Grayson wasn’t much for keeping the records or hanging on to his dummy copies. For years it’s been assumed that these were all destroyed, but I’ve never been convinced of that.”
“So what happened?”
“We flew to Seattle.”
“Who is we?” I looked at Kenney. “You?”
Kenney shook his head. “I hadn’t been hired yet.”
“I took Mr. Pruitt,” Scofield said.
“Surely not,” I said in real dismay.
“There was no reason to doubt him then.”
“But what purpose did he serve?”
“He was what he always was: a bodyguard. I learned long ago that it pays to have such men with you. When you’ve got money, and that fact is generally known, you get accosted by all kinds of people.”
“But you had nobody with you to function as an expert…nobody like Kenney?”
“Murdock was my expert. He had already had one meeting with this woman and had examined the book himself. There was no doubt in his mind what it was.”
I didn’t point out that the ax Murdock was grinding would’ve given Paul Bunyan a hernia. It wouldn’t help to beat that horse now.
“So you took Pruitt,” I said. “What happened when you got there?”
“Murdock met us at the airport and took us straight to the meeting place. I wasn’t at my best: I’m prone to colds and flu, and I felt I was coming down with something. The weather was bad: I remember it was raining.”
“What else does it ever do in this town?”
“We went to the place she had picked out, a restaurant downtown. She wanted to meet in a public place, probably for her own protection. Murdock had reserved a table in a far corner, where she’d told him to go. It was dark back there, but that’s how she wanted it. We did it her way…everything, her way.”
He sipped his drink, gave a little cough. “She was late. We waited half an hour, maybe more. Murdock and I had little to talk about. It seemed like a very long wait, and I was not feeling well.”
“Where was Pruitt all this time?”
“Posted at the door, up front.”
“So when she finally did get there…”
“She had to walk right past him.”
“And he’d have seen her.”
“But not to recognize. She wore a veil…black coat, black hat…and a deep red dress. The veil did a good job. I never saw her face and neither did Murdock. With the veil, and the darkness at that table, she could’ve been anyone.”
“Did she bring the book?”
“Oh, yes.” He trembled at the memory of it. “It was superb…magnificent…completely lovely. Beyond any doubt, Grayson’s masterpiece.”
“You could tell all this in the dark?”
“Murdock had come prepared. He had a small penlight and we examined the book with that. You can’t be sure under conditions like that, but there we were. I still didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t seem to know either. She seemed in dire financial need one moment and unconcerned the next, as if her two greatest fears were selling the book and losing the deal we had come there to make. The ball was in my court: I felt I had to do something or risk losing it. I had brought some cash—not much, about twenty thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. I offered her this for the opportunity to examine the book for one week. The money would be hers to keep regardless of what we finally decided to do. We would sign a paper to that effect, handwritten by me and witnessed by Murdock. In exactly one week we’d meet back at that same restaurant. If the book passed muster, she would be paid an additional fifty thousand. Her reaction was palpable: it was more than she’d dreamed…she took it, and I felt I was home free.”
The room was quiet. Kenney stood back like a piece of furniture. Amy sat on the edge of her chair. I held fast to Scofleld’s pale eyes.
“So you had the book,” I said. “Then what?”
“We flew back to Los Angeles with it. I wrote Murdock a check for his work, and at that point I decided to have some independent appraisers fly in and look at it. I called Harold Brenner in New York.”
He looked at me expectantly. I had heard the name, had seen Brenner’s ads in AB , but I had never had any dealings with the man. Kenney said, “Brenner’s one of the best men in the country on modern small-press books.”
“But Brenner couldn’t come out till the end of the week,” said Scofield. “This would still leave us time to have the book examined and get back to Seattle for our meeting with the woman in red, early the following week. Then I got sick—whatever I had caught in Seattle got dangerously worse, and on my second day home I was hospitalized as a precaution. That night my house was burglarized. My choice Grayson pieces were taken.”
“Including The Raven , I’m sure,” I said. “How long did it take you to realize that Pruitt was behind it?”
“The police were surprisingly efficient. Pruitt had been out playing cards that night: four other men would swear that the game had gone on till dawn and he’d only left the room once or twice to use the facility. But from the start, one of the detectives knew it was an inside job. How could it be anything else?…Who else would know how to defeat the system and get in so easily? The big problem was proving it…they had to catch the perpetrator and make him talk. Within forty-eight hours they had questioned everyone remotely connected with the installation of the security system, including all of Pruitt’s local cronies. Early on the third day they made an arrest, a petty hoodlum named Larson, who had known Pruitt for years. When he was picked up, he still had one of the break-in tools in his possession.”
I gave a dry little laugh. Even after my long police career, the stupidity of some criminals amazes me. This is why the jails are full.
“It was a screwdriver,” Scofield said. “One of those extra blades that comes on a utility knife, you know, a six-tools-in-one instrument. He had used it to break open the bookshelf locks. This was easy: once he’d gotten into the house, then into the library, breaking open the cabinets themselves was relatively simple— he just wedged his screwdriver into the metal lock and pried it open. But it left a scrape mark, which was identical to the sample police made later with the same tool. He also left a partial heelprint in the garden outside the house. His heel fit it perfectly. We had just fertilized that flowerbed, and a chemical residue was found in the nail holes of his heels. I was getting that fertilizer from Germany, it wasn’t yet widely available in the United States, so the odds of finding that precise mix of ingredients in any other garden would have been quite long. We didn’t even have the analysis back from the crime lab yet, but Mr. Larson—and more to the point, Mr. Pruitt—must have known what it would show. Larson was a two-time loser who was looking at a long trip up the river. His incentive to deal was getting better by the hour.”