“Let’s start with this one. Do you think Nola Jean Ryder set the fire?”
He rocked back in his tracks. But he kept on moving, trying to cover his surprise by making the sudden movement seem intentional. He climbed up on a high steel chair at the table where the answering machine blinked its red light and looked at me from there, leaning in and out of the shadow.
I wasn’t going to ask him again. Let him stew his way through it. Finally the silence got to him and he said, “The fire was an accident.”
“Some people don’t think so.”
“Some people think the world is flat. What do you want me to do about that?”
Who’s got an attitude now? I thought. But I said, “Give it a guess.”
“Darryl died, that was the end of it. That’s my guess. There wasn’t any reason for Nola Jean to be here anymore. I doubt she ever stayed in one place more than six months in her life till she came here. Why would she stick around after Darryl died? Everybody here hated her.”
“Did you hate her?”
“I never gave her that much thought.”
I grunted, the kind of sound that carries a full load of doubt without the bite.
“Look,” he said, annoyed that I’d caught him lying. “She was Darry’s woman. That made her off-limits to me, no matter what I might’ve thought from time to time or how willing she might’ve been to play around.”
“Did she come on to you?”
“That woman would come on to a green banana. Look, I’m having a hard time understanding how any of this old shit’s gonna help you find Ellie.”
“This sounds like the stone wall going up again, Arch.”
“Well, fuck, what do you expect? This stuff hurts to talk about.”
“Who does it hurt? Grayson’s dead, right? Can’t hurt him.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Who does it hurt?…You?…Rigby?…Crystal?”
“Hurts us all. When you lose somebody like that, it hurts.”
“But real people get over it. At least they move on past that raw hurt and get on with life. I’m not saying you forget the guy: maybe you love him till you die. But you don’t carry that raw pain on your sleeve for twenty years.”
He rocked back, his face in darkness.
“So what’s the real story here? Why does Rigby get the shakes every time Grayson’s name comes up? Why does Crystal go all protective and clam up like Big Brother’s listening? You’d think the man just died yesterday.”
“Gaston…”
I waited.
“Gaston thought Darryl walked on water. Damn near literally. Haven’t you ever had somebody in your life like that, Janeway?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got enough trouble with the concept of a real god. Don’t ask me to deal with men being gods.”
“Then how can you expect to understand it?”
I reached into my jacket where I’d tucked the envelope under my arm. Took out the glossy photograph and held it up in the light so he could see it. “Can you identify the people in this picture?”
He made a show of it. Took the picture and grunted at it. Leaned way back in his steel chair. Put on his glasses, squinted, and finally said, “Well, that’s Nola Jean Ryder there in the front with her arm around that fella.”
“Are you telling me you don’t know the others?”
“I don’t seem to recall ‘em.”
“That’s strange, Archie, it really is. Because here’s another shot of all of you together. I believe that’s you over there in the corner, talking to this fella you say you can’t remember.”
“I can’t remember everybody I ever talked to. This has been a long time ago.”
“Try the name Charlie Jeffords. Does it ring a bell now?”
“That’s the fella down in New Mexico…”
“Whose house Eleanor burgled. Now you’ve got it. Maybe you see why it bothers me so much, the fact that all of you know exactly who Jeffords was right from the start. The minute she got arrested and the name Jeffords came up, you knew why she went down there and what she was trying to find out. You could’ve shared that information with me when it might’ve meant something, last week in court. But for reasons of your own, you all hung pat and let that kid take the fall.”
The room simmered with rage. “I’ll tell you, Janeway, you might be thirty years younger than me, but if you keep throwing shit like that around, you and me are gonna tear up this printshop.“
“Who was Charlie Jeffords?”
He was still rocking slightly. The steel chair made a faint squeaking noise as he moved back and forth on it.
“Charlie Jeffords,” I said.
“Leave it alone.”
“Who’s the other woman in this picture with Jeffords?—the one standing back there glaring at them from the trees?”
He shrugged.
“I seem to be doing all the work here. Maybe I can figure it out by myself; you can sit there and tell me if I go wrong.” I gave the picture a long look. “The first time I saw this, something struck me about these two women. They look too much alike not to be related. They’ve got the same hairline. They’ve both got Eleanor’s high cheekbones.”
He leaned forward and looked at the picture as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “That damn Ryder blood must be some strong shit.”
“Keep trying, Archie, maybe you can find somebody you can sell that to. Me, I’m not buying any more. When you’ve worked in the sausage factory, you try to be careful what brands you buy.”
“What do you want?”
“The only thing that’s left. Everything.”
“I don’t think I can help you with that.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Charlie Jeffords was Darryl Grayson’s binder.”
He took in a lungful of air through his nose.
“Grayson never wanted that known, did he? That’s why you’re all so tight about it, you’re still protecting the legend, pushing the myth that every book was created from dust by one man only, start to finish. The mystique feeds on that. Even Huggins can’t understand how Grayson could turn them out so fast and so perfect and with so many variants. Well, he had help. That’s not a capital crime, the man was human after all. Most of us would be proud of that, being human. But not Grayson.“
“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”
“I’m not guessing here, you know. A friend of mine went to Taos to see Jeffords. What do you think she found there? A garage full of binding equipment. Very fine leathers, a bookpress or two…do I need to go on? Charlie Jeffords was a bookbinder by trade, right up till last year when he got sick. Jeffords did the binding on every Grayson book that came out of here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what is?”
“Darryl did a lot of it…a helluva lot. I did some. Gaston did. Richard did, before he started making so much money with his own books. But Charlie was the best…him and Gaston. Those two could bind a book you’d want to take home and eat.” He leaned forward, slapped his knee, and said, “Ah, shit,” with a sigh.
He shook his head, hating it. “You can’t take anything away from Darryl just because he turned some of it over to other people at the end. He did all the conceptual stuff. The design, the lettering, the layout—that’s where the real genius is. And he told all of us how he wanted ‘em bound and we did ’em that way to the letter. And he looked ‘em over with an eagle eye and tossed back any that weren’t right. I’m not saying the binding’s not important, it’s damn vital, it’s the first thing you see when you look at it. But it’s a craft, it can be learned. What Darryl did came from some goddamn other place, who knows where. Ain’t that what genius is?”
“I guess.”
“You know damn well.”
“Well, we’ll leave it at that. You wanna tell me now who the other woman was?”
“Jonelle.”
“And she was…”
“Nola Jean’s sister.”
He got off the bench and I tensed. But he sat back down again, pushed back and forth by restless energy.
“Richard played around with both of ‘em at one time or another. Then he brought ’em over here and the trouble started. I guess it appealed to his sense of humor. Two screwed-up sisters and two screwed-up brothers. I remember him saying that one time. Nola thought it was funny as hell.”
“Did anybody ever ask Jonelle what became of her sister?”
“She didn’t know either. That’s what she told the people that investigated the fire. Me, I didn’t give a damn. Good riddance, we all thought. Then Jonelle moved away too.”
“And she and Jeffords landed in Taos.”
“Apparently so.”
“And ended up together.”
“I guess that proves some damn thing. Fairy tales come true or something. Jonelle always had this crazy lust for Charlie Jeffords. But Nola Jean always took Jonelle’s men away from her. It came as natural as breathing. She tortured Charlie Jeffords and drove that poor bastard nuts. Diddled and teased him and never even gave him a good look at it.”
The telephone rang. He didn’t want to answer it. But we both knew who it was, and he picked it up just as the recording started to kick in.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he’s here now.”
Then Crystal told him something that made his mouth hang open.
He held the phone away from him, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got to take this.”
“Sure.”
“Shut that door but don’t go away. We’re not done yet.”
I stepped back into the front room and closed the door. I couldn’t hear anything. Crystal seemed to be doing all the talking.
I looked down at the desk, at Eleanor’s letter. Picked it up and put it in my pocket.
What’s a little federal crime at this stage of the game, I thought, and I walked out.
I crossed the street and stood in the dark place between buildings. I watched his storefront and I waited. He seemed to be back there a long time. When he did come out, he came slowly. He came to the front door and out onto the sidewalk.
“Janeway,” he called up the empty block.
I didn’t move.
“Janeway!”
He jumped in his truck and drove away, leaving his door wide open. I let him get well ahead. I wasn’t worried. I knew where he was going.
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