We sat and talked. Eventually Mallory asked the big question.
“So what’re you gonna do?”
About me, he meant.
Quintana shrugged. “Talk to the chief. I dunno, Stan, I don’t see where we’ve got much evidence for a case against this man.”
Mallory gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.
“We’ll see what the chief says tomorrow,” Quintana said.
In a little while Mallory left. Quintana said, “If I get you out of this shit, it’ll be a miracle. The Lady of Fatima couldn’t do it.”
I followed him into an adjacent room. He sat at a table with some video equipment. “I talked to Mrs. Rigby today. You interested?”
“Sure I am.”
He popped a cassette into a machine and Crystal’s haggard face came up on a screen. “Most of this’s routine. Stuff you already know. The kicker’s at the end.”
He hit a fast button and looked in his notebook for the counter number where he wanted to stop it. “Her problem was, they never had any money,” he said. “They owned the property they lived on, they’d bought it years ago before prices went out of sight. And she had a piece of land in Georgia that she’d inherited. I guess that’s gone now. She’d given it to Eleanor and they put it up for the bail.”
The machine whirred.
“Rigby wasn’t interested in anything that generated their day-to-day income. He was always doing his Raven thing. But she loved him. So he sat out in that shop and made his books, and they just kept getting better and better. After a while she thought they were better than Grayson’s. One day Rigby went down to Tacoma to look at some equipment in a printshop liquidation, and Crystal brought Moon over to see the books. Moon couldn’t believe his eyes. He thought Grayson had come back to life, better than ever.
“The temptation to sell one was always with her after that. She started hearing what people were paying—all that money changing hands out there and they had none of it. If she could just sell one, for enough dough. She could hide the money and dribble it into their account and they wouldn’t be so damn hard up all the time. Rigby didn’t seem to notice things like that. As long as there was food on the table and a roof over their heads, he didn’t spend a lot of time fretting. He didn’t care much about the books either. He’d finish one and toss it back in that room and never look at it again. Sometimes he talked about destroying them, but he never did because Eleanor loved them and he couldn’t stand to hurt her. But all of them knew—Crystal, Moon, Eleanor—they all knew that if he ever made one that satisfied him, the others were all history.
“The temptation killed her. But she was afraid, scared to death. If Rigby ever found out…well, he’d never forgive her, would he?”
“If she was lucky.”
“Yeah, except she didn’t think of it that way. She’d be betraying Grayson in his eyes and that scared her silly. It came to a head about seven years ago. They had a string of money problems all at once and she started making some calls. Eventually she got fun-neled to Murdock, who was then the leading Grayson dealer in the country. The rest of it’s pretty much like Scofield told it to you. When he had that coughing attack, that’s what scared her off. It dawned on her what an old man she was dealing with. If Scofield should die and the book get out…well, that would make news, wouldn’t it?”
“It would in the book world.”
“And there was a chance Rigby would hear about it and go look and see the book was missing from that back room.”
“Eleanor might even tell him. She’d read it in AB , a new Grayson book found, and tear it out and show it to him.”
He stopped the tape, ran it back slightly to the spot he wanted, and leaned back in his chair. “That’s when Pruitt came into it. When he lost his job with Scofield, it was all downhill from there. He thought if he could find this woman in red, he could do two things—get back at Scofield and put himself on easy street. But he figured wrong. He thought it had to be one of Grayson’s old girlfriends, and for most of a year he chased down that road, trying to track ‘em all down.“
“What a job.”
“That’s what he found out. This Nola Jean—he worked on her for months and came to the same dead end everybody else came to. He went out and interviewed the Rigbys one time, even went to Taos, tracked down her sister, tried to talk to her. None of it panned out. Finally he ran out of leads and had to give it up. But he never stopped thinking about it.
“In the last five years, Pruitt really descended to his natural level in the order of man. He was a cheap hood, dreaming of glory. Then Eleanor got busted in New Mexico. That was the catalyst, that’s what started this new wave of stuff. There was a little article in one of the Seattle papers, not much, just police-blotter stuff. There wasn’t any what they call byline on the story, it was just a long paragraph, Seattle woman arrested in Taos heist and murder attempt, but your friend Aandahl says she wrote it. Pruitt saw it. Suddenly Grayson was back on the front burner again. The Rigby girl had broken into the Jeffords woman’s house. What could that mean? Maybe Jeffords had been Scofield’s woman in red. The only thing Pruitt knew for sure at that point was that Jeffords had had something the Rigbys wanted, and he had a pretty fair idea what that thing was. He called Slater and sent him to New Mexico to watch Rigby. Then Pruitt went to North Bend to confront Crystal, but she wouldn’t admit anything. He harrassed her for a day or two, but that didn’t get him anywhere. So he flew down to New Mexico and turned up the heat on Eleanor. He stalked her, called her at night with threats. He’d call at midnight and hum that song. Anything to rattle her, to get her to give up the book.”
“This was when she was out on bail.”
“Yeah, there was a period of about a week there when Pruitt and Slater were hard on her case. She didn’t have the book then but she knew where it was. Charlie Jeffords had told her, it was Nola’s book. So she went back and took it and made her run. The funny thing is, she might not’ve done any of that if the Jeffords woman had just talked to her.”
“All she wanted was to find her mother.”
“So they get back up here and Pruitt starts in on Crystal again. Stalking, calling. There were some death threats. He’d call her at night and play that song, just a snatch of it, just enough of it, just enough of it. But loud, menacing. Then he started on Rigby too, and that was his big mistake. He was messing with the wrong dude. Rigby wound up at Pruitt’s house and you know what happened after that. He ransacked the joint and found the photocopies of Grayson’s Raven —that what you found burned in the wastebasket. I figure Pruitt made that copy when he stole Scofield’s book, years ago.
“There wasn’t even a misspelled word in that one.”
“I’ll bet he didn’t even look.”
He punched the tape. Crystal’s voice filled the room.
“We stood around in shock,” she said, faltering.
Quintana leaned back in his chair. “She’s talking about the morning after the fire.”
“We were over at Archie’s shop, in Snoqualmie,” she said. “We were like three dead people. Gaston and Archie were beside themselves. Gaston was inconsolable. It was the worst day of our lives…until this one. I don’t think we said a word to each other the whole time. What could be said? Then we heard the door open…someone had come into the shop. And I remember Archie yelling out that he was closed… go away, just…go away. But the footsteps came on, and then she was there. Nola. I kept waiting for her to say something…maybe to cry. But she looked at Gaston across the room…she looked straight at him and said, mean as hell, ‘Cry if you want to, suckers. I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead.’“
Crystal sniffed and dabbed her eyes. “I knew she didn’t mean that, it was just spite. She’d had that awful fight with Darryl the day before…and she’d always hated Gaston because she could never move him the way she always got at other men. When she said it, I felt sick. I turned away from her, I couldn’t look at her…and then…then there was this thump, or a kind of…crushing sound…and when I turned around, she was lying there with her brains…and Gaston stood over her with the bloody hammer and Archie…Archie’d kinda shrunk back to the wall and we all just…just…”