Riker glanced at the hours posted in the shop window. Poor Sparrow. She had wanted the book so badly, but there had been no time to read it before she was mutilated and hung.
CHAPTER 4
The sunlit room was racked with gleaming copper-bottom pots, more spices than the stores carried and every cooking utensil known to God and Cordon Bleu – and even here, antiques prevailed. Charles Butler lit a flame under an old-fashioned percolator. He was dressed in yesterday’s shirt and jeans, and his eyes were sore from working through the night on Mallory’s account, though he would never get credit for mending her present, a waterlogged paperback western. Riker had never understood this man’s one-sided infatuation with her. Charles was hardly a virgin in the area of abnormal psychology, and he must know what she was.
The detective sat at the kitchen table and opened the restored book to the page with the inscription. Apart from Lou Markowitz’s lost signature, there was no sign of damage, and he toyed with the idea of actually giving it to Mallory. ‘Good as new. It’s magic’
‘The paper was very brittle.’ Charles set the table with coffee cups and forks. ‘I had to treat it with a matte polymer so the pages wouldn’t crumble. Of course, that would’ve destroyed the value of a rare book. So I did some research first.’
Apparently, this was not a joke. Riker glanced at the stack of volumes on the kitchen table, all reference materials of an avid book collector. Among the titles he found, The Role of the Western in American Literature. ‘The book is worthless, right?’
‘Yes, sorry.’ Charles laid the old receipt from Warwick’s Used Books on the table alongside the paperback. ‘I can’t imagine why Louis paid so much money for it.’
‘I told you they were hard to find. It took a while to track this one down.’
‘Ah, he hired a book tracer. I use one from time to time. Well, that explains it.’ Charles leaned down and pointed to the faded date on the receipt. ‘Wasn’t that the year Louis took Mallory into foster care?’
Riker felt queer and cold, the sensation of a misstep on a ladder. There were no regrets over stealing the book; he would risk his badge to do it again. No, his great mistake was made in that sentimental moment when he had decided not to destroy it. The second error was bringing the book to the man who loved Mallory. ‘Hey, I really appreciate all the time you – ’
‘It’s not like I had something better to do.’ Charles set two plates of pie on the table, then turned down the flame on the stovetop. ‘I don’t think I care for summer vacations. Oh, I almost forgot. I found a list of Jake Swain’s work. Did you know he wrote eleven other books?’
‘Yeah, I knew that.’ Riker wondered how much of the truth he could tell before the whole mess came unraveling.
His host poured coffee into the cups, then sat down on the other side of the table. ‘Interesting that Louis would go to so much trouble.’ His tone was merely conversational and curious, not suspicious – not yet. ‘If he hired a tracer, he must’ve wanted it very badly.’
Of course, this would be confusing. Charles and the late Louis Markowitz had shared a reading list of more respectable authors. Perhaps he was hoping that this bad novel was some inside joke between Mallory and her foster father.
‘No tracer,’ said Riker. ‘The bookshop owner found it for him.’ He sipped his coffee and tasted bile rising in his throat.
‘So – how did you know about Swain’s other books? They’re very obscure. Did Louis mention them?’
‘Yeah, Lou read ‘em all.’ Riker knew he would not be believed, though he was telling the truth.
Charles was incredulous. ‘Why would he read books – like – that!’ His gigantic vocabulary had failed him. He could find no better euphemism for god-awful crap.
Riker jabbed at the pie with his fork. ‘Because it’s great literature?’
‘No, I don’t think that’s quite it. May I?’ Charles reached for the western, then opened it to a page near the end. ‘In the last chapter, there’s a rather strange gunfight.’
There was no need of the book to refresh his memory. Charles could read as fast as most people turned pages, and he retained everything in eidetic memory. Yet he kept the small conventions of normalcy – always trying to pass for a less gifted man, less of a freak. Riker wondered if this was partly his own fault. Perhaps he should stop referring to the brilliant clients of Butler and Company as Martians. He sometimes forgot that this man hailed from that same far planet.
‘Here it is.’ Charles looked up from the page. ‘First, a gun shoots a red flame like a blowtorch. Then the crowd lets out a cheer. Oh, and the mayor has a few words to say. And then, at the other end of Main Street, an aging dance-hall girl faints when she actually hears the sound of the bullet entering the opponent’s body.’ He looked up at his guest. ‘Now, given all the action and conversation between firing the shot and hitting the target, I estimate that the bullet took six minutes to travel down the street.’ He closed the book, pronouncing it ‘Wildly implausible.’
Riker gave him a slow grin. ‘You only say that ‘cause you never saw Lou on the firing range. A man could wait around all day for one of his bullets to hit a target.’ He sipped his coffee, stalling for time, hunting for words that would not sound like lies. ‘There were usually two gunfights in every book.’ And now he remembered the name of the gunslinger. ‘Now I never read this particular book, but I’m guessing that last shoot-out was between Sheriff Peety and the Wichita Kid.’ He shook his head slowly in mock sadness. ‘So that’s how it ends.’
‘You read them, too?’
‘Yeah, maybe half of ‘em.’ And he had read the books under duress. Lou Markowitz had wanted a second opinion, for he had never understood why a ten-year-old girl could be so attached to the trashy westerns.
Charles was still skeptical, crediting the detective with better taste in reading material if not suits and ties. And though it would not occur to him to call a friend on a he, he clearly required more proof.
‘In the first book,’ said Riker, ‘Sheriff Peety watches this little boy grow up in a sleepy burg called Franktown, Kansas. The kid and his mother rode in one day on the Wichita stagecoach.’ More of the story was coming back to him now, and his appetite had returned. ‘Well, the kid follows the sheriff around like a little shadow. In fact, Peety was the one who started calling him the Wichita Kid. It made the boy sound like a gunslinger. Just a joke, see? But the boy loved that name. It really made him strut.’
By the time the Wichita Kid had obtained his first six-shooter, ‘a rusty old gun he bought for a dollar,’ Riker was done with his pie. ‘It was the kid’s birthday. He’d just turned fifteen. And that morning, the sheriff wakes up to gunfire. So he comes runnin’ out to the street.’ The detective looked down at the floor and made Charles see a body there. The stranger in Franktown was an unarmed cowboy lying on his back in the blood and the dust.
‘His unblinking eyes stared into the sun.’ Riker surprised himself with this hokey line quoted verbatim. ‘And guess who’s standing over the body?’ His hand formed an imaginary gun, and he blew smoke from one finger. ‘Looks real bad for the Wichita Kid.’
The situation worsened when the boy stole a horse and rode out of town. In the next chapter, the lawman was saddling a black stallion. ‘He’s riding out after the kid.’ And Riker had finished his coffee. ‘Sheriff Peety can hardly see. He’s got tears in his eyes. He loves the boy. But Wichita killed a man, and he’s gotta hang for that. At the end of the story, the sheriff runs the kid off a canyon wall. It’s a long drop, hundreds of feet to the bottom of that canyon. But Peety’s still tracking the boy in the book after that one.’