‘She almost gave this poor bastard a heart attack. So now the engineer’s afraid she’ll electrocute herself on the third rail. He calls out the Transit cops, and they block off the tunnel. Six of those clowns couldn’t catch one little girl. She laughed at them. So now the social worker arrives. This woman walks into the tunnel and rounds up the kid in two minutes flat. You know how she did that? Kathy walked right up to her, this tall blonde – ’
‘Like your friend Sparrow.’
‘Yeah, and the kid was real happy to go anywhere with this woman. Kathy even held the social worker’s hand while they were filling out paperwork at Juvie Hall. So the kid’s in custody. She’s been cleaned up and fed, all settled in for the night. But now the social worker goes home and leaves her alone in that place. Well, no tall blonde – no Kathy. The kid left five minutes later, and the guards never figured out how she got away. She was their only escapee – ever.’
‘Sounds like she picked up bad habits from the Wichita Kid.’
Riker froze. How long had the door been open? How long?
Jack Coffey stood on the threshold, saying to him, ‘You’ve got a visitor.’
And then, as if Charles Butler knew how dangerous the westerns were, he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’
When Riker returned to his desk in the squad room, an old friend was waiting for him. There was nothing in Heller’s expression to say that he had good news or bad, for he was the king of deadpan. He held up a business card. ‘You know this guy, right?’
Riker took the card and read the name aloud, ‘Warwick’s Used Books’. His stomach knotted as he eased into the chair behind the desk, and his mouth was suddenly dry. ‘Yeah, I interviewed him.’
Heller slowly swiveled his chair, turning away to look out the window. ‘John Warwick came in while I was here, and Janos palmed him off on me. So this little guy’s all excited. He waves a newspaper in my face. Then he goes into a ramble about some paperback book. He doesn’t ask – he tells me I found it in Sparrow’s apartment. Says he knows I found it – and he wants it back. Seems the hooker stole it from his store an hour before she was hung.’ He turned back to face the desk and the sorry-looking detective. ‘Warwick says you’ll vouch for that ‘cause you took his statement.’
‘Yeah, I did.’ Riker tapped the side of his head, a gesture to say that the bookseller was not quite sane. ‘The paperback probably went into the fire, but I didn’t tell that to Warwick.’
‘I told him,’ said Heller. ‘And you’re right – he is nuts. The little guy broke down and cried. I guess that book was pretty important to him – and Sparrow.’
‘I guess.’ Riker was recalling his suit jacket all buttoned up – very fancy for a sweltering crime scene. And Heller, a man who could do a postmortem on a dead fly, would have noticed the damp spot on the breast of that jacket – and every other detail of that night in Sparrow’s apartment.
Heller looked down at an open notebook in his hand. ‘Warwick says the title is Homecoming, by Jake Swain.’ He looked up. ‘But I figure you already knew that.’
This man had run cops off the force for stealing trinkets from crime scenes. If Heller developed a case for tampering with evidence, he would prosecute in a New York heartbeat, no exceptions for friendships that spanned twenty years. They stared at one another, and the silence went on for too long.
‘After Warwick left,’ said Heller, ‘I went back to the lab and sifted through ashes and fragments. Some of the magazines were intact, but no sign of a paperback. Now that’s strange – even with the age of the book, the brittle paper. You’d think the core would’ve survived, a good chunk of pressed pages. There are tests I could run. You want me to keep on looking?’
Riker slowly shook his head, and this must have passed for a confession.
Heller nodded, then ripped the sheet from his notebook and dropped it into a wastebasket. ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of it.’ With no goodbye, he rose from his chair and crossed the squad room to the stairwell door.
Riker knew he would keep his badge for lack of physical evidence to hang him – but this man was no longer his friend. And that was what Heller had dropped by to tell him.
Cafe Regio on MacDougal Street was filled with the metropolitan babble of foreign languages. Charles Butler looked around the large single dining area crammed with people, paintings and eclectic furnishings. He spied an acquaintance at a corner table.
Anthony Herman was a child’s idea of a pixie, not quite five feet tall, with a small bulbous nose and pancake ears sticking out at right angles. His light brown hair was swept back to display a pronounced widow’s peak, a sure sign of witchcraft, though his true profession would seem rather boring to most. The little man nervously adjusted a red bow tie while doing his best to hide behind a menu, though it was long past the dinner hour.
When Charles sat down at the table, the antiquarian book dealer handed him a package wrapped in brown paper and said, ‘That’s the whole set. Don’t open it here.’
A very generous check crossed the table and found its way into Herman’s pocket. The little man looked around, as if the other late night diners might be watching this exchange and making notes or taking blackmail photographs. His toes just barely reached the floor to tap it, and his fingers rapped the table. ‘If you ever tell anyone I was tracing those – ’
‘I know,’ said Charles. ‘You’ll hunt me down and kill me. Your reputation is safe.’ He set the package of books on the table. ‘How did you find them so fast?’
‘There’s a collector,’ said Herman. ‘Well, hardly that – not at all discriminating, but the man’s a repository of every western ever written. I had to go to Colorado. That’s why the bill is so high. The books didn’t cost a dime. I won them shooting pool with a rancher who thinks that crap is high art.’
While Charles was grappling with the odd idea of Anthony Herman as a pool hustler, the man added, ‘The rancher also has first editions from the penny-dreadful era. If you want them, you go shoot pool with the old bastard.’
‘I don’t suppose you read any of these novels?’ Charles watched Herman’s eyes grow a tad fearful. ‘You did read them, didn’t you?’
‘I might’ve glanced at one on the plane.’ The little man’s mouth dipped down at the corners, silently intoning, What a question, making it clear that he was hardly the type to read this sort of trash, and his client should know better.
Charles opened the package, despite the book detective’s sudden violent shaking of the head, begging that he not do this in public. After leafing through a chapter of the first volume, he smiled at Herman, another great speed reader, for this was a talent that went along with the trade of manuscript comparisons. ‘Light stuff, isn’t it? Lots of white space. How long was the plane trip? Three or four hours?’
‘All right.’ Herman bowed his head. ‘I read them. All twelve.’
‘I’m sure you had other reading material with – ’
‘It’s your fault, Charles. I just had to know why you wanted them so badly. Then I got caught up in the whole thing.’
‘They’re not very good, are they?’
‘No. The writing is awful, the plots are thin. Very bad – very – all of them.’
‘But you read the entire series.’