SIX
For the next two days I sat in the store fulfilling orders I'd received from the Internet. More and more of my business was actually done through the mail and over the Internet, now that I'd hooked up with several online bookseller databases. I'd list most rarities and first editions, and within a couple of weeks I'd generate orders and I'd send the books off. It was much easier to reach collectors who knew what they were after and were willing to pay, rather than relying on the chance that someone would come in off the street who was probably only interested in finding a cheap paperback copy of a recent bestseller. I had three locked glass cases filled with books over a century old, and it felt nearly that long since anyone had browsed and asked me to unlock the cabinets.
My assistant Debi Kiko Mashima finally realized that the way to fame and success was not to work in a Greenwich Village bookstore, but to quit NYU and marry one of the leading software writers on the face of the earth. His name was Bobby Li and he liked to rollerblade and always wore hockey jerseys. They'd met at a computer expo at the Jacob Javits Center. Despite the fact that he, too, was of Japanese descent, he'd lived in the San Francisco area all his life and now owned a large portion of it. He was Debi's age, twenty-one, and worth roughly half a billion dollars. They'd had five dates before he proposed and she accepted. I did not consider her leaving my employ to be a great betrayal.
If I moved the store to Felicity Grove and went in partners with the flower shop, I could still make a living, but I'd have to get a door with bells on it that chimed or jangled or rang or tinkled whenever anybody came in. Maybe I just had a low distraction threshold, but the idea of having a clanging noise interrupt my thoughts and work every few minutes didn't appeal to me. A door opening and somebody entering made more than enough clamor to alert you to the presence of a potential customer. And every once in a while somebody came in hoping to sell me a few rain-soaked paperbacks they'd nabbed out of the trash.
Or so I thought, until I turned in my seat and saw a guy standing there only two feet away, staring intently at me.
He'd entered without a sound.
No way to judge how tall he might be, crimped as he was, low to the ground like an animal tensed and coiled. He wore remnants of a dark three-piece suit, ripped and patched with different pieces of fabric, a frayed black overcoat hanging open so that he looked like an Old West gunslinger waiting to draw. He had the hard, confident, but wary edge the street imbued those whose brains hadn't been turned to tapioca by drugs, self-pity, sexual abuse, or the unending loneliness of the outcast. His eyes had a black, shrewd, and discerning energy to them, but I might have just been mistaking malicious aptitude. He had a poorly trimmed beard, thick in spots and showing cuts in other places, as if he'd used a pair of broken scissors to slice off hanks.
He took his time sizing me up, shifting now until he stood in front of the counter, glancing down at my fists filled with invoices and mailing labels.
Despite his silent entrance, I should have noticed the reek. The stink of rotting fruit and vegetables followed him in. His torn, gaping pockets were stuffed with lettuce leaves and a few bruised apples and old legumes. I smelled no alcohol. He looked fifty, but might have been a decade younger or older. A sharp look of feral intelligence lit his face, and I thought he must be one of the rare breed who had chosen the street instead of the street choosing them. He could have been a cop taken down low.
"You're Kendrick," he said.
"Yes."
A bell over the door might not be such a bad thing after all, I thought. One that jangled and rang up such a storm that nobody who looked like they wanted to yank a Colt strapped to his thigh could walk in while I worried about how distracting bells over the door would be.
Even if I'd wanted to wallop first and ask questions later, he stood just out of arm's reach. Keeping a fair distance, yet staying close enough so that if I had a weapon handy he could whirl over the counter and leap into my chest before I could do anything about it.
"I'm Nicodemus Crummler," he said. "Nick. I know you're my brother Zeb's friend. I need your help."
"Who's Maggie?" I asked.
His eyes lost their protective black shale aspect, the dead sheen lifting for a second. That seemed to be about as close to a flinch as he was capable of after living so long in the refuse. He chose to ignore the question for the moment.
I'd rolled with it pretty well myself, I thought, but he'd still shocked the hell out of me. I'd known Zebediah Crummler most of my life and always believed that in his childish mind and burning-wire mania resided truths not even the rumor mill of a small town could ever chum free. But a brother? He'd been in orphanages, hospitals, and foster homes before coming to rest in Felicity Grove, that much was common knowledge.
Now that I looked harder I could make out similar physical characteristics: the same wiry hair, facial muscles spread wide as if battling tics forever, an equal amount of intensity there, although Nick bit his down hard.
"How did you hear about him being in trouble?" I asked.
"You make the news, you and your grandmother, and now him, too. The son of Theodore Harnes murdered, that's what they're saying. Did you think they'd only hear about it in Buffalo?" That wasn't what I'd meant at all, and of course he knew it. "Oh, because I don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, you think I can't buy and read a paper? I can only wrap my feet in them?"
I cleared about twenty pounds of books from the chair beside me, but he didn't sit. The idea that he might have once been a cop hit again, the way he stood with such a sense of authority. He reminded me of Lowell. There was no anger behind his words, everything fell out with a perfectly composed and even tone, as if whatever might have been heated had cooled before he said it.
"He never mentioned a brother," I told him. "I thought he was an orphan, a ward of the state."
"He was. You're talking about when we were six and seven years old. A brother who's a year younger doesn't count as family in the eyes of the law. We were separated. That's what they did back then. Still do, I think. Besides, he's special, they call it. They couldn't wait to get him into the system." He leaned back against the cabinets of rare books and my heart hitched a little to the left, imagining him with shards of glass raining on him, my stock destroyed. He had a dancer's spryness though, and the fragile doors didn't even rattle in their frame. I couldn't quite picture him jitterbugging with children. "It's not hard to track somebody, not as hard as they make you think it is, anyway. I've kept in touch with him, best as I could, best for him."
"Why haven't you ever shown up before?"
"I do, but that's between me and him. Not you, and not the rest of that place. He's better off with the dead, and a whole lot safer. At least he was until now."
We stared at each other for a minute. I thought of the guy I'd sissy-slapped in the restaurant, and the way he'd wanted to shoot Crummler. I could imagine him raising his fist and shouting in delight the next day after reading the paper, vindicated for his beliefs that the "psycho son of a bitch" had proven to be a killer.
"Did he ever say anything about Teddy Harnes?”
“No."
"He said he'd been in battle with himself. Does that mean anything to you?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. How do you know that name?" he asked, again without any inflection in his voice, so that it hardly sounded like a question at all. "Maggie."
I focused on his hands. Although small, they were thickly veined, and appeared powerful, like Lowell's. For some reason I didn't like thinking of Lowell and this man together, but couldn't help myself. "He mentioned her."