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  Bookman's wake

  ( Cliff Janeway - 2 )

  John Dunning

  Also by John Dunning

  FICTION

  The Holland Suggestions

  Looking for Ginger North

  Denver

  Deadline

  Booked to Die

  The Bookman’s Wake

  Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

  NONFICTION

  Tune in Yesterday

  On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio

  THE

  BOOKMAN’S WAKE

  JOHN DUNNING

  POCKET STAR BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PA Pocket Star Book, published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1995 by John Dunning

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-56782-9

  First Pocket Books printing March 1996

  10 9 8

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover design by Jae Song

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  To Jack Kisling of Hairline Press, who navigates

  with a steady hand the eddies and shoals

  of the printshop.

  Again, prices on actual books discussed by characters in the story may be a year or two out-of-date. In a time of madness, when a new novel can bring ten times its cover price a year after publication, prices become obsolete almost as they’re published. Janeway remains a cynic when people pay too much too soon and glorify the trendy. But he is an equal-opportunity cynic who saves his deepest skepticism for me, when he and I are alone at four-thirty in the morning.

  Another tip of the hat to Warwick Downing, who bullied me for three years. To George Fowler for turning me left and right in the Seattle rain. To Pat McGuire for long friendship and a kick in the duff when I needed it. And a kind word for the small-press publishers of today. Some still struggle valiantly in the great lost cause.

  THE

  BOOKMAN’S WAKE

  The man in St. Louis died sometime during the afternoon, as near as the coroner could figure it. It happened long ago, and today it is only half-remembered even by old-timers who follow crime news. The victim was eccentric and rich: that, combined with the inability of the police to identify either a motive or a suspect, kept it on front pages for a week. Then the press lost interest. Reporters had been charmed by the puzzle, and by the colorful background of the deceased, but they could only sell that for a few days and then something new had to happen. It didn’t—the case slipped off the front pages and became history, perhaps to be resurrected periodically in anniversary pieces or in magazine accounts of unsolved mysteries. On the news desk at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , an editor ripped and read an AP squib about a triple murder in Phoenix, fifteen hundred miles to the southwest and thought—not for the first time—that the world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people. He considered using it as a two-graph filler on page eight: then he thought, Christ, we’ve got enough crazy people of our own, and the Phoenix murders got bumped by a UPI account of a squabble along the Chinese-Russian border. In Phoenix, that day and for the rest of the week, the case was front-page news. The cops didn’t have a clue. If murder had to happen, said the cop in charge of the

  Phoenix case, it should at least be logical. It’s not the garden-variety passion killer we find scary, the cop said, it’s the guy who kills for no good reason and then disappears into the night. The police hardly ever catch him because he strikes without reason and has no motive. The trouble with random murder is that all the common denominators are superficial. The killer may break in the same way, he may use the same weapon, but there is never anything that hints of a motive because there isn’t any. Give me a motive, other than craziness, said the cop, and I’ll clear this case. That cop didn’t know, because it didn’t make the papers in Phoenix and was one among many brutal homicides on the national teletype as the long weekend began, that a Baltimore man had just been killed in much the same way. This time there was a survivor—his wife, blind from birth and left babbling madly in the killer’s wake. She was useless as a witness and was soon committed to a state institution, but perhaps even then she might have had something to tell an investigator with knowledge of Phoenix and St. Louis and the perspective to see them all as a single case. But computers weren’t yet in broad general use: communities separated by vast distances weren’t linked as they are today; murders weren’t grouped electronically by such factors as weaponry, forensic matching, and killer profiles. There was the teletype, with its all-points bulletins advising that murders had been committed, but what else was new? The term serial killer had not yet entered the common lexicon, and to most people it was inconceivable that a killer might strike in St. Louis on Monday, Phoenix on Wednesday, and in a Baltimore suburb on Friday night. On Sunday there was a double murder in Idaho—a rancher and his wife killed just as they were sitting down to dinner. This was big news in Boise, but it made hardly a ripple in St. Louis, Phoenix, or Baltimore. On the ninth day the killer struck for the last time—an elderly woman living alone in New Orleans. This time he set fire to the house, hoping, police theorized, to cover up his crime. In each of the five cities teams of detectives worked their local angles and found nothing. They sifted false clues, chased down rumors, and slowly over the weeks watched their final leads disappear into the big blank wall. The one common denominator remained hidden by the vast expanse of geography and by the often cryptic methods of police teletyping.

  No one knew it then, but in each of the death houses lived a book collector.

  That’s how I got into it, more than twenty years later.

  BOOK I

  ELEANOR

  Slater wasn’t my kind of cop. Even in the old days, when we were both working the right side of the good-and-evil beat, I had been well able to take Mr. Slater or leave him alone. He had played such a small part in my life that, for a moment, I didn’t know who he was. I was working in my office, a small room in the rear of the used-and-rare bookstore I owned in Denver, writing up books for my first catalog, when Millie buzzed me from the front. “There’s a Mr. Slater here to see you,” she said, and the last person I would’ve thought about—did think about—was Clydell. This was annoying. My work was going slowly: I was an absolute novice at bibliography, and even with modern books there are pitfalls everywhere. Open on the table before me was a copy of Nickel Mountain , by John Gardner, as fresh and crisp as the day it was born in 1973. Gardner had signed it on the half title, a nice little touch, since he won’t be signing any more, that almost doubled its value. It’s not yet an expensive book—about $25-40 unsigned, in fine first edition—the kind of book that should be a snap to describe and price. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, who not only puts out fine books but also gives
you the straight bibliographical poop. He’s not like Lippincott, who states first edition most of the time, or McGraw-Hill, who states it when the guy in the back shop feels like putting it on: if Knopf says it’s a first edition, you can take it to the bank and cash it…although I do remember one or two Willa Cathers that might or might not follow tradition. Let’s face it, all these houses are dotted with land mines. William Morrow was a model of consistency, but on one pricey little Harry Crews title, instead of noting second printing as always before, he put two tiny dots at the bottom of the copyright page. Cute, Morrow. That little piece of camouflage cost me $40 for a spectacular nonfirst last year. Doubleday always, and I mean always , puts the words first edition on his copyright page and takes it off for later printings. But on one John Barth he didn’t: he put no designation whatever, instead hiding a code in the gutter of the last two pages. The code must say H-18—not H-38 or H-Is-for-Homicide or H-anything-else—or it’s not a first. Harper and Row was as reliable as Knopf over the years, except in one five-year period, circa 1968— 73, when for reasons known only to Messrs. Harper and Row in that great bookstore in the sky, they started putting a chain of numbers on the last page, for Christ’s sake, in addition to saying first edition up front. Figure that out. The only way I can figure it out is that people who publish books must hate and plot against people who cherish them, make collectibles of them, and sell them. I can just see old Harper and Row, rubbing their translucent hands together and cackling wildly as some poor slob shells out his rent money, $700, for a One Hundred Years of Solitude , only to discover that he’s got a later state, worth $40 tops. Harper really outdid himself on this title: in addition to hiding the chain of numbers (the first printing of which begins with “1”), he also published a state that has no numbers at all. This is widely believed to be the true first, though there can still be found a few keen and knowledgeable dealers who would beg to differ. The one certainty is that on any Harper title for that era, the back pages must be checked. Thus concealed are points on early Tony Hillermans in the $750-and-up range, some Dick Francis American firsts (the numbers on one of which seems to begin with “2,” as no “1” has ever been seen), a good Gardner title, and, of course, Solitude , a fall-on-your-sword blunder if you make it, the rent’s due, and the guy who sold it to you has gone south for the winter.

  So I was stuck on Nickel Mountain , with a guy I didn’t want to see storming my gates up front. I was stuck because I seemed to remember that there were two states to this particular book, A. A. Knopf notwithstanding. I had read somewhere that they had stopped the presses in the middle of the first printing and changed the color on the title page. God or the old man or someone high in the scheme of things didn’t like the hue, so they changed it from a deep orange to a paler one. Technically they are both first editions, but the orange one is a first-first, thus more desirable. It’s no big deal, but this was my first catalog and I wanted it to be right. The title page looked pretty damn orange to me, but hot is hot only when you have cold to compare it with. Go away, Slater, I thought.

  I took an index card out of my desk, wrote check the color , and stuck it in the book. I told Millie to send the bastard back, and I got ready to blow him off fast if he turned out to be a dealer in snake oil or a pitchman for a lightbulb company. Even when he came in, for a moment I didn’t know him. He was wearing a toupee and he’d had his front teeth pulled. The dentures were perfect: you couldn’t tell the hairpiece from the real thing, unless you’d known him in the days when the tide was going out. His clothes were casual but expensive. He wore alligator shoes and the briefcase he carried looked like the hide of some equally endangered animal. His shirt was open and of course he wore a neckchain. The only missing effect was the diamond in the pierced ear, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d get to that too.

  “You fuckhead,” he said. “Lookitcha, sittin‘ there on your damn dead ass with no time to talk to an old comrade-in-arms.”

  “Hello, Clydell,” I said without warmth. “I almost didn’t know you.”

  He put his thumbs in his lapels and did the strut. On him it was no joke. “Not bad, huh? My gal Tina says I look twenty years younger.”

  Tina, yet. An instant picture formed in my mind— young, achingly beautiful, and so totally without brains that she just missed being classified as a new species in the animal kingdom.

  “You’re the last guy I’d ever expect to see in a bookstore, Clydell,” I said, trying to keep it friendly.

  “I am a doer, not a reader. It’s good of you to remember.”

  “Oh, I remember,” I said, sidestepping the gentle dig.

  “My deeds of daring have become legends among the boys in blue. I’m still one of their favorite topics of conversation, I hear. So are you, Janeway.”

  “I guess I can die now, then. Everything from now on will just be downhill.”

  He pretended to browse my shelves. “So how’s the book biz?”

  I really didn’t want to talk books with a guy who— you could bet the farm on it—couldn’t care less. “Have a seat,” I said reluctantly, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Listen to ‘im,” he said to some attendant god. “Same old fuckin’ Janeway. No time for bullshit, eh, Cliffie? One of these days they’ll make a movie about your life, old buddy, and that’s what they’ll call it: No Time for Bullshit .”

  It was all coming back now, all the stuff I’d always found tedious about Slater. His habit of calling people old buddy. The swagger, the arrogance, the tough-guy front. The false hair on the chest, as some critic— probably Max Eastman—had once said about Hemingway. The glitz, the shoes, the bad taste of wearing animal hides and buying them for his wife. Then bragging about it, as if going deep in hock on a cop’s salary for a $4,000 mink was right up there on a scale with winning the Medal of Honor for bravery. Some of us thought it was poetic justice when the Missus took the mink and a fair piece of Slater’s hide and dumped him for a doctor. But there was still light in the world: now there was Tina.

  “It’s just that I’m pretty sure you didn’t come in here for a book,” I said. “We sold our last issue of Whips and Chains an hour ago.”

  “You kill me, Janeway. Jesus, a guy can’t even stop by for old times’ sake without getting the sarcasm jacked up his ass.”

  “To be brutally honest, you and I never ran with the same crowd.”

  “I always admired you, though. I really did, Janeway. You were the toughest damn cop I ever knew.”

  “I still am,” I said, keeping him at bay.

  He made dead-on eye contact. “Present company excepted.”

  I just looked at him and let it pass for the moment.

  “Hey, you know what we should do?—go a coupla rounds sometime. Go over to my gym, I’ll give you a few pointers and kick your ass around the ring a little.”

  “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds,” I said, finally unable to resist the truth.

  “You prick,” Slater said in that universal tone of male camaraderie that allows insults up to a point. “Keep talking and one day you’ll really believe that shit.” He decided to take my offer of a chair. “Hey, just between us old warriors, don’tcha ever get a hankering to get back to it?”

  “You must be out of your mind. No way on this earth, Clydell.”

  He looked unconvinced. “Tell the truth. You’d still be there if it wasn’t for that Jackie Newton mess. You’d go back in a heartbeat if you could.”

  “The truth?…Well, what I really miss are the Saturday nights. I hardly ever got through a whole shift without having to wade through guts and pick up the pieces of dead children. It’s pretty hard for something like this”—I made the big gesture with my arms, taking in the whole infinite and unfathomable range of my present world—“to take the place of something like that.”

  We looked at each other with no trace of humor or affection. Here, I thought: this’s the first honest moment in this whole bullshit conversation—we’ve
got nothing to say to each other. But the fact remained: Slater hadn’t come waltzing in here to show off his togs and tell me about Tina.

  He lit a cigarette and looked at the bookshelves critically, the way a scientist might look at a bug under a microscope.

  “Is there any money in this racket?”

  I shook my head. “But it’s so much fun we don’t care.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he said dryly.

  I felt my temperature rising. Slater had about twenty seconds left on his ticket and he must’ve known it. Abruptly, he switched directions.

  “Y’know, there are some jobs where you can have fun and still make a buck or two. Maybe you’ve heard.”

  I think I knew what he was going to say in that half second before he said it. It was crazy, but I was almost ready for him when he said, “I could use a good man if you’re ever inclined to get back in the real world.”

  I let the full impact of what he was saying settle between us. He raised his eyebrows and turned up his palms, pushing the sincere look. It probably worked like a charm on children and widows and one-celled organisms like Tina.

  “Let me get this straight, Clydell…you’re offering me a job?”

  “More than a job, Clime…a lot more than that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t jump too fast, old buddy, till you hear me out.” He took a long drag and blew smoke into the air. “Last year I paid tax on a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Somebody’s gotta pay for those two-hundred-dollar toilet seats the Pentagon keeps buying.”

  “Listen, you asshole, just shut up and listen. The best thing I ever did was take early retirement and go out on my own. Right now I’m the hottest thing Denver’s ever seen. I may branch out into radio. I was on two shows last week and the program director at KOA says I took to it like nobody she ever saw. Are you listening to me, Janeway? I could make a second career out of this if I wanted to. It’s so easy it oughta be against the law. None of those guys work more than two or three hours a day, and I’m just gettin‘ warmed up then. It’s all bullshit. I can bullshit my way out of anything, and that’s all you need in radio. I found that out after the first five minutes. It ain’t what you know, it’s what you got between your legs. You hear what I’m saying?”