The Bookwoman's Last Fling Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN DUNNING

  FICTION

  The Sign of the Book

  The Bookman’s Promise

  Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

  The Bookman’s Wake

  Booked to Die

  Deadline

  Denver

  Looking for Ginger North

  The Holland Suggestions

  NONFICTION

  On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio

  Tune in Yesterday

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

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

  Copyright © 2006 by John Dunning

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9989-3

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-9989-2

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  This is for Helen,

  for all the reasons there are.

  Love and hugs forever,

  from the room far below.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks again to Susanne Kirk, who watched over the manuscript, edited it, and kept my stuff straight: who, more than that, pulled Janeway and me out of her slush pile years ago.

  To Susan Moldow, who runs the Scribner ship and keeps us all heading north.

  To Sarah Knight, who provided great wiseguy yin and yang.

  To Phyllis Westberg, my agent since the world began.

  To old pals Wick Downing and Pat McGuire for good cheer and wise counsel.

  And to the racetracker pals of my youth. To Fred Bates, who rubbed ’em. To Jon Kunitake, who rode ’em. And to Bob Tessier, the drummer guy from Boston. We had a happy shedrow together, forty years ago. Where are they now?

  THE BOOKWOMAN’S LAST FLING

  1

  The morning was angry but I was cool. The rain rolled in from the west like a harbinger of some vast evil brewing but I had the man’s money in my bank account, it was mine, he couldn’t get it back unless I went nuts and decided to give it to him, and that made me cool. I had followed his orders almost to the letter, varying them just enough to satisfy my own persnickety nature. Long before the first faint light broke through the black clouds, I got up, dressed, got out of my motel room, and drove out toward the edge of town.

  I found the all-night diner without a hitch; parked at the side and sat in my cold car with the motor idling. I was early. I had been told to come at five o’clock, no more or less, but I tend to ignore advice like that, especially when it comes with an attitude. I waited ten minutes and the appointed hour came and went. I could sense his presence off to my left beyond the parking lot: If I looked hard at that patch of darkness I could make out the vaguest shape of a car or truck, a vehicle of some kind in a small grove of trees. At five-oh-five by the clock in my car I got out and went inside. The waiter took my order, a slam-bang something with eggs and pancakes: enough cholesterol to power the whole state of Idaho. I consoled myself. I seldom eat like that anymore unless I am on the road, and apparently I am one of the lucky ones: I have great genes and my so-called good cholesterol readings are always sensational. No matter how much fat I eat, my system burns it. To my knowledge, no one in my family tree has ever died of a heart attack, which only means that I have a fine opportunity to be the first one.

  The waiter tried to make the cook understand what I wanted through a serious language barrier. The cook looked illegal as hell: he spoke a kind of Spanglish through the window and the waiter struggled with that. I sat through two cups of coffee and no one came out of the lot beyond parking. My breakfast was surprisingly tasty and hot; I ate it slowly and looked up occasionally for some sign of life in the parking lot. When I looked at my watch again, it was five-thirty. The man was half an hour late.

  I stretched out my legs and waited some more. If he didn’t come at all it was truly his loss. I had five thousand of his American big ones and that usually guaranteed good faith. I could buy a fairly nice book with that. It was my rock-bottom minimum these days, the least it took for a stranger like him to get me off my dead ass in Denver and on the road to some distant locale. I got the money up front for just such contingencies as this one: a client with guff to match my own. That’s one thing people had said about Harold Ray Geiger in all the newspaper accounts I had read of his life and death. He was abrupt, and so was the guy who had called me.

  Geiger’s man was also mysterious, enigmatic to a fault. He had sent me a cashier’s check, so I still didn’t know his full name. “My name is Willis,” he had said on the phone. “I am Mr. Geiger’s representative in Idaho.” Normally I wouldn’t touch a job like this: I certainly wouldn’t leave home and make such a drive without knowing certain salient details. What had sold me on the case were the books. Geiger had died last month with a vast library of great first editions, the estate had a problem with them, and that was partly what I did now. I seldom did appraisal work: I found that boring and there were others who could do it faster and at least as well. There can be huge differences between honest appraisers and I tend to be too condition-conscious for people who, for reasons of their own, want their appraisals high. But I would help recover stolen books, I would try to unravel a delicate book mystery, I would do things, and not always for money, that got me out in the sunshine, away from my bookstore in Denver and into another man’s world. It all depended on the man, and the voice on the phone seemed to belong to a five-grand kind of guy.

  Six o’clock came and went. I rolled with it, prepared to sit here half the morning. The man deserved no less than that for five thousand dollars.

  At some point I saw the truck move out of the shadows and bump its way into the parking lot. It was one of those big bastards with wheels half the size of Rhode Island. The sky was still quite dark and the rain drummed relentlessly on the roof of the truck. I could see his knuckles gripping the wheel—nothing of his face yet, just that white-knuckle grip beyond the glass. I knew he had a clear look at me through the windshield, and at one point I smiled at him and tried to look pleasant. But I had a come-if-you-want-to, don’t-if-you-don’t attitude of my own. The ball was in his court.

  Eventually he must have realized this, for I saw the unmistakable signs of life. A light went on in the truck and a man in a hat and dark glasses materialized. He climbed down and came inside.

  “You Janeway?”

  I recognized his voice from that cryptic phone call a week ago. I said, “Yep. And you would perhaps be representing the estate of Mr. Harold Ray Geiger?”

  “I’m Willis. I was Mr. Geiger’s right-hand man for more than thirty years.”

  He sat in the booth and sent up a signal for coffee. He didn’t offer his hand and I didn’t try to take it. There was another moment when I might have taken it by force, but then he had moved both hands into his lap and I figured groping around between his legs might cast us both in a bad light. From the kitchen the Mexican cook was watching us.

  The mystery man sat sipping his coffee.

  “Do you have a first name, Mr. Willis?”

  “Yes, I have a first name.” He said this with dripping sarcasm, a tone you use with a moron if you are that kind of guy. Already I didn’t like him; we were off to a bad start.
>
  “Should I try to guess it? You look like somebody named Clyde, or maybe Junior.”

  I said this in a spirit of lighthearted banter, I hoped, but he bristled. “My first name doesn’t matter. I am the man who will either take you out to Mr. Geiger’s ranch or leave you to wonder for the rest of your life what this might have been.”

  Now it was my turn to stifle a laugh.

  “Are you making light of this?” I sensed a blink behind his dark shades. “Are you trying to annoy me?”

  “Actually, Mr. Willis, I was starting to think it was the other way around.”

  “You’ve got a helluva nerve, coming out here with an attitude.”

  “I wasn’t aware I had one.”

  “Keep it up and you can just climb right back in that car and get the hell out of here.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. I was suddenly glad I had been paid by cashier’s check: his money was now firmly in my bank.

  “I want it established right from the start,” he said: “You are working for me. You will appraise Mr. Geiger’s books and do it ASAP. If it turns out that books are missing and lost forever, I want you to give me a document to that effect, something that will satisfy God, the executor of Mr. Geiger’s will, and any other interested party who happens to ask. Is that clear enough?”

  “I wasn’t told I had to satisfy God as well as all those other people.”

  “I am not paying you for that kind of wiseass commentary. I was told you are a reliable professional and that’s what I want from you. That’s all I want.”

  “Well, let’s see if I understand it so far. You want me to look at some books. Supposedly there are some missing titles. I’m to give you a written appraisal and do it on the quickstep. I’m to tell you what’s missing based on your assertion that these missing books were ever there in the first place. I’m to do all this in a cheerless environment; I’m not allowed to ever crack a joke or even smile once in a while for comic relief. Twice a day you send a gnome up with bread and water and he hands it to me through the bars. I get to go pee occasionally, as long as I don’t abuse this privilege; otherwise it’s pucker-up-and-hold-it time. Is that about it?”

  “I don’t like your attitude.”

  “We’ve already established that.” I slipped into my Popeye voice. “But I yam what I yam, Mr. Willis. That’s what you get for your money, which by the way isn’t all that great. And it’s looking less great the more we talk.”

  “Then leave,” he said in an I dare you tone.

  I slid out of the booth, picked up the check, and started toward the counter. I sensed his disbelief as I paid the tab and sidled back to the booth to leave the waiter a tip.

  “Thanks for the call. Give my regards to Idaho Falls.”

  I was halfway across the parking lot when I heard the door open. He said my name, just “Janeway,” and I stopped and turned politely.

  “What are you, crazy? You haven’t even heard what this is about.”

  “Believe me, I would still love to be told.”

  “Then stop acting so goddam superior.”

  “It’s not an act, Clyde. I don’t have any act. This may surprise you, but I have lived all these years without any of Mr. Geiger’s money. I’ve gotten wherever I am with no help at all from you guys, and I’m willing to bet I can go the rest of the way on my own as well. I do appreciate the business, however.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  We looked at each other.

  “What do you think, I brought you out here just for the hell of it?”

  “I have no idea why you do what you do. If you want to talk, let’s go. Your five grand has already bought you that privilege.”

  He stood there for another moment as if, with enough time, he could reclaim some of the high ground he had lost. “You’re a slick piece of change, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. I may not be much of many things, but I am slick. Two things before we go. First take off those glasses, please. I like to see who I’m talking to.”

  He took them off slowly, and in that act the authority passed all the way from him to me. His eyes were gray, like a timber wolf or a very old man.

  “Thank you. Now tell me, please, who you are. Is Willis your first name or last?”

  “Last.”

  “What’s your first?”

  He stared at me for a long moment. Then he said, “Junior.” I swear he did, and that confession made the whole trip worthwhile.

  2

  I called him Mr. Willis after that. I try to be polite unless people deliberately piss me off, the man was older than me by at least twenty years, and respecting my elders is part of my code. He could have been any age between an old fifty-five and a well-preserved seventy. I parked my car on the street and we drove out of town in his Sherman tank. The city lights fell away and the rain came hard again. I could now see a faint streak of light in the east, but it was still too faint to matter. He drove about ten miles and turned into a dirt road posted KEEP OUT; fenced on both sides with the distinctive wooden slats of a horse ranch.

  That was the other thing I knew about Geiger from his obit: In addition to his book collection he had been a horse racing man. But I’d soon found out that I had this chronology backward. In addition to being a lifelong horseman, Geiger had a book collection. Horses were his life and books were now part of it, a combination I found irresistible. I had always been partial to the horse, a nobler, wiser, much gentler, and far more majestic creature than man. I had been an enthusiastic customer at Centennial Race Track in Littleton, just south of Denver, until it closed in 1983. I was one of those daring young kids who got in as soon as the law allowed and maybe a little sooner than that. This was years before my police career began. I had been drawn to the turf by the spectacle, not so much as the lure of fast money. Before I was ten I had read all of Walter Farley’s wonderful Black Stallion novels, and for a year I pictured myself as an impossible cross between Alec Ramsey and Eddie Arcaro. Of course I could never have been a jockey—I was still a growing boy and already pushing 175 pounds, but at eighteen I could spend entire afternoons watching the races. I talked to the grooms over the rail and I quickly learned their lingo. They were called ginneys, a term going back to old racing days in England, when winning owners tipped their grooms a guinea. Today, I had heard, well-heeled owners passed out bills, not coins, featuring Jackson and Grant, occasionally a Franklin if the winning pot had been good enough. I knew these things, though I had never crossed that magical line between the grandstand and the backside. I knew where the class raced, at Hialeah and Gulfstream in Florida, at Aqueduct, Belmont, and Jamaica in New York, and on the West Coast at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, among other fabled places. I struggled with algebra but I knew the difference between allowance races and claimers. Claiming races were the guts of almost any racing program. Here a horse’s true grit could be calculated, scientifically some said, against others of similar company. In a claiming race, each owner was putting a price on his horse, and the horse could be bought—claimed—by any other owner at the meet who was willing to pay the claiming price. At the same time, the price was a measure of a horse’s class. How I loved those hazy, distant Saturdays at Centennial. I was caught up in the majesty of the post parade and the drama of the race, and I didn’t care whether I had the two bucks for a bet.

  Willis clattered and splashed us along the dirt road for a good quarter-mile. The country here was mostly a gently rolling plain. Occasionally there were trees; I could see them now as the black sky became reluctantly gray; nestled among them were some barns and beyond it all was the house. We turned in among the barns and came up to a small training track. There I got my first look at a man who might have been Geiger in earlier times. He stood at the rail watching an exercise boy work a horse in the slop: a stoop-shouldered figure in silhouette, lonely as hell by the look of him. He wasn’t wearing a GEIGER sign on his heavy black slicker; I just figured he was one of the old man’s three sons, the way y
ou sometimes figure things out. He glanced over his shoulder as we went past and that’s how he took note of us; no wave of the hand, no other movement at all. He wore a hood that showed nothing of his face. He just stood there like some grim reaper in a bad dream; then he turned away as the boy galloped his horse around the track again to complete the mile.

  Willis didn’t stop and I didn’t ask. We didn’t exchange any wisdom or wit; he didn’t pull up under the big old tree and start showing me pictures of his grandchildren or his prizewinning roses. Sudden camaraderie was not about to break out between us, so my best bet was to keep my mouth shut and not annoy him more than I already had. This I did while he drove along the track and around it, turning up the road to the house, which now loomed before us in the rain. It was an old two-story house, old when Geiger had bought it would be my guess, built here sometime well before the 1920s for another old sodbuster now long dead. None of that mattered now. Willis pulled around to the side and parked under a long overhang. A set of steps went straight up from there. We got out of the car, he gestured at me sullenly, and I went up ahead of him, emerging onto a wide wraparound porch. I stood at the railing looking out at the farm, which was just coming to life in the gray morning. I could see up to the track where the horse was being led back through the gap. The groom held him while the hooded man stood apart, and the boy sat straight in the saddle. On the road he hopped off and they all walked down to the barn where a black man stood waiting with a hot bucket of water. They were a hundred yards away but my eyes were good. The ginney washed the mud off his horse and then skimmed off the water with a scraper. Steam floated off the horse like the bubbling ponds around Old Faithful, but I still couldn’t see anything of the hooded man’s face. His hood kept him dark and mysterious.

  I heard Willis cough behind me. He said, “You comin’?” and I said yeah sure. His tone remained surly while I tried to keep mine evenly pleasant. I followed him into the house through a side door. He said, “Wait here,” and for once I did as I was told. He disappeared along a totally black corridor. A moment later a light came on, far down at the end of the hallway on the other side of the house. He motioned me with his hand and turned into the room. Almost at once I was aware of another light beaming out into the hall, and when I reached it I saw Willis sitting behind an enormous desk. My eyes also took in two dozen horse pictures on the far wall, winner’s circle pictures with an oil painting in the center. The centerpiece was a great painting of a magnificent red stallion. The caption said, Man o’ War, 1921.