Bookman's wake

“My world and welcome to it.” I didn’t know if he’d make the literary connection, so I helped him along. “That’s a line from Thurber.”

“I know what it’s from. You think I’m some wetback just crawled over the border? Walter Mitty’s from that book.”

“Good man.”

He had a leg up on the game already.

I asked if he had a first name.

“Shane,” he said, daring me not to like it.

But I couldn’t play it straight. “Shane Quintana ?”

“I see you come from the part of Anglo-town where all brown babies gotta be named Jose.”

“Shane Quintana.”

“I was named after Alan Ladd. Kids today don’t even know who the hell Alan Ladd was.” He deepened the Chicano in his voice and said, “Ey, man, Shane was one tough hombre, eh? He knock Jack Palance’s dick down in the mud and stomp his gringo ass.”

“I think it was the other way around. And Shane was a gringo too.”

“Don’t fuck with Shane, Janeway. I can still put you in jail.”

“That’s your big challenge in the book world, Quintana. Shane . Find that baby and it gets you almost two grand.”

We went to a place he knew and shot pool. Neither of us would ever break a sweat on Minnesota Fats but we took a heavy toll on each other. He had a beeper on his belt but nobody called him. I could assume Trish was alive and holding her own.

Late that night we ended up back downtown in the precinct room. Mallory was still there, two-fingering some paperwork through an old typewriter.

We sat and talked. Eventually Mallory asked the big question.

“So what’re you gonna do?”

About me, he meant.

Quintana shrugged. “Talk to the chief. I dunno, Stan, I don’t see where we’ve got much evidence for a case against this man.”

Mallory gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.

“We’ll see what the chief says tomorrow,” Quintana said.

In a little while Mallory left. Quintana said, “If I get you out of this shit, it’ll be a miracle. The Lady of Fatima couldn’t do it.”

I followed him into an adjacent room. He sat at a table with some video equipment. “I talked to Mrs. Rigby today. You interested?”

“Sure I am.”

He popped a cassette into a machine and Crystal’s haggard face came up on a screen. “Most of this’s routine. Stuff you already know. The kicker’s at the end.”

He hit a fast button and looked in his notebook for the counter number where he wanted to stop it. “Her problem was, they never had any money,” he said. “They owned the property they lived on, they’d bought it years ago before prices went out of sight. And she had a piece of land in Georgia that she’d inherited. I guess that’s gone now. She’d given it to Eleanor and they put it up for the bail.”

The machine whirred.

“Rigby wasn’t interested in anything that generated their day-to-day income. He was always doing his Raven thing. But she loved him. So he sat out in that shop and made his books, and they just kept getting better and better. After a while she thought they were better than Grayson’s. One day Rigby went down to Tacoma to look at some equipment in a printshop liquidation, and Crystal brought Moon over to see the books. Moon couldn’t believe his eyes. He thought Grayson had come back to life, better than ever.

“The temptation to sell one was always with her after that. She started hearing what people were paying—all that money changing hands out there and they had none of it. If she could just sell one, for enough dough. She could hide the money and dribble it into their account and they wouldn’t be so damn hard up all the time. Rigby didn’t seem to notice things like that. As long as there was food on the table and a roof over their heads, he didn’t spend a lot of time fretting. He didn’t care much about the books either. He’d finish one and toss it back in that room and never look at it again. Sometimes he talked about destroying them, but he never did because Eleanor loved them and he couldn’t stand to hurt her. But all of them knew—Crystal, Moon, Eleanor—they all knew that if he ever made one that satisfied him, the others were all history.

“The temptation killed her. But she was afraid, scared to death. If Rigby ever found out…well, he’d never