But she took the glass he handed her and gulped it.
“Then what happened?”
“Archie said…something like…it’s a good thing you did that or I woulda. But that was just talk, it was Gaston who’d done it. And he’d sat down and there was no concern or…anything…on his face…and somebody mentioned the police. And I said no…can’t call them, they’ll lock him up and what would I do without him? He was my life, how would I live? So we rolled her in a rug and that night Archie and I took her off in the truck and we buried her.”
Off camera, Quintana said, “What about the other people he killed?”
“I don’t know.” She began to cry again.
“Should we believe that, Mrs. Rigby?”
“I don’t care what you believe. My life is over.”
Quintana snapped off the machine and rewound the tape. Neither of us spoke until it clicked.
“Did she know Rigby had taken Eleanor?”
“I don’t think so. She says no. I believe her.” He put the cassette away and pushed himself back from the desk. “I found out a few more things while you were out playing the Lone Ranger. It was Rigby who made that call at four o’clock in the morning. He called the cops on his own kid. I think he was afraid of himself, what he might do if it turned out that Eleanor really had that flawed book. Hell, he was right to be afraid, he’d killed everybody else who ever had one. He tried to hide his voice, but I’ve got the tape and it was him. He was on long enough for the number to get logged, so we know the call came from that phone. I think he turned on the record at Pruitt’s for the same reason. There was a part of him that wanted us to catch him.”
I thought of Crystal and Archie and asked what he thought would happen to them now.
“Whatever it is, it won’t be anything compared to what they’ve already been through. We’ll see if the facts bear out her story. I doubt if they’ll do any jail time; the only charge would be rendering criminal assistance, and the statute’s probably run on that. They don’t seem to care right now. They waived their rights to a lawyer, gave us statements of their own free will, and the statements jibed and I believe ‘em.”
He turned up his palms. “You might as well be in on the payoff if I can swing it. There’s just one thing. You’ve got to teach me this bookscouting stuff. Call it one you owe me.”
“I’ll give you the two-day crash course, teach you all I know.”
“I’m a quick read. One day will do it.”
In the morning he came to get me. Trish had a restless night but was upgraded to fair. She was asking for me but her doctors told her not yet, maybe tomorrow.
Quintana and I ate breakfast together and then did a couple of bookstores. I watched him buy without comment, and afterward we sat in a coffee shop and I told him what he’d done wrong.
Never buy a bad copy of a good book. The better the book, the more the flaws magnify.
Condition, condition, condition…
We drove to the jail and picked up Moon. He looked old in his jail clothes, and he looked strangely small sitting between the two deputies in the backseat.
We arrived at Rigby’s in brilliant sunshine. Moon walked between us as we crossed the meadow. We went along the path I had followed up from the house, dipped into the trees, and stopped a hundred yards into the woods.
An hour later, the deputies dug up the rug containing the bones of Nola Jean Ryder.
In the spring they flew into Denver for Quintana’s long-postponed book odyssey. Trish was looking good and I was thrilled at the sight of her. We ate that night in a Mexican place on a hill near Mile High Stadium, and in the morning we lit out for Nebraska, Iowa, and points east. The trouble with Denver is it’s a light-year from everywhere, a hard day’s ride to any other city with bookstores. The landscape is bleak, though there are those who love the brown plains and the dry vistas and the endless rolling roads. We filled the day with shoptalk, of books and crime and the people who do them. We laughed our way across Nebraska, drawn by the Platte and bonded by the good companionship that makes book-hunting so special and rich. We prowled in little towns where thrift-store people are uncorrupted by the greedy paranoia of the big-city stores. It was in such a place that Quintana made the first good strike of the trip, a sweet copy of Alan Le May’s
We scouted Lincoln and found some gems at Blue-stem, an oasis of books just off downtown; then we moved on to Omaha. The weather was grand all the way, and we laughed about it and Trish swore it had not rained a drop in Seattle since I’d been there last October. Quintana made a dubious cough but had to agree that the winter had been unusually dry. We swung north into Minneapolis and spent a day tramping around with Larry Dingman of Dinkytown Books. I still had the picture of Eleanor that Slater had given me long ago, and in every stop I showed it to bookpeople in the hope that someone had seen her.
In Chicago I saw a guy brazenly doctor a Stephen King book, just the way Richard Grayson had done
