Booked to die

Copyright © 1992 by John Dunning

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Charles Scribner’s Sons Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.

Macmillan Publishing Company 200 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 200

866 Third Avenue Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1 New York, NY 10022

Macmillan Publishing Company is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunning, John, 1942—

Booked to die: a mystery introducing Cliff Janeway/John Dunning.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-684-19383-3

I. Title.

PS3554.U49394B66 1992 813.54—dc20 91-26889

10 987654321 Printed in the United States of America

To Warwick Downing,

who got me started again,

and

to the Denver antiquarian book trade: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Certain unique books discussed in Booked to Die (Hawthorne’s copy of Moby Dick and Mencken’s copy of This Side of Paradise, among others) have been fictionalized for the sake of the story and may actually reside in real libraries, public or private. Dealers who would argue with the author over prices should remember that the story takes place in 1986. Values on some books have risen dramatically in five years. Catcher in the Rye, for example, is now a $1,500 piece. Interview with the Vampire is usually seen at $600 plus. And so it goes.

BOOKED to DIE

A MYSTERY INTRODUCING CLIFF JANEWAY

Bobby the bookscout was killed at midnight on June 13, 1986. This was the first strange fact, leading to the question, What was he doing out that late at night? To Bobby, midnight was the witching hour and Friday the thirteenth was a day to be spent in bed. He was found in an alley under one of those pulldown iron ladders that give access to a fire escape—another odd thing. In life, Bobby would never walk under a ladder, so it would seem ironic to some people in the Denver book trade when they heard in the morning that he had died there.

You should know something about bookscouts and the world they go around in. This is an age when almost everyone scouts for books. Doctors and lawyers with six-figure incomes prowl the thrift stores and garage sales, hoping to pick up a treasure for pennies on the dollar. But the real bookscout, the pro, has changed very little in the last thirty years. He’s a guy who can’t make it in the real world. He operates out of the trunk of a car, if he’s lucky enough to have a car, out of a knapsack or a bike bag if he isn’t. He’s an outcast, a fighter, or a man who’s been driven out of every other line of work. He can be quiet and humble or aggressive and intimidating. Some are renegades and, yes, there are a few psychos. The one thing the best of them have in common is an eye for books. It’s almost spooky, a pessimistic book dealer once said—the nearest thing you can think of to prove the existence of God. How these guys, largely uneducated, many unread, gravitate toward books and inevitably choose the good ones is a prime mystery of human nature.

They get their stock in any dusty corner where books are sold cheap, ten cents to a buck. If they’re lucky they’ll find $100 worth on any given day, for which an honest book dealer will pay them $30 or $40. They stand their own expenses and may come out of the day $30 to the good. They live for the prospect of the One Good Book, something that’ll bring $200 or more. This happens very seldom, but it happens. It happened to Bobby Westfall more often than to alll the others put together.

In one seventy-two-hour period, the story goes, Bobby turned up the following startling inventory: Mr. President, the story of the Truman administration, normally a $6 book unless it’s signed by Truman,