Jerry Harkness was long and lean and still fighting the good fight against middle age. He perched on a stool behind his counter and watched me all the way past his front window and through the front door. He had been reading a Clive Barker paperback when I came along, and he put it aside for the customary greeting as I came in. I went straight to the counter and got to the point.
“When was the last time you saw Bobby Westfall?” “
You mean the bookscout? I don’t see him, unless he’s got something for me. He knows I don’t buy stock from scouts. They want too much for the run-of-the-mill stuff. He comes in if he’s got a King or a Burroughs, or maybe an early Gene Wolfe. He knows I’ll pay him more than anybody if it’s something good in my field.”
“So you see him what… once a month?” “
If that. I did see him about two weeks ago. I think he was up the street trying to sell Ruby Seals some books. I don’t know, he didn’t bother showing ‘em to me.”
“Did he seem any different than he usually did?”
“I don’t know how he usually seemed. These bookscouts are almost nonentities after you’ve seen ‘em around awhile. I don’t think about things like how they usually are. But since you asked me, I guess he seemed the same as ever.”
“Which was what?”
“Quiet. Almost mousy. He just walked around looking at my stuff. That’s how they learn, you know… look at the books on the shelves and see how they’re priced. None of ‘em ever have any reference books, they can’t afford that, so they have to keep it all up here.” He tapped himself on the head. “What’s the matter? Bobby get himself in trouble?”
“Bobby got himself dead.”
Harkness opened his mouth and it hung there for a moment. “Did you ever talk to him?” I said.
“As a matter of fact, we passed a few words that day in the store.”
“About what?”
“Usual run of stuff. How bad business is, on both his end and mine. This is the slow time of the year. I’m used to it. In the early summer, right after tax time, you’ll go whole days without seeing more than ten people. Then a dealer will come through and drop five hundred, and in the end the figures balance out okay. But bookscouts have it tough. Books have been drying up. Even the Goodwill is putting horrendous prices on their books lately. God, I wonder who’d kill Bobby.”
I looked at him strangely. He got my drift and shrugged. “You’re a homicide cop; I put two and two together and assumed he’d been murdered.”
I nodded.
“I don’t know what I can tell you. Bobby was singing the blues about those stupid asses at Goodwill. People are just plain greedy: they don’t want to leave anything for anybody else, they don’t want the next guy to make even a dime. Goodwill’s trying to play bookstore again. They’re a thrift store, for God’s sake, and they put everything out at bookstore prices. They’ve got some clerk there who can’t find her ass with both hands, and she’s gonna figure out what a book’s really worth. Right. Of course they get it all wrong. They go on weight and glitz. They’ll put out some useless novel about two lesbians fighting for control of their dead aunt’s cosmetics company for five dollars. Then they’ll let a King first go for fifty cents.”
“How does that hurt the bookscout?”
“It’s the stock he makes his bread and butter on. You don’t find Kings every day. What the bookscouts used to be able to do is grab up a handful of these glitzy titles for a buck apiece and double or triple their money in one of the big general bookstores. They can’t do that anymore. Goodwill goes through this silliness once every three or four years. Somebody in the front office gets a wild hair up his ass and they start marking everything through the roof. After a while they learn they can’t sell the damn things and they go back to the old prices. But while they’re at it, guys like Bobby really hurt.”
So this is the gist of what Bobby was complaining about?“
“That’s what he said to me.”
“Did he give you any indication that he might’ve made a recent score?”
“Are you kidding? The way he was talking, he didn’t have bus fare back downtown.”
“Maybe he found something and hadn’t had a chance to sell it yet.”
“I doubt that. I don’t think he had a prayer of seeing any money in the immediate future. He was just too down, too pissed off at the world.”
“Who else did he do business with?”
“Almost everybody. You’re gonna have to go to every bookstore in Denver if you want to touch all of Bobby’s bases.”
“But they have their favorite guys they sell to, isn’t that right?”
“Sure. They all do that. They’ll find a dealer who pays ‘em well and they’ll stick with that guy for a while. Then something happens—either they get pissed off or the dealer does—and they go somewhere else. But it’s never perfect and eventually they come back. It’s a vicious circle. When a book doesn’t sell to anybody reputable, they wind up giving it away for pennies to jerks like the one two doors down.”
“You mean Clyde Fix?”
“What an idiot. I wish we could get that junkman off the block.”
