She had propped herself up on one arm, a silhouette against the window.
“He’ll do whatever he can to get at me. I don’t think it matters to him that I’m a cop, or that you are. I don’t think anything matters. It’s him and me.”
“Hatfields and McCoys.”
“Yeah. It’s gotten that deep. I may’ve given Barbara Crowell some very bad advice today.”
“Cliff, you need a vacation.”
“I need to get something on that weasel. That’s the only vacation I need. To get him good and make it stick.”
“You’re a classic type-A, you’ll die before you’re forty. You need to go and lie on a beach and listen to tropical breezes blowing through luscious palm trees.”
“And go crazy with boredom. That’s not what I need.”
“I’d go along too… try to keep you from getting too bored.”
More long minutes passed.
“I’ll do whatever I can,” Carol said.
“As a matter of fact, there is something you can do.”
“Just tell me.”
“Get the hell out of here.”
“Oh, Cliff, that’s not going to help anything.”
“I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since I gave Jackie the thirty-eight-caliber lollipop. Newton doesn’t know who you are. All he knows is, he called my place and a woman answered. Nobody knows about us. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to keep what’s ours private.”
She took a deep, long-suffering breath.
“Well? Will you do it?”
“Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “But God damn it, don’t ask me to like it.”
I patted her rump. “Good girl.”
“You sexist bastard.”
We laughed. At that moment I came as close to asking her the big question as I ever would.
It was a long time before we got to sleep. When I did sleep, I slept soundly, untroubled by dreams. In the morning we got her things together and I carried them down the back way and put them in her car. I watched the street for ten minutes before I let her come down and drive away.
She rolled down her window. “I’m not afraid, you know.”
“I know you’re not,” I said. “But I am.”
I called rita McKinley and got the same recording. This time I left a message, telling her who I was and that I needed to speak with her on official business regarding a homicide investigation. I left both numbers, home and office.
I called the AB in New Jersey. Also known as
I went to see Roland Goddard, in Cherry Creek. This is a neighborhood of high-class and expensive shops in east Denver. Nestled in the center of things was Roland Goddard’s Acushnet Rare Book Emporium. Goddard had a cool, austere manner, almost like Emery Neff only somehow different. You could break through with Neff, if you were patient enough and gave a damn: with Goddard, you never could. He had an icy, slightly superior attitude about books and his knowledge of them, and he could intimidate a customer or a bookscout before the first word was said. If he had friends, they were not in the book business: no one I had ever spoken to knew Goddard personally.
It would be hard to imagine two guys less alike than Goddard and Harkness. At least with Ruby Seals and Emery Neff, their differences seemed to complement each other: Harkness and Goddard were ill-suited for partnership in almost every way. It’s hard sometimes to look back over twenty years and know why the boys we were then did things so much at odds with the attitudes and philosophies of the men we had become. Goddard was fastidious: Harkness tended to be sloppy. Goddard disdained everything about the book business that Harkness found interesting. Oh, he’d sell you a Stephen King— whatever else you could say about Roland Goddard, he was a helluva bookman and he knew where the money came from—but you might leave his store feeling faintly like a moron.
