Booked to die

track him down.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“How small can something like that be?”

I looked at him, not understanding the question.

“Bobby had several thousand dollars on him the night he went to Buckley’s,” Hennessey said. “Presumably he was going to buy something at a wholesale price.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far.”

“What’s the retail valuation on something you’d pay up to five grand for?”

“Hell, Neal, it could be anywhere from ten to twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Could it be more than that?”

“If it gets to be much more than that, it stops being wholesale and starts being fraud. Most honorable book dealers figure twenty-five to forty percent as a fair wholesale price. Twenty would be rock-bottom. But for a big- money piece, sometimes you have to go higher than forty percent. If you fall into a piece that’s worth a quarter mil, you might have to put up three-quarters, maybe even eighty percent. That’s still a lot of change for the book dealer.”

“If he can sell it.”

“On that level he can always sell it. The easiest thing in the world to sell is a truly rare book. The biggest problem would be getting the money to buy it.”

I still didn’t see where his mind was going. Hennessey tends to plod in his thinking—that’s why we were a good team. I tend to leapfrog, and sometimes it takes a guy with a more fundamental approach to rein me in and make me see what’s been in front of my face all along.

This time he didn’t seem to know where he was going. He was groping, trying to find a handle.

“You said something a minute ago,” he said. “That most honorable dealers figure such-and-such. How honorable do these guys tend to be?”

“As a group, they’re just like everybody else. There are some old gentlemen straight out of the last century. Fewer of those every day. There are egomaniacs… more of those every day. There are shysters, a few scumbags, a nut or two. There are some guys who’ll take your pants off if you don’t know anything. But I think as a group they have a pretty good standard of ethics. They’ll vary right up and down the scale.”

Hennessey nodded.

“Neal, I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

He blinked and brought himself back to his premise. “Robbery. Bobby bought something and somebody brained him and took it away from him. That idea works, Cliff, if it was something small enough for him to carry it around with him. I think this is going to be a very stupid question, but does it sound feasible for something that small to cost so much money?”

“Hell yes. Why would you think otherwise?”

“It just seems like, for five g’s, you ought to get something more than a booklet.”

I told him the Tamerlane story—how some guy had found one in a bookstore for fifteen bucks and sold it at auction for two hundred grand.

“I hate to say it, but I don’t know what Tamerlane is.”

“Poe’s first book. Just a booklet, like you said, but some of the most expensive stuff in the world is very small. Broadsides, pamphlets, papers…”

“Stuff you could put in a pocket.”

“Sure. That’s the first thing a dealer or a bookscout has to learn. Always look at the little stuff.”

“So it’s not farfetched to think that the bookscout might have been carrying something that somebody would kill him for.”

“Not at all. Just imagine that somebody had found a little piece of scroll signed by Jesus Christ. A silly example—I don’t know who the hell they’d get to authenticate it—but for the sake of argument, okay? How much do you think something like that would be worth?”

“I get your point. And I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to pin down… a motive for robbery. Something so tiny he could carry it in his pocket, but worth big bucks. That’s what he was sent to buy, and somebody killed him and took it away from him.”

“If that’s true, it points back to the book trade. It wasn’t a sudden fight or an old enemy. The answer is in the money. Where did the money go, where did it come from? If we can follow the money, we’ll know a lot more than we know now.”

“There’s one more thing we could check,” Hennessey said. “How about the religion angle?”

I saw it suddenly, what Neal had been pushing around in his head all day.

“They say our boy was religious,” Hennessey said. “Found the Lord in prison a few years ago. That means he went to church somewhere. That means he had a life outside the book business. Maybe friends on a whole different level. Maybe a minister he’d confide in. You only see one side of him when you see him in a bookstore.”