printed on.”
“What did your written appraisal say?”
“Just that. No value, except as salvage books. Maybe a decorator might want them, to fill shelves in model homes.”
This was her statement and it was now finished. What she had told me so far was harmless: it was what she would tell Hennessey tomorrow or the next day. This was where the questioning began, for a cop. I wasn’t a cop anymore and I had to be careful of what I said to her. You don’t tell someone what questions the cops are likely to be asking: it sets her on edge, gives her an advantage.
But I couldn’t resist this. “Would it surprise you to know that someone bought that library, Miss McKinley? Thought he was getting a helluva deal.”
I saw the anger again, but this time she kept it in. “Nothing surprises me,” she said. “There’s always someone who’ll buy something, and there’s always someone who’ll pay too much. You’ll find that out when you’ve been in it a while.”
I gave a little shrug. “This guy knew books,” I said, and my alarm went off and that was the last thing I was going to say to Rita McKinley about the Ballard books until she had given her statement to Hennessey.
Her anger simmered to the surface. “Maybe he didn’t know them as well as you think. Maybe he lost his mind, Mr. Jane-way. Maybe I was in cahoots with someone. What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you think I lowballed the appraisal just so somebody could buy it cheap? Is that what this is all about?”
“It doesn’t matter what 1 think. I’m not the police anymore.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said again. “Show me a couple of things in your glass case first.”
I took the books out and she looked at them carefully. “Let me see those too, please.” She was all business now. I tried to be too. I showed her the books and eventually she put most of them back. What she finally bought were Saul Bellow’s two rare novels, perfect copies I had bought from Peter less than a month ago. Ruby had priced them, high retail I had thought at the time:
She didn’t ask for a discount: money seemed to mean nothing to her. I gave her the usual twenty percent and she wrote a check for $520.
And I fell into the pit of aimless chatter. Suddenly the night looked very long and dark, and I hated to see her go.
“I’m surprised you bought those: an old bookman I know said I’d probably die with them. Bellow’s supposed to be like Mailer and Roth and Henry Miller. Nobody cares enough to collect them.”
“I guess your friend was wrong. At least about these Bellows.”
She was heading for the door. I wanted to grab her by the sleeve and show her something. It didn’t matter what, as long as it was interesting and she hadn’t seen it before.
How would you like to see how a cop really interrogates, Miss McKinley?
What I said, though, was “Look, I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
She turned at the door and gave me a look. I gave up the fight and made my betrayal of the Denver Police Department complete.
“I knew the books weren’t worth anything,” I said. “We saw the statements from the club. He kept them all, a complete record, all the way back to the beginning. I could’ve done that appraisal, just from the records he’d kept.”
“Well, then,” she said crisply. “I guess I won’t go to the electric chair after all.”
She had the door open. Now or never, I thought.
“How about dinner some night?”
“I don’t think so,” she said in the same heartbeat. “Thank you for asking, but no.”
The door pulled shut in her wake. I stood again in an empty room on an empty world. A faint trace of her cologne lingered. Her memory lingered a good deal longer.
I dreamed about her. We swam together through a sea of books, in my dream. This was wonderful stuff. I hadn’t had much to do with love, quote-unquote, in a very long time. Perhaps a bachelor heading into senility doesn’t believe in the quote-unquote; maybe it’s the one thing he’s truly afraid of. But Rita McKinley had lit a fire under me and I knew it. I had gone up like an ember doused with gasoline. This may be normal for an adolescent, but for a man in his thirties who deals in “relationships” rather than “love,” the feeling was heady and strange. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but with it came the unease of knowing that it would probably turn out to be.
