“I think you’d better call her back.”
She went out of the room while I called. The phone rang and rang. The clock on the wall said five twenty-five: the store had been closed for twenty-five minutes.
I sat for a moment and stared at the machine. Miss McKinlev poked her head in.
“Everything all right?”
“I don’t know. Could I hear the tape again?”
But there was nothing on the tape that hadn’t been there the first time.
I called Seals & Neff. Ruby answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Rube, this’s Janeway. Listen, would you walk up the street and see if everything is okay at my place?”
“Sure. What’s wrong?”
“Peter was just in there. I’m afraid he may’ve been giving Miss Pride some grief.”
“Sure… gimme your number where you’re at…I’ll call you right back.”
I hung up and sat down to wait.
“How about some coffee?” Miss McKinley said. “I’ve got some whiskey if you’d like a drink.”
“As a matter of fact, it is almost decent time for a bourbon.”
“How do you like it?”
“Just like it comes.”
She came back with the drink just as Ruby called. She motioned to the phone, that I should answer it, and I did. Ruby said, “Place looks shipshape to me, Dr. J. All locked up tight and the night-light on.”
“Did you try the doors?”
“All both of’em. Walked around, rattled the windows, sang three stanzas of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ through the keyhole. Nobody’s there, Dr. J. Whatever the bug up Pete’s ass was, she must’ve handled it and got him out of there.”
“Okay,” I said in a doubtful voice. “Thanks, Ruby.”
I looked at Miss McKinley. “What a crazy thing.”
“There’s probably a simple explanation.”
“Yeah…but you’d think she’d call back.”
“Maybe it slipped her mind. She did say someone had come in. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Might as well do what you came for.”
Everything julian lambert had said about her books was true, except that even then you weren’t prepared for them. You just don’t see that many sensational books in one place. It was all literature, published since the mid- 1800s, and it was all letter-perfect. You need a bookman’s eye to appreciate what a perfect copy of a fifty-year-old book looks like. It does not look like a new book—it looks so wonderfully like an old book that’s never been touched. Never been touched by human hands—that’s the feeling her books gave you. There were things in that room that I knew hadn’t been seen in that condition in half a century. She had a shelf of Jack Londons in crisp dust jackets from before 1910. She had a little poetry piece that had ushered Ernest Hemingway into the book world. She had Mark Twain’s copy
The phone rang, and I thought of Miss Pride. I heard the recorder kick on and Rita McKinley’s voice repeating the message I had heard so often. At the beep, a man said, “Rita, this is Paul… Call me back when you can.” It rang again, almost immediately. The recorder played and beeped and a voice said, “This is George Butler the Third calling from New York. I have decided to buy the four books we discussed yesterday. Would you please ship and bill as soon as possible?” Of course I knew who Butler the Third was. I saw his self-aggrandizing ads in the AB all the time. “Mr. George Butler III announces his acquisition of…” That kind of thing. George Butler was one of the so- called big boys of the book world. You read his ads and you knew he never put on his pants like a mortal man, he just drifted up and floated down into both legs at once. I wondered what four books George Butler had decided he couldn’t live without, and what the tariff would be. Ten thousand? Twenty? Just routine business for Ms. McKinley, who was certainly operating on a high level from her ivory tower in the mountains.
I took a break and called Miss Pride’s home number. She wasn’t home. I looked through some more books. I had done most of one short wall and still had the long wall and another short one left. I felt light-headed, like a drunk just coming back from a three-week bender. It had been too rich, this feast of her books, and I decided to pack it in for the night. I got up, stretched, and moved to the door. There was no sound in the house, other than the grandfather’s clock ticking in the hallway. The clock said it was eight-thirty. I went through the dark hall, drawn by the light at the end. Suddenly I smelled food cooking. When I came into the kitchen, I saw that she had set a table for two.
