Booked to die

“A couple more questions, then I’ve got to go,” I said. “I talked to Miss Pride in the middle of the day. Told her to call and tell you she’d be there alone at closing…” I looked searchingly at both faces.

Ruby shook his head. “She never called me.”

“No,” Neff said.

Damn you, Pinky, I thought. Next time do what I tell you.

I felt the shivers in my own spine, and hoped I wasn’t coming down with Neff’s flu.

“What about Peter?” I said. “I asked you before if you knew where he lived.”

“Didn’t know then, don’t know now,” Ruby said.

“What was Peter’s last name?”

“Uh, wait a minute… yeah, I know it, I just can’t call it. Hell, Em, help me out, you know what it is.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, we’ve written enough hot checks to the old fart. I don’t mean that the way it sounds, Dr. J… don’t want to speak ill of the dead…I’m just… tryin‘ to…call the damn thing up for you and I can’t get a handle on it. Haven’t you ever written him a check?”

“I always paid him cash,” I said.

“Must be nice. It’s on the tip of my tongue, that’s how close it is. It’s Peter, uh… uh… God damn it! Peter, uh… I know the damn thing as well as I know my own.”

“Think about something else for a minute,” I said. I looked at three boxes of books stacked against the glass case. “Is this the stuff you bought yesterday?”

“Yeah. Damn lovely stuff it is, too. Go ahead, take a look.”

I peeked over the edge and saw a fine copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Under it was A Clockwork Orange, a beaut. Under that was a nice double stack, about fifteen books. The three boxes would hold forty, maybe fifty pieces.

“It was a hurry-up deal,” Ruby said. “Woman was going out of town, she calls us and needs the cash right now. I tell you, Samson, we had to scrounge to get it up. Fifteen hundred we had to pool, and two hours to do it. But we did it.”

I didn’t go through the box. For once I didn’t feel like looking at books.

I started to leave, stopped at the door and said:

“Hey, Rube! What’s Peter’s name?”

“Bonnema,” he said. “Two n‘s, and one m. Peter Bonnema. By God, Dr. J, that’s a good trick. That’s a damn good trick.”

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” I said, and left.

33

Harkness too had been out on a major buy late yesterday. His place reeked of fresh Stephen King. There were King books scattered across the counter and stacked on the floor. He had gotten the call two days ago and had closed early yesterday to go look at the stuff. The buy was in Boulder, thirty miles away. He had closed the store around one-thirty. He had walked up to my place and had stood talking with Miss Pride for about ten minutes. She had mentioned in passing that she would be closing alone—Mr. Janeway had made her tell him that, she explained with a frown—but he had told her he’d be gone at closing time so she should call Seals & Neff and let them know. She had rolled her eyes and said, “You men!” and that was the last time he had seen her. He looked to be on the verge of tears.

I asked what time he had come in last night. “It was almost eight,” he said. “By the time I got to Boulder it was quarter to three. The buy didn’t take long. King stuff never does. You know what it goes for and so do they: the only question is, can you get it from them for any kind of a decent price, or do they want to make all the money? Usually they want full pop, but this one was reasonable. I only had to pay sixty-five percent.”

“Man, that sounds high,” I said.

Harkness didn’t react at all. He said, “It is, for anything but King. I’ll put it away and in a year it’ll look cheap, what I paid for it. What the hell difference does it make? What difference does anything make?”

“Yeah,” I said.

The Kings had been owned by a woman. Her husband was the collector but he had died and she was trying to figure out the rest of her life. King didn’t figure in it, but she could get a fair start with the money he would bring her. “It cost me plenty,” Harkness said, “every damn dime I had in the bank, but look at what I got.” It was all there, the entire King output: the five major Doubleday firsts, variant jackets on the two Salem’s Lots, all the signed limiteds. Harkness didn’t seem to care.

“I was done with it by four o’clock,” he said. “I should’ve come back. If I had, maybe she’d still be alive. I’d‘ve got back here before five and taken her to dinner and she’d still be here.”

“What did you do instead?”

“Went out to eat alone. Some burger joint near the campus. I sat there for an hour thinking about it.”