“And he’d have seen her.”
“But not to recognize. She wore a veil…black coat, black hat…and a deep red dress. The veil did a good job. I never saw her face and neither did Murdock. With the veil, and the darkness at that table, she could’ve been anyone.”
“Did she bring the book?”
“Oh, yes.” He trembled at the memory of it. “It was superb…magnificent…completely lovely. Beyond any doubt, Grayson’s masterpiece.”
“You could tell all this in the dark?”
“Murdock had come prepared. He had a small penlight and we examined the book with that. You can’t be sure under conditions like that, but there we were. I still didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t seem to know either. She seemed in dire financial need one moment and unconcerned the next, as if her two greatest fears were selling the book and losing the deal we had come there to make. The ball was in my court: I felt I had to do something or risk losing it. I had brought some cash—not much, about twenty thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. I offered her this for the opportunity to examine the book for one week. The money would be hers to keep regardless of what we finally decided to do. We would sign a paper to that effect, handwritten by me and witnessed by Murdock. In exactly one week we’d meet back at that same restaurant. If the book passed muster, she would be paid an additional fifty thousand. Her reaction was palpable: it was more than she’d dreamed…she took it, and I felt I was home free.”
The room was quiet. Kenney stood back like a piece of furniture. Amy sat on the edge of her chair. I held fast to Scofleld’s pale eyes.
“So you had the book,” I said. “Then what?”
“We flew back to Los Angeles with it. I wrote Murdock a check for his work, and at that point I decided to have some independent appraisers fly in and look at it. I called Harold Brenner in New York.”
He looked at me expectantly. I had heard the name, had seen Brenner’s ads in
“But Brenner couldn’t come out till the end of the week,” said Scofield. “This would still leave us time to have the book examined and get back to Seattle for our meeting with the woman in red, early the following week. Then I got sick—whatever I had caught in Seattle got dangerously worse, and on my second day home I was hospitalized as a precaution. That night my house was burglarized. My choice Grayson pieces were taken.”
“Including
“The police were surprisingly efficient. Pruitt had been out playing cards that night: four other men would swear that the game had gone on till dawn and he’d only left the room once or twice to use the facility. But from the start, one of the detectives knew it was an inside job. How could it be anything else?…Who else would know how to defeat the system and get in so easily? The big problem was proving it…they had to catch the perpetrator and make him talk. Within forty-eight hours they had questioned everyone remotely connected with the installation of the security system, including all of Pruitt’s local cronies. Early on the third day they made an arrest, a petty hoodlum named Larson, who had known Pruitt for years. When he was picked up, he still had one of the break-in tools in his possession.”
I gave a dry little laugh. Even after my long police career, the stupidity of some criminals amazes me. This is why the jails are full.
“It was a screwdriver,” Scofield said. “One of those extra blades that comes on a utility knife, you know, a six- tools-in-one instrument. He had used it to break open the bookshelf locks. This was easy: once he’d gotten into the house, then into the library, breaking open the cabinets themselves was relatively simple— he just wedged his screwdriver into the metal lock and pried it open. But it left a scrape mark, which was identical to the sample police made later with the same tool. He also left a partial heelprint in the garden outside the house. His heel fit it perfectly. We had just fertilized that flowerbed, and a chemical residue was found in the nail holes of his heels. I was getting that fertilizer from Germany, it wasn’t yet widely available in the United States, so the odds of finding that precise mix of ingredients in any other garden would have been quite long. We didn’t even have the analysis back from the crime lab yet, but Mr. Larson—and more to the point, Mr. Pruitt—must have known what it would show. Larson was a two-time loser who was looking at a long trip up the river. His incentive to deal was getting better by the hour.”
“To give them Pruitt’s head on a platter.”
“You could put it that way.”
“I can almost guess the rest.”
He nodded. “Suddenly my attorney got a call from Larson’s lawyer…Larson’s
“I’ll bet the cops loved you for that.”
“The detective who had made this case was not thrilled, to say the least. He fumed and yelled and said this was not my call to make.”
“But he soon learned better, didn’t he? Grease runs the world in L.A. too.”
“You’ve got to understand something. This was never said, but there was a strong implication that if I didn’t agree right then, on the spot, my books might end up in the Pacific Ocean. What was I supposed to do? I agreed to have the case dropped, and on Monday morning a note was delivered to my office. If I showed up at a certain corner at a certain time, a taxi would arrive and the driver would have my books in two big boxes. And that’s what I did. I never saw Pruitt again until just this morning. End of story.”
“Not quite, Mr. Scofield. You left the woman in red hanging from a cliff.”
“I flew back to Seattle that same night. There wasn’t time to have the book examined by Brenner or anyone else. I went on my gut, as they say, not the first time I’ve done that in my life. I was still weak from my illness, and the stress of having lost the book for the better part of a week had also taken its toll. I went against my doctor’s
