“I can’t remember everybody I ever talked to. This has been a long time ago.”
“Try the name Charlie Jeffords. Does it ring a bell now?”
“That’s the fella down in New Mexico…”
“Whose house Eleanor burgled. Now you’ve got it. Maybe you see why it bothers me so much, the fact that all of you know exactly who Jeffords was right from the start. The minute she got arrested and the name Jeffords came up, you knew why she went down there and what she was trying to find out. You could’ve shared that information with me when it might’ve meant something, last week in court. But for reasons of your own, you all hung pat and let that kid take the fall.”
The room simmered with rage. “I’ll tell you, Janeway, you might be thirty years younger than me, but if you keep throwing shit like that around, you and me are gonna tear up this printshop.“
“Who was Charlie Jeffords?”
He was still rocking slightly. The steel chair made a faint squeaking noise as he moved back and forth on it.
“Charlie Jeffords,” I said.
“Leave it alone.”
“Who’s the other woman in this picture with Jeffords?—the one standing back there glaring at them from the trees?”
He shrugged.
“I seem to be doing all the work here. Maybe I can figure it out by myself; you can sit there and tell me if I go wrong.” I gave the picture a long look. “The first time I saw this, something struck me about these two women. They look too much alike not to be related. They’ve got the same hairline. They’ve both got Eleanor’s high cheekbones.”
He leaned forward and looked at the picture as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “That damn Ryder blood must be some strong shit.”
“Keep trying, Archie, maybe you can find somebody you can sell that to. Me, I’m not buying any more. When you’ve worked in the sausage factory, you try to be careful what brands you buy.”
“What do you want?”
“The only thing that’s left. Everything.”
“I don’t think I can help you with that.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Charlie Jeffords was Darryl Grayson’s binder.”
He took in a lungful of air through his nose.
“Grayson never wanted that known, did he? That’s why you’re all so tight about it, you’re still protecting the legend, pushing the myth that every book was created from dust by one man only, start to finish. The mystique feeds on that. Even Huggins can’t understand how Grayson could turn them out so fast and so perfect and with so many variants. Well, he had help. That’s not a capital crime, the man was human after all. Most of us would be proud of that, being human. But not Grayson.“
“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”
“I’m not guessing here, you know. A friend of mine went to Taos to see Jeffords. What do you think she found there? A garage full of binding equipment. Very fine leathers, a bookpress or two…do I need to go on? Charlie Jeffords was a bookbinder by trade, right up till last year when he got sick. Jeffords did the binding on every Grayson book that came out of here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what is?”
“Darryl did a lot of it…a helluva lot. I did some. Gaston did. Richard did, before he started making so much money with his own books. But Charlie was the best…him and Gaston. Those two could bind a book you’d want to take home and eat.” He leaned forward, slapped his knee, and said, “Ah, shit,” with a sigh.
He shook his head, hating it. “You can’t take anything away from Darryl just because he turned some of it over to other people at the end. He did
“I guess.”
“You know damn well.”
“Well, we’ll leave it at that. You wanna tell me now who the other woman was?”
“Jonelle.”
“And she was…”
“Nola Jean’s sister.”
He got off the bench and I tensed. But he sat back down again, pushed back and forth by restless energy.
