Bookman's wake

I tucked everything back as it was. In a slipcase at the side of the glove compartment I found her address book. It fell open to the letter G , so often had that page been used. She had written some names under the general heading Grayson . There were book dealers from coast to coast, several of them known to me as specialists in fine-press books. There was a local number for Allan Huggins, the Grayson bibliographer, and at the bottom of the page were three names in bold, fresh-looking ink.

Nola Jean Ryder.

Jonelle Jeffords.

Rodney Scofield.

Jonelle Jeffords I remembered as the name of the woman in Taos whose house Eleanor had burglarized. There was a phone number beginning with a 505 area code. The number for Rodney Scofield was a 213 exchange, which I recognized as Los Angeles. The space beside Nola Jean Ryder was blank.

I sat behind the wheel, crossed my fingers, and turned the ignition.

Yea, verily, it started.

I was back in business. I had wheels.

I stopped at the Hilton and called Hennessey. I knew by the cautious sound of his voice that he had what I wanted.

“I’ve got bad vibes about this.”

“Neal, it’s your nature to have bad vibes. The time for you to really start worrying is when you don’t have bad vibes.”

“Very funny. Someday you’ll get me fired, I’ve got no doubt of that at all. No, don’t tell me about it, please… you’re not gonna kill this guy, are you?”

“Now why would you ask a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. I just had a vision of the beaches up there littered with cadavers, all of ‘em named Pruitt. It doesn’t sit well at one o’clock in the morning.”

“I’m just gonna pay him a friendly little visit.”

“Like the Godfather, huh? You’ve got that edge in your voice.”

There was nothing else to say: he’d either give or he wouldn’t.

“Your plate’s registered to a Kelvin Ruel Pruitt. He’s got half a dozen old unresolved legal problems, all in Illinois. Careless driving, failure to appear, a bad check never made good, stuff like that. They’re not about to go after him in another state, but if he ever gets stopped in Chicago, it’ll be an expensive trip.”

He sighed and gave me Pruitt’s address.

“Bless you, Mr. Hennessey, you lovely old man. Now go back to bed and make your wife happy.”

“She should be so lucky.”

I sat at the table and unfolded a Seattle street map. Pruitt lived in a place called Lake City, north of town. I marked the map, but I already had the routes memorized. As a courtesy I called Taos and told them Rigby had escaped. The lonely-sounding dispatcher took my message and managed to convey his contempt across the vast expanse of mountains and plains. I didn’t bother telling him that I was going to find Rigby and bring her back to him. I didn’t think he’d believe that anyway.

19

It was a fifteen- minute drive at that time of night. The draft from the floorboards became a freezing gale, numbing me in my wet clothes. The heater was only partly effective, just beginning to get warm as I reached the Lake City turnoff. I went east on 125th Street, zigzagging through dark and narrow residential lanes until I found the street where Pruitt lived. It was wrapped in wet murk, the sparse streetlights as ineffective as candles. The rain kept coming, beating down like a draconian water cure. The first thing I saw as I turned into the block was the fat man’s car, parked under a tree at Pruitt’s address. I whipped around and pulled in behind him, then sat for a few minutes with the heater running, recovering from the cold drive. The house was draped by trees and flanked by thick underbrush. None of it could be seen from the street. There was also no sign of Pruitt’s Pontiac, which was troubling but might be explained by a garage out back. It was now 1:18 by my watch: almost three hours since they’d snatched her off the street. I had to assume the worst and go from here. Assume all three men were in the house. Figure one of them would be posted as a lookout. The fat man and the kid didn’t scare me much: I had dealt with goons many times, and they always fold when the game gets rough. Pruitt was the X-factor, the unknown. You never know what a psycho will do, or what you’ll have to do if you get him started.

I pulled my gun around to the front of my belt. Still I sat, bothered by something I couldn’t pin down. Then I saw that the fat man’s car door was open in the rain, cracked about six inches. The interior light had come on: this had run the battery down and cast the car in a dim, unnatural glow. He took her in the house, I thought: he had to carry her and never got his door closed, then he forgot to come back out and shut it. I thought of Otto Murdock’s store, pulling that connection out of the rain, from God knew where. Things were left empty, open, unattended. People went away and didn’t come back. Nothing sinister about that, except my own nagging feeling that somehow it shouldn’t be that way.

I’d have to move Eleanor’s car, I knew that. Pruitt would know it on sight, and if he happened to drive up, I’d lose