Bookman's wake

I had a hunch I had found Pruitt’s moneyman, and I wanted to catch him cold.

I slept five hours. No apologies, no bouts with conscience. My tank was empty: I needed it.

I awoke at four o’clock in a state of anxiety. I had heard a bump somewhere and had come to life thinking of supercop. Dark shadows passed outside, beyond my window, probably a SWAT team getting ready to crash the door.

But when I parted the curtains, it was just a family checking in. The rain had stopped for the moment, but a heavy cloud cover hung over the city, and the streets were wet from a recent drenching. I took a hot shower and dressed, thinking of my immediate future in terms of moves.

My first move had to be to ditch Eleanor’s car. I walked over to the lobby, giving the clerk a good look at me in my old-man role. I used the cane well and was satisfied when he gave me nothing more than a smile and a passing glance.

I bought a Seattle Times from a box and sat in my room browsing the classifieds. I found the car I wanted in less than a minute, but when I called, the party had sold it. I tried again: there were plenty more like that. All I wanted was something cheap that would run for a week.

The one I found was twenty minutes away, in a ramshackle garage behind a tenement house. It was a Nash from the fifties, the oldest car I would ever own. The body was consumed by rust but the engine sounded decent, rebuilt, said the young man selling it, just three or four years ago. He wanted four hundred: it was a classic, he said, selling hard. I told him everything today was a classic and offered him three. “This is a great make-out car,” he said. “The seats fold back into a full bed, with five different positions.” I gave him a long gray stare and asked if I looked like a guy who needed five different positions. He grinned and said, “Just need wheels to get you to the ”VA, huh, pops?“ We settled on three-fifty with no further commentary.

The whole business took less than half an hour. He brought out some papers and signed them over to my Raymond Hodges alias and had one last-minute doubt about the license plates. “I think you’re supposed to pull those plates and go down to motor vehicles and get a temporary.” I told him I’d take care of it and he accepted this cheerfully. I left Eleanor’s car on the street a block away, noting the address so I could call the Rigbys to come pick it up. It was a quiet residential neighborhood and I thought the car would be safe there for a few days before somebody called in and reported it to the city as abandoned.

Back in the motel, I made my phone checks again. Neither Leith Kenney in L.A. or Charles and Jonelle Jeffords in Taos were yet answering the telephone, but I reached Allan Huggins on the sixth ring.

“Mr. Huggins?”

“Speaking.” He sounded out of breath, as if he’d run some distance to catch the phone.

“My name’s Hodges, you don’t know me, I’m a book dealer from Philadelphia. I’ve been hired by a private investigator to track down a book and I’m hoping it’s something you might be able to help me with.”

His laughter was sudden and booming. “You’re a card, aren’t you, sir?…A book dealer who’s also a detective, you say? What’ll they think of next?”

“I guess it’s that combination of skills that makes me as good a bet as anybody to find a book that nobody thinks is real.”

“Aha, you must be looking for the Grayson Raven …Darryl Grayson’s lost masterpiece.”

“How’d you know that?”

“It’s what everyone’s looking for. I must get half a dozen calls a year on it, maybe more. It’s one of those urban myths that got started just after the Graysons died. It just won’t go away, and it’s all preposterous, just total nonsense. Read my bibliography.”

“I’ve done that.”

“Well, then…”

“It’s a great piece of work, but it won’t answer the one question that keeps coming up.”

“Which is…?”

“If there’s nothing to it, why do so many people keep chasing it?”

“Now you’re asking me to be a psychologist, and all I ever was, was a poor bibliographer. This is the reason I stick to books. No matter how complicated they become, bibliographically, their mysteries can always be solved. With people, who knows? Have you ever solved the mystery of anyone, sir—your brother, your son, the woman you love?”

“Probably not. Maybe I could come see you, we could put our heads together and solve the riddle of the Graysons.”

“Not very damned likely.”

“I won’t take much of your time.”

“If you think it’ll help, come ahead. But I can tell you right now, you won’t get any encouragement from me in this Grayson Raven business. If you ask me was Grayson planning another Raven , my answer would have to be yes. I’ve alluded to that much in my bibliography. But there’ve been no major changes in the Grayson Press bibliography since my book was published. Some poems by Richard have turned up, and maybe fifty significant broadsides. But in my humble opinion, the Raven project never got off the ground. If you want to ask me why foolish people keep