There was another pause. I stopped the tape, looked through the freezer, found a pizza, and put it in the real oven on a piece of tinfoil. The hell with instructional booklets written by committee in Japan.
I pushed the on button on the tapedeck.
“So,” she said, “on to business.”
Yes ma’am.
“The cops picked up that kid who was with Pruitt and Carmichael. His name is Bobby John Dalton, date of birth”—I could hear her shuffling through notes—“one nine…umm…‘sixty-six. He’s got a record, nothing major: one or two fights, one assault charge, a drunk and disorderly, carrying an unlicensed weapon, having an open can in a moving vehicle. He thinks of himself as a tough guy, a muscleman. Maybe he is—I mention it so you’ll know…he’ll figure he owes you for what you did to him in the garage. He was a bouncer in a nightclub, a bodyguard…Quintana wouldn’t tell me much more than that. I’m recording this on Saturday night. My plane leaves in two hours and I don’t know at this moment whether they’ve actually booked this Dalton kid or are just holding him for questioning. He was still downtown the last time I checked, about an hour ago. I don’t know if the cops have any new leads on Pruitt after talking to the kid.”
Again she leafed through her notes. “Here’s a little more personal information on the Dalton kid…just a minute.”
She read off a home address, on Pine Street east of 1-5. “It’s a boardinghouse owned by his mother. She seems to be a character in her own right, in fact as mean as he thinks he is. His father’s been dead for years, though probably not long enough. The old man was a gambler and a drunk and was probably abusive. It’s no wonder Bobby’s on a fast track to nowhere.
“This should make you feel pretty good. At least the cops are doing their part. They’re looking at Rigby as a serious abduction, so you’ve accomplished what you wanted without coming in. However, comma, be advised that Quintana is still on your case.”
I heard a click, then another, as if she had turned the machine off then on again. “As you would imagine, the cops are playing it close to the vest on the particulars at the murder scene. I did find out, from a source inside the department, one strange bit of information. At this point they think the woman in the house was killed sometime earlier than Carmichael…maybe as much as two hours. They’ll know more when the lab gets through and, hopefully, so will I. But assuming that holds up, don’t you find it strange?”
Yes ma’am.
“That’s all I have on it. I guess you should burn this tape. I’ve set a fire for you in the living room: all you’ve got to do is light it and toss this in. In fact, I don’t know if you’ll get in touch with Judy, or if you’ll hear this tape, or if you do hear it, when that might be.”
She took a deep breath. “I should be back in Seattle by Tuesday night…earlier if I get lucky.”
I could hear doubt in her voice now, as if she had come to a new bit of business and wasn’t sure how much if any of it she wanted to tell me.
“Have you read my book yet? Did you like it?”
Yes ma’am.
“I guess you could say I’m rewriting the final chapter.”
I heard her breathe: she had moved the microphone closer to her mouth and was fiddling with it, trying to set it up straight.
“Help me, Janeway, I’m not having an easy time here. Send me some vibes, give me a clue. I’m trying to tell you some things you should probably hear, but I’m still a reporter and this is the big story of my life. I’ve lived with it a long time and I don’t share these things easily.”
I waited. The tape was hot and running.
“I’ll tell you some things I put in my original draft and later had to take out. But I won’t name names or places here, and I don’t want to tell you yet where I’ve gone. We’ll talk about it next week, when I get home, and we’ll see where we are then.
“There was a man I wanted to interview, back when I was doing my research. He lived in the city I’m going to tonight. He probably wasn’t important. His connection to Grayson was slender—all he did was collect and love Grayson’s books. I don’t think they ever met, and to tell the truth I’m not sure what my original intent was in seeking him out…to see his books, maybe, or get some insight into the quintessential Grayson collector. I didn’t think he’d contribute more than a line to my book, but I was in his town, I had his name and a few hours to kill. So I tried to look him up.
“Turned out he was dead…he’d been murdered years before, in 1969 as a matter of fact, a few days after the Graysons died. This in itself might mean nothing, but it put an uneasy edge on my trip. I decided to stay over an extra day and ask around. The investigating officer had since retired from the police. I found him running security for a department store. He didn’t mind talking about it—it was an old case then, nothing had been done on it for years, and the old cop told me things about the scene that he might not’ve said a few years earlier. One thing in particular stood out, and I thought of it this morning when you were telling me about the scene at Pruitt’s. This Grayson collector was found dead in a room full of books twenty years ago. Right beside his body was a pile of ashes.”
37
I opened my eyes to a blinding sunrise. It was six forty-five, the clock radio had just gone off, and the sun was shining.
I shooed the dogs off the bed and hit the shower. Wrapped in steam, I considered Trish and the tape she’d left me. The fire had eaten the tape, but the chimney had gagged on the words. They hung in the air and chilled the
