41
She had returned almost a full day early. There was a click and the dogs swarmed her at the front door.
She looked at me across the room, as if she hadn’t expected me to be there and didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. “You’ve changed,” she said, and I gave her an old man’s grin. She threw her raincoat over a wicker basket, came slowly around the couch, and sat facing me with an almost schoolmarm-ish primness.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “Been running it through my head all the way home from Albuquerque, trying to figure out what I ought to do.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“I’m in it now.”
“I thought you always were.”
“It’s different now. I’m in it with you.”
This was happy news. I felt a warm glow at the sound of it.
She said, “Whatever happens, we go together.”
We didn’t need to hash out the ground rules. When you connect with someone, things like that are understood. Suddenly we were like police partners, comparing notes, poring over evidence. There was a lot to be done, and the first commandment was the test of fire. You never hold out on your partner.
We ate a late supper and talked into the morning. For the first time in a long time I broke bread with a good-looking woman without thinking of Rita.
42
She had covered a lot of ground in two days. She had flown out of Sea-Tac at nine-forty Pacific time on Saturday night. Her destination was St. Louis, where she arrived in light snow at two-twelve in the morning. She had a room reserved, but her old companion, insomnia, was along for the ride. She filled the dead time reading. At nine a.m. she was in the homicide room downtown, looking at photographs and evidence from an old murder case. Stuff that was once under tight wraps was shared with her, off the record, by the man on duty Sunday morning. It had been a long time, years, since anything exciting had been added to the file, and they didn’t have much hope of cracking it now. She had flown two thousand miles and that impressed them. She had observed the proper protocol, speaking first by telephone with the chief, and they let her see the file.
The victim was Joseph Hockman, fifty-two, a bachelor. She looked at the pictures, including the close-ups. It didn’t bother her: she had been a reporter for a long time and had seen it all many times.
The victim lay in a pool of blood in a library room. Pictures had been taken from every angle, so she could see the shelving and the arrangement of books on all four walls. The black and whites were vivid and sharp, clear enough that the titles could be read and the jacket formats identified. Her eyes traveled along one row and she saw some famous old books.
She began to make notes. Mr. Joseph Hockman collected so-called serious fiction—no mysteries, no fantasy, nothing that smacked of genre. He liked his literature straight, no sugar, no cream. He did have a weak spot for fine limiteds: a shot over the body toward the window wall showed a good-sized section of books in slipcases. She asked for a magnifying glass, and the detective, fascinated, got her one from a desk drawer.
“Looks like Limited Editions Club,” she said.
The detective said, “Oh,” the way people do when they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Near the end of the shelf was a gap where some books had been taken out but not returned.
“Looks like there’s fifteen or twenty books missing here,” she said.
The detective, who had been reading the reports from the original investigating officers, said, “There was some discussion at the time about the possibility of theft being the motive. They thought that was pretty weak, though. Who’d kill a man that way just to steal a bunch of books?”
“Any indication in the file whether the books ever turned up?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Or what they were?”
