Bookman's wake

“All right,” I said, “what would you have done?”

“I can’t even imagine. I’m not making light of it, it’s just that I’m starting to worry about your chances of ever getting back to Denver as a free man.”

“I’ll worry too if you think that’ll help. But I’m still going to pay off Murdock’s cat, so I can own those books with a clear conscience and not add grand theft to all the other stuff I’ve got hanging.”

She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she had to be thinking.

“If this is getting too dicey for you, I can understand that. If you want to change your mind, I’ll understand that.”

“No,” she said too quickly. Then, after a few seconds’ thought: “No, I’m fine.”

She gestured at Grayson’s notebook. “But look what you’ve done, you’ve messed up another crime scene. Quintana will have your head on a stick.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t have to find out.”

“I hate to break this to you, Janeway, but luck is not the first word that crosses my mind when I think of you.”

“Then you’ll have to admit that I’m due for a break.”

“You’re hanging by a thread. You’re walking a tightrope with deep trouble on both sides of you. It had to occur to you that this little notebook just might be the motive for that old man’s murder.”

“Then why didn’t the killer take it?”

“How should I know?…Maybe he couldn’t find it…you said yourself the place was a mess.”

“He didn’t even look for it, that’s what I’m telling you. The place was a mess, but it was an accumulated mess. There weren’t any drawers emptied, no papers thrown around. I didn’t see any ashes on the floor. I don’t think the killer even knew this notebook was there.”

“Then why was Murdock killed?”

“I don’t know that. All I can tell you is, it’s different than the others.”

“Different killers?…Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, it’s the same guy, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find one motive at the bottom of it. But he was drawn to these guys for different reasons. Carmichael was killed for what was in Pruitt’s house. Same thing with Hockman, years ago: he was killed for what he had. Murdock was killed for what he knew.”

She leaned over and looked at the notebook close up. But she avoided touching it, as if whatever lay beneath its cover had been hopelessly tainted. “It’s still a wonderful motive for murder. Imagine what someone like Huggins would pay for it. He’d sell his house to get it. It’s the map to Treasure Island, the only thing a Grayson freak would ever need for the scavenger hunt of his dreams.”

I was thinking the same thing, with Scofield playing the Huggins role. A rich man could chase down the subscribers or their heirs and suck the market dry in no time. Each year fewer Graysons would appear at auction and no one would quite know why. Suddenly dealers would list them in catalogs as rare and mean it. In ten years the prices on the few odds and ends would be stratospheric.

I told her about Scofield and Kenney and about the interesting talk I’d had with Mrs. Kenney earlier in the evening. She listened with her fingers to her lips and came to the same conclusion I had reached a few hours before.

Kenney and Scofield were flying in to meet Pruitt.

That meant Pruitt had been in touch, sometime since I last spoke with Kenney, probably well within the last twenty-four hours.

“My God, he’s found the book,” Trish said breathlessly.

“That…would seem to be the case.”

“What else could it mean?”

“I don’t know what it means. Or might mean for Eleanor.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna be there when the deal goes down. After that it’s up for grabs.”

She said something under her breath that sounded like “Jesus.”

I nudged Grayson’s notebook in her general direction. “Maybe you should break down and give this a look. It tells us some things we never knew before.”

“Such as what?”

“It turns out that Grayson did a tiny lettered run for each of his books. A superlimited series that went to a few select customers.”

“I don’t remember seeing that in Huggins.”

“It wasn’t in Huggins. I looked.”