Bookman's promise

I paid him $130 and he did the math. He had spent $22.50 plus tax and gas, which netted him a bill for less than a full day’s work.

“And you didn’t make any mistakes with the publishers,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“If I’ve got any kind of gift, it’s a super memory. I can read a recipe and cook it a week later without ever looking back at it.”

“That is a great, great gift for a bookscout.”

It was after five but he wanted to go out again. “If Denise calls, tell her I’ll be home after a while, but don’t tell her what I’m doing.” He fingered my check. “I want to surprise her.”

I gave him a new route, this time across the southern reaches of the city, where a few places I knew stayed open till nine, and he left with a high heart.

Much later I pieced together what happened next.

The hunt was not as good the second time out. For some reason this often happens: a break in the continuity of a good day chases Lady Luck away, leaving the bookscout high and dry until she comes back again. There is no logical reason for this, but I know from my own experience that it happens. A bookscout’s luck runs hot and cold, just like that of a player in a gambling hall, and a savvy player never leaves the game when it’s running good.

He worked his way south on Broadway, then west on Alameda, where a pair of competing thrift stores faced each other across the street. I had once pulled two copies of The Last Picture Show out of those stores just five minutes apart, a coincidence that borders on spooky, but I had not found anything remotely that good in either place ever again. The juice wasn’t working for Ralston that night, and he moved on west.

He drifted all the way out to the edge of Golden, where a few flea markets had sprung up in old supermarket buildings. Soon he would learn for himself that places like that are always slim pickings. Give a bookscout a booth of his own and a little rent to pay and suddenly he starts thinking of himself as a dealer, with prices to match. Ralston poked his way through several of these. He called me at home and asked about one book, a fine copy of Robert Wilder’s Wind from the Carolinas, which would cost him ten dollars, and I told him to pass. He had found just one book since six o’clock, a fine copy of Two Weeks in Another Town. No big deal, but okay for a quarter.

He tried Denise from the pay phone just outside the store, but their line was busy.

By then the streets were dark. He had gone on a long, circular drive and was heading back to Globeville with almost nothing to show for it. There were still a couple of stores on the list I had given him, and he was lured on by his success of the afternoon. He wanted to find one more. Just one good one. The bookscout’s curse.

The stores closed at nine and he picked up Interstate 70 and headed east toward home.

He felt good about the day in spite of the evening. Maybe this could turn into a new line of work, an avocation that would give him the freedom he hungered for above all else. If he got good at it, he might get Denise out of that crappy motel job and not have to kiss the Man’s ass to do it.

He turned off the highway on Washington and a few minutes later rolled into his block. The lights were on, giving him a warm feeling of anticipation. He came through the gate and clumped up onto the porch.

He opened the door and heard Denise’s favorite music on the classical radio station. The phone was off the hook but this was not unusual: she often left it off when she had a headache. But in that moment he felt the dark man cross his path: the same Grim Reaper Mrs. Gallant had seen was still in the room, and he shivered, then he quaked, and had his first vivid sense of the unthinkable.

“Hey, doll,” he said to the empty room, and his voice broke in his throat.

He crossed to the hall quickly now. He looked into the bedroom and felt his life drain away at what he saw.

CHAPTER 11

I was just reaching for the phone to turn it off for the night when it rang under my hand. “Hey, Cliff.”

“Who is this?” I said belligerently.

I knew quite well who it was: I could pick his laid-back voice out of a crowd, but this late at night it could be nothing but trouble. Neal Hennessey had been my partner in homicide. We had been close friends a few years ago, and for a while after my abrupt exit from the Denver cops we had kept up the pretense that nothing had changed between us. Occasionally I bought him a lunch for old times’ sake; sometimes we would go for a beer in a bar we liked on West Colfax near the Rocky Mountain News. But those times had become fewer and farther between. Months had passed since I’d last seen his beefy face, but I was an outsider now and that’s how cops are.

“We got one on the north side,” Hennessey said. “It’s not my case but your name came up and the primary officer remembered what a dynamic duo we used to be. So I got a call on it.”

I still didn’t put it together. Who did I know on the north side? A few years ago it had been a hotbed of local mobsters and I had helped put one of them away, but how could that come back to haunt me after all this time?

Then Hennessey said, “Do you know a fellow named Ralston?” and suddenly I felt sick.

“What happened?”