I stared into the sightless eyes of the dead man lying on the floor. My shoulders were still shaking, but now my knees were wobbling, too. Spots and spirals flooded my eyesight.
“Oh, no.” I backed away from the body, away from the chair.
“Oh, God.” Poor Joe. He was a sweet man. He didn’t deserve this.
And neither did I.
Yes, I felt really, really bad for Joe, but why was it always
My heart started beating so hard I could hear it in my ears, and those dots in my vision got bigger.
“No, no, no. Don’t you dare faint,” I muttered as I backed farther away from the body. “Don’t you dare. I mean it.”
I repeated the words again, louder this time, because I couldn’t hear myself think over my own moans. The thing is, I’ve been known to faint at the merest sight of blood.
“Not now, not now, not now.” I repeated it over and over again in between sucking in great globs of air. I couldn’t faint just yet. Nobody would catch me.
I’d seen so many dead bodies by now that you’d think I’d be a little more blase about it, but no. My head was dizzy and my ears were ringing. I kept talking to myself and taking deep breaths, and that seemed to help a little.
I heard a creak and let out a tiny shriek. Was the killer still in the store? There were all sorts of nooks and crannies in this place. Was he hiding somewhere? Waiting for me? Or was my mind playing tricks?
I tiptoed quickly across the room to the two largest display cases, took a deep breath, and squeezed into the space between them. I stood there barely breathing, listening, for what felt like an hour, but was probably less than a minute. I hated hiding. It made me feel like a complete idiot, but at least I was a living, breathing idiot.
A door slammed and I yelped again.
“Okay, that was a real noise.” And it came from inside Joe’s store.
Before I could think too much about it, I slunk out from between the cabinets and took off running in the direction I thought the slammed door might be. Back in the front area, I skirted the room and ended up in Joe’s small, grimy office near the back of the building. The screen door leading to the alley was still swinging and I headed right for it. Then stopped.
A killer had just run out that door. Was I really going to chase after him? Anything was better than hiding in fear, although my inner scaredy-cat was willing to argue the point.
“You can’t go out there,” Scaredy-cat whined. But I could. I had to see who was running away. If I could identify Joe’s killer, even from behind, that would be a good thing.
I nudged the screen door open an inch or two and leaned my head out for a peek.
It was a back alley in the San Francisco style, which meant it wasn’t an alley at all, but another street. A very narrow, tidy, one-lane street, with a tattoo parlor, a postcard shop, and a bar on the side opposite Joe’s. There were potted ficus trees on either side of the door to the postcard shop. It was all very neat and pretty. Not a Dumpster in sight. No killer, either.
I looked both ways, but saw no one running away. I figured it had taken me twenty or thirty seconds to get here from my hiding place in the antiquarian room. That was probably how long it would take to race to the end of the alley and disappear out on the cross street.
My sigh of relief was audible as I stepped outside into the cool, shadowy space. The day had turned cloudy, and I shivered as I glanced around. There was only one escape route; the alley dead-ended a few yards north of Joe’s store. I turned south and jogged to the nearest side street, six doors down. There was no one running in either direction there, so I gave up and walked back to Joe’s to call the police.
On the side of the building was a street sign that read JIM PLACE. So this alley had a name. That, too, was typical for San Francisco, and I wondered which Jim they were talking about, since many of the city’s alleys were named for famous people, like Damon Runyon and Isadora Duncan.
I looked up and saw second- and third-floor apartments above the storefronts on both sides of Jim Place. Was it too much to hope that someone inside one of the shops or apartments saw whoever ran out of Joe’s bookstore?
Hurrying back inside Joe’s office, I locked the alley door and turned the dead bolt. That was when I realized I’d made a strategic error by leaving my purse with my cell phone on the wingback chair next to poor old Joe’s body.
“Damn.” I stopped and gave myself a serious pep talk. Yes, there was a dead body, but I could go back in there. I took twenty or thirty deep breaths and darted back around to the antiquarian room. I made a beeline for my purse, grabbed it, and turned to scurry away. But my conscience nagged at me and I found I couldn’t leave the room without paying some respect to Joe.
Sucking in another breath and letting it out, I whipped around and forced myself to gaze at Joe’s inert form on the Persian carpet. I had the worst urge to apologize, as if the very act of my showing up here had somehow caused his death.
Gadzooks, as my dad would say. This wasn’t all about me; I knew that. I didn’t have the power of life or death over anyone, but it was a plain, hard fact that the body count among my circle of acquaintances was growing monthly and I seemed to be the common denominator. I lived in fear that my friends and family would begin to shun me for their own good.
I found my cell phone and called the police. The dispatcher told me to hang around until the police arrived and I assured her I would. I had no intention of leaving Joe alone.
Now that I knew the police would arrive soon, I took the opportunity to observe the scene more objectively- without looking at Joe too closely. I tried to piece together his last minutes. He’d probably been in this room, putting away a book or straightening one of the displays. Or maybe the killer had lured him into the room, pretending to be a customer. Maybe they had a few words, discussed a book or two. Maybe Joe offered him a seat in that very chair. They walked over toward the Russian bible, Joe turned, and the killer attacked.
Did the killer push him back? Was that why Joe was almost hidden by the heavy chair? I forced myself, holding my stomach as it pitched and rolled, to look at his body.
I had issues with the blood that continued to seep out of Joe into the lovely, faded Oriental rug. The fact that it was still seeping out meant that Joe had been dead only a short while. If I’d arrived a few minutes earlier, I might have saved him.
“And you might be dead now, too,” I told myself sternly, putting an end to that line of thinking.
I tilted my head as something caught my eye. There was an object in the carpet reflecting the light from the chandelier. I took a step closer to the body, then reconsidered. I didn’t want to disturb the crime scene more than I already had, and I certainly didn’t want to step in any blood. But my curiosity got the best of me. I grabbed hold of the back of the chair. Using its weight as leverage to keep from stepping too close to the body, I got a better look at the glimmering object.
It was a knife. A bloody knife, oddly shaped, with a short wood handle and a four-inch, squared-off steel blade. I recognized it as a type of shearing knife used by bookbinders and papermakers. It was sturdy and inexpensive and sharp. I knew because I had several of my own that were almost identical to this one.
“Oh, crap,” I whispered, and there went my stomach again as I contemplated the worst. It couldn’t be my knife, could it? This was a nightmare! I leaned over the chair as far as I could to study the knife. But it took almost a minute of squinting and peering before I was able to determine that it wasn’t one of mine.
“Of course it’s not mine,” I mumbled. Why would it be? Just because someone had once stolen some of my bookbinding tools to use as murder weapons didn’t mean that my knife was the one used to kill Joe. I was just being paranoid. But come on. Who could blame me?
I had the strongest urge to grab the knife and throw it away, but it was too late. The police would be here any minute, and let’s face it: anywhere I hid it, they would find it, along with my finge‹?rprints.
It made me sick to think someone in the book arts world had killed Joe. But with that knife as the weapon, who else could’ve done it? Joe probably knew a hundred different bookbinders in the city and probably a few papermakers, too. It was a small community and a fairly peaceful one, or so I’d always thought. And Joe was one of the most mild-mannered men I’d ever known. Why would anyone kill him?
A more important question-to me, at least-was, Did the killing have something to do with
