he appeared.
“Obviously,” he said, “I’m not into it anymore. But that would have been the perfect opportunity.”
Gilkey told me the story of another perfect opportunity as we left the Crowne Plaza and headed to one of his other favorite pay phones, a few blocks away in the Grand Hyatt. He and his father had taken a red-eye to New York and had themselves a few days of what he called “the good life,” using stolen credit cards. The trip, said Gilkey, was “very, very successful.” That’s when he got the Winnie-the-Pooh books he later tried to sell, and a copy of
The third pickup in New York was, he said, “a funny story.” He and his father were staying at the Hyatt near Madison Avenue, where there were several rare book stores. In a listing from one, which Gilkey declined to name, he had picked out a few selections, one of which was a series of travel books. Since he was having trouble deciding on one, he asked his father to choose. The elder Gilkey thought the travel books sounded appealing, so Gilkey called from a pay phone at the Hyatt and placed the order.
“So I get over there, and they were gift wrapping it,” said Gilkey. “It turns out it’s a seventeen-volume set. It must have weighed like seventy-five pounds. I had to carry it all the way back to the hotel.” He said he didn’t take a taxi because he didn’t want to spend the money. “Very strenuous,” he went on. “I had to keep taking breaks. . . . I kept trudging along, trudging along.”
Did anyone know about this theft? Did Sanders? The ABAA? When I asked Gilkey which store he got it from, he said, “I better not say.” I heard this response more often now, because he was, in fact, confessing crimes more frequently. He seemed to be growing more trusting of me, and I hoped that he would eventually tell me where the books were stashed.
In addition to lining his suitcases with rare books and a handful of other collectibles, Gilkey said he and his father spent their time in New York “eating hundred-dollar meals, visiting the Empire State Building, and walking around Greenwich Village. We were eating like kings. I said to my dad, ‘I guarantee you everything, the hotels, the meals, will be free. I guarantee you.’ ”
The trip was an inspiration.
“That’s what I wanted to do,” said Gilkey, “plan trips to other cities, especially because New York was amazing. Nothing went wrong.”
Until their return. Gilkey and his father boarded the plane with suitcases full of loot, but after they arrived in San Francisco, Gilkey discovered that someone had taken his luggage.
“That was the worst thing that could have happened,” he said. “All those thousands of dollars’ worth of books.”
A passenger from San Mateo had the same model of Hartmann luggage, and within hours he had returned Gilkey’s bag. In spite of that experience, as Gilkey relayed the story of his trip to New York, it was clear that it was one of his fondest memories.
“That’s what I wanted to do. Go to a city, get free hotels, free plane tickets. New York worked out perfectly. I had eighty to ninety credit slips, and I could get one thousand, two thousand, three thousand a slip at least. . . . If you like getting stuff for free, it was the perfect trip. I didn’t feel guilty. Free vacation, free meals, free books. I was excited. I was gonna go mobile from city to city. New York, that was the test run. New York was the future of what I was going to do, because what more could I ask?”
13
And Look: More Books!
After our tour of Union Square’s finest phone booths, I didn’t hear a thing from Gilkey for several weeks. While wondering if he had been caught stealing and was back in prison again, I kept busy. Once, when my daughter was looking for a costume at Goodwill, I drifted over to the bookshelves. This is the type of place where it’s still possible to find a treasure, however unlikely. But maybe I would be lucky. Collector Joseph Serrano had told me about two of his recent finds there: a signed first-edition Willie Mays autobiography for $2.49 (he later saw two copies online, unsigned, priced at $400 each) and a first-edition
The next week, several times, I called the California inmate locator service to see if Gilkey was back in prison, but he wasn’t. I called his mother’s house, where his sister Tina answered the phone and told me she didn’t know where he was. But I knew from Gilkey that the two of them were in frequent contact; I doubted she was telling me the truth.
Eventually, Gilkey called me and agreed to meet again, suggesting the Olive Garden in the Stonestown Shopping Center. Over a pizza, Gilkey explained that because he had stopped going to his weekly parole meetings, he was now a fugitive, a “parolee at large,” but he couldn’t have been happier. He had bought a new laptop, which he showed me, and said he was taking classes at “a nearby college” that he was reluctant to name because he wanted his whereabouts kept secret. He told me he was enrolled in a class on the philosophy of Nietzsche, whom he had mentioned as an interest before, and was particularly taken with what he described as Nietzsche’s idea that if a law or system is unjust, to break it down, to go against it, is not wrong. Apparently, the unfair system Gilkey had in mind was one under which he cannot afford what he wants while others can. There are books that cost more than Gilkey can pay, or wants to pay, so he steals them. It’s a correction to the system.
Gilkey said he had a part-time job at the waterfront, but wouldn’t give me any details. Living off a part-time job in an expensive city like San Francisco while staying in a hotel, however fleabag-ish, is no easy feat. I asked him what he was living on.
“I spent eighteen dollars yesterday,” he said. “Then I got a Lotto ticket and won nineteen, so I actually finished ahead. . . . I figure I’ve got good luck now. It’s time for a jack-pot.” He was full of energy and optimism. “What a story that would be! I win a hundred million dollars in the lottery and buy a rare book shop.”
I had the sense he was offering me an ending to the book I had told him I was working on. It would not be the first time he had done this, nor would it be the last. The next time we met, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that by the time you’re done with the book, maybe I’ll have read all the one hundred best novels, and maybe I’ll hire an artist to do the work, and I’ll have a show. That would be a good way to finish it.”
After giving that idea some thought, he added, “Unless I do something bad or something . . . but I don’t think so.”
“Have you been in any trouble lately?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”
WHILE GILKEY WAS still on parole and living, as far as I knew, in a cheap motel in San Francisco, I drove to his family’s house in Modesto to meet his mother, Cora, and sister Tina, a meeting he had helped arrange.
The Gilkeys live in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses with modest lawns bordered by rows of tall liquidambar trees shedding piles of leaves onto the sidewalks. It seems like the kind of town that thirty years ago rang with the sounds of bicycle bells and hollering mothers. I walked through the front door and into the dim living
