Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

‘No prob. I’m on my way.’

Less than three minutes later Jerome is coming around the corner. He nips into a space just vacated by a mom picking up a couple of kids that look way too shrimpy to be in high school. Hodges pulls out, gives Jerome a wave, and heads for Holly’s position on Garner Street, punching in her number as he goes. They can wait for Jerome’s report together.

22

Pete’s father does take Vioxx, has ever since he finally kicked the OxyContin, but he currently has plenty. The folded sheet of paper Pete takes from his back pocket and glances at before going into City Drug is a stern note from the assistant principal reminding juniors that Junior Skip Day is a myth, and the office will examine all absences that day with particular care.

Pete doesn’t brandish the note; Bill Hodges may be retired, but he sure didn’t seem retarded. No, Pete just looks at it for a moment, as if making sure he has the right thing, and goes inside. He walks rapidly to the prescription counter at the back, where Mr Pelkey throws him a friendly salute.

‘Yo, Pete. What can I get you today?’

‘Nothing, Mr Pelkey, we’re all fine, but there are a couple of kids after me because I wouldn’t let them copy some answers from our take-home history test. I wondered if you could help me.’

Mr Pelkey frowns and starts for the swing-gate. He likes Pete, who is always cheerful even though his family has gone through incredibly tough times. ‘Point them out to me. I’ll tell them to get lost.’

‘No, I can handle it, but tomorrow. After they have a chance to cool off. Just, you know, if I could slip out the back …’

Mr Pelkey drops a conspiratorial wink that says he was a kid once, too. ‘Sure. Come through the gate.’

He leads Pete between shelves filled with salves and pills, then into the little office at the back. Here is a door with a big red sign on it reading ALARM WILL SOUND. Mr Pelkey shields the code box next to it with one hand and punches in some numbers with the other. There’s a buzz.

‘Out you go,’ he tells Pete.

Pete thanks him, nips out onto the loading dock behind the drugstore, and jumps down to the cracked cement. An alley takes him to Frederick Street. He looks both ways for the ex-detective’s Prius, doesn’t see it, and breaks into a run. It takes him twenty minutes to reach Lower Main Street, and although he never spots the blue Prius, he makes a couple of sudden diversions along the way, just to be safe. He’s just turning onto Lacemaker Lane when his phone vibrates again. This time the text is from his sister.

Tina: Did u talk 2 Mr Hodges? Hope u did. Mom knows. I didn’t tell she KNEW. Please don’t be mad at me.

As if I could, Pete thinks. Were they two years closer in age, maybe they could have gotten that sibling rivalry thing going, but maybe not even then. Sometimes he gets irritated with her, but really mad has never happened, even when she’s being a brat.

The truth about the money is out, but maybe he can say money was all he found, and hide the fact that he tried to sell a murdered man’s most private property just so his sister could go to a school where she wouldn’t have to shower in a pack. And where her dumb friend Ellen would be in the rearview mirror.

He knows his chances of getting out of this clean are slim approaching none, but at some point – maybe this very afternoon, watching the hands of the clock move steadily toward the hour of three – that has become of secondary importance. What he really wants is to send the notebooks, especially the ones containing the last two Jimmy Gold novels, to NYU. Or maybe The New Yorker, since they published almost all of Rothstein’s short stories in the fifties. And stick it to Andrew Halliday. Yes, and hard. All the way up. No way can Halliday be allowed to sell any of Rothstein’s later work to some rich crackpot collector who will keep it in a climate-controlled secret room along with his Renoirs or Picassos or his precious fifteenth-century Bible.

When he was a kid, Pete saw the notebooks only as buried treasure. His treasure. He knows better now, and not just because he’s fallen in love with John Rothstein’s nasty, funny, and sometimes wildly moving prose. The notebooks were never just his. They were never just Rothstein’s, either, no matter what he might have thought, hidden away in his New Hampshire farmhouse. They deserve to be seen and read by everyone. Maybe the little landslide that exposed the trunk on that winter day had been nothing but happenstance, but Pete doesn’t believe it. He believes that, like the blood of Abel, the notebooks cried out from the ground. If that makes him a dipshit romantic, so be it. Some shit does mean shit.

Halfway down Lacemaker Lane, he spots the bookshop’s old-fashioned scrolled sign. It’s like something you might see outside an English pub, although this one reads Andrew Halliday Rare Editions instead of The Plowman’s Rest, or whatever. Looking at it, Pete’s last doubts disappear like smoke.

He thinks, John Rothstein is not your birthday fuck, either, Mr Halliday. Not now and never was. You get none of the notebooks. Bupkes, honey, as Jimmy Gold would say. If you go to the police, I’ll tell them everything, and after that business you went through with the James Agee book, we’ll see who they believe.

A weight – invisible but very heavy – slips from his shoulders. Something in his heart seems to have come back into true for the first time in a long time. Pete starts for Halliday’s at a fast walk, unaware that his fists are clenched.

23

At a few minutes past three – around the time Pete is getting into Hodges’s Prius – a customer does come into the bookshop. He’s a pudgy fellow whose thick glasses and gray-flecked goatee do not disguise his resemblance to Elmer Fudd.

‘Can I help you?’ Morris asks, although what first occurs to him is Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?

‘I don’t know,’ Elmer says dubiously. ‘Where is Drew?’

‘There was sort of a family emergency in Michigan.’ Morris knows Andy came from Michigan, so that’s okay, but he’ll have to be cagey about the family angle; if Andy ever talked about relatives, Morris has forgotten. ‘I’m an old friend. He asked if I’d mind the store this afternoon.’

Elmer considers this. Morris’s left hand, meanwhile, creeps around to the small of his back and touches the reassuring shape of the little automatic. He doesn’t want to shoot this guy, doesn’t want to risk the noise, but he will if he has to. There’s plenty of room for Elmer back there in Andy’s private office.

‘He was holding a book for me, on which I have made a deposit. A first edition of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It’s by—’

‘Horace McCoy,’ Morris finishes for him. The books on the shelf to the left of the desk – the ones the security DVDs were hiding behind – had slips sticking out of them, and since entering the bookstore today, Morris has examined them all. They’re customer orders, and the McCoy is among them. ‘Fine copy, signed. Flat signature, no dedication. Some foxing on the spine.’

Elmer smiles. ‘That’s the one.’

Morris takes it down from the shelf, sneaking a glance at his watch as he does. 3:13. Northfield High classes end at three, which means the boy should be here by three thirty at the latest.

He pulls the slip and sees Irving Yankovic, $750. He hands the book to Elmer with a smile. ‘I remember this one especially. Andy – I guess he prefers Drew these days – told me he’s only going to charge you five hundred. He got a better deal on it than he expected, and wanted to pass the savings along.’

Any suspicion Elmer might have felt at finding a stranger in Drew’s customary spot evaporates at the prospect of saving two hundred and fifty dollars. He takes out his checkbook. ‘So … with the deposit, that comes to …’

Morris waves a magnanimous hand. ‘He neglected to tell me what the deposit was. Just deduct it. I’m sure he trusts you.’

‘After all these years, he certainly ought to.’ Elmer bends over the counter and begins writing the check. He does this with excruciating slowness. Morris checks the clock. 3:16. ‘Have you read They Shoot Horses?’

‘No,’ Morris says. ‘I missed that one.’

What will he do if the kid comes in while this pretentious goateed asshole is still dithering over his checkbook? He won’t be able to tell Saubers that Andy’s in back, not after he’s told Elmer Fudd he’s in Michigan. Sweat begins to trickle out of his hairline and down his cheeks. He can feel it. He used to sweat like that in prison, while he was waiting to be raped.

‘Marvelous book,’ Elmer says, pausing with his pen poised over the half-written check. ‘Marvelous noir, and a piece of social commentary to rival The Grapes of Wrath.’ He pauses, thinking instead of writing, and now it’s 3:18. ‘Well … perhaps not Grapes, that might be going too far, but it certainly rivals In Dubious Battle, which is more of a socialist tract than a novel, don’t you agree?’

Morris says he does. His hands feel numb. If he has to pull out the gun, he’s apt to drop it. Or shoot himself straight down the crack of his ass. This makes him yawp a sudden laugh, a startling sound in this narrow, book-lined space.

Elmer looks up, frowning. ‘Something funny? About Steinbeck, perhaps?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Morris says. ‘It’s … I have a medical condition.’ He runs a hand down one damp cheek. ‘It makes me sweat, and then I start laughing.’ The look on Elmer Fudd’s face makes him laugh again. He wonders if Andy and Elmer ever had sex, and the thought of that bouncing, slapping flesh makes him laugh some more. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Yankovic. It’s not you. And by the way … are you related to the noted popular-music humorist Weird Al Yankovic?’

‘No, not at all.’ Yankovic scribbles his signature in a hurry, rips the check loose from his checkbook, and passes it to Morris, who is grinning and thinking that this is a scene John Rothstein could have written. During the exchange, Yankovic takes care that their fingers should not touch.

‘Sorry about the laughing,’ Morris says, laughing harder. He’s remembering that they used to call the noted popular-musical humorist Weird Al Yank-My-Dick. ‘I really can’t control it.’ The clock now reads 3:21, and even that is funny.

‘I understand.’ Elmer is backing away with the book clutched to his chest. ‘Thank you.’

He hurries toward the door. Morris calls after him, ‘Make sure you tell Andy I gave you the discount. When you see him.’

This makes Morris laugh harder than ever, because that’s a good one. When you see him! Get it?

When the fit finally passes, it’s 3:25, and for the first time it occurs to Morris that maybe he hurried Mr Irving ‘Elmer Fudd’ Yankovic out for no reason at all. Maybe the boy has changed his mind. Maybe he’s not coming, and there’s nothing funny about that.

Well, Morris thinks, if he doesn’t show up here, I’ll just have to pay a house call. Then the joke will be on him. Won’t it?

24

Twenty to four.

There’s no need to park on a yellow curb now; the parents who clogged the area around the high school earlier, waiting to pick up their kids, have all departed. The buses are gone, too. Hodges, Holly, and Jerome are in a Mercedes sedan that once belonged to Holly’s cousin Olivia. It was used as a murder weapon at City Center, but none of them is thinking about that now. They have other things in mind, chiefly Thomas Saubers’s son.

‘The kid may be in trouble, but you have to admit he’s a quick thinker,’ Jerome says. After ten minutes parked down the street from City Drug, he went inside and ascertained that the boy he was tasked to follow had departed. ‘A pro couldn’t have done much better.’

‘True,’ Hodges says. The boy has turned into a challenge, certainly more of a challenge than the airplane-stealing Mr Madden. Hodges hasn’t questioned the pharmacist himself and doesn’t need to. Pete’s been getting prescriptions filled there for years, he knows the pharmacist and the pharmacist knows him. The kid made up some bullshit story, the pharmacist let him use the back door, and pop goes the weasel. They never covered Frederick Street, because there seemed to be no need.

‘Now what?’ Jerome asks.

‘I think we should go over to the Saubers house. We had a slim chance of keeping his parents out of this, per Tina’s request, but I think that just went by the boards.’

‘They must already have some idea it was him,’ Jerome says. ‘I mean, they’re his folks.’

Hodges thinks of saying There are none so blind as those who will not see, and shrugs instead.

Holly has contributed nothing to the discussion so far, has just sat behind the wheel of her big boat of a car, arms crossed over her bosom, fingers tapping lightly at her shoulders. Now she turns to Hodges, who is sprawled in the backseat. ‘Did you ask Peter about the notebook?’

‘I never got a chance,’ Hodges says. Holly’s got a bee in her hat about that notebook, and he should have asked, just to satisfy her, but the truth is, it never even crossed his mind. ‘He decided to go, and boogied. Wouldn’t even take my card.’

Holly points to the school. ‘I think we should talk to Ricky the Hippie before we leave.’ And when neither of them replies: ‘Peter’s house will still be there, you know. It’s not going to fly away, or anything.’

‘Guess it wouldn’t hurt,’ Jerome says.

Hodges sighs. ‘And tell him what, exactly? That one of his students found or stole a stack of money and doled it out to his parents like a monthly allowance? The parents should find that out before some teacher who probably doesn’t know jack-shit about anything. And Pete should be the one to tell them. It’ll let his sister off the hook, for one thing.’

‘But if he’s in some kind of jam he doesn’t want them to know about, and he still wanted to talk to someone … you know, an adult …’ Jerome is four years older than he was when he helped Hodges with the Brady Hartsfield mess, old enough to vote and buy legal liquor, but still young enough to remember how it is to be seventeen and suddenly realize you’ve gotten in over your head with something. When that happens, you want to talk to somebody who’s been around the block a few times.

‘Jerome’s right,’ Holly says. She turns back to Hodges. ‘Let’s talk to the teacher and find out if Pete asked for advice about anything. If he asks why we want to know—’

‘Of course he’ll want to know why,’ Hodges says, ‘and I can’t exactly claim confidentiality. I’m not a lawyer.’

‘Or a priest,’ Jerome adds, not helpfully.

‘You can tell him we’re friends of the family,’ Holly says firmly. ‘And that’s true.’ She opens her door.

‘You have a hunch about this,’ Hodges says. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s a Holly-hunch. Now come on.’

25

As they are walking up the wide front steps and beneath the motto EDUCATION IS THE LAMP OF LIFE, the door of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions opens again and Pete Saubers steps inside. He starts down the main aisle, then stops, frowning. The man behind the desk isn’t Mr Halliday. He is in most ways the exact opposite of Mr Halliday, pale instead of florid (except for his lips, which are weirdly red), white-haired instead of bald, and thin instead of fat. Almost gaunt. Jesus. Pete expected his script to go out the window, but not this fast.

‘Where’s Mr Halliday? I had an appointment to see him.’

The stranger smiles. ‘Yes, of course, although he didn’t give me your name. He just said a young man. He’s waiting for you in his office at the back of the shop.’ This is actually true. In a way. ‘Just knock and go in.’

Pete relaxes a little. It makes sense that Halliday wouldn’t want to have such a crucial meeting out here, where anybody looking for a secondhand copy of To Kill a Mockingbird could walk in and interrupt them. He’s being careful, thinking ahead. If Pete doesn’t do the same, his slim chance of coming out of this okay will go out the window.

‘Thanks,’ he says, and walks between tall bookcases toward the back of the shop.

As soon as he goes by the desk, Morris rises and goes quickly and quietly to the front of the shop. He flips the sign in the door from OPEN to CLOSED.

Then he turns the bolt.

26

The secretary in the main office of Northfield High looks curiously at the trio of after-school visitors, but asks no questions. Perhaps she assumes they are family members come to plead the case of some failing student. Whatever they are, it’s Howie Ricker’s problem, not hers.

She checks a magnetic board covered with multicolored tags and says, ‘He should still be in his homeroom. That’s three-oh-nine, on the third floor, but please peek through the window and make sure he’s not with a student. He has conferences today until four, and with school ending in a couple of weeks, plenty of kids stop by to ask for help on their final papers. Or plead for extra time.’

Hodges thanks her and they go up the stairs, their heels echoing. From somewhere below, a quartet of musicians is playing ‘Greensleeves.’ From somewhere above, a hearty male voice cries jovially, ‘You suck, Malone!’

Room 309 is halfway down the third-floor corridor, and Mr Ricker, dressed in an eye-burning paisley shirt with the collar unbuttoned and the tie pulled down, is talking to a girl who is gesturing dramatically with her hands. Ricker glances up, sees he has visitors, then returns his attention to the girl.

The visitors stand against the wall, where posters advertise summer classes, summer workshops, summer holiday destinations, an end-of-year dance. A couple of girls come bopping down the hall, both wearing softball jerseys and caps. One is tossing a catcher’s mitt from hand to hand, playing hot potato with it.

Holly’s phone goes off, playing an ominous handful of notes from the Jaws theme. Without slowing, one of the girls says, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ and they both laugh.

Holly looks at her phone, then puts it away. ‘A text from Tina,’ she says.

Hodges raises his eyebrows.

‘Her mother knows about the money. Her father will too, as soon as he gets home from work.’ She nods toward the closed door of Mr Ricker’s room. ‘No reason to hold back now.’

27

The first thing Pete becomes aware of when he opens the door to the darkened inner office is the billowing stench. It’s both metallic and organic, like steel shavings mixed with spoiled cabbage. The next thing is the sound, a low buzzing. Flies, he thinks, and although he can’t see what’s in there, the smell and the sound come together in his mind with a thud like a heavy piece of furniture falling over. He turns to flee.

The clerk with the red lips is standing there beneath one of the hanging globes that light the back of the store, and in his hand is a strangely jolly gun, red and black with inlaid gold curlicues. Pete’s first thought is Looks fake. They never look fake in the movies.

‘Keep your head, Peter,’ the clerk says. ‘Don’t do anything foolish and you won’t get hurt. This is just a discussion.’

Pete’s second thought is You’re lying. I can see it in your eyes.

‘Turn around, take a step forward, and turn on the light. The switch is to the left of the door. Then go in, but don’t try to slam the door, unless you want a bullet in the back.’

Pete steps forward. Everything inside him from the chest on down feels loose and in motion. He hopes he won’t piss his pants like a baby. Probably that wouldn’t be such a big deal – surely he wouldn’t be the first person to spray his Jockeys when a gun is pointed at him – but it seems like a big deal. He fumbles with his left hand, finds the switch, and flips it. When he sees the thing lying on the sodden carpet, he tries to scream, but the muscles in his diaphragm aren’t working and all that comes out is a watery moan. Flies are buzzing and lighting on what remains of Mr Halliday’s face. Which is not much.

‘I know,’ the clerk says sympathetically. ‘Not very pretty, is he? Object lessons rarely are. He pissed me off, Pete. Do you want to piss me off?’

‘No,’ Pete says in a high, wavering voice. It sounds more like Tina’s than his own. ‘I don’t.’

‘Then you have learned your lesson. Go on in. Move very slowly, but feel free to avoid the mess.’

Pete steps in on legs he can barely feel, edging to his left along one of the bookcases, trying to keep his loafers on the part of the rug that hasn’t been soaked. There isn’t much. His initial panic has been replaced by a glassy sheet of terror. He keeps thinking of those red lips. Keeps imagining the big bad wolf telling Red Riding Hood, The better to kiss you with, my dear.

I have to think, he tells himself. I have to, or I’m going to die in this room. Probably I will anyway, but if I can’t think, it’s for sure.

He keeps skirting the blotch of blackish-purple until a cherrywood sideboard blocks his path, and there he stops. To go farther would mean stepping onto the bloody part of the rug, and it might still be wet enough to squelch. On the sideboard are crystal decanters of booze and a number of squat glasses. On the desk he sees a hatchet, its blade throwing back a reflection of the overhead light. That is surely the weapon the man with the red lips used to kill Mr Halliday, and Pete supposes it should scare him even more, but instead the sight of it clears his mind like a hard slap.

The door clicks shut behind him. The clerk who probably isn’t a clerk leans against it, pointing the jolly little gun at Pete. ‘All right,’ he says, and smiles. ‘Now we can talk.’

‘Wh-Wh—’ He clears his throat, tries again, this time sounds a little more like himself. ‘What? Talk about what?’

‘Don’t be disingenuous. The notebooks. The ones you stole.’

It all comes together in Pete’s mind. His mouth falls open.

The clerk who isn’t a clerk smiles. ‘Ah. The penny drops, I see. Tell me where they are, and you might get out of this alive.’

Pete doesn’t think so.

He thinks he already knows too much for that.

28

When the girl emerges from Mr Ricker’s homeroom, she’s smiling, so her conference must have gone all right. She even twiddles her fingers in a little wave – perhaps to all three of them, more likely just to Jerome – as she hurries off down the hall.

Mr Ricker, who has accompanied her to the door, looks at Hodges and his associates. ‘Can I help you, lady and gentlemen?’

‘Not likely,’ Hodges says, ‘but worth a try. May we come in?’

‘Of course.’

They sit at desks in the first row like attentive students. Ricker plants himself on the edge of his desk, an informality he eschewed when talking to his young conferee. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re not parents, so what’s up?’

‘It’s about one of your students,’ Hodges says. ‘A boy named Peter Saubers. We think he may be in trouble.’

Ricker frowns. ‘Pete? That doesn’t seem likely. He’s one of the best students I’ve ever had. Demonstrates a genuine love of literature, especially American literature. Honor Roll every quarter. What kind of trouble do you think he’s in?’

‘That’s the thing – we don’t know. I asked, but he stonewalled me.’

Ricker’s frown deepens. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Pete Saubers I know.’

‘It has to do with some money he seems to have come into a few years back. I’d like to fill you in on what we know. It won’t take long.’

‘Please say it has nothing to do with drugs.’

‘It doesn’t.’

Ricker looks relieved. ‘Good. Seen too much of that, and the smart kids are just as much at risk as the dumb ones. More, in some cases. Tell me. I’ll help if I can.’

Hodges starts with the money that began arriving at the Saubers house in what was, almost literally, the family’s darkest hour. He tells Ricker about how, seven months after the monthly deliveries of mystery cash ceased, Pete began to seem stressed and unhappy. He finishes with Tina’s conviction that her brother tried to get some more money, maybe from the same source the mystery cash came from, and is in his current jam as a result.

‘He grew a moustache,’ Ricker muses when Hodges has finished. ‘He’s in Mrs Davis’s Creative Writing course now, but I saw him in the hall one day and joshed him about it.’

‘How did he take the joshing?’ Jerome asks.

‘Not sure he even heard me. He seemed to be on another planet. But that’s not uncommon with teenagers, as I’m sure you know. Especially when summer vacation’s right around the corner.’

Holly asks, ‘Did he ever mention a notebook to you? A Moleskine?’

Ricker considers it while Holly looks at him hopefully.

‘No,’ he says at last. ‘I don’t think so.’

She deflates.

‘Did he come to you about anything?’ Hodges asks. ‘Anything at all that was troubling him, no matter how minor? I raised a daughter, and I know they sometimes talk about their problems in code. Probably you know that, too.’

Ricker smiles. ‘The famous friend-who.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘As in “I have a friend who might have gotten his girlfriend pregnant.” Or “I have a friend who knows who spray-painted anti-gay slogans on the wall in the boys’ locker room.” After a couple of years on the job, every teacher knows about the famous friend-who.’

Jerome asks, ‘Did Pete Saubers have a friend-who?’

‘Not that I can recall. I’m very sorry. I’d help you if I could.’

Holly asks, in a small and not very hopeful voice, ‘Never a friend who kept a secret diary or maybe found some valuable information in a notebook?’

Ricker shakes his head. ‘No. I’m really sorry. Jesus, I hate to think of Pete in trouble. He wrote one of the finest term papers I’ve ever gotten from a student. It was about the Jimmy Gold trilogy.’

‘John Rothstein,’ Jerome says, smiling. ‘I used to have a tee-shirt that said—’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Ricker says. ‘Shit don’t mean shit.’

‘Actually, no. It was the one about not being anyone’s birthday … uh, present.’

‘Ah,’ Ricker says, smiling. ‘That one.’

Hodges gets up. ‘I’m more of a Michael Connolly man. Thanks for your time.’ He holds out his hand. Ricker shakes it. Jerome is also getting up, but Holly remains seated.

‘John Rothstein,’ she says. ‘He wrote that book about the kid who got fed up with his parents and ran away to New York City, right?’

‘That was the first novel in the Gold trilogy, yes. Pete was crazy about Rothstein. Probably still is. He may discover new heroes in college, but when he was in my class, he thought Rothstein walked on water. Have you read him?’

‘I never have,’ Holly says, also getting up. ‘But I’m a big movie fan, so I always go to a website called Deadline. To read the latest Hollywood news? They had an article about how all these producers wanted to make a movie out of The Runner. Only no matter how much money they offered, he told them to go to hell.’

‘That sounds like Rothstein, all right,’ Ricker says. ‘A famous curmudgeon. Hated the movies. Claimed they were art for idiots. Sneered at the word cinema. Wrote an essay about it, I think.’

Holly has brightened. ‘Then he got murdered and there was no will and they still can’t make a movie because of all the legal problems.’

‘Holly, we ought to go,’ Hodges says. He wants to get over to the Saubers home. Wherever Pete is now, he’ll turn up there eventually.

‘Okay … I guess …’ She sighs. Although in her late forties, and even with the mood-levelers she takes, Holly still spends too much time on an emotional roller coaster. Now the light in her eyes is going out and she looks terribly downcast. Hodges feels bad for her, wants to tell her that, even though not many hunches pan out, you shouldn’t stop playing them. Because the few that do pan out are pure gold. Not exactly a pearl of wisdom, but later, when he has a private moment with her, he’ll pass it on. Try to ease the sting a little.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Ricker.’ Hodges opens the door. Faintly, like music heard in a dream, comes the sound of ‘Greensleeves.’

‘Oh my gosh,’ Ricker says. ‘Hold the phone.’

They turn back to him.

‘Pete did come to me about something, and not so long ago. But I see so many students …’

Hodges nods understandingly.

‘And it wasn’t a big deal, no adolescent Sturm und Drang, it was actually a very pleasant conversation. It only came to mind now because it was about that book you mentioned, Ms Gibney. The Runner.’ He smiles a little. ‘Pete didn’t have a friend-who, though. He had an uncle-who.’

Hodges feels a spark of something bright and hot, like a lit fuse. ‘What was it about Pete’s uncle that made him worth discussing?’

‘Pete said the uncle had a signed first edition of The Runner. He offered it to Pete because Pete was a Rothstein fan – that was the story, anyway. Pete told me he was interested in selling it. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to part with a book signed by his literary idol, and he said he was considering it very seriously. He was hoping to help send his sister to one of the private schools, I can’t remember which one—’

‘Chapel Ridge,’ Holly says. The light in her eyes has returned.

‘I think that’s right.’

Hodges walks slowly back to the desk. ‘Tell me … us … everything you remember about that conversation.’

‘That’s really all, except for one thing that kind of nudged my bullshit meter. He said his uncle won the book in a poker game. I remember thinking that’s the kind of thing that happens in novels or movies, but rarely in real life. But of course, sometimes life does imitate art.’

Hodges frames the obvious question, but Jerome gets there first. ‘Did he ask you about booksellers?’

‘Yes, that’s really why he came to me. He had a short list of local dealers, probably gleaned from the Internet. I steered him away from one of them. Bit of a shady reputation there.’

Jerome looks at Holly. Holly looks at Hodges. Hodges looks at Howard Ricker and asks the obvious follow-up question. He’s locked in now, the fuse in his head burning brightly.

‘What’s this shady book dealer’s name?’

29

Pete sees only one chance to go on living. As long as the man with the red lips and pasty complexion doesn’t know where the Rothstein notebooks are, he won’t pull the trigger of the gun, which is looking less jolly all the time.

‘You’re Mr Halliday’s partner, aren’t you?’ he says, not exactly looking at the corpse – it’s too awful – but lifting his chin in that direction. ‘In cahoots with him.’

Red Lips utters a brief chuckle, then does something that shocks Pete, who believed until that moment he was beyond shock. He spits on the body.