Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Although he hadn’t written about Rothstein’s murder in his term paper, Pete had read all about it, mostly in the computer room at the library. He knew that Rothstein had been shot ‘execution-style.’ He knew that the cops had found enough different tracks in the dooryard to believe two, three, or even four people had been involved, and that, based on the size of those tracks, all were probably men. They also thought that two of the men had been killed at a New York rest area not long after.

Margaret Brennan, the author’s first wife, had been interviewed in Paris not long after the killing. ‘Everyone talked about him in that provincial little town where he lived,’ she said. ‘What else did they have to talk about? Cows? Some farmer’s new manure spreader? To the provincials, John was a big deal. They had the erroneous idea that writers make as much as corporate bankers, and believed he had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away on that rundown farm of his. Someone from out of town heard the loose talk, that’s all. Closemouthed Yankees, my Irish fanny! I blame the locals as much as the thugs who did it.’

When asked about the possibility that Rothstein had squirreled away manuscripts as well as cash, Peggy Brennan had given what the interview called ‘a cigarette-raspy chuckle.’

‘More rumors, darling. Johnny pulled back from the world for one reason and one reason only. He was burned out and too proud to admit it.’

Lot you knew, Pete thought. He probably divorced you because he got tired of that cigarette-raspy chuckle.

There was plenty of speculation in the newspaper and magazine articles Pete had read, but he himself liked what Mr Ricker called ‘the Occam’s razor principle.’ According to that, the simplest and most obvious answer was usually the right one. Three men had broken in, and one of them had killed his partners so he could keep all the swag for himself. Pete had no idea why the guy had come to this city afterwards, or why he’d buried the trunk, but one thing he was sure of: the surviving robber was never going to come back and get it.

Pete’s math skills weren’t the strongest – it was why he needed that summer course to bone up – but you didn’t have to be an Einstein to run simple numbers and assess certain possibilities. If the surviving robber had been thirty-five in 1978, which seemed like a fair estimate to Pete, he would have been sixty-seven in 2010, when Pete found the trunk, and around seventy now. Seventy was ancient. If he turned up looking for his loot, he’d probably do so on a walker.

Pete smiled as he turned onto Sycamore Street.

He thought there were three possibilities for why the surviving robber had never come back for his trunk, all equally likely. One, he was in prison somewhere for some other crime. Two, he was dead. Three was a combination of one and two: he had died in prison. Whichever it was, Pete didn’t think he had to worry about the guy. The notebooks, though, were a different story. About them he had plenty of worries. Sitting on them was like sitting on a bunch of beautiful stolen paintings you could never sell.

Or a crate filled with dynamite.

In September of 2013 – almost exactly thirty-five years from the date of John Rothstein’s murder – Pete tucked the last of the trunk-money into an envelope addressed to his father. The final installment amounted to three hundred and forty dollars. And because he felt that hope which could never be realized was a cruel thing, he added a one-line note:

This is the last of it. I am sorry there’s not more.

He took a city bus to Birch Hill Mall, where there was a mailbox between Discount Electronix and the yogurt place. He looked around, making sure he wasn’t observed, and kissed the envelope. Then he slipped it through the slot and walked away. He did it Jimmy Gold-style: without looking back.

A week or two after New Year’s, Pete was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when he overheard his parents talking to Tina in the living room. It was about Chapel Ridge.

‘I thought maybe we could afford it,’ his dad was saying. ‘If I gave you false hope, I’m just as sorry as can be, Teens.’

‘It’s because the mystery money stopped coming,’ Tina said. ‘Right?’

Mom said, ‘Partly but not entirely. Dad tried for a bank loan, but they wouldn’t give it to him. They went over his business records and did something—’

‘A two-year profit projection,’ Dad said. Some of the old post-accident bitterness crept into his voice. ‘Lots of compliments, because those are free. They said they might be able to make the loan in 2016, if the business grows by five percent. In the meantime, this goddam Polar Vortex thing … we’re way over your mom’s budget on heating expenses. Everyone is, from Maine to Minnesota. I know that’s no consolation, but there it is.’

‘Honey, we’re so, so sorry,’ Mom said.

Pete expected Tina to explode into a full-fledged tantrum – there were lots more of those as she approached the big thirteen – but it didn’t happen. She said she understood, and that Chapel Ridge was probably a snooty school, anyway. Then she came out to the kitchen and asked Pete if he would make her a sandwich, because his looked good. He did, and they went into the living room, and all four of them watched TV together and had some laughs over The Big Bang Theory.

Later that night, though, he heard Tina crying behind the closed door of her room. It made him feel awful. He went into his own room, pulled one of the Moleskines out from under his mattress, and began rereading The Runner Goes West.

He was taking Mrs Davis’s creative writing course that semester, and although he got As on his stories, he knew by February that he was never going to be a fiction-writer. Although he was good with words, a thing he didn’t need Mrs Davis to tell him (although she often did), he just didn’t possess that kind of creative spark. His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. He had gotten a taste for this kind of detective work while writing his paper on Rothstein. At the Garner Street Library he hunted out one of the books Mr Ricker had mentioned, Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, and liked it so much that he bought his own copy in order to highlight certain passages and write in the margins. He wanted to major in English more than ever, and teach like Mr Ricker (except maybe at a university instead of in high school), and at some point write a book like Mr Fiedler’s, getting into the faces of more traditional critics and questioning the established way those traditional critics looked at things.

And yet!

There had to be more money. Mr Feldman, the guidance counselor, told him that getting a full-boat scholarship to an Ivy League school was ‘rather unlikely,’ and Pete knew even that was an exaggeration. He was just another whitebread high school kid from a so-so Midwestern school, a kid with a part-time library job and a few unglamorous extracurriculars like newspaper and yearbook. Even if he did manage to catch a boat, there was Tina to think about. She was basically trudging through her days, getting mostly Bs and Cs, and seemed more interested in makeup and shoes and pop music than school these days. She needed a change, a clean break. He was wise enough, even at not quite seventeen, to know that Chapel Ridge might not fix his little sister … but then again, it might. Especially since she wasn’t broken. At least not yet.

I need a plan, he thought, only that wasn’t precisely what he needed. What he needed was a story, and although he was never going to be a great fiction-writer like Mr Rothstein or Mr Lawrence, he was able to plot. That was what he had to do now. Only every plot stood on an idea, and on that score he kept coming up empty.

He had begun to spend a lot of time at Water Street Books, where the coffee was cheap and even new paperbacks were thirty percent off. He went by one afternoon in March, on his way to his after-school job at the library, thinking he might pick up something by Joseph Conrad. In one of his few interviews, Rothstein had called Conrad ‘the first great writer of the twentieth century, even though his best work was written before 1900.’

Outside the bookstore, a long table had been set up beneath an awning. SPRING CLEANING, the sign said. EVERYTHING ON THIS TABLE 70% OFF! And below it: WHO KNOWS WHAT BURIED TREASURE YOU WILL FIND! This line was flanked by big yellow smiley-faces, to show it was a joke, but Pete didn’t think it was funny.

He finally had an idea.

A week later, he stayed after school to talk to Mr Ricker.

‘Great to see you, Pete.’ Mr Ricker was wearing a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves today, along with a psychedelic tie. Pete thought the combination said quite a lot about why the love-and-peace generation had collapsed. ‘Mrs Davis says great things about you.’

‘She’s cool,’ Pete said. ‘I’m learning a lot.’ Actually he wasn’t, and he didn’t think anyone else in her class was, either. She was nice enough, and quite often had interesting things to say, but Pete was coming to the conclusion that creative writing couldn’t really be taught, only learned.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Remember when you were talking about how valuable a handwritten Shakespeare manuscript would be?’

Mr Ricker grinned. ‘I always talk about that during a midweek class, when things get dozy. There’s nothing like a little avarice to perk kids up. Why? Have you found a folio, Malvolio?’

Pete smiled politely. ‘No, but when we were visiting my uncle Phil in Cleveland during February vacation, I went out to his garage and found a whole bunch of old books. Most of them were about Tom Swift. He was this kid inventor.’

‘I remember Tom and his friend Ned Newton well,’ Mr Ricker said. ‘Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle, Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera … when I was a kid myself, we used to joke about Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother.’

Pete renewed his polite smile. ‘There were also a dozen or so about a girl detective named Trixie Belden, and another one named Nancy Drew.’

‘I believe I see where you’re going with this, and I hate to disappoint you, but I must. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden … all interesting relics of a bygone age, and a wonderful yardstick to judge how much what is called “YA fiction” has changed in the last eighty years or so, but those books have little or no monetary value, even when found in excellent condition.’

‘I know,’ Pete said. ‘I checked it out later on Fine Books. That’s a blog. But while I was looking those books over, Uncle Phil came out to the garage and said he had something else that might interest me even more. Because I’d told him I was into John Rothstein. It was a signed hardback of The Runner. Not dedicated, just a flat signature. Uncle Phil said some guy named A1 gave it to him because he owed my uncle ten dollars from a poker game. Uncle Phil said he’d had it for almost fifty years. I looked at the copyright page, and it’s a first edition.’

Mr Ricker had been rocked back in his chair, but now he sat down with a bang. ‘Whoa! You probably know that Rothstein didn’t sign many autographs, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Pete said. ‘He called it “defacing a perfectly good book.”’

‘Uh-huh, he was like Raymond Chandler that way. And you know signed volumes are worth more when it’s just the signature? Sans dedication?’

‘Yes. It says so on Fine Books.’

‘A signed first of Rothstein’s most famous book probably would be worth money.’ Mr Ricker considered. ‘On second thought, strike the probably. What kind of condition is it in?’

‘Good,’ Pete said promptly. ‘Some foxing on the inside cover and title page, is all.’

‘You have been reading up on this stuff.’

‘More since my uncle showed me the Rothstein.’

‘I don’t suppose you’re in possession of this fabulous book, are you?’

I’ve got something a lot better, Pete thought. If you only knew.

Sometimes he felt the weight of that knowledge, and never more than today, telling these lies.

Necessary lies, he reminded himself.

‘I don’t, but my uncle said he’d give it to me, if I wanted it. I said I needed to think about it, because he doesn’t … you know …’

‘He doesn’t have any idea of how much it might really be worth?’

‘Yeah. But then I started wondering …’

‘What?’

Pete dug into his back pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Mr Ricker. ‘I went looking on the Internet for book dealers here in town that buy and sell first editions, and I found these three. I know you’re sort of a book collector yourself—’

‘Not much, I can’t afford serious collecting on my salary, but I’ve got a signed Theodore Roethke that I intend to hand down to my children. The Waking. Very fine poems. Also a Vonnegut, but that’s not worth so much; unlike Rothstein, Father Kurt signed everything.’

‘Anyway, I wondered if you knew any of these, and if you do, which one might be the best. If I decided to let him give me the book … and then, you know, sell it.’

Mr Ricker unfolded the sheet, glanced at it, then looked at Pete again. That gaze, both keen and sympathetic, made Pete feel uneasy. This might have been a bad idea, he really wasn’t much good at fiction, but he was in it now and would have to plow through somehow.

‘As it happens, I know all of them. But jeez, kiddo, I also know how much Rothstein means to you, and not just from your paper last year. Annie Davis says you bring him up often in Creative Writing. Claims the Gold trilogy is your Bible.’

Pete supposed this was true, but he hadn’t realized how blabby he’d been until now. He resolved to stop talking about Rothstein so much. It might be dangerous. People might think back and remember, if—

If.

‘It’s good to have literary heroes, Pete, especially if you plan to major in English when you get to college. Rothstein is yours – at least for now – and that book could be the beginning of your own library. Are you sure you want to sell it?’

Pete could answer this question with fair honesty, even though it wasn’t really a signed book he was talking about. ‘Pretty sure, yeah. Things have been a little tough at home—’

‘I know what happened to your father at City Center, and I’m sorry as hell. At least they caught the psycho before he could do any more damage.’

‘Dad’s better now, and both he and my mom are working again, only I’m probably going to need money for college, see …’

‘I understand.’

‘But that’s not the biggest thing, at least not now. My sister wants to go to Chapel Ridge, and my parents told her she couldn’t, at least not this coming year. They can’t quite swing it. Close, but no cigar. And I think she needs a place like that. She’s kind of, I don’t know, lagging.’

Mr Ricker, who had undoubtedly known lots of students who were lagging, nodded gravely.

‘But if Tina could get in with a bunch of strivers – especially this one girl, Barbara Robinson, she used to know from when we lived on the West Side – things might turn around.’

‘It’s good of you to think of her future, Pete. Noble, even.’

Pete had never thought of himself as noble. The idea made him blink.

Perhaps seeing his embarrassment, Mr Ricker turned his attention to the list again. ‘Okay. Grissom Books would have been your best bet when Teddy Grissom was still alive, but his son runs the shop now, and he’s a bit of a tightwad. Honest, but close with a buck. He’d say it’s the times, but it’s also his nature.’

‘Okay …’

‘I assume you’ve checked on the Net to find out how much a signed first-edition Runner in good condition is valued at?’

‘Yeah. Two or three thousand. Not enough for a year at Chapel Ridge, but a start. What my dad calls earnest money.’

Mr Ricker nodded. ‘That sounds about right. Teddy Junior would start you at eight hundred. You might get him up to a grand, but if you kept pushing, he’d get his back up and tell you to take a hike. This next one, Buy the Book, is Buddy Franklin’s shop. He’s also okay – by which I mean honest – but Buddy doesn’t have much interest in twentieth-century fiction. His big deal is selling old maps and seventeenth-century atlases to rich guys in Branson Park and Sugar Heights. But if you could talk Buddy into valuing the book, then go to Teddy Junior at Grissom, you might get twelve hundred. I’m not saying you would, I’m just saying it’s possible.’

‘What about Andrew Halliday Rare Editions?’

Mr Ricker frowned. ‘I’d steer clear of Halliday. He’s got a little shop on Lacemaker Lane, in that walking mall off Lower Main Street. Not much wider than an Amtrak car, but damn near a block long. Seems to do quite well, but there’s an odor about him. I’ve heard it said he’s not too picky about the provenance of certain items. Do you know what that is?’

‘The line of ownership.’

‘Right. Ending with a piece of paper that says you legally own what you’re trying to sell. The only thing I know for sure is that about fifteen years ago, Halliday sold a proof copy of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it turned out to have been stolen from the estate of Brooke Astor. She was a rich old biddy from New York with a larcenous business manager. Halliday showed a receipt, and his story of how he came by the book was credible, so the investigation was dropped. But receipts can be forged, you know. I’d steer clear of him.’

‘Thanks, Mr Ricker,’ Pete said, thinking that if he went ahead with this, Andrew Halliday Rare Editions would be his first stop. But he would have to be very, very careful, and if Mr Halliday wouldn’t do a cash deal, that would mean no deal. Plus, under no circumstances could he know Pete’s name. A disguise might be in order, although it wouldn’t do to go overboard on that.

‘You’re welcome, Pete, but if I said I felt good about this, I’d be lying.’

Pete could relate. He didn’t feel so good about it himself.

He was still mulling his options a month later, and had almost come to the conclusion that trying to sell even one of the notebooks would be too much risk for too little reward. If it went to a private collector – like the ones he had sometimes read about, who bought valuable paintings to hang in secret rooms where only they could look at them – it would be okay. But he couldn’t be sure that would happen. He was leaning more and more to the idea of donating them anonymously, maybe mailing them to the New York University Library. The curator of a place like that would understand the value of them, no doubt. But doing that would be a little more public than Pete liked to think about, not at all like dropping the letters with the money inside them into anonymous streetcorner mailboxes. What if someone remembered him at the post office?

Then, on a rainy night in late April of 2014, Tina came to his room again. Mrs Beasley was long gone, and the footy pajamas had been replaced by an oversized Cleveland Browns football jersey, but to Pete she looked very much like the worried girl who had asked, during the Era of Bad Feelings, if their mother and father were going to get divorced. Her hair was in pigtails, and with her face cleansed of the little makeup Mom let her wear (Pete had an idea she put on fresh layers when she got to school), she looked closer to ten than going on thirteen. He thought, Teens is almost a teen. It was hard to believe.

‘Can I come in for a minute?’

‘Sure.’

He was lying on his bed, reading a novel by Philip Roth called When She Was Good. Tina sat on his desk chair, pulling her jersey nightshirt down over her shins and blowing a few errant hairs from her forehead, where a faint scattering of acne had appeared.

‘Something on your mind?’ Pete asked.

‘Um … yeah.’ But she didn’t go on.

He wrinkled his nose at her. ‘Go on, spill it. Some boy you’ve been crushing on told you to buzz off?’

‘You sent that money,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

Pete stared at her, flabbergasted. He tried to speak and couldn’t. He tried to persuade himself she hadn’t said what she’d said, and couldn’t do that, either.

She nodded as if he had admitted it. ‘Yeah, you did. It’s all over your face.’

‘It didn’t come from me, Teens, you just took me by surprise. Where would I get money like that?’

‘I don’t know, but I remember the night you asked me what I’d do if I found a buried treasure.’

‘I did?’ Thinking, You were half-asleep. You can’t remember that.

‘Doubloons, you said. Coins from olden days. I said I’d give it to Dad and Mom so they wouldn’t fight anymore, and that’s just what you did. Only it wasn’t pirate treasure, it was regular money.’

Pete put his book aside. ‘Don’t you go telling them that. They might actually believe you.’

She looked at him solemnly. ‘I never would. But I need to ask you … is it really all gone?’

‘The note in the last envelope said it was,’ Pete replied cautiously, ‘and there hasn’t been any more since, so I guess so.’

She sighed. ‘Yeah. What I figured. But I had to ask.’ She got up to go.

‘Tina?’

‘What?’

‘I’m really sorry about Chapel Ridge and all. I wish the money wasn’t gone.’

She sat down again. ‘I’ll keep your secret if you keep one Mom and I have. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Last November she took me to Chap – that’s what the girls call it – for one of their tour days. She didn’t want Dad to know, because she thought he’d be mad, but back then she thought they maybe could afford it, especially if I got a need scholarship. Do you know what that is?’

Pete nodded.

‘Only the money hadn’t stopped coming then, and it was before all the snow and weird cold weather in December and January. We saw some of the classrooms, and the science labs. There’s like a jillion computers. We also saw the gym, which is humongous, and the showers. They have private changing booths, too, not just cattle stalls like at Northfield. At least they do for the girls. Guess who my tour group had for a guide?’

‘Barbara Robinson?’

She smiled. ‘It was great to see her again.’ Then the smile faded. ‘She said hello and gave me a hug and asked how everyone was, but I could tell she hardly remembered me. Why would she, right? Did you know her and Hilda and Betsy and a couple of other girls from back then were at the ’Round Here concert? The one the guy who ran over Dad tried to blow up?’

‘Yeah.’ Pete also knew that Barbara Robinson’s big brother had played a part in saving Barbara and Barbara’s friends and maybe thousands of others. He had gotten a medal or a key to the city, or something. That was real heroism, not sneaking around and mailing stolen money to your parents.

‘Did you know I was invited to go with them that night?’

‘What? No!’

Tina nodded. ‘I said I couldn’t because I was sick, but I wasn’t. It was because Mom said they couldn’t afford to buy me a ticket. We moved a couple of months later.’

‘Jesus, how about that, huh?’

‘Yeah, I missed all the excitement.’

‘So how was the school tour?’

‘Good, but not great, or anything. I’ll be fine at Northfield. Hey, once they find out I’m your sister, they’ll probably give me a free ride, Honor Roll Boy.’

Pete suddenly felt sad, almost like crying. It was the sweetness that had always been part of Tina’s nature combined with that ugly scatter of pimples on her forehead. He wondered if she got teased about those. If she didn’t yet, she would.

He held out his arms. ‘C’mere.’ She did, and he gave her a strong hug. Then he held her by the shoulders and looked at her sternly. ‘But that money … it wasn’t me.’

‘Uh-huh, okay. So was that notebook you were reading stuck in with the money? I bet it was.’ She giggled. ‘You looked so guilty that night when I walked in on you.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Go to bed, short stuff.’

‘Okay.’ At the door she turned back. ‘I liked those private changing booths, though. And something else. Want to know? You’ll think it’s weird.’

‘Go ahead, lay it on me.’

‘The kids wear uniforms. For the girls it’s gray skirts with white blouses and white kneesocks. There are also sweaters, if you want. Some gray like the skirts and some this pretty dark red – hunter red they call it, Barbara said.’

‘Uniforms,’ Pete said, bemused. ‘You like the idea of uniforms.’

‘Knew you’d think it was weird. Because boys don’t know how girls are. Girls can be mean if you’re wearing the wrong clothes, or even if you wear the right ones too much. You can wear different blouses, or your sneakers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can do different things with your hair, but pretty soon they – the mean girls – figure out you’ve only got three jumpers and six good school skirts. Then they say stuff. But when everyone wears the same thing every day … except maybe the sweater’s a different color …’ She blew back those few errant strands again. ‘Boys don’t have the same problem.’

‘I actually do get it,’ Pete said.

‘Anyway, Mom’s going to teach me how to make my own clothes, then I’ll have more. Simplicity, Butterick. Also, I’ve got friends. Plenty of them.’

‘Ellen, for instance.’

‘Ellen’s okay.’

And headed for a rewarding job as a waitress or a drive-thru girl after high school, Pete thought but did not say. If she doesn’t get pregnant at sixteen, that is.

‘I just wanted to tell you not to worry. If you were.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Pete said. ‘I know you’ll be fine. And it wasn’t me who sent the money. Honest.’

She gave him a smile, both sad and complicit, that made her look like anything but a little girl. ‘Okay. Gotcha.’

She left, closing the door gently behind her.

Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.