She took me to a place near the university called Half Price Books. It nestled modestly on a street named Roosevelt Way, a cornucopia of books on two floors. There were no real high spots, but I could’ve spent two hundred on stock, it was that kind of place. I bought only what I couldn’t leave and got out for less than eighty. We were going out the door when Eleanor spied a copy of Trish Aandahl’s book on the Gray-sons. “You oughta buy this,” she said. “It’s a helluva read.”
She was a little curious at how fast I did buy it. I still hadn’t told her about my interest in Grayson and probably wouldn’t now until we were on the airplane and well away from here. “You drive,” I said, throwing her the keys. “I want to fondle my stuff.” But all I did as she wove through the crowded, narrow streets was browse through Aandahl. The jacket was an art deco design, with elegant curlicues and old-style fringe decorations. It was dominated by black-and-white photographs of the Grayson brothers, a little out of focus and solving none of the mystery of the men. The art director had overlapped the pictures and then pulled them apart, leaving parts of each infringed upon the other, the ragged gulf between them suggesting disruption and conflict. The title, Crossfire , stood out in red: under it, in black, the subtitle, The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard Grayson . Richard’s resemblance to Leslie Howard was more real than imagined: Darryl Grayson’s image was darker, fuzzier, barely distinguishable. His was the face on the barroom floor, and not because it had been painted there. The jacket blurb on Trish Aandahl consisted of one line, that the author was a reporter for the Seattle Times , and there was no photograph. If the lady wasn’t interested in personal glory, she’d be the first reporter I had ever known who felt that way. I thumbed the index: my eye caught the name of Allan Huggins, the Grayson bibliographer, mentioned half a dozen times in the text. Gaston Rigby made his appearance on page 535, and there were three mentions for Crystal Moon Rigby. Archie Moon was prominent, entering the Grayson saga on page 15 and appearing prolifically thereafter. A section of photographs showed some of Grayson’s books, but, strangely, the only photographs of the subjects themselves were the same two of poor quality that had been used on the jacket. It was 735 pages thick, almost as big as the Huggins bibliography, and packed with what looked to be anecdotal writing at its best.
The only negative was that it was a remainder copy, savagely slashed across the top pages with a felt-tip marker. I hated that: it’s a terrible way to remainder books, and Viking is the worst offender in the publishing industry. “Look at this,” I griped. “These bastards must hire morons right off the street with a spray can. I can’t believe they’d do that to a book.”
“It’s just merchandise to them,” she said. “Nobody cares, only freaks like you and me. It is a fine-looking book, except for the remainder mark.”
“I saw a woman once who would’ve been a beauty queen, if you could just forget the fact that somebody had shot her in the face with a .45.”
We were stopped at a red light about a block from the freeway. She was looking at me in a different way now, as if I had suddenly revealed a facet of my character that she had been unable to guess before. “Are you interested in the Graysons? If you are, I know a guy who used to have the best collection of Grayson books in the universe. Maybe he’s still got a few of them. His store’s not far from here.”
“I think we’ve got time for that. Lead on.”
Otto Murdock was an old-time Seattle book dealer who had seen better days. Twenty years of hard drinking had reduced him to this—a shabby-looking storefront in a ramshackle building in a run-down section on the north side. “This man used to be Seattle’s finest,” Eleanor said, “till bad habits did him in. For a long time he was partners with Gregory Morrice. You ever hear of Morrice and Murdock?”
“Should I have?”
“If Seattle ever had an answer to Pepper and Stern, they were it. Only the best of the best, you know what I mean? But they had a falling-out years ago over Otto’s drinking. Morrice does it alone now—he’s got a book showplace down in Pioneer Square, and Otto wound up here. I hear he ekes out a living, but it can’t be much…he wholesales all his good stuff. They call him In-and-Out Murdock now. A good book means nothing but another bottle to him.”
She pulled to the curb at the door of the grimiest bookstore I had seen in a long time. The windows were caked with dirt. Inside, I could see the ghostly outlines of hundreds of books, stacked ends-out against the glass. The lettering on the hand-painted sign had begun to flake, leaving what had once said books now reading boo. The interior was dark and getting darker by the moment. It was a quarter to five, and already night was coming. A block away, a streetlight flicked on.
“He looks closed for the night,” I said.
“He’s still got his open sign out.”
I knew that didn’t mean much, especially with an alcoholic who might not know at any given time what year it was. We sat at the curb and the rain was a steady hum.
“I’ll check him out,” Eleanor said. “No sense both of us getting wet.”
She jumped out and ran to the door. It pushed open at her touch and she waved to me as she went inside. I came along behind her, walking into a veritable cave of books. There were no lights: it was even darker inside than it had looked from the street, and for a moment I couldn’t see Eleanor at all. Then I heard her voice: “Mr. Murdock…Mr. Murdock…hey, Otto, you’ve got customers out here.” She opened a door and a dim beam of light fell out of a back room. “Mr. Murdock?” she said softly.
I saw her in silhouette, moving toward me. “That’s funny,” she said. “Looks like he went away and left the store wide open.”
I groped along the wall and found a switch. It was dim even with the lights on. I took my first long look at how the mighty could fall. Murdock had tumbled all the way down, hitting rock bottom in a rat’s nest of cheap, worn, and tattered books. His bookshelves had long since filled to overflowing, and the floor was his catchall. Books were piled everywhere. The piles grew until they collapsed, leaving the books scattered where they fell, with new piles to grow from the rubble like a forest after a fire. I walked along the back wall, looking for anything of value. It was tough work—the fiction section was almost uniformly book-club editions of authors who aren’t collected anyway: Sidney Sheldon, Robert Wilder, Arthur Hailey. A sign thumbtacked to the wall said books for a buck. Cheap at half the price, I thought.
“You see anything?” Eleanor asked from the far corner.
“Four computer books, two copies of The Joy of Sex , and five million Stephen King derivatives.”
She sighed. “Put ‘em all together and what’ve you got?”
“Desk-top breeding by vampires.”
She gave a sharp laugh, tinged with sadness. “This place gets worse every time I come here. I’m afraid I’m wasting your time; it looks like Otto hasn’t had a good book in at least a year.“
You never knew, though. This was the great thing about books, that in any pile of dreck a rose might hide, and we were drawn on through the junk in the search for the one good piece. I had worked my way around the edge of the front room and had reached the door to the back when I heard Eleanor say, “Good grief, look at this.” She had dropped to her hands and knees, out of sight from where I stood. I asked what she had and she said, “You’ll have to come look, you’ll never believe it.” I found her near the door, holding a near-perfect copy of The Fountainhead .