Elmer Gantry.
Miss Lonelyhearts.
Manhattan Transfer …
She began to make notes. Mr. Joseph Hockman collected so-called serious fiction—no mysteries, no fantasy, nothing that smacked of genre. He liked his literature straight, no sugar, no cream. He did have a weak spot for fine limiteds: a shot over the body toward the window wall showed a good-sized section of books in slipcases. She asked for a magnifying glass, and the detective, fascinated, got her one from a desk drawer.
Grapes of Wrath in two volumes.
Anthony Adverse in three…
“Looks like Limited Editions Club,” she said.
The detective said, “Oh,” the way people do when they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Near the end of the shelf was a gap where some books had been taken out but not returned.
“Looks like there’s fifteen or twenty books missing here,” she said.
The detective, who had been reading the reports from the original investigating officers, said, “There was some discussion at the time about the possibility of theft being the motive. They thought that was pretty weak, though. Who’d kill a man that way just to steal a bunch of books?”
“Any indication in the file whether the books ever turned up?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Or what they were?”
“Nope. One of the officers pursued that thought as far as he could take it, but the guy didn’t keep records like that. He kept it all up here.” He tapped his head.
“Somebody took those books and the officer knew that—that’s why he pursued it,” she said. “Look in this shot, you can see a book on the floor, right under that empty place in the bookshelf. When he pulled the books out, this one came out with it. But he didn’t bother to pick it up.”
“What does that tell you?”
“It tells me he didn’t want that book, just the ones that filled about this much shelf space.” She held up her hands about two feet apart. “He didn’t care about any of the others.”
She went book by book with the glass. Some of the titles were unreadable, but there wasn’t a Grayson book that could be identified as such anywhere in the room.
“That’s funny,” she said. “I heard this guy had all the Grayson books.”
The detective said, “Oh,” again, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he cared enough to ask her who Grayson was. “They tossed the book angle back and forth but it didn’t excite them much. The feeling was, yeah, the perp might’ve taken a few books, but that wasn’t the prime motive.”
“But they never found a motive.”
“Early in the investigation, the feeling was it might’ve been personal.”
“Did Mr. Hockman have any enemies?”
“Looks like he’d had some words with people. He was becoming a crusty old bastard. But, no, they never got anything they could pin on anybody.”
“Did their thinking change later?”
“Like it always does with crimes like this that you can’t solve. Some nutcase.” He flipped a page and went on reading. “Here’s something about a book.”
She looked up.
“They interviewd a woman named Carolyn Bondy, who did secretarial work for Hockman. Once a week she’d come over and take dictation, do his correspondence. The week of the murder he sent a letter to a book publisher. He’d gotten a book with a mistake in it and it seemed to ruin his week.”
“Really?”
“Does that interest you?”
“Yeah, you bet.”
“Too bad they didn’t take it much further than that.”
“They didn’t ask her what the book was or who published it?”
“It just seemed to come up in the course of things.”
“Or what the mistake might’ve been?”
“Just that he was annoyed. He’d been looking forward to this book…something special, I guess. Nobody thought it was much of a motive for murder. The woman did say Hockman was a good deal more annoyed than he let on in his letter. The letter he wrote was pretty soft and that surprised her. It was almost like Hockman was apologizing for telling the guy he’d screwed up.”
“Anything else?”
“Just this. The reason Hockman was annoyed was because it was the same mistake the guy had made before.”
“Is that what she said?…The same mistake…”
“That’s what’s in here.”
“Is there an address or phone number for this woman—what’s her name?”
“Carolyn Bondy.” The detective read off an address and phone number. “Doubt if she still lives there. It’s been twenty years.”
She looked through more evidence. She picked up a clear plastic bag that was full of ashes.
“I’ll have to ask you not to open that,” the detective said. “I mean, we do want to cooperate, but, uh…”
“Hey, I appreciate anything you can do. May I just move it around a little?”
“I don’t guess that’ll hurt anything.”
She took the bag with both hands and made a rotating motion like a miner panning gold. Slowly a fragment of white paper rose through the charred silt on the top.
She peered through the filmy plastic and saw two letters.
“Look at this…looks like a capital F …and a small r…part of the same word.”
The detective leaned over her shoulder.
She looked up in his face. “Are you in the mood to do me a huge favor?”
“I won’t kill ya for asking.”
“Is that a Xerox machine over there?…”
She called Wilbur Simon, an assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . As a young reporter from Miami, she had won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a year of study and meditation at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Simon had been one of her teachers. They had had good rapport and he had pursued her for his own paper ever since.
She sat in the empty newsroom on Sunday afternoon, reading the clip file on the Hockman case. She and Simon had coffee in a diner not far away and talked about old times, the rain in Seattle, and the Hockman case. Simon had vivid recollections of Hockman. He had been the paper’s news editor then and had done the layout on the first-day story and on most of the follow pieces. It stuck in his mind as the beginning of the crazy age. He had said as much in a diary he had kept then and had dug out and reviewed just after she had called him this morning. He had written about life and work and his personal evolving philosophy. The thing about Hockman was, you never thought much about random killers before then and you were always aware of them since. Suddenly you couldn’t pick up hitchhikers without taking your life in your hands. The day of the serial killer had come.
“I don’t think this was a serial killer, Wilbur,” she said.
At least not the kind of serial killer people meant when they used the term, she thought.
They parted with a hug and Simon offered her a job. She smiled and said she was flattered, but it would take more than rain to get her to give up Seattle for St. Louis.
She looked up Carolyn Bondy in the telephone book. There was a George Bondy at that address. The man who answered said Carolyn Bondy, his mother, had died just last month.
She ate dinner alone in the city and caught a ten-o’clock flight to Albuquerque.
She slept on the plane, just enough to keep her awake the rest of the night. A rental car got her into Taos at three o’clock in the morning, mountain time, thankful that she had reserved a room and secured it with a credit card. She had made photocopies of the Post-Dispatch clips, but it was that single sheet from homicide with the shadowy image of the two con-nected letters shot through plastic that she looked at now as she faced the new day. She had done her homework: she knew that Charlie and Jonelle Jeffords lived in the hills fifteen miles from town. She had studied the maps and knew where to drive with only occasional stops to refresh her memory. She bumped off the highway and clattered along a washboard road, leaving a plume of dust in her wake. The road twisted up a ridge and skirted a valley. She saw patches of snow in the high country as the road U-turned and dipped back into the hills. There were washouts along the way, but each had been repaired and the drive was easy. She reached the gate at nine o’clock. A sign nailed to a post said keep out , and she thought that hospitality at Rancho Jeffords was like the weather, chilly with a chance of sudden clouds. She slipped the rope loop off the gate and drove in. The house was a hundred yards away, shaded by trees and hidden from the road by hilly terrain. It was a splitlevel mountain home with a deck that faced west. There was no sign of life. She pulled into the yard and decided to go ahead with caution, remembering the inclination of the cheerful Mr. Jeffords to greet trespassers with the business end of a gun.