Читать книгу The Cover Girl Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

Anderson heaved his bulk out of his wooden chair and paced to the office door. He gestured to Lindsey, who followed him. They paraded through a warren of metal shelves until they came to a gunmetal door with a huge combination lock built into it. Anderson crouched, his bulk hiding the lock from Lindsey’s view.

When Anderson straightened he swung the heavy door open to reveal a closet-sized safe. It was filled with metal boxes. He ran his finger across the rows of boxes; they were marked with index numbers that meant nothing to Lindsey but were obviously plain as day to Anderson.

Finally he pulled down a box, opened it and extracted a transparent envelope containing a paperback book. He held the book toward Lindsey. “Hold this.” Lindsey did.

What kind of person would maintain this level of security on what was obviously a treasure, yet hand it so casually to a stranger? Lindsey couldn’t figure it out, but he’d been working with collectors for years now, and nothing they did could surprise him any more.

They made their way back to Anderson’s office. Anderson poked his head inside the room, muttered something like “Too stuffy,” and gestured Lindsey to follow him again. This must be the way Alice felt as she followed the white rabbit.

They wound up in a living room, or what must pass for one in this bizarre apartment. There were actually a few square feet of wall space not covered with books. Instead, framed paintings had been hung. They were well executed, but they didn’t have the feel of gallery paintings. There were scenes of gangsters blasting at uniformed police, spaceships silhouetted against blazing, multicolored suns and planets, gorgeous women in low-cut gowns lounging against pianos, cowpokes galloping straight out of the frame.

Anderson must have seen Lindsey’s expression. He beamed, “You like them? Originals!”

“They look like movie posters. They’re, ah, very vivid.”

“They’re paperback cover paintings. Look, that’s a Mitchell Hooks. That’s a Bob Maguire. And that beauty—” he pointed “—that’s a Robert McGinnis. You won’t see many of those. There’s a Jim Avati. A Stanley Meltzoff. And that red one—the one with the spaceman and the bat-creatures—that’s a Paul. Frank R. Paul. No, they don’t paint ’em the way they used to.”

“They must be valuable.”

“You wouldn’t believe it. Five or six figures. They used to throw them away back in the fifties. Listen, if I just had a time machine, what I couldn’t do!”

Lindsey had to get the subject back to Death in the Ditch. “You said something about.…” He gestured to the book in Anderson’s hand.

Anderson slid the envelope across his desk. “Please don’t open it. If you need to look at the book, I’ll get it out for you. It must be done just right or it can be damaged.”

Lindsey leaned over the book. “Is it all right if I pick it up?”

“The way porcupines make love.”

“How’s that?”

“Very carefully.”

Lindsey managed a polite laugh. He’d thought that joke was hilarious when he was ten.

The book was Buccaneer Blades. The author was Violet de la Yema. The cover illustration could have been straight out of a fifties pirate movie, maybe one starring Burt Lancaster and Maureen O’Hara, with Basil Rathbone as the evil Spanish governor of a Caribbean island and Akim Tamiroff as his comic aide.

He turned the book over carefully. “No price?”

“They were all a quarter. No need for a price back then. Did you catch the publisher’s logo?”

“I see it there in the corner. Nice idea—the open book with all the pages, and the publisher’s name, Paige. Was there a Mr. Paige?”

Anderson shrugged.

Lindsey turned the book over. The spine was printed in black with the title and byline dropped out, in white. The Paige Publications logo was reproduced at the base of the spine, along with a serial number, 101. Lindsey raised his eyebrows.

“Saw it, did you?” Anderson’s match-stick bobbed up and down.

“You mean the serial number? Does 101 mean this was the very first Paige book?”

“Apparently it does. Nobody really knows much about Paige. When I turned this book up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Paiges are the holy grail of paperback collectors. Like the first ten Pocket Books. They printed 10,000 of each, you’d think there would be a lot of them left. Well, except for Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, for some reason they only did 7,600. But they’re scarcer than hen’s teeth. People must have read ’em and threw ’em away. Or the LA Bantams. If you could get hold of The Shadow and the Voice of Murder or Tarzan in the Forbidden City.…”

Lindsey shook his head. “I’ve worked on collectibles cases before, but this field is new to me.”

“The first—oh, there’s too much of this. You ought to read one of the books on the subject. Thom Bonn’s, or Piet Schreuders’. Anyway, if you know anything about collectibles, you know that their intrinsic value doesn’t really matter. What’s the difference between two identical books, only one of them has a minor typo in it and the other doesn’t, and we know that the typo was only in the true first edition and corrected after that?”

“I—” Lindsey tried to answer, but Anderson wasn’t stopping.

“You wouldn’t think there was a difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between a treasure and a reading copy. It’s the difference between a book to kill for and one you can pick up at any lawn sale for a nickel.”

Anderson’s predatory grin returned. When he was relaxed, his eyes were a bland, pale blue. Now they regained their deep intensity.

“Matter of fact, I got my Paige at a garage sale in Lafayette. Just cruising, stopped to see what they had. All the usual junk, last season’s Robert Ludlum, fifteenth printing, couple of Agatha Christies and Ellery Queens, zillionth editions, and…and a Paige!”

Lindsey nodded. He understood collectors as well as anyone could who was not himself a collector.

“I asked where the book came from,” Anderson continued, “after I’d bought it, of course. Nobody knew. Maybe Grandma read it when she was a girl. She always kept it, the old dear. But she’s gone to Valhalla now, and they were cleaning out her room, and nobody in the family really wanted Grandma’s old paperbacks, so—out they went. For a nickel apiece.” Anderson cackled gleefully at the thought of his great coup.

“One thing that I haven’t been able to verify, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The book is autographed. That is, somebody wrote a message in it. No, don’t open it up, please. I remember exactly what it says. To my Comrade with thanks. Salud y suerte. Violeta. That’s health and luck in Spanish. Salud y suerte. But nobody knows what Violet de la Yema’s handwriting looks like. And why ‘Violeta’ instead of ‘Violet’ or “Vi?” So—is it an authentic inscription?” Anderson shrugged his massive shoulders. “I hope it is. I like to think it is. But nobody can tell me. Nobody.”

Lindsey let his eye settle on the deep cleavage of the model on the front of Buccaneer Blades, then turned the book over. He could feel his heart shift into overdrive. The back cover of Buccaneer Blades was not devoted to a blurb extolling the virtues of the book, or a paragraph lifted from a particularly seamy scene, as he’d expected. Instead, it featured an ad for another Paige book. It was an ad for Death in the Ditch.

The copy read like a standard hardboiled mystery—a struggling, penniless private eye (“he was down to his last sawbuck and he knew the check wasn’t in the mail”), a one-armed bar-tender (“he’d left his grenade-hurling wing on the bloody coral of Tarawa”), a gorgeous babe (“smoldering eyes and gams like Grable’s”), murderous mobsters (“the Big Guy was gone and they were ready to kill for a piece of his empire”) and corrupt cops (“they were there to enforce the law, but the law they enforced was written in dollars—and hot lead”).

It sounded like something written in the late 1940s rather than the early 50s. That one-armed bar-tender was the giveaway. By the early 50s, Tarawa was yesterday’s story, along with Iwo Jima and Saipan and Guadalcanal and the rest of the island-hopping battles of the Pacific campaign. The Cold War was under way, General MacArthur was commanding UN forces in Korea, and World War II was stale news.

Still, Michener and Jones and Mailer were writing their great novels. Why not—Lindsey had to squint to make out the by-line on the miniature cover of Death in the Ditch—Del Marston?

Del Marston.

All right.

It looked as if finding Albert Crocker Vansittart’s beneficiary was going to take some serious detecting. Maybe old Del Marston, the author of Death in the Ditch, would have had his hero solve the puzzle with a gat and a few slugs of bourbon, but Lindsey didn’t work that way. The job could be laborious and time-consuming, but eventually Lindsey’s patient, methodical efforts would bring him to his destination.

Unless somebody else had got there first and erased all the clues. Lindsey was a good investigator, but he was no magician.

He asked Scotty Anderson, “Would you take the book out of the envelope for me? I know you don’t want me to—”

Anderson’s huge hand took back the book. The big man’s face took on a look of concentration, the unlighted match pointing straight down. He peeled back a strip of tape, opened a transparent flap and slid the book gently from its reliquary. He held it toward Lindsey, but his expression made it clear that Lindsey was to look not touch.

“Have you actually read Buccaneer Blades?”

Anderson shook his head, smiling again as if Lindsey had asked, “Have you ever taken tea on Mars?”

“No way. Much too fragile. Don’t want to crack the binding. I did open it far enough to shoot the indicia and front matter, and the first couple of pages. It’s routine Spanish Main stuff.”

“I figured as much. Do you think you could open it for me? So I could copy down the publisher’s address, and the like.”

Anderson shook his head again, slowly. “Don’t want to risk it. But you can have copies of my printouts. I’ll get ’em for you before you leave.” He slid the book back into its transparent envelope, sealed the envelope with tape once more and laid it on a low table. He leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. He’d shown his treasure, his visitor had been clearly and suitably impressed, it was a good day for Scotty.

“The thing is, you see, I only found this Paige a couple of months ago. Nobody has one. I went to the Library of Congress to check on it, and they don’t have any Paiges that they knew of.”

That surprised Lindsey. “I thought—you know, for copyright registration, especially under the old law—wouldn’t they have sent copies to the Library?”

Anderson nodded. The match-stick was tilted at a jaunty angle, like FDR’s cigarette holder back in the days when it was okay for a politician to be photographed smoking.

“The books were registered, okay. That’s why I have a list of all the Paiges, or at least all the ones that they registered. The serial numbers jibe, though, so I think that’s all. But they don’t have any copies. A lot of old paperbacks and magazines just got shoved in a back room and they’re still there. They’ll shelve them when they get a chance, they say, but they never get around to it. But how’s this—it looks as if some Congressmen were pretty interested in the Paige books and they leaned on the library staff to log ’em in so they could check ’em out. They were checked out by a HUAC staffer—you know about HUAC?”

“Uh—”

“House Committee on Un-American Activities. Run by a couple of Congressional lice named Martin Dies and J. Parnell Thomas. Sort of premature Joe McCarthyites. Tricky Dickie Nixon got his start with HUAC.”

Lindsey wasn’t going to talk about Richard Nixon. Instead he asked, “Why would they want these particular books?”

“That’s what I wondered. I think I have a good clue, although it might take some more digging in the Congressional Record to find out for sure.”

“But if the books were in the Library of Congress, aren’t they still there?”

Anderson grinned. “You’d be amazed how many books get checked out by members of Congress. They wouldn’t lower themselves to deal with mere librarians, of course. They send staff people. generally low-level staff people. They check things out and they never give them back. I mean, what’s going to happen? Somebody in the library calls up Senator Jones and says, You have our fist edition Maltese Falcon, you better return it or there’s a nickel fine for every day it’s late—huh? Fat chance.”

Lindsey was still puzzled. “You said you had a clue.”

Anderson shoved himself upright. “You wait here.” He picked up his precious copy of Buccaneer Blood and headed for the door. “Help yourself to refreshments.”

Lindsey looked around for refreshments. He couldn’t find any.

When Anderson returned he had disposed of Buccaneer Blood, probably locked it away in its reliquary. He was carrying a few sheets of computer printout.

“This is my article for Paperback Parade. Just a draft, I have to work on it some more. Especially with this insurance story of yours.”

He lowered himself into his chair. He selected one sheet of paper and handed it to Lindsey.

“This is a complete Paige Publications bibliography. At least, it’s every book they registered with the Library of Congress. There might have been some that they didn’t register, but I think that’s unlikely.”

He handed the sheet to Lindsey. The heading on the page gave Paige Publications’ address. Paige Building, LaSalle at Kinzie Streets, Chicago, Illinois. There were three columns of type on the page. Lindsey scanned them carefully.

Buccaneer Blood Violet de la Yema 1951

Cry Ruffian! Salvatore Pescara 1951

Death in the Ditch Del Marston 1951

Teen Gangs of Chicago (a.k.a. Al Capone’s Heirs)

(anonymous) 1951

By Studebaker Across America

Walter Roberts 1952

Great Baseball Stars of 1952 J. B. Harkins 1952

I Was a Lincoln Brigadier Bob Walters 1952

Prisoner! (“by the author of Teen

Gangs of Chicago”) 1952

* * * *

Lindsey looked up from the list. “That’s all?”

“Far as I can tell.”

“Why would a Congressional committee care about these books? What difference does a pirate swashbuckler make, or a book about gangsters, or a Studebaker trip, for heaven’s sake?”

Anderson extended a thick finger and tapped the paper in Lindsey’s hands. “There’s the one. That’s the one I think got their backs up.”

He pointed at the line for I Was a Lincoln Brigadier.

“You know about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?”

Lindsey wasn’t sure. “I think it rings a bell.” He smiled. “Faintly.”

“American volunteers, fought in the Spanish Civil War, 1936. They went there to fight Fascism, to fight against Franco. They figured he was a front man for Hitler and they weren’t too far from right.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, there was a lot of Communist influence in the Lincolns. Hell, there were a lot of Communists in there. But they went to Spain to fight the Fascists. At least that was their version. But once the Cold War got going, they were…how shall I put this?”

He removed the match stick from between his teeth and studied it sadly. He broke it in half, dropped the pieces into a bowl, and located a fresh replacement in a pocket of his denim shirt. He smiled approvingly at the new match stick, then clenched its non-business end between his teeth.

“Once the Cold War got going, these guys were highly suspect. Highly suspect. So, when Bob Walters brought out his little memoir—I guess it was a memoir, I’ve never seen a copy—HUAC jumped up and down and started doing its war dance.”

Lindsey studied the single sheet of computer paper once more. There was no more information there than there had been the first time.

“Do you mind if I keep this?” Lindsey asked.

Anderson pushed himself out of his easy chair. The match stick pointed straight ahead. “Feel free, I’ve got it all in my computer.” With one sausage-like finger he pointed to his head. “You have to go now?”

Lindsey looked at his Seiko. He got to his feet. “You’ve been very helpful. If you want to bill us, International Surety will pay a modest honorarium.”

Anderson waved that away. “Glad to be of help. Glad to have a chance to show off my collection a little bit. Better let me show you the way out. People have got lost in this place and starved to death.”

As Lindsey started toward his Volvo, he heard Anderson’s door open behind him. He heard Anderson’s voice. “Mr. Lindsey?”

He stopped and turned around.

Scotty Anderson stood in the doorway, matchstick in mouth. “You’re sure Lovisi didn’t send you?”

Lindsey managed not to laugh. “I’m sure.”

“Funny.” Anderson frowned. “I had a note from Lovisi last week, said that somebody else was interested in the Paige stuff. Said he was a serious researcher, claimed that he was some kind of professor or something.”

“Have you heard from this person?”

“Oh, no. No way. Lovisi wouldn’t do that. Let the bozo do his own work. I don’t mind helping you, Mr. Lindsey, you’re not a competitor, you see? But this bozo.… Well, never mind. Long as you’re sure Lovisi didn’t send you.”

Lindsey waved his thanks and slid his key into the lock on his Volvo. Then he stopped and turned back to see Scotty Anderson disappear inside his apartment. “Mr. Anderson! Just a second!”

The big collector turned around. “Hmm?”

“Maybe—would you mind—do you have this Lovisi fellow’s address? Maybe I should get in touch with him.”

Anderson stood still for a few seconds, an abstracted look on his face. Then he said, “Oh, sure,” and rattled off an address in Brooklyn. Lindsey pulled out his pocket organizer, jotted down the address, and thanked Anderson.

* * * *

Hobart Lindsey and Marvia Plum planned dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Richmond Marina. Marvia had got hold of some old radio shows on tape and on the way to dinner, cruising up the freeway in her classic Mustang, the headlights of oncoming cars flashing by hypnotically, she slipped one into the tape deck. It was a fifty-year-old melodrama, complete with commercials. The Shadow in “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There.”

Between acts, a hearty-voiced announcer urged the audience to support the war effort by conserving coal. The war was obviously World War II. The Spanish Civil War was over by then, and the Lincoln Brigadiers were probably back in uniform, fighting Fascism again. This time they were heroes instead of traitors, but they only needed to wait a few years. They’d be traitors again.

At the restaurant, Lindsey and Marvia Plum settled into a comfortable spot in the lounge. It was a cold January night and outside the lounge’s windows the running lights of sailboats sparkled on San Francisco Bay.

Marvia asked Lindsey if he was making any progress finding Albert Crocker Vansittart’s beneficiary. Lindsey recounted his paper chase, from Cody’s to Moe’s to the San Francisco Mystery Book Shop to Scotty Anderson’s amazing apartment in Castro Valley.

“It’s funny.” Marvia put her hand on Lindsey’s. “It looks as if I’m going to be involved in this case, too.”

“How so?”

The cocktail waitress interrupted, ready to take their orders. Marvia asked for a hot toddy; Lindsey, for an Irish coffee. The waitress departed. It was a pleasure to be treated like any other couple, with no odd looks just because you and your companion weren’t the same color.

“Jamie’s video tape.”

“Really?”

“My son the celebrity. CNN made dubs of his tape for editing, but Jamie got his original back. Then the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department asked if they could get a look at the tape, and of course my good little citizen was happy to cooperate with law enforcement.”

“I’ll bet he was having the time of his life.”

“You bet he was. Well, they got the Coast Guard into the act and studied some of the landmarks in the background of the tape, studied their precious maps and decided that the helicopter crashed in Nevada.”

The waitress was back with their drinks. The glass containing Lindsey’s Irish coffee was hot. He wrapped his fingers around it, savoring the heat. He looked at Marvia Plum and smiled, then looked past her at the bay, remembering the time he’d gone overboard from a powerboat near the San Rafael Bridge, a bullet in his foot. That was the first time he’d worked with Marvia Plum, the first time he’d got to know her. It was just a few years ago, but he remembered himself as another man living in another world. That had been a series of experiences that had changed his life. It had ended with a young man dead in an alley in Berkeley, a young woman in a wheelchair in Richmond, a strange man named Francis Francis dead in San Francisco Bay, and an individual whose seething envy of those more talented than himself had led to those tragedies, in prison. That man, a former university professor named Nathan ben Zinowicz, still haunted Hobart Lindsey’s dreams.

But that had been years ago. Lindsey looked at Marvia Plum and felt a warmth inside his chest. He reached across the table and touched her cheek, lightly.

“Is Washoe County in charge of the case, then?”

Marvia smiled. “It’s a can of worms. Turns out that initial jurisdiction is federal. Airspace is federal, especially on an interstate flight. NTSB is interested in the cause of the ’copter crash, but other than the safety kids, the feds are delighted to hand off to anybody else who’ll take the case. So —- it may wind up in California, it may wind up in Nevada. For the moment, Nevada has it.”

Marvia sipped at her hot toddy, then lowered it to the tabletop. “They’re trying to get that fiber-optic scanner down to the chopper. If they do, they’re going to need a top computer graphics analyst to help them with it. They’ve already called one in to try and sharpen up Jamie’s tape. See if they can get an image inside the ’copter bubble before it hit the water. One guess who the designated genius is.”

“Fabia Rabinowitz.”

“Bingo! Your old friend from Cal, right here in town. And guess who’s the designated liaison officer between all of these entities.”

“That’s great. It means we can talk about this project, feed each other information without having to sneak it out the back door.”

“Yep.”

“How did you fall into that job?”

Marvia laughed. “You know there are only nine people in the world, right? And all the rest are just holograms.”

“I’ve had the feeling a few times.”

“The phone rings at McKinley Avenue this morning and it’s a sergeant from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department calling to set up liaison with BPD. I catch the squeal—”

“I love it when you talk cop.”

“—and the voice I hear sounds strangely familiar. Turns out it’s Willie Fergus.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“We were in the army together. We were MP’s in Wiesbaden.”

“Colleagues? Friends?”

“We dated a couple of times. Before I got mixed up with the wonderful Lieutenant Wilkerson. I wound up pregnant, then married, then discharged, then divorced, then back in school, then a cop.”

“Ah yes, I remember it well.”

“Willie joined up young, did his twenty and out, and now he’s US Army retired and a sergeant for the Washoe County Sheriff. And you know what?”

Lindsey didn’t know what.

“Willie thinks there’s something fishy about this whole case.”