Booked to Die by John Dunning Page B

breath.
    “Well? Will you do it?”
    “Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “But God damn it, don’t ask me to like it.”
    I patted her rump. “Good girl.”
    “You sexist bastard.”
    We laughed. At that moment I came as close to asking her the big question as I ever would.
    It was a long time before we got to sleep. When I did sleep, I slept soundly, untroubled by dreams. In the morning we got her things together and I carried them down the back way and put them in her car. I watched the street for ten minutes before I let her come down and drive away.
    She rolled down her window. “I’m not afraid, you know.”
    “I know you’re not,” I said. “But I am.”

11
    I called rita McKinley and got the same recording. This time I left a message, telling her who I was and that I needed to speak with her on official business regarding a homicide investigation. I left both numbers, home and office.
    I called the AB in New Jersey. Also known as
Bookman’s Weekly
, the AB is the trade journal of the antiquarian book world. Each week it lists hundreds of books, sought and for sale by dealers everywhere. Thus can a total recluse operate effectively in the book business without ever seeing another human being: he buys and sells through the AB. In addition to the listings, which take up most of the magazine, there are a few articles each week on doings in the trade—obits, career profiles, book fair reports. Sometime during the past few years, I explained to the editor, a piece or pieces were run on Rita McKinley. He was a wise gentleman who knew his business, and he knew right away who McKinley was and about when the stories had run. He promised copies in the next mail.
    I went to see Roland Goddard, in Cherry Creek. This is a neighborhood of high-class and expensive shops in east Denver. Nestled in the center of things was Roland Goddard’s Acushnet Rare Book Emporium. Goddard had a cool, austere manner, almost like Emery Neff only somehow different. You could break through with Neff, if you were patient enough and gave a damn: with Goddard, you never could. He had an icy, slightly superior attitude about books and his knowledge of them, and he could intimidate a customer or a bookscout before the first word was said. If he had friends, they were not in the book business: no one I had ever spoken to knew Goddard personally.
    It would be hard to imagine two guys less alike than Goddard and Harkness. At least with Ruby Seals and Emery Neff, their differences seemed to complement each other: Harkness and Goddard were ill-suited for partnership in almost every way. It’s hard sometimes to look back over twenty years and know why the boys we were then did things so much at odds with the attitudes and philosophies of the men we had become. Goddard was fastidious: Harkness tended to be sloppy. Goddard disdained everything about the book business that Harkness found interesting. Oh, he’d sell you a Stephen King— whatever else you could say about Roland Goddard, he was a helluva bookman and he knew where the money came from—but you might leave his store feeling faintly like a moron.
    Goddard dealt primarily in Truly Important Books—incunabula, sixteenth-century poetry, illuminated manuscripts, fine leather stuff. He had some great things. Even the name °f his store simmered in tradition.
Acushnet
was the whaler Melville served on in the 1840s. I liked his store and I loved his stock, though I never did much business there. When I marry one of the Rockefellers, Goddard will have a big payday, most of it from me.
    Acushnet was one of only three bookstores in Denver that could afford full-time help. The man who worked there was Julian Lambert, a good bookman in his own right. Lambert bought and sold as freely as his boss did: Ruby, in fact, had told me once that bookscouts preferred dealing with Goddard because he paid them more. Goddard wasn’t in when I arrived, but I busied myself looking through the stock until I