The Bookwoman's Last Fling (12 page)

She put him in a stall and gave him a warm mash, and he ate like a starving castaway.

“Nothing wrong with his appetite,” I said.

“That's the good news.” She touched the side of his face, then lifted her hand a few inches and wiggled her fingers. “I think he's blind in this eye. I'll give him an antibiotic and see how he is tomorrow. Maybe all he needs is time and a new outlook on life.”

She leaned toward him and made a soft kissing noise and he put his head on her shoulder. “Look at him,” she said. “He's a real lover boy. He loves to cuddle.”

“Does he have a name?”

“He does now. I think we'll call him Paul, after a fellow I once knew. Life treated him badly too.”

We went up to the house and sat on her porch, and there I began to ask more questions. I wondered if she knew what the deal was between Junior and Damon: it seemed like an unholy alliance or at least an uneasy one. “It's really pretty simple,” she said. “They've got a crackerjack three-year-old and some other nice horses they want to take out to Santa Anita this winter. But the will won't be settled for a while yet, so they'll want to get all of us together. Apparently Bax has told them he's fine with it. I'm the stumbling block.”

“What do you think you'll do?”

“Don't know yet. I'm not sure I can do anything legally; the executor would probably side with them pretty quickly. There's two ways you can look at it. I don't particularly like racing, but these horses have been well-trained and they're fit, ready to run. This is what they've been aimed at; when HR was alive he and Junior were supposedly getting them ready, and I'm not sure I should step in now and mess that up. I doubt HR would actually have taken them racing, but this new crop they've got is exceptional. I watched Damon work one colt on our track and he does run like the wind, he could really be something good. If it was just Damon taking him I'd say no way, I'd fight him to the death. But believe it or not, I trust Junior. Maybe his bedside manner with people is lacking but I think he'll do what's right for his horses.”

She remembered her mother in scattered episodes: here sometimes, gone with Geiger for weeks at a time. She had often been left with Rosemary during her school years. Louie had taught her about horses when they were home. “In a real way Louie and Rosemary raised me.”

She was eleven when her mother died. “That's when they really raised me full time.”

They were good teachers, she said. Rosemary taught her right from wrong and Louie showed her how to sit a horse properly.

But as time went on, her discontent deepened. “I never lost the feeling that my life would have been so much different if she had lived.”

Gently I eased into the subject of her mother's death. “Where were you when she died?”

“I was here: it was the middle of the school semester.”

“Who was here then?”

“Rosemary, Lillian…”

“Your dad?”

“He was in California.”

“There at the farm?”

“No, he had gone to a friend's ranch to look at some horses he wanted to buy.”

“So she was alone.”

She nodded. “HR found her when he came home.”

“Where was Junior?”

“Out there at the racetrack. Junior was always there when HR went racing.”

“What about your brothers?”

“Racing at Bay Meadows. Cameron was at some county fair.”

All in Northern California, she said.

“Why did the cops out there assume Candice's death was an accident? Was there an autopsy?”

“Yes, it was the peanuts that killed her. That was never in question.”

“The real question was, how'd she get them? The cops had to wonder about that.”

She fell into a long silence, so long I had to prod her. “Sharon?”

“I think they suspected…”

“What?”

“They thought she might have eaten them intentionally.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Someone told them she was unhappy.”

“Who told them that?”

“I never knew. Someone they talked to, and then they asked Louie about it. Someone had told them she was unhappy and that's how the question came up.”

“So whoever it was, they got the idea she might have done it herself. And they never found any other theories or motives? Seems like they were pretty quick to make that call.”

“Actually, they talked to everybody. I've got some of the reports. There came a time when they couldn't do any more.”

“Okay, I understand that, I had a few like that myself.”

I asked her to tell me about her brothers.

“Cameron's the oldest, but they're all getting up there now: When Candice married HR they were as old as she was.”

“Did they resent Candice?”

“At first, I think. Then they learned she was far from a young gold digger, she could buy and sell them all fifty times over.” Sharon laughed. “I'd love to've been there then, when that realization first came over each of them. Wish I had their faces on film. I'd play it back on my TV on Saturday nights just for amusement.”

 

That afternoon I looked through Sharon's books while she made some telephone checks. I wrote out detailed notes and checked them against my earlier impressions from the old man's books. By late afternoon Sharon had learned where Cameron had been staying: a flophouse indeed, but he had already checked out. Before evening we had begun to slip into a routine. In the morning we did the stable work, and after breakfast she made some phone calls. Baxter was indeed at Golden Gate. “That's where I expect Cameron to go if he goes back to California,” she said; “either to Golden Gate or some county fair. I think they're running at Pomona now.”

She had made contact with half a dozen horsemen she knew on the Coast. “If he shows up anywhere out there, we'll know. Then what?”

“I'll see what I can do.”

I wasn't stonewalling her; I had been thinking about it for days.

I talked with Rosemary and Lillian the next morning, and with Louie early that afternoon. At first they went on about how great Candice was—nice but not particularly helpful. “They all think she walked on water,” I told Sharon. “They need to understand that I'm not here to sandbag your mom, but I've got to get the names of any people who had anything against her.” This might be difficult, I admitted: “I need you to convince them to tell me the truth, no matter where that leads.” Sharon said she'd speak with them, and the next day I went through it all again. Now their manner was cool but I thought I was getting at the truth.

Rosemary said Candice knew a few young men, one who went back to her childhood. “She had funny made-up names for 'em. One was like Tricky Dicky, like that president Tricky Dicky we had. That wasn't exactly right, but it was something like that.”

“Yeah, she made up names for lots of people,” Lillian said. “She had names from her storybooks, and she'd slap one of them names on somebody if she liked 'em and the name fit. I forgot about Tricky Dicky, but I remember it now.”

I asked if they had ever seen any of these people.

“I seen Tricky Dicky one time,” Rosemary said.

They had been at the farm in California and this young man had been buzzing around her. “I never seen him up close, but sometime she'd walk down to the gate and he be there and they walk under the trees and talk.”

“She had a friend name Gail,” Louie said. “I didn't know about none of them boys, but I remember Gail from down on the farm.”

He couldn't remember Gail's last name, just a nice gal her own age.

I worked the phone. I called every bookseller I knew on both Coasts and some in the great Midwest. I used the ABAA directory of top dealers in juvenile fiction, I called ILAB specialists in London and asked the same question. Had anyone ever, even years ago, come in with wonderful juveniles to sell?…the kind of stuff you don't ever forget. I worked from the boxes of reprints Sharon had stashed in the barn, and from the sketchy list I had made of missing titles that first morning with Junior. Yes, I told them all, there was a question of theft. You don't worry about dealers at that level unless you are truly paranoid.

In the afternoon I went down to the book room and lost myself till early evening. Just before dinner I went running, a two-mile sprint that took me well past the road to the Geiger ranch, out to the road and back. I looked for Junior but there was no sign of him.

On Thursday I told Sharon I had returned Junior's money by special delivery and I was no longer in his employ. “That's good to know,” she said coolly. “If you need anything, holler.”

I stayed with her ten days. Every morning I helped with the stable chores; every afternoon I made my phone checks. I spent hours in the late afternoon looking through her books. The book room consumed my thoughts: It was so easy to lose all track of time down there, and my roster of her books got more detailed every day. I was flying by the seat of my pants, giving everything the broadest possible value. “At least $50,000,” I wrote beside one entry: “could be four times that, depending on how many copies there are in the universe.” I made a supplemental note: “I suspect there will be none in this condition.” I was conservative by nature, but now I wrote superlatives—“superb,” “gorgeous,” “marvelous”—until I got tired of using them. Then I began noting degrees of superb with small checks in the margins of my notes. I could have walked out of there with a quarter-million dollars under my coat and she wouldn't know it till she took some kind of inventory, if that day ever came. I felt the weight of her trust more every day.

I was drawn to the books with her grandfather's bookplate: every time I opened one it was like a thrilling new surprise. One morning I asked her the obvious: “You said you've been looking for these but you don't go into bookstores. You must have a dealer keeping his eyes open for you.” She said she had several dealers searching constantly. One had a shop in Los Angeles and knew high-end dealers like Heritage, who might hear if something like that came on the market. I wrote all this into my notebook for future reference.

I had been in touch with the coroner's office in the little county where Candice had died. But it was hard to get the kind of information I wanted on the phone: another reason why I'd have to go there. This was a strange time. I was not working for Sharon and yet I was. She never mentioned money again; she just left me alone. The routine continued. Each morning we were out by sunrise, feeding and watering, going about the day's chores. We never left the house unguarded. Either I was there or Louie was: Occasionally we had Billy watch over things. I knew Sharon must be getting impatient, but she never griped, and until we found out where Cameron had gone, this was what we were stuck with.

There came a time when I ran out of people to call. It almost seemed like the missing books had fallen into some dark hole. Not a dealer, I thought: They were in some collector's hands, someone who hadn't sold them.

I sat for an hour in the open loft looking out over the farm. I did fifty push-ups in the barn three days that week, and by Monday of the second week I had increased my reps to seventy-five. For the first time my old wounds felt truly healed and I was whole again. At dusk I went up to the house for dinner and talk. Rosemary and Lillian kept each other in stitches and as Louie might have said we were a happy shedrow together. On Thursdays and Fridays they didn't work, and on those nights it was just the two of us, eating alone in that big house. I sensed a slight awkwardness on her part, though I stayed loose and tried to keep things easy.

“It doesn't seem right putting you in that tack room,” she said one evening. “You should stay in the house. I've got lots of room, plenty of space upstairs where you'd have as much privacy as you need. One room's clear over on the other side: you wouldn't hear me at all.” There was no hint that the offer was anything more than it seemed, but I liked it where I was. On Monday, my tenth day, Sharon and I met as usual just before dawn. “Cameron's turned up,” she said. “He's at Golden Gate, trying to borrow money from everybody he knows.” Her friend Sandy Standish had seen him in the stable area and had left a message on her telephone.

My time here was winding down and I still hadn't talked to Damon. I drove out along the road and turned in toward the house. It was mid-morning: The sun was bright and the day was warm, and I could see they were still up at the track, Junior and Damon, watching a horse gallop. I could see their ginney, standing by at the barn waiting with a bucket of water. I stopped the car well short of the track, got out, and said good morning to the ginney. He said, “How you doin', sir?” almost as if he knew me well. I asked if I could go up and talk to the gentlemen at the rail and the question seemed to baffle him for a few seconds. Then he said, “I wouldn't mess with 'em while they workin', sir. They be right back, and this be our last horse this mornin'.” So I waited.