The Bookwoman's Last Fling (3 page)

“Who's the woman?” I said.

“Mr. Geiger's wife.”

“Was there a reason why she never came down in the winner's circle?”

“I'm sure there was. There must have been.”

“Am I supposed to guess that as well?”

“Go ahead. I won't be able to tell you if you're right; I never discussed things like that with either of them. But give it a shot if you want to.”

“Well, let's see. She was shy. She was humble. She was eccentric or quiet or just superstitious.”

“Interesting choice of guesses.”

“Which would you pick?”

I didn't think he'd answer that. But after a moment he said, “Maybe all of them.”

“Interesting answer.”

“She was an interesting lady.”

“I take it from the past tense that Mrs. Geiger is no longer with us.”

“She died in 1975. She was just forty years old.”

“Was this an unexpected illness?”

“You sound suspicious.”

“I was a cop for years. Homicide cops are always suspicious when people die.”

“It was quite unexpected. She had severe allergies.”

“And that's what killed her?”

He nodded. “Mr. Geiger was devastated. They were very close.”

“Did he stop racing after that?”

“Not right away. But he didn't put up any pictures after she died.”

“He didn't need to. What he's got fills up the wall nicely.”

“There are many more in the file. Mr. Geiger won a lot of races. But this represents the best of them…the best of her. It covers the whole brief time they were together.”

I didn't know whether to find this touching or morbid. She had been dead about twenty years and he seemed to be saying that Geiger had never stopped mourning. I left some open pages in my notebook, where Mrs. Geiger had died, and creased the corners.

“There were some gaps in the continuity,” I said. “Here's just one in 1964, then she was back again in 1966, then there are other gaps along the way.”

He looked at the 1964 shot. “That's when she was…that's when she had Sharon. Her daughter.”

He was still uptight: he had trouble saying the word
pregnant,
and he quickly changed the subject. “Lots of people recommended you. Still, I can't help wondering how much of a book expert you are in real life.”

“That depends. I know how to tell the front free endpaper from an errata sheet. I know a first edition when I see one. Beyond that it gets fuzzy pretty fast. There comes a point where the best expert is the guy with a good gut…the guy who's cautious and on guard…who's got the best instincts. The guy who can look at a book he's never seen before and say, ‘that knocks my socks off,' and be right almost every time. And the guy who knows how to look it up once his instincts have been, so to speak, aroused.”

I told him there are experts on Americana, good solid bookmen who know nothing and don't care about modern lit. “I am a generalist. That means I know a bit about a lot of things and not everything about anything. I have a fair understanding of what makes a book valuable, and I've got a good system for finding out what I myself don't know.”

He stared at me.

“Just for the record,” I said, “I have never called myself an expert on anything. But I've got good juice. When I see a book I usually know if it's a bad one, just a good one, or maybe a great one. Beyond that we've got to search and find out.”

This seemed to please him. “How do you do this searching?”

“I've got a good reference library. And I was on the book fair circuit for most of a year. I saw some great books and I made some great contacts. Specialist dealers, collectors, experts in their fields, guys I can call on if I need them. And a few gals, too.”

“How are your experts on kids' books?”

“I know just the man if the books are good enough. The best expert you can get.”

Immediately I had thought of Carroll Shaw. Shaw was the curator of the booming collection of juvenile material at the Blakely Library in Northern California. I knew him the way many booksellers and librarians come to know each other, as voices on the telephone. I also knew a high-end specialist in Americana and a librarian who was putting together a collection of incunabula. I had never met any of these men but we had done some good business together, and a mutual trust had formed between us. That year I spent on the book fair circuit was like a postgraduate course in bookselling. I discovered again what I had heard long ago through the grapevine, that a bookman is only as good as his contacts. If I came across a great piece of scarce juvenilia, I knew Shaw would buy it and he wouldn't quibble over the price. Sometimes when I called and he wasn't in, when I was on the road and time was running short, I would buy a piece for him on a blind, at my own risk. Once I spent fifteen thousand on a book I had never seen but I knew well by reputation, I liked it and I was ready to live with it if it went bad. I liked Shaw because he always got me the money with no hassle. I didn't have to hard-sell him a book, I never wasted his time with second-grade stuff, and now he had become one of my valued contacts. I scratched his back; he scratched mine. He was always my first stop when I needed a quick answer to an obscure question on an eighteenth-century kids' book. A ten-minute phone call often saved me ten hours of digging through reference books.

“That's good,” Junior said, warming to me, at least for the moment.

I turned again to the wall of pictures. “Mrs. Geiger was a striking woman. Is there a reason for the white dress?”

“She liked it. Isn't that reason enough?”

“Maybe. But this goes beyond liking something, don't you think? Was it some kind of good-luck thing, a superstition of some kind?”

He didn't answer that. After a while I said, “It's almost like a fetish.”

I braced for another explosion but he faced this invasion into Mrs. Geiger's character calmly.

“She did believe strongly in luck if that's what you're asking.”

“I guess what I'm asking is how relevant all this might be to the real reason I'm here. Look, I'm perfectly willing to shoot the breeze, but if there's a point I'm missing it.”

“Mrs. Geiger was the book collector.”

“Ah.”

“She was a very serious book collector. She spent at least as much money on her books as Mr. Geiger spent on his stable.”

“You can buy a lot of books for what one of these horses would cost you.”

“Or maybe just one. It's like anything else; it's relative. At least I've learned that much this year. You can buy a cheap horse or a cheap book. Expensive horse, expensive book. She knew what she was doing with books just like Mr. Geiger always knew horses. She was damned good at it. Maybe you think you're good at it but I'd bet serious money that she was better. She was a helluva great bookwoman. She could have been a dealer at the top levels of your profession.”

“Why wasn't she?”

“She didn't choose to be. Money didn't matter, so why sell 'em if you don't need to?”

“What kind of stuff did she collect?”

“Kids' books, history, you name it. No popular junk history…original documents, early books. If a book had significance she knew what that was, like you were just saying about experts, and she bought it. She never worried about the money, but she knew that a truly rare one would go nowhere but up. Didn't matter what field it was in, she had a feeling for a great book.”

“There are people like that. I envy the hell out of 'em.”

“There was no one like Candice. Someday somebody will write a book about
her
and her books.”

“Sounds like you know a bit about it yourself.”

“I know what I could learn in my spare time. I've been reading up on it, trying to make sense of it. But by the time I knew enough to talk to her about it…”

I arched my eyes, waiting for the answer.

“By then she had been gone for years,” he said.

“So you do know books, is that what you're saying?”

“I've been trying to educate myself, but it's not easy when you're tucked away in Nowhere, Idaho, and you've got nobody to talk to. Like you said, there's a lot to learn, a lot of trial and error, and I've got horses to take care of. I can sometimes tell one edition from another, but I don't know enough to appraise anything. The terminology alone…but that's why I need you, isn't it?”

I walked along the wall and looked at the pictures, paying no attention now to the horses or to Willis. Now I looked at her. She was always directly in the center, never more than ten feet behind the circle: apart yet central. Her face was the one ever-changing element. She wasn't beautiful but she sure was striking. She had an unforgettable face. She looked like a lady, then a temptress, then a reveler; she looked thoughtful and regal, mischievous and funny and sad. In one shot she stuck out her tongue impishly, and in the very next one, taken on the same day at Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha, she looked ready to cry. Geiger had won two races that day.

“She looks drugged in this one,” I said.

“She should have been an actress. She'd have been a great one.”

“But she didn't do drugs…”

“Hell no. Do us all a favor, don't go there again.”

“Did she ever do any theater?”

“No. She played all her roles just for him.”

I thought we had arrived at an unexpectedly intimate place in our talk. He smiled, the first time I had seen that from him, on the wall or in person, and I felt myself trying to warm toward him in spite of my earlier misgivings. I knew there was more that needed saying but for the moment I wasn't inclined to push him. Then I said, “Tell me about them, Mr. Willis,” and I seemed to be pushing him after all.

“What do you want to know?”

“How long did he race after she died?”

“For a while, but there came a time when his heart wasn't in it. He didn't feel the need anymore, and God knows he didn't need the money. But once a year we went to the yearling sales and if he saw one he liked, he bought it.”

“And did what with it?”

“Just enjoyed having it, and working with it. Watching it grow and learn, watching it run in the early morning. I don't suppose you'll understand that.”

“And he never considered going back to racing?”

“I think he toyed with it. Sometimes he'd say to me, ‘I think we'll take this one to Santa Anita this winter,' or, ‘Maybe we'll go to Hollywood Park this year.' But he never did. He had been a master with cheap bad-legged horses; that's what he was great at and enjoyed doing. He loved taking a horse nobody thought would run again and bringing it back.”

A quiet moment passed. “We've got some classy horses here now,” he said. “Not like the old days, when everything had to be patched together. Some damn good studs, some truly fine broodmares…”

I thought that might explain the man in the hood working the horse in the rain, but now I had to ask. “Who's the man up at the track?”

“Mr. Geiger's son Damon. He arrived here late last week.”

“How was his relationship with his dad?”

“Hasn't had any, not for years. None of them have.” He watched me out of the corner of his eye. “Now you'll be wondering what he's doing working the horses.”

I nodded. The thought had crossed my mind.

“Go ask him,” he said, without any warmth.

“So Damon just shows up and starts giving orders. Have I got it right so far?”

“That's about it.”

“Any reason for him to think he can do that?”

Willis shrugged slightly.

“You ever think of stopping him?”

“Damon doesn't stop real easy. He is a blood relative, and I imagine he thinks that makes some kind of difference.”

“Does it?” I asked. “Where are the other sons?”

“Cameron's already here. He was sniffing around before Mr. Geiger died. I expect Bax'll be here sometime.”

“He didn't come to the funeral?”

“None of 'em came, except Sharon.”

“So if and when Bax does get here, then what?”

“Then we'll see. I don't think there's any love lost between any of 'em. But how would I know, I've never had much to do with those three.”

“And now the old man's dead and the food fight begins over his estate.”

“That's one way to put it.”

“What did Mr. Geiger's will say?”

“The farms go to Sharon. I'll eventually get some of the horses. Bax gets some; so does Damon. I guess we'll have to fight over which ones. And there's a sizable cash bequest that's split up among us.”