Booked to Die by John Dunning Page B

me.”
    “Did he give you any indication that he might’ve made a recent score?”
    “Are you kidding? The way he was talking, he didn’t have bus fare back downtown.”
    “Maybe he found something and hadn’t had a chance to sell it yet.”
    “I doubt that. I don’t think he had a prayer of seeing any money in the immediate future. He was just too down, too pissed off at the world.”
    “Who else did he do business with?”
    “Almost everybody. You’re gonna have to go to every bookstore in Denver if you want to touch all of Bobby’s bases.”
    “But they have their favorite guys they sell to, isn’t that right?”
    “Sure. They all do that. They’ll find a dealer who pays ‘em well and they’ll stick with that guy for a while. Then something happens—either they get pissed off or the dealer does—and they go somewhere else. But it’s never perfect and eventually they come back. It’s a vicious circle. When a book doesn’t sell to anybody reputable, they wind up giving it away for pennies to jerks like the one two doors down.”
    “You mean Clyde Fix?”
    “What an idiot. I wish we could get that junkman off the block.”
    “Can you think of anybody else Bobby might’ve sold to regularly?”
    “I think he was in with Roland Goddard. Don’t tell Goddard I sent you, though. He used to be my partner.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Oh, yeah. But don’t bring it up. We don’t get along now.”
    “How come?”
    “You don’t really want to get into that. It’s ancient history.”
    “Humor me a little.”
    “When we were kids we both worked for Harley Bishop. Then we moved on to the Book Emporium, you remember, that big place that used to be on Fifteenth, across from Public Service? They closed it up and Goddard and I bought out the stock and used it to start our first store together. It didn’t work out, that’s all. We’ve got different aims in life, different tastes. At the bottom of it, we just didn’t like each other. Sometimes you’ve got to go into business with somebody to find out how little you like each other. So we flipped a coin to see who would buy the other out. Goddard won. Or lost, depending on how you look at it.“
    “That’s a pretty classy shop he’s got.”
    “Yeah, but so what? Everything in life has a trade-off. He’s got a great shop and a super location in Cherry Creek, probably makes two hundred grand a year. But the overhead’s got to be unreal. Me, I was out of the business for a couple of years after the big coin flip, but I’m back again. I’ve got what I want.”
    “Can you think of anybody else I should see?”
    “As a matter of fact, yeah. Go talk to Rita McKinley.”
    “Who’s that?”
    He raised his eyebrow. “You’re a bookman in this town and you’ve never heard of Rita McKinley?”
    “I guess I never did.”
    “Well, Officer Janeway, you’ve got a treat in store for you.”
    “Who’s Rita McKinley?”
    “She’s got a closed shop in Evergreen. Appointment only, that kind of place. Operates out of her house.”
    “What’s she got to do with Bobby?”
    “I don’t know, except when he was here he dropped a piece of paper with her name on it.”
    “You still got it?”
    “Sure. I’ve been waiting for him to come in again so I could give it back to him.” He reached into the cash drawer and took out a small sheet of notepaper. In pencil, someone had written the name and a phone number.
    I looked at Harkness. “You ever met the lady?”
    ‘She was in here once, a year or two ago. A real looker, young and pretty and sharp as a new brass tack. She knows books, brother. She knows as much as I do, and I’m talking about books in my field. You know what she did? Bought two copies of
Interview with the Vampire
out of here for fifty bucks apiece. That’s what the son of a bitch was going for then. Now it’s three hundred, and it’s gonna go to five, I’ll betcha. I’d love to have one of those babies back; hell, I’d pay her