San Francisco day. But Lindsey wasn’t going to worry too much about the contingent bennies today.
His job was.… He must have been listening to too much music lately. His mind was setting his task to music. A silent orchestra played inside his head as he sang along.
Was the tune Happy Birthday to You…?
Find the girl on the book, Find the girl on the book, It’s Death in the Di-itch.…
Or maybe it was Beethoven’s Fifth.…
Locate the girl! Locate the girl! Locatethegirllocatethe-girllocatethegirl.…
He found himself giggling into the monitor screen. Maybe this job was making him crazy. He shut down the computer, left the office, grabbed a snack downstairs and walked to his car. Traffic in the Caldecott Tunnel was light.
It was a gray day in Berkeley. Lindsey was dressed casually, a heavy sweater over a woolen shirt. He parked in a city garage just off Telegraph Avenue and headed for Cody’s, the town’s premiere bookstore. A clerk at the center desk offered to help him. She had short hair and a spectacularly beautiful face. She wore a Dan Quayle for President tee shirt. Lindsey didn’t know what to make of that, so he didn’t comment.
He asked if she knew of a book called Death in the Ditch. No author, no publisher, but it was probably first issued in 1951 or so. The clerk smiled. “I doubt that it’s still in print. Unless it was a classic of some kind.”
“I don’t know what kind of book it was, except there was a girl on the cover.”
The clerk raised her eyebrows. “A little girl, you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
“Or a woman. A grown-up woman.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
The clerk turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “I’ll look in Books in Print. On the CD-ROM.” She punched some keys on a computer. Mysterious boxes and symbols raced across the monitor screen. Finally it settled down. The clerk turned back to Lindsey. “Sorry. Doesn’t show anything like that. Death in Venice? Death in the Bathroom? Death in a Warm, Dark Place?”
Lindsey shook his head.
The clerk nodded. “I didn’t think so. Tell you what.” Lindsey had one hand on the counter, and the clerk put hers on top of his. “Maybe you could try Moe’s next door. First floor, they have a lot of used paperbacks. That might be your best bet.”
Lindsey thanked her and walked next door. It wasn’t raining so he didn’t get wet, even though he wasn’t at 101 California Street.
The clerk was right, Moe’s had thousand upon thousands of used paperbacks. Trouble was, they were arranged by author, not title. Finding Death in the Ditch—if Moe’s had it at all—was about as likely as dropping a pebble from the Goodyear blimp and hoping to hit the right spectator in a stadium full of football fans.
But again a clerk came to the rescue. “You know the San Francisco Mystery Book Store? Twenty-fourth Street? If anybody can help you, they can.”
Lindsey drove across the Bay Bridge, took Duboce Street to Market and turned left on Castro. On a Saturday afternoon the city’s gay community was out in force, but something struck Lindsey as odd. There were teenagers and twenty-something’s and there were gray heads and lined faces, but the thirty- and forty-somethings were missing from the scene. Those, he realized, were the population who’d been living it up fifteen years ago, when the HIV virus was spreading like a stealth disease.
At Twenty-fourth Street he found a parking place and walked to the mystery specialty store. The place was crammed with books and book-lovers. He squeezed through narrow aisles and reached the upstairs room. Hardcovers and paperbacks were intermixed. There must be thousands of them. If Lindsey had been a mystery fan—he was not—he would have been in paradise.
But again, the arrangement was alphabetical by author, not title. He squeezed back down the narrow staircase. A blonde woman with sharp, attractive features sat at a tiny, battered desk. She had a Styrofoam cup of coffee wedged between stacks of books and papers. Maybe bookstores attracted good-looking women. Was that thought politically correct?
Lindsey asked the blonde woman if she knew a book called Death in the Ditch, published around 1951.
The woman frowned, shook her head, then said, “I never heard of it. You know anything about it?”
“Only that there was a girl on the cover.”
The blonde said, “You sure of that? Cover, not jacket?”
“As far as I know. I’ve never seen it.”
“Then it’s probably a paperback. There weren’t as many published back in the early ’fifties, that was just before the big explosion. You know, when Bantam got going, then Ballantine and Ace. But ’51—there were some pretty obscure outfits got started around then, and didn’t last too long.”
She took a sip from the Styrofoam cup. The cream in it, or whatever she used, had formed a thin scum on top of the coffee. The blonde grimaced and set the cup back down. “Maybe it’ll get better as it ages.” She looked up at Lindsey. “What you really ought to do is, you ought to talk to Scotty Anderson. You know Scotty Anderson?”
Lindsey shook his head.
“Great collector. Real scholar. If you need an old paperback, if anybody in the world has it, Scotty does.”
Lindsey grinned. “Does he live here? I mean, nearby?”
“East Bay.” The blonde shuddered. “You want his address, phone number?”
Lindsey did.
“Let’s see.” She moved a stack of publishers’ catalogs onto the floor, uncovering a plastic Rolodex. She flipped the lid open and read an address and phone number aloud. Lindsey wondered if her tone was what they used to call a whiskey voice.
Lindsey flipped his pocket organizer open and jotted down the information. “He won’t mind my calling?”
“Just tell Scotty I sent you.” The blonde told Lindsey her name and he added that to the organizer. He slipped his gold International Surety pencil and the organizer into his pocket, thanked the blonde and headed for a pay phone.
Anderson was at home. Lindsey made an appointment for Sunday afternoon and hung up. Maybe he was getting somewhere.
He called Marvia’s house and got her answering machine, then tried her mother’s house. Gloria Plum answered. Marvia had taken her son, Jamie Wilkerson, and his friend, Hakeem White, to the mall to make up for their canceled snow weekend.
Somehow Gloria managed to blame Lindsey for the canceled weekend. Somehow Gloria managed to blame Lindsey for most things she was unhappy about.
This is really swell, Lindsey thought. I’m not even married and I’ve got mother-in-law problems already. He went home.
Mother had planned to go out for the evening with Gordon Sloane. They’d been dating—How can your mother be dating? Lindsey wondered—for almost a year now.
