“You got it. Interesting character. I remember when he started out, his stuff was so crude I couldn’t believe it. Like he was the Ed Wood of publishing. But he kept at it and now he turns out beautiful stuff. Beautiful.”
Good for him, Lindsey thought. But what does this have to do with me? He waited for Anderson to go on, and Anderson did.
“I promised Lovisi an article for Paperback Parade on the legendary Paige Publications. Everybody in the hobby claims he knows somebody who has some Paige books, even claims he’s seen one, but none of them turn up at the shows, none of them turn up in dealers’ catalogs.”
“Do they really exist?”
Anderson’s pale blue eyes lost their wide innocence. They narrowed and darkened and flashed. Anderson reached an oversized hand and clasped Lindsey by one wrist. He leaned forward so the unlit match clenched in his teeth nearly scraped Lindsey’s cheek.
Scotty Anderson cast a suspicious look to the left, then to the right. The match-head did scrape Lindsey’s face but Anderson ignored the contact.
“I have one,” he whispered.
CHAPTER THREE
Anderson heaved his bulk out of his wooden chair and paced to the office door. He gestured to Lindsey, who followed him. They paraded through a warren of metal shelves until they came to a gunmetal door with a huge combination lock built into it. Anderson crouched, his bulk hiding the lock from Lindsey’s view.
When Anderson straightened he swung the heavy door open to reveal a closet-sized safe. It was filled with metal boxes. He ran his finger across the rows of boxes; they were marked with index numbers that meant nothing to Lindsey but were obviously plain as day to Anderson.
Finally he pulled down a box, opened it and extracted a transparent envelope containing a paperback book. He held the book toward Lindsey. “Hold this.” Lindsey did.
What kind of person would maintain this level of security on what was obviously a treasure, yet hand it so casually to a stranger? Lindsey couldn’t figure it out, but he’d been working with collectors for years now, and nothing they did could surprise him any more.
They made their way back to Anderson’s office. Anderson poked his head inside the room, muttered something like “Too stuffy,” and gestured Lindsey to follow him again. This must be the way Alice felt as she followed the white rabbit.
They wound up in a living room, or what must pass for one in this bizarre apartment. There were actually a few square feet of wall space not covered with books. Instead, framed paintings had been hung. They were well executed, but they didn’t have the feel of gallery paintings. There were scenes of gangsters blasting at uniformed police, spaceships silhouetted against blazing, multicolored suns and planets, gorgeous women in low-cut gowns lounging against pianos, cowpokes galloping straight out of the frame.
Anderson must have seen Lindsey’s expression. He beamed, “You like them? Originals!”
“They look like movie posters. They’re, ah, very vivid.”
“They’re paperback cover paintings. Look, that’s a Mitchell Hooks. That’s a Bob Maguire. And that beauty—” he pointed “—that’s a Robert McGinnis. You won’t see many of those. There’s a Jim Avati. A Stanley Meltzoff. And that red one—the one with the spaceman and the bat-creatures—that’s a Paul. Frank R. Paul. No, they don’t paint ’em the way they used to.”
“They must be valuable.”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Five or six figures. They used to throw them away back in the fifties. Listen, if I just had a time machine, what I couldn’t do!”
Lindsey had to get the subject back to Death in the Ditch. “You said something about.…” He gestured to the book in Anderson’s hand.
Anderson slid the envelope across his desk. “Please don’t open it. If you need to look at the book, I’ll get it out for you. It must be done just right or it can be damaged.”
Lindsey leaned over the book. “Is it all right if I pick it up?”
“The way porcupines make love.”
“How’s that?”
“Very carefully.”
Lindsey managed a polite laugh. He’d thought that joke was hilarious when he was ten.
The book was Buccaneer Blades. The author was Violet de la Yema. The cover illustration could have been straight out of a fifties pirate movie, maybe one starring Burt Lancaster and Maureen O’Hara, with Basil Rathbone as the evil Spanish governor of a Caribbean island and Akim Tamiroff as his comic aide.
He turned the book over carefully. “No price?”
“They were all a quarter. No need for a price back then. Did you catch the publisher’s logo?”
“I see it there in the corner. Nice idea—the open book with all the pages, and the publisher’s name, Paige. Was there a Mr. Paige?”
Anderson shrugged.
Lindsey turned the book over. The spine was printed in black with the title and byline dropped out, in white. The Paige Publications logo was reproduced at the base of the spine, along with a serial number, 101. Lindsey raised his eyebrows.
“Saw it, did you?” Anderson’s match-stick bobbed up and down.
“You mean the serial number? Does 101 mean this was the very first Paige book?”
“Apparently it does. Nobody really knows much about Paige. When I turned this book up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Paiges are the holy grail of paperback collectors. Like the first ten Pocket Books. They printed 10,000 of each, you’d think there would be a lot of them left. Well, except for Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, for some reason they only did 7,600. But they’re scarcer than hen’s teeth. People must have read ’em and threw ’em away. Or the LA Bantams. If you could get hold of The Shadow and the Voice of Murder or Tarzan in the Forbidden City.…”
Lindsey shook his head. “I’ve worked on collectibles cases before, but this field is new to me.”
“The first—oh, there’s too much of this. You ought to read one of the books on the subject. Thom Bonn’s, or Piet Schreuders’. Anyway, if you know anything about collectibles, you know that their intrinsic value doesn’t really matter. What’s the difference between two identical books, only one of them has a minor typo in it and the other doesn’t, and we know that the typo was only in the true first edition and corrected after that?”
“I—” Lindsey tried to answer, but Anderson wasn’t stopping.
“You wouldn’t think there was a difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between a treasure and a reading copy. It’s the difference between a book to kill for and one you can pick up at any lawn sale for a nickel.”
Anderson’s predatory grin returned. When he was relaxed, his eyes were a bland, pale blue. Now they regained their deep intensity.
“Matter of fact, I got my Paige at a garage sale in
