The Dickens with Love (8 page)
“No.”
“Have you changed your mind about letting me examine the book?”
He hesitated.
The injured pride and hurt feelings I’d been struggling with all day and evening came bubbling back
to the surface like magma expanding toward the mouth of a volcano.
I said, “The fact is, I’m tired, I didn’t really want a cup of coffee, and I don’t feel like being polite to you anymore tonight.” I rose. “Since you’re so into the unvarnished truth, the truth is I don’t want to see you again and I don’t want to talk to you again.”
He rose too, and now he was irritated. “I have never met
anyone
as oversensitive as you.”
“You should get out more.” My control, such as it was, slipped. “If you’d been through what I went
through, you’d be oversensitive too.”
I turned and walked out to the interest of our fellow late-night diners.
It was getting to be quite a habit with me.
The amazing thing was, chasing after me was apparently getting to be a habit with Sedgwick. He was
out the door about four seconds after me, hastily tucking bills back in his wallet and shoving the wallet in his jeans’ pocket as he half-ran down the cement walkway.
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know. I have no concept of what the Strauss affair did to you,
although it’s clearly changed your life in all kinds of ways. If you don’t want coffee, let me buy you a drink and you can tell me about this client of yours and this preemptive bid process.”
Well, of course that settled it. I had to have a drink with him now.
We found a small dive that stayed open till two a.m. and managed to get our drink order placed before
last call. Sedgwick ordered a Stardust and I ordered a brandy.
“I’ve got it,” he said quickly, reaching for his wallet.
I nodded shortly. It was his party. Anyway, even if I’d wanted to object, I wasn’t in position to. I’d spent my entertainment budget for the month at the Champagne Bar the night before.
“Who were the books for?” I asked. I felt obliged to make conversation. A holdover from the days
when I’d only had sex with people I liked and wanted to know better.
He looked puzzled, then smiled. “My niece and nephew. Connor and Caitlyn. Twins. Their birthday is
in January.”
I realized that he would be going home to England in a few days. It gave me an odd feeling to think
that I’d never see him again. One thing for sure, he wouldn’t be easy to forget.
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“Do you have a lot of family?”
“Two older sisters and a younger brother. Selena, Samantha and Swithin.”
Swithin and Sedgwick. I nobly refrained from comment, restraining myself to a mild, “A middle
child.”
“Yes.”
“Are you close to your family?” I was surprised at my own curiosity, but it was genuine. He seemed
like a very unusual person.
“I am. Yes. My father is the vicar at Rye Harbour Church. My mother paints religious triptychs. My
family has lived in East Sussex since William the Conqueror landed on the coast. What about you?”
I was still trying to synthesize the glow-in-the-dark condoms with the fact that he apparently came
from a devoutly religious family. “Actually, I’m an orphan.”
He looked startled. “Straight up?”
“Yep.” He appeared so taken aback, I had to ask, “Did you think it only happened in books?”
“Were you—you must have been adopted, surely?”
“My parents died when I was eleven. That’s an awkward age for adoption. And I was not a
cooperative kid.”
His curiosity was neutral: neither sympathetic nor skeptical. It made it easier to talk about a thing I very rarely spoke of. “The fact is, I was very angry. Very hostile. I didn’t want to be placed. I didn’t want anything or anyone but my own parents. Since I couldn’t have that, I wouldn’t have anything.”
“Do you regret that?”
“Probably. This time of year I’m sorry I don’t have family.”
“Wasn’t there anyone? No grandparents or aunts or uncles?”
“If there were, I didn’t know about them. My mom and dad had cut themselves off from their own
folks—or maybe they were orphans themselves.” I said it lightly, but it wasn’t funny to me. It never had been, it never would be.
“I’m sorry.” He seemed to mean it, but then having grown up in what was clearly a large and
affectionate family, my situation probably did strike a chord with him.
“Thanks. I’m not looking for sympathy, though. I don’t ever think about it except at birthdays or this time of year. I’m giving you a little background so you understand why I’m maybe overly touchy about
certain things.”
“Like the Strauss affair?”
He made it sound like a 1960s Cold War novel. All we needed was a guy in a trench coat to show up
and buy the next round.
I admitted, “If I’d had some sort of emotional support, I might have been better able to handle
everything that happened afterwards.” Granted, in theory Corey should have been my emotional support,
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The Dickens with Love
but Corey had pulled out the minute suspicion fell on me. Looking back, I realized the cracks must have already been there—or the foundation of our relationship was built on nothing more substantial than papier-mâché.
Interestingly enough the thought of Corey didn’t bother me as I sat across the table from Sedgwick.
“What did happen with Strauss?”
“Don’t tell me my former colleagues weren’t delighted to fill you in on all the gory details?”
He said gravely, “None of your colleagues think you were involved. If I didn’t make that clear enough
before, I want to do that now.”
I shrugged. “Oh, I believe you. Everyone knows that if there had been anything to connect me, I’d
have been arrested. The police did their best. The truth is, Louis took me in like everyone else. That’s why I don’t trust my instinct anymore.”
It was weird thinking back to that time. Weird to think I had ever been so completely and
uncomplicatedly happy. I had loved that old bookstore on West 6th Street with its bow windows and maze of narrow shelves. It had felt like home for nearly the first time in my life. I’d loved the adventure and challenge of hunting down books; loved working with people as obsessed about books as me. Granted, it
had always been more about the books and less about the people for me.
“Strauss was selling forgeries from the beginning?”
I smiled bitterly. “Well, it makes sense in hindsight. No one could really be that lucky. To discover
that many rare and valuable unpublished works and lost documents? It defied the odds. But Louis had built up such an impeccable reputation through the years, and a dealer’s reputation is one of the primary
considerations when considering the authenticity of items.”
I paused as our drinks arrived, waiting till the weary cocktail waitress—in her coat and clearly on her way out the door—departed.
“It shouldn’t be, but that’s human nature, and so there’s usually more attention paid to the dealer and his credentials than the actual attributes of the item in question. Like how many such items the dealer has handled, his record of successful and unquestioned dealings, the number of forged docs he’s identified.”
“And Louis Strauss was actually forging these items?”
“He was working with another man. Alphonse Kidman. Kidman was the forger. A brilliant artist in
his own way. He created what was supposed to be a previously unpublished poem by Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and I was instrumental in getting it consigned to Christie’s.”
“The auction house?”
I nodded. “It sold for…well, a substantial amount.”
“That can’t have been all your responsibility, surely?”
“No. But it was certainly partly my responsibility. I didn’t recognize that it was a fake. I put my
reputation on the line.”
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Sedgwick sipped his glittering drink. “How did forgery lead to murder?”
“I don’t know.” I balanced the rounded bottom of the snifter in my palm, letting it warm. “Nobody
knows the entire truth and I don’t think anyone ever will. Apparently Kidman was falling further and
further in debt despite the fact that he and Louis were making a fortune on all these forgeries. He kept coming up with more and more items for Louis to ‘discover’. And the items were getting more and more
outlandish. Letters between Lewis and Clark supposedly proving they were gay, an unpublished story by
Edgar Allen Poe, Kit Carson’s will, a signed engraved portrait of Abraham Lincoln. When Louis tried to refuse handling this flood of stuff, Kidman became more and more belligerent and threatening. He tried to blackmail Louis and when that didn’t work, he hired a thug to break into his house and beat him up.”
“How could he think he would get away with that?”
“Well, he knew Louis couldn’t go to the police. His reputation as one of the leading antiquarians in
the country, his social position in Los Angeles society, his comfortable lifestyle…Louis wasn’t about to give any of that up. He’d have died first, no question. But instead of dying, he decided to kill Kidman and try and make it look like suicide.”
“Meanwhile you were getting suspicious?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not really. Oh, I knew something was wrong, and I was uneasy about the
provenance of a few of the items we were selling to collectors, but it never occurred to me what was really going on.” I said with difficulty, “You have to understand. Louis was good to me. He took me on when I was right out of college. When I had nothing more going for me than ambition and eagerness. He taught me everything I know—and, believe it or not, that’s quite a bit. With his help I became one of the best known and best respected book hunters in the city. I made a lot of money thanks to Louis.”
I sipped my brandy and added, “Mostly legitimately. I think. It’s hard to be sure because Kidman was
very good at what he did.”
Sedgwick had that grave angelic look again. “What finally tipped the scales?”
“Louis asked me to alibi him for the night Kidman supposedly shot himself. Oh, he didn’t tell me why
he needed an alibi, but the minute I read about Kidman’s suicide, I knew. He’d been to the bookstore
several times to see Louis. I read the newspaper article and…I knew. I asked Louis and he denied it all.
Said he needed the alibi because he feared that people were liable to jump to the same conclusion I had, but I knew he was lying.” I sighed. “And I couldn’t do it. I owed him everything, but I couldn’t do it.”
In the silence between us I could faintly hear music. I recognized the melody first, and then I realized it was America singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas.”
As the poets say:
yeesh
.
Sedgwick observed, “You sound like you feel guilty because you refused to alibi a murderer. He lied,
stole, cheated, killed and ultimately tried to make you part of it. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
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The Dickens with Love
“And yet, I do feel guilty. And I guarantee you that all those people who assured you they didn’t think I had anything to do with the forgeries or murder, think I have something to feel guilty about. No one in this town would hire me after it was all over. No one will hire me now.”
“Someone’s hired you,” he pointed out. “This mysterious collector of yours.”
I blinked at him. “A few private collectors still deal with me, yes. I mean no bookstore, no dealer, no auction house.”
“Which is why you’re working at a chain bookstore?”
For twenty hours a week at barely over minimum wage. How art the mighty fallen. That’s what my
book hunter rivals thought—if they thought of me at all, which was doubtful.
“Books are what I know. Books are
all
I know.”
“If you know books, you know a great deal else, surely?”
The truth of that surprised me.
The overhead lights flashed, jarring the intimate mood between us.
“Last call,” the bartender announced.
I glanced around and realized the place was nearly empty, only the hardcore drunks left brooding over
their glasses. Sedgwick gave me an inquiring look. I shook my head. “I need to get home.”
His disappointment was almost funny. “Perhaps we could get another drink at my hotel?”
“Your hotel is not exactly on the way to my place.”
“No. Well.” He gathered his nerve. “All the same, why don’t you come back to my hotel?”
I laughed, though not unkindly. “You have a one-track mind. You know, there are other guys in this
city who would probably enjoy the…er…peppermint.”
“I don’t want
other guys
. I want you.”
His stubbornness was unexpected and flattering. I considered him. He met my gaze straight on.
“A bloke in the hand is worth two in the bush?” I was still teasing, but I had decided to go back with him—strictly because it was in my best interests to do so. I wanted a look at that book and I would do what I needed to make that happen. Still, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to play hard to get.
“You’re selling yourself short.”
“Am I? Well, at least you know my price.”
His eyes narrowed as he worked that out. He said softly, disbelievingly, “Are you saying you’ll let me fuck you again if I let you look at the book? You’re putting a price on having sex with me?”
My heart began to pound very hard. I had conducted certain borderline transactions over the past three years, but this was different. Very different. I had effectively taken this from playful and flirtatious to something else. Something not too pretty.
I felt a little numb. But I nodded.
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