The Dirty Book Murder Read Online Free Page B

I drove to what many considered the best used bookstore in town.
    After all, I’d narrowly escaped owing Colonel Bender’s client an amount I couldn’t possibly have raised in the foreseeable future; my health was excellent after years of trying to destroy it; and the used-book trade, like movie theaters and liquor sales, was proving to be recession-proof, picked up by ever-increasing sales on the Internet. Even last week’s shock of learning that my twenty-year-old daughter was having an affair with a notorious celebrity nearly three times her age had retreated to the back of my consciousness, hovering like a faintly disagreeable odor.
    At least she was coming home for a while.
    Riverrun Books anchors the middle of a quaint shopping center built in 1924. It is bordered by a tailor shop to its south and a bakery to the north. An inside open door connects the bakery with the bookstore so that the smell of baking bread and brewing coffee permeates the place.
    As I approached Fifty-fifth Street in my jeep, I saw customers sitting outside my shop at green bistro tables under a broad awning drinking caffe lattes and reading
The New York Times
. A dog, lazing at the feet of a young couple, chewed on a leather bone while a little boy sat on crossed legs contentedly reading a picture book.
    I pulled into my regular space in a church lot across the street, turned off the engine, and set the automatic lock before exiting it. Three paces from the car I realized I’d left the keys in the ignition. Returning to the jeep, hoping against hope that I hadn’t really locked myself out, I reached for the door latch hesitantly, preferring emptyuncertainty to the confirmation of a locked door.
    I jiggled the handle.
    Locked.
    I jiggled the handle again.
    Same result.
    I cursed under my breath and looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had noticed my predicament. Only the boy with the picture book seemed concerned.
    I gazed at the asphalt and, finding no answers there, decided to swallow my pride and seek help in the shop. But first I had to do the manly thing and slam my fist against the offending door.
    The car alarm went off, scattering pigeons and causing Father Patrick Doogan’s cup of hot chocolate, propelled by his startled knees under the café table, to spill onto the virginal laps of Sister Mary Catherine Browne and her cousin, Mary Margaret Scanlon.
    While I scuttled across the street to the bookstore, apologizing to what seemed like half of St. Peter’s parish, Weston Preston, towel in hand, leaped from behind his coffee cart and darted outside.
    “You’d best turn that noise off, boss,” he said unnecessarily in his southern Missouri drawl as he sponged the steaming mess off the nun’s habit.
    “I locked myself out,” I said, equally unnecessarily.
    “Well now, that would be a problem, if …”
    Leaving the cousins to clean themselves with paper towels, Weston set up the table that had fallen over and began wiping off the top, lost in mid-sentence as if the whooping and clanging of the alarm had rendered him catatonic.
    “If what, for God’s sake?” I said. “Why aren’t you looking for a wire coat hanger or something?”
    “If,” Weston said, looking up at me with the slightest hint of superiority, “you didn’t have an extra key in a magnet box stuck under the left front wheelbase; the one you had me put there a year ago after another one of these episodes.”
    “I don’t remember that.”
    “You was drunk.”
    “Oh.”
    He went back to wiping the table while I ran across the street to bring peace and quiet once again to the neighborhood.
    A round of applause and laughter led by the priest greeted my return to the shop. It being Saturday, the store was crowded. Inside, some of the regulars sat at tables arranged in a semicircle in front of the coffee cart.
    Brian Canady, Scottish Dan Muldoon, and Kiki Bates had been strangers to one another until developing common bonds through my bookstore. Their