It all needs to take place quickly. Because of Ellen it is a matter of acute urgency: she has six weeks, no longer. But she can’t execute the crucial part of the plan until the license with her photograph on it arrives in the mail from Sacramento.
That will take a fortnight or more. Time enough to set Jennifer Corfu Hartman up in business.
17 She finds the shop easily enough from the instructions on the phone. It’s set back in a little Burbank shopping mall, hardly much bigger than a motel—she counts eleven stores in the U-shaped court.
When she emerges from the car it is like opening the door of an oven that someone neglected to turn off two days ago: the heat has accumulated in pavement and walls and cars from which it radiates in lancing slivers of reflected sunlight, as painful against the eyes as steel darts.
Everything is too bright, too raw. She scrutinizes the place with unease and a growing skepticism.
It shows painful evidence of a promoter-builder’s efforts to be quaint. The shops have high wooden false fronts and the walkway is shaded by a veranda roof supported on posts and wooden arches—an imitation wild west movie set. The parking lot is decorated with wagon wheels.
There are a western wear shop, an ice cream bar, the Native American Crafts Shop, a one-hour photo store, a harness and tack outfit that features silver-tooled saddles; she makes a face at the hitching rail in front of that one. Next door a display window holds agate and turquoise jewelry under a wooden sign that hangs on chains and carries the legend The Desert Rockhound. On the corner by the curb is a restaurant where you may eat al fresco at rustic tables under big umbrellas, the dining area surrounded by a split-rail corral fence. Behind it the small windows are filled with colored neon signs advertising several brands of beer. That is—inevitably?—Buffalo Bill’s Saloon.
It looks like bloody Disneyland, she thinks, and makes her dubious way toward the half-hidden corner shop that announces itself with a meekly faded sign as Books of the West.
Inside she finds the soothing relief of air conditioning and another kind of relief that the shop hasn’t been decorated with cheap gimcracks: no framed plastic replicas of old guns.
The bookcases along both walls are filled with volumes most of which don’t seem to be new—many are without dust jackets—and the bins and tables that crowd the center of the room are stacked high with oversized picture books and paperbacks and bargain selections: All Books On This Table $1.59.
The cash register near the front door is a genuine antique—brass keys and pop-up numbers behind glass. But she sees a computer screen on the shelf behind.
There is no one at the counter. Two men are deep in conversation near the back: the older one glances her way and speaks up: “Be right with you, ma’am.”
“Take your time,” she says. “No hurry.” She smiles at his “ma’am.”
He is white-haired: tall with a flowing white gunfighter’s mustache, a bit stooped, dressed in jeans and an outdoorsy red plaid shirt. The customer with him is younger—thirties or early forties, brown mustache, khaki poplin business suit.
She removes her sunglasses and replaces them with the clear-lensed ones and glances along the shelves. Hand-crayoned signs thumbtacked to the bookcases identify their subject matter: American Indians … California History … Colorado River … Gold Rush … Gunmen.…
The man with white hair separates himself from his customer and comes forward through the clutter. She sees that he is younger than he appeared at a distance; his smooth tanned face is interestingly in contrast with the color of his hair, which is abundant and well combed, and with the stoop of his shoulders, which at closer glance seems a symptom of scholarliness rather than age. He’s nearer fifty than seventy. His eyes are a troubled brown behind silver-framed glasses.
“May I help you?” He pronounces it he’p. Texas, she decides.
“I’m Jennifer Hartman—the one who called this morning about your ad? Are you Mr. Stevens?”
“Doyle Stevens.” His handshake is almost reluctant. He goes behind the counter and glances out the window and touches a corner of the cash register. He seems to go slack. His attention flits around the walls and she senses a furtive desperation. He utters an awkward laugh. “I feel tongue-tied,” he says.
Then he punches a button: there is the jingle of the high-pitched bell and the No Sale tab flips up and the drawer slams open with a satisfying crunch of noise. It is a gesture: some kind of punctuation.
He says: “You don’t look like somebody looking to get into this kind of business.”
It startles her because she hasn’t had the feeling he’s scrutinized her at all. “I’m sorry. What should I look like?”
He flaps a hand back and forth, dismissing it. “You want to know how’s business, I expect. I can tell you how it is. Calm as a horse trough on a hot day. Or, to put it another way, and not to put too fine a point on it—business is terrible. You think we’d be putting ads in the papers if we were earning a fortune here?”
He pokes his head forward: suspicious, belligerent. The mustache seems to bristle. “Mostly I get fuzzy-headed inquiries by phone. Investors looking for opportunities—want to know about inventory and volume of business. Traffic in the location, all that jargon and bullroar. I tell them if they need to ask those kinds of questions, this is the wrong place for them. I tell them it’s a terrible investment for a real businessman. You could earn more on your money with a passbook savings account.”
Doyle Stevens prods his finger into the drawer and rattles a few coins around and finally pushes it shut. It makes a racket.
Finally he stares at her face. “I get letters from folks in Nebraska. Retired couples looking to set themselves up in retail. Looking for something genteel to, I guess, keep them busy while they enjoy the winter sunshine. I tell them too—forget it, my friends, it’s hard work and it’s full time and then some. My wife and I work a six-day week. And most of our evenings on the cataloging and the mail order.”
He squints at her. “You don’t do this to make money. And you can’t treat it like some kind of part-time hobby.”
She says: “No. You do it because you adore it.”
But her smile seems to exacerbate his anger.
She says, “You have to love the smell of old books.”
“Don’t romanticize it. I hate sentimentality.”
Sure you do, she thinks. What she says is, “Do you and Mrs. Stevens work here together?”
“Normally. She’s at the accountant’s office this morning. Trying to untangle some of the shambles. Paperwork. Federal government, state, county of Los Angeles, you’d think we were right up there alongside General Motors. A small binness like this, the paperwork alone can—Aagh, doesn’t matter.”
He pulls an old-fashioned pocketwatch out of his shirt pocket and snaps its lid open and consults it. Oddly, she does not have the impulse to laugh at the affectation.
He says, “She’s got a good head for that kind of paperwork. And she’s saintly patient with the bureaucracies and their fools. I expect her back shortly, in time for lunch.”
Then he peers at her. “Ever been in the retail book trade?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you’re a Western buff. Afficionado of frontier feminism or Indian folk medicine—one of these fashionable concerns?”
“I wouldn’t know a frontier feminist from Martha Washington. But I adore books and I’d like to learn.”
Doyle Stevens doesn’t try to conceal his suspicion. “Care to tell me why you called?”