Death by the Book - Lenny Bartulin [46]
He gave a statement to a couple of police officers first. They asked him to come into the main bedroom. It was dark with stained timber and heavy brown drapes. The double bed was made, the polished wood-veneer closet closed, the rugs on the floor perfectly aligned: there was nothing out of place, not even a pair of old pyjamas thrown over the tall-backed chair set against the wall. Kass must have been an obsessive-compulsive it was so neat in there. One of the officers wrote down what Jack said, the other prompted him. Neither looked him in the eye, once. Cops had a way of making Jack feel that whatever he said was a lie. It must have been a trick they learnt at police school: How to dredge your suspect’s guilt, no matter if it’s from when he was five and stole a chocolate bar from the corner shop. After they had finished, he read through the script and signed.
Then Detective Sergeant Keith Glendenning had his turn. There were flakes of dandruff on his shoulders. In a steady, bored voice he asked a lot of questions. One of them was whether Jack knew either of the dead men.
‘I knew Edward Kass,’ said Jack. ‘But only by name. This would have been our first meeting.’
‘About what?’
‘His books. I’m a book dealer.’ Jack elevated the prestige of his business, but it had no visible effect on Detective Sergeant Glendenning. He looked just as bored as ever.
‘What about his books?’ he asked.
Jack cleared his throat. He knew Celia had already spoken to the detective. ‘I was interested in buying them.’
‘Why?’
‘So I could sell them. It’s what I do.’
‘Are they worth a lot of money?’
‘Not really.’ Jack checked himself. ‘Well, a little, if they’re signed.’
‘And that’s why you were coming to see him?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How much?’
‘How much what?’
‘How much are they worth? Signed.’
‘Not enough to get excited about.’
Detective Sergeant Keith Glendenning gave a sly smile. Probably his first for the month. Jack caught a glimpse of his crooked, not very white teeth. The cruel shape of his pale, fleshy lips emphasised a mouth that had spoken an obscenity or two in its time. A mouth that could snarl when it wanted to.
‘How much gets you excited?’ asked the detective.
‘Anything above a dollar eighty-five.’
Jack had the distinct feeling that maybe he had underestimated the detective. Glendenning was piling on the questions like a chess player who only moved his pawns. But before you knew it, most of them were standing around your queen, grinning like a pack of murderous dwarves.
‘So they were worth enough to come and see him?’ The detective’s smile had vanished. He checked his mobile phone, squinting down at its illuminated screen.
Jack shrugged his shoulders, tried to give an air of calm. ‘A buck’s a buck. Unless you’re on a copper’s wage, I suppose.’
The detective looked up. ‘It’s only a buck over here, too, last time I checked.’ The tone was nothing nasty but the hard grey-blue eyes were unimpressed. Glendenning glanced down at his mobile phone again. ‘And what about the other guy, on the floor?’ he asked, like it was an afterthought. Like he did not care whether Jack knew him or not.
They were standing in a small connecting hall that led to the two bedrooms in the apartment. It was dim — the bare, single globe above them did a cheap job. Jack looked at the floor: it was covered in an orange-and-brown carpet, patterned with circles and some kind of curved pyramid shape set at different angles between the circles. He doubted there was ever a time it was fashionable. As his eyes followed the pattern around for a moment, he noticed somebody else walk into the hallway.
‘Just need the toilet.’ Durst squeezed past Detective Sergeant Glendenning. He looked at Jack. Jack looked back. The detective noticed.
As Durst shut the door to the bathroom, Glendenning scratched the stubble on his broad chin. ‘So have you ever seen him before? The guy on