NINE

“Miss Rainmeyer,” I say, tipping my hat slightly, hoping it’ll cover my panic. “You knew I’d be here?”

“Well, I remembered the names you’d told to the woman at the DA’s office,” she says quickly. “So I did a little digging in public records—found they owned a bookstore. Not quite the criminal enterprise I was hoping for, but color me intrigued. What’s the case?”

“You know I can’t tell you that,” I say, walking a little away from the store, out of view of the windows. She follows me. “But even if I could, trust me, Ms. Rainmeyer, there’s nothing newspaper-worthy here.”

“Oh, newspaper-worthy isn’t about the facts—it’s in how you write it. I already talked to one of the owners, DeeDee. She seems sweet. No idea what she could be up to, though. Now, the other one…” She takes out her notebook and flips to a page. “He could be…”

“Ms. Rainmeyer,” I say, my tone as polite, but firm, as I can make it, “if a reporter is poking around a case, it could make it very difficult for me to do my job.”

“Well, if you were to tell me what you’re working on, I wouldn’t have to poke around.” She smiles. “You’re going to say it’s none of my business, but you’re wrong. Everything is my business, quite literally. I need to find news in order to report on it.”

“I appreciate that, but not everything is news, and this case is definitely not.” I say it as calmly as I can. I want her to think I’m being sincere. “The truth is, since becoming a PI, my job is quite dull. Insurance scams, cheating wives. Nothing worth the time of a talented reporter.”

She beams at that. “Flattery. I like it. It won’t work, but I do like it.”

“What will work, then? If I go in there to talk to someone, and you follow me, neither of us will get any answers. So I need you not to follow me.”

She tilts her head, thinking. “That’s true. All right.”

I try not to let the shock show on my face, but fail. She laughs.

“I’m a reasonable woman,” she says. “You’re right. No one will talk to a PI if there’s a reporter in tow. You should go in alone.”

“Thank you,” I say, with a nod, walking back to the bookstore.

“I’ll be waiting outside when you’re done,” she calls, waving at me as I pull the door open. The little bell clangs, but she doesn’t follow me inside, so I go behind one of the shelves, out of sight of the windows, and take a deep breath. Between the chief this morning, and now the exact woman he told me to avoid showing up, I feel like I’m being hunted by something—not the usual way, but like someone is setting me up, luring me into a cage with a tiger. This is bad. If she keeps on me, she could expose me, my clients, my location. She might even stumble on the list, and then she could publish it, like they do the names of people arrested in raids on gay bars. Anything she writes about could get targeted, destroyed. Including this case: Pat, the family at Lavender House, baby Rina. Not to mention me. I swallow, but my throat is dry and it sticks on the way down, like swallowing a ball of sand.

“All right, there, dear?” A woman behind the register comes out and walks over to me. “You look very nervous, I don’t mean it rudely, though I suppose it comes out that way, but you do look nervous, maybe like you saw a ghost. Do you need a glass of water? Not that water will help with ghosts, will it?” She laughs. She’s maybe in her sixties, with short gray curls and cat-eyed glasses on a string of beads that falls from her face down and around her neck. She’s wearing a yellow dress with a blue cardigan over it and a small matching yellow hat, the colors so bold it comes across as childlike, and her expression seems younger than the lines in her face.

“Are you DeeDee?” I ask.

She nods, a little wary. “Dorothea, really, if you can believe it. My mother, though, she thought Dorothy was too plain, wanted me to have a fancy name. Like my sister. Rochelle. She thought that was fancy, too. But I go by DeeDee, just plain DeeDee. She probably rolls in her grave every time someone says it, but it’s not as plain as just Dot, is it?”

If I hadn’t been warned about her being a talker, I’d say she was trying to cover up a lie—people do that sometimes, talk so much they hope you won’t catch what they’ve buried in the words. But sometimes, people just talk a lot.

“I’m Pat’s friend,” I say.

Her eyes widen, and she nods slowly, over and over, as she thinks. “Well, let’s go in the back, then, shall we?”

I nod and follow her to the back room. She stops once at the register to put out a little bell on the counter, and a sign that says RING IF YOU NEED ASSISTANCE.

In the back, she sits behind the desk, staring at me. The office looks mostly the same, aside from a purse and a stack of unopened letters on the desk, and some paper taped over the broken windowpane. “So you’re the detective. The gay one, I mean. I’ve never met one in real life. Any detective, not just gay ones. Though I suppose you’re probably the only one, aren’t you? Gay detective, I mean. That can’t be a very common job.”

“Far as I know, it’s just me. Pat says you were surprised to find that Howard hadn’t been minding the store? And now you don’t know where he is?”

“No idea. I’m worried, but also Howard, he sometimes got these big ideas, and he would sort of follow them and forget about other things. Though never this bad before. At least not since we were children. We grew up a few houses down from each other, you know, our mothers were friends. Everyone thought we’d get married, that’s a laugh, isn’t it? We almost did, just to make them happy, you know? But being married to Howard…” She shakes her head. “It’s enough running a business with him. I was very happy living in a ladies’ boardinghouse until I met my Suzie, and then we found a landlord who just thought we were a pair of old maids who lived together for company. Marrying him would have ruined all that.”

“Sure,” I say. “But Howard, this week? Any idea where he’s gone?”

“Oh, well, I mean he knew where I was going, knew I was visiting my sister in Vegas. It’s a wild town, Vegas. Have you been? I don’t think it’s the best place for my sister, honestly. But Howard, right, you wanted to know about Howard. I really don’t know if I should be worried. He should have kept the store open, but Howard was so easily distracted, caught up in his ideas and plans…” She smirks, then shakes her head, remembering what we’re talking about. “Pat is worried. Are you worried?”

“Yes, I found some things out that concern me.”

She pales at that, and looks down. “Are you sure? I thought maybe it was just one of his little adventures, did that all the time when we were children. Vanished in the woods overnight once. They called the police, made a search party with dogs and everything, but he was just building a tree house out there. By himself! Saw the perfect tree for it, he said, had to do it.” She shakes her head, sort of amused, sort of annoyed. I get the impression it’s something she does a lot. “Had to do it. That’s Howard. Saw an adventure, had to take it. When we got older it wasn’t tree houses anymore, of course. It was men. Much more trouble than tree houses. But this one … if you’re worried…” She sighs, and shakes her head, looking suddenly so sad. “It’s that book.”

She looks over to the empty side of the office. The scrap of cardboard box is gone now.

“A new book for the service?” I ask. “The memoir you were publishing yourself?”

She freezes for a moment, staring at me, then shakes her head. “So you know about that. I told him, I told him it was a bad idea. A gay mobster. No one would believe it, and if they did then we’d be in more trouble. But he went on with it anyway.”

“A gay mobster,” I repeat, letting the idea of it sink into me. A wild book for sure. But who’s the author? Not Merle, I decide quickly. Merle might have been his boyfriend, but Merle is no mobster. And too young to have many stories. But his friend, Joe, the one who Bridges said wasn’t there anymore, he was older, he was definitely working for the mob. Could easily be him. “Did you know the author, too?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Some friend of his. I never met him. I would have run if I had. I would have run if I’d known…” She shakes her head again. “Howard thought it would make us all rich, like The Homosexual in America, he said, but with crime. Decades of stories of life in the mob, but also life hiding from the mob. Affairs, murder, oh he went on and on, I just…” She pauses, again, thinking. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter. When I came back, and I saw the book hadn’t arrived … I knew. Something was wrong.”

“Hadn’t arrived?” I ask.

“They should have come in on Tuesday. I left on Monday morning, I think it was. Yes, that must be it. It’s a long drive, you know, got there well past midnight, should have left earlier.”

“But the books?”

“Yes, the printer was supposed to deliver them Tuesday, like I said, and then we’d stack them up over there, like we usually do, and then the next week, yesterday it would have been, Monday, we’d put a few copies on the shelves and mail out the rest to the book service subscribers. We’d need to spend the weekend packaging each of them up, we have a lot of subscribers … a lot more than I ever thought we would.”

I nod. So the books were probably here, and then taken. Maybe by the mob. Certainly if they knew about the book, they’d want it gone, and probably Joe and Howard, too. Which would explain all of them missing. But if the feds had raided the place, then they would have taken the books too. And the way Bridges talked about Joe … it didn’t feel like Joe had betrayed them. There wasn’t any anger there. And wouldn’t Merle have known? I shake my head. Too many things are still unclear.

“Why are you so sure it’s the mob?” I ask.

“Who else would it be?”

“The feds,” I say. “The post office is cracking down on gay books being sent through the mail.”

She tilts her head at me, thinking, her eyes going wider. “You could be right. If they raided the place, then they could have arrested Howard and taken these books right here because they were all waiting to be mailed. But then why not the front of the store, too?”

“Have you checked that all the gay books out there aren’t missing?”

Her eyes go even wider and she practically leaps up from the chair and dashes back to the front of the store. I follow her. She flits from shelf to shelf, looking. “The thing is we don’t have just one shelf for those kind of books, of course, that would draw attention, don’t want that, that’s how you get bricks through your window. No, no, we just put them around in different sections, like … here’s one. And … there should be one here, but there isn’t…”

I nod. “So maybe they were taken, but they couldn’t find them all.”

“Maybe,” she says. She looks around. There are a few customers, but no one who seems to need help. They take down the leather-clad books and flip the pages quietly, the sound like rustling leaves. It smells in here, I realize. Like leather and old paper. It smells good. I can see why people want to spend time here.

DeeDee shakes her head and leads me back to the office, where she sits down again, her breathing heavy. She bends over, her hands on her knees. Her wrists are so thin, I worry she might fall forward.

“I’m sorry about all this,” I say.

“Don’t apologize, dearie. This isn’t you. This is…” She takes a deep breath and looks up at me. “This is the world.”

I nod. “I’ll find a way to check if it was the feds. If it was, you should hide the rest of those books, and be careful, they might have a warrant out for you too.”

She nods, solemn. “I understand. But I don’t think it’s them. I’ll keep the store open. With those books gone … it’s going to be hard for a while. I’ll come up with something else to send the subscribers.”

“If you do that, then the feds will definitely—”

“I’ll pick a clean one,” she says, waving her hand. “Nothing unseemly on the page, a sad ending where we’re punished for … being us. It’ll be a safe one.”

“I still think it’s a bad idea,” I say.

Her mouth hardens into a flat line. “Books are important,” she says, her voice harder than it’s been till now. “Even the ones not about us. Stories, you know, they let us see into other lives, make us imagine how it might be for other people. Howard and I, even before we knew what we were, we read together, traded books, talked about how the characters made us feel. When I had figured out what I was, it was because of a book I just picked up in the library … Imre. I don’t think even the librarian knew what it was. I don’t know how it got there. I read it, and … so many things became clear to me. It was about men, but if two men could be like that, then, women … well, I showed it to Howard, and when he had read it, we met—in that damned tree house, that’s where we always met—and we just cried. We hugged each other, and we cried, because we knew what we were and we knew that we weren’t the only ones, because this book existed.” She wipes away a tear that’s forming in her eye and leans back. “And now, now, that McCarthy and Cohn, they say they’re going to check for subversive books at the American embassies overseas. I have a friend whose husband works at one, and she wrote me, said that they might burn the books! In Indiana, an old librarian friend of mine says there’s a lady trying to ban Robin Hood. Too communist to take from the rich and give to the poor, apparently. She says the American Library Association is working on a statement, though. About the freedom to read.” She smiles, proud at that. “Well, I’m not a librarian anymore, but I’ll keep the shop open, Mr. Gay Detective. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll try to get the stories that deserve to be out there out there … as long as I can manage it, anyway.” She tilts her head and squints at me. “You know, if Howard were here, he’d probably be trying to get you to write a book. Anonymous, of course, like the mobster’s was.”

“It was anonymous?”

“Oh yes, didn’t even use a name on the cover. Just by ‘A Former Criminal.’ Though if he was still gay, even if he left the mob, he was still a criminal, I say. But I think that was about selling, about style. Howard was good at that sort of thing, better at it than me. He could sell a book to anyone who came in. Knew how to make them curious about it.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”

“He might not be dead,” I say. “And if it is a lawsuit from the feds, then he could get out soon.”

“Oh.” She nods, clearly not believing me. “Right. Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Still, best to go on without him, can’t rely on him for at least a little while, so I’d better get out there and try to sell some books. Did you need anything else from me?”

“Do you know where the mailing list is?” I ask. “I assume Howard had it, if he was here all week getting ready to mail books. Did he keep it in the office, home?”

“Oh, well, he knew a lot of those addresses by heart, he had a very good memory, at least for words, you know, not where he left things, but names, addresses, and he wrote them all back, so many of them, he just answered these letters…” She pats the stack of unopened letters on the desk, then looks down quickly. “I don’t know who’s going to do it now. Me? I don’t know if anyone wants to hear from me.” Her eyes linger on the letters, getting watery.

“I’m sure they do,” I say, though I know it sounds false. “The address list, though … did he have it? Pat said you knew where it was.”

She wipes her face with her palm and turns back to me. “I know the places it could be,” she says, looking confused. “You’re worried someone has it?”

“Maybe. And that could be dangerous for a lot of people. What does it look like?”

“Oh, it was just a little brown address book. Normal. No one would know all the addresses in it were … well. But I’m sure it’s around here. I haven’t looked around much yet, only got in a little before you, and some woman came up to me, asked me strange questions about how I was. Very peculiar, didn’t like her.”

“Yeah, she’s a reporter, don’t talk to her again,” I say, frowning slightly.

She pales and shakes her head. “Oh, I won’t. I know trouble when I see it, trust me, and when I see trouble, it’s time to go. But I don’t have the address book yet. I’ll look around, of course. It might be in my car, or apartment, or it might be at his house. I … don’t want to go there, in case he’s…” She shakes her head and then opens a drawer, taking out a large purse. She keeps speaking as she rifles through it. “I have a pair of his keys. He had a spare for my place, too, you know. Just in case. Never can be too careful, and we’re at the age you start forgetting things. If you find the address book there, please bring it back. I need it, so I can send out the next round of books. I’m not going to stop just because Howard is gone. This is important. And it’ll keep the place afloat. Without the book service, we’ll go under for sure. Just my savings … and oh.” She stops rifling and frowns. “Howard’s life insurance. I was the beneficiary on that.” She laughs suddenly. “Probably shouldn’t say that in front of a detective though, should I?”

“He could still be alive,” I tell her again.

She shrugs. “Oh, here they are.” She takes out a pair of keys on a ring and hands them to me. “If he isn’t, I’ll try to figure that out then. That could help keep the store afloat. He would have wanted that. He was a generous man, you know, too generous sometimes, I think. Gave away books sometimes, to people who couldn’t afford them. Always said books should be free. I said he should go work in a library then, and we laughed. Like they’d ever allow people like us to be librarians. Terrible life, hiding everything like that from work. I tried it for a little while, thought it was a good job after publishing, but then the government started getting nosy … I quit pretty quickly. Worked at bookstores. No, no, here was our little place. Even if he did give away books sometimes.” She looks at the keys I’m still holding. “Bring those back when you’re done,” she says softly.

“I will. And I’ll tell you if I find … him.”

“Right down the street, star on the door. He’s the back apartment on the ground floor.”

I nod, and shift my weight to one foot. The list is still missing. Hopefully it’ll be at his place, because I already looked everywhere here. But the idea that Howard might have memorized those addresses means even if I do find the address book there, he could still be somewhere, naming names.

“I suppose I should get back to work, plenty of customers out there, waiting, trying to find a book.” She forces a smile, looking at the door to the main room. “You should get to work, too, finding my friend. Terrible job, you have. Though I’m not paying you, am I? So is it a job? Is someone paying you? Pat?”

“Pat’s a friend. This is a favor.”

She looks back and smiles widely at that. “That’s so kind of you, really, such kindness. But I shouldn’t be surprised, Pat is so kind, and has so many friends, so many people willing to help him out, you know, because he helps so many of them. He’s here so often, just moving boxes, doing inventory, or reaching high shelves, and it’s not as though he’s much younger than us, he’s no spring chicken either, but he’s sprightly, and if he can’t lift something he can always find some young man to do it, he knows a lot of young men, more than Howard even.”

“Did Howard know a lot of young men?” I ask. Merle seemed like the type who could get jealous.

DeeDee blushes and turns back to the book of poetry, not perfectly wrapped, and taps her fingers on it. “Well, I suppose when it’s phrased that way it sounds sort of scandalous, but I didn’t mean it like that, you know. But he knows many young men, sure, and he’s … dated some of them, certainly, nothing wrong with that, they’re adults, just younger than Howard, but who isn’t younger than Howard? Except me, I suppose. He never really settled down, though, if that’s what you’re asking, not like me and my Suzie. But she died a few years back now, I miss her a lot, you know. And now Howard, too…” She sighs.

“He might be alive.” I’ve said it so many times, I almost believe it myself. “Don’t give up hope. I’ll try to find him.”

“You’re a dear. Such a nice young man. I wouldn’t expect it from your profession, but maybe that’s wrong of me to think. Read too many stories about those hard detectives, cold and mean, maybe. But you’re not like the stories.”

“Only when it’s raining,” I tell her. The joke doesn’t land. “Did you notice an odd smell in here, when you got back?” I ask. “Like fish? Did Howard eat lunch in here?”

She blinks, then shakes her head. “No. I didn’t notice that.”

“I’ll come back when I find out more or if I have more questions.”

“That’s kind,” she says, looking back out at the shop. “It’s really very kind, but in my heart … I don’t have a good feeling.” She tilts her head toward me and I see her face shake, so she looks away again, trying to hide it. She’s sad. Scared, too. The kind of fear she’s trying to tell herself she shouldn’t have, I think, trying to will it away. “Be careful.”

The bell over the door chimes and a young woman with two small children comes in. DeeDee goes to greet them, leaving me alone.