Hearts of Sand(15)

“You’re a bookstore,” he said to the young woman.

“Partners and Crime, Mystery Booksellers,” she said brightly. “Haven’t you visited us before?”

“I don’t visit New York all that often,” Gregor said. “I almost never get down here.”

“Well, if you have the time, you should come in and look around. We’re the largest mystery bookstore in New York. And we carry, really, just about everything.”

“True crime?”

“Of course true crime,” the young woman said. “Although I’ve got to admit, I prefer fiction. But lots of people want true crime these days. It’s a very hot subgenre.”

The young woman flashed Gregor a smile and went back inside.

Gregor backed up a little to look at the facade. The name of the store was painted in gold letters across a black expanse that reminded him a little of the old Scribner building.

He went closer to the windows again. The young woman was fiddling with what looked like a cash register. He made up his mind and went through the front door.

“You’ve decided to come in,” she said, looking up. “That’s excellent. I’ve decided to sell you at least five books, all in hardcover. Is there anything special you might want to see?”

Gregor said, “Do you think you can get me something about a crime that occurred thirty years ago, a series of bank robberies in suburban Connecticut—”

“Oh, that,” the young woman said. Then she peered at him, suddenly seeming uncertain. “You know, you look very familiar. I’m not sure why. But the Waring case, with the murder and all the publicity—well, I do have some items you might find of interest.”

“Already?” Gregor asked. “It’s been—what? A week?”

“They’re not new books,” the young woman said. “But we stocked up. And I’ve got one that you might be interested in.”

“Which one is that?”

The young woman moved out into the store, waving at Gregor to stay where he was. She came back only moments later with a large, coffee table–sized volume that was obviously a picture book.

“There’s not a lot of text,” she said, putting the book down on the counter, “but a year from now, we’re going to be inundated with very good work. We’ve heard that Ann Rule is doing something on the case, on the murder case, of course. And then there’s always the chance that Gregor Demarkian will finally decide to write one of his own. I figure someday, he’s almost going to have to.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like to write,” Gregor said.

“Maybe. Still, if he wrote one, that would be the one you’d want. Anway, this book has got literally hundreds of pictures from the time when the robberies happened, family pictures of some of the people involved, or people the police thought were involved. That kind of thing.”

Gregor flipped through the wide tall pages, past one grainy black-and-white print after another. Every once in a while there would be a photograph in color that looked like an amateur snapshot.

He closed the book.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it. You take American Express?”

“We take everything,” the young woman said. “Let me ring this up for you. You really do look very familiar. If you hadn’t said you were just visiting, I’d have thought you were one of our regulars.”

2

When the time came, Gregor took a cab to the FBI office.

Sitting in the cab, he leafed through the book. It was not only large and ungainly, but haphazard and sort of oddly printed. The title was Gone: The Real Truth About Chapin Waring and the Black Mask Robberies, but there was virtually no text among the pictures.

Gregor stopped at one that took up an entire half of the page. There were six people, lined up more or less by height. He looked at the caption and found that the two enormously tall men were Kyle Westervan and Tim Brand, that the very tall woman just after them was Virginia Brand. That would be Tim Brand’s sister and, according to Gregor’s notes, later Kyle Westervan’s wife. Then the heights dropped off significantly, so that Martin Veer, who was next, barely made it to Virginia Brand’s shoulders, and Hope Matlock, who followed him, was almost as tall, but not quite. The two of them looked oddly out of place. They were boxy and lumpy instead of tall and willowy. They looked like members of a different species.

The last figure in the line was Chapin Waring, and she was very small indeed. There was, however, nothing boxy or lumpy about her. She was like an exquisite miniature of a pedigreed dog.

Gregor looked on the back of the book and found: KNIGHT SION BOOKS. He looked at the copyright page and found Knight Sion Books again, along with an address in Queens.