An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

Author:Dwyer Murphy [Murphy, Dwyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

14.

It took half a day, a pot of lousy coffee, a joint, and some digging through the yellow pages online, but eventually I came up with the name of the bookseller who had confronted me at the Sotheby’s fine books, prints, and Americana auction, way back at Christmas, when it had all seemed pretty funny and I was just out walking around the city, killing time, enjoying myself. John Stone. He was Reddick’s friend, his defender, ready to brawl but then not quite. He had a shop in the borderland between the Meatpacking District and the West Village, it turned out. A good address on the corner of Jane and Greenwich, a tony stretch of the city that had belonged to streetwalkers not long ago but now was home to rows of gleaming condo buildings and lots of restaurants that were scrambling to offer brunch to the people who had arrived in town after watching early seasons of Sex and the City.

I took the L train to Eighth Avenue and walked the rest. The sun was driving people indoors and had them huddling under warehouse awnings. Stone’s Books had a new sign out front, green with gold letters, only just painted. John Stone was prospering, or appeared to be. You never really know. I’ve learned from experience never to presume a person is free of obligations.

I stood outside awhile and drank a coffee from a bodega and waited for Stone to come back from his lunch break. He was the only one minding the store from the looks of it. It seemed strange that in New York of all places a shop could close for lunch, but I figured that was why people went into the book business, in order to live by the old customs and illusions. There was a little sign in the window that said, “Back in a Jiff,” which meant thirty-five minutes, give or take.

Coming around the corner, Stone was about how I remembered him from the auction. Forty to forty-five, hair graying around the temples, with an ineffectual air that traveled one step ahead of him and advertised his disappointments to the world. He had a paper bag under his arm. I followed him into the shop, not too close on his heels. He didn’t recognize me at first and said hello awkwardly and put his lunch down on the counter. He would be with me in a minute, he said. If I needed anything, that is—otherwise I should feel free to browse, only please don’t climb the ladders. There were ladders bolted to the shelves—wooden ladders and overstuffed shelves, just the way you want a used and rare bookshop to look, like he had sent away for it in a kit. The inventory was mostly fiction. He had a section in the back dedicated to crime and mystery novels, and on the wall there was a cutout comic strip that had something to do with Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t understand the joke, or else there was no joke, it was only a drawing.

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