Lisey's Story(62)

According to Woodbody, it was Dooley who had turned their conversations in this direction. Lisey, who knew how Woodbody sounded when he was denied what he wanted, doubted if it had taken much effort.

And at some point, Dooley had told Woodbody that he, Dooley, could persuade the widow to change her mind about those unpublished manuscripts. After all, how hard could it be to talk sense to her when the man's papers were almost certainly going to end up in the University of Pittsburgh Library with the rest of the Landon Collection anyway? He was good at changing people's minds, Dooley said. He had a knack for it.

The King of the Incunks (looking at his new friend with a drunk's bleary shrewdness, Lisey had no doubt) asked Dooley how much he'd want for such a service. Dooley had said he wasn't looking to make a profit. They were talking about a service to mankind, weren't they? Prying a great treasure away from a woman who was too stupid to understand what it was she was sitting on, like a broody hen on a clutch of eggs. Well, yes, Woodbody had responded, but the workman was worthy of his hire. Dooley considered this and said he'd keep a record of his various expenses. Then, when they got together and he transferred the papers to Woodbody, they could discuss the matter of payment. And with that, Dooley had extended his hand over the bar to his new friend, just as if they had closed a deal which actually made sense. Woodbody had taken it, feeling both delighted and contemptuous. He had gone back and forth in his mind about Dooley during the five or seven weeks he'd known him, he told Lisey. There were days when he thought Dooley was a serious hardass, a self-made jailhouse scholar whose blood-chilling stories of stickups and fights and spoonhandle knifings were all true. Then there were days (the day of the handshake being one of them) when he was positive that Jim Dooley was nothing but talk, and the most dangerous crime he'd ever committed was stealing a gallon or two of paint thinner out of the Wal-Mart in Monroeville where he'd worked for six months or so in 2004. So for Woodbody it had been little more than a half-drunk joke, especially when Dooley more or less told him he was going to talk Lisey out of her dead husband's papers for the sake of Art. That, at least, was what the King of the Incunks told Lisey on that afternoon in June, but of course this was the same King of the Incunks who had sat half-drunk in a bar with a man he hardly knew, a self-confessed "hard-time con," the two of them calling her Yoko and agreeing that Scott must have kept her around for one thing and one thing only, because what else could he have wanted her for? Woodbody said that, as far as he was concerned, the whole thing had been little more than a joke, just two guys blue-skying in a bar. It was true that the two guys in question had exchanged e-mail addresses, but these days everybody had an e-mail address, didn't they? The King of the Incunks had met his loyal subject just one more time following the day of the handshake. That had been two afternoons later. Dooley had limited himself to just a single beer on that occasion, telling Woodbody that he was "in training." After that one beer he'd slid off his barstool, saying he had an appointment "to see a fella." He also told Woodbody he'd probably meet him the following day, next week for sure. But Woodbody had never seen Jim Dooley again. After a couple of weeks he'd stopped looking. And the Zack991 e-mail address stopped working. In a way, he thought, losing track of Jim Dooley was a good thing. He had been drinking too much, and there was something about Dooley that was just wrong.

(Figured that out a little late, didn't you? Lisey thought sourly.) Woodbody's drinking dropped back to its previous level of one or two beers a week, and without even really thinking about it, he moved to a bar a couple of blocks away.

It didn't occur to him until later (until my head cleared was how he put it) that he was unconsciously putting distance between himself and the last place he'd seen Dooley; that he had, in fact, repented of the whole thing. If, that was, it had ever been anything other than a fantasy, just one more Jim Dooley air-castle which Joe Woodbody had helped to furnish while drinking away the waning weeks of another miserable Pittsburgh winter. And that was what he had believed, he finished, summing up as earnestly as a lawyer whose client faces lethal injection if he screws up. He had come to the conclusion that most of Jim Dooley's stories of banditry and survival at Brushy Mountain had been complete fabrications, and his idea of getting Mrs. Landon to give up her late husband's manuscripts was just one more. Their deal had been nothing but a child's game of What-If.

"If that's true, tell me something," Lisey said. "If Dooley had shown up with a truckload of Scott's stories, would that have kept you from taking them?"

"I don't know."

That, she thought, was actually honest, and so she asked him something else. "Do you know what you've done? What you've set in motion?"

To this Professor Woodbody said nothing, and she thought that was also honest. As honest, maybe, as he was capable of being.

7

After a pause to think, Lisey said: "Did you give him the number where he called me? Do I have you to thank for that, too?"

"No! Absolutely not! I didn't give him any number, I promise you!"

Lisey believed him. "You're going to do something for me, Professor," she said. "If Dooley gets in touch with you again, maybe just to tell you he's hot on the trail and things are lookin good, you're going to tell him the deal's off. Totally off."

"I will." The man's eagerness was almost abject. "Believe me, I - " He was interrupted by a woman's voice - his wife's, Lisey had no doubt - asking something. There came a rustling sound as he covered the bottom part of the telephone with his hand.