Allison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much - The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

The next week, several times, I called the California inmate locator service to see if Gilkey was back in prison, but he wasn’t. I called his mother’s house, where his sister Tina answered the phone and told me she didn’t know where he was. But I knew from Gilkey that the two of them were in frequent contact; I doubted she was telling me the truth.

Eventually, Gilkey called me and agreed to meet again, suggesting the Olive Garden in the Stonestown Shopping Center. Over a pizza, Gilkey explained that because he had stopped going to his weekly parole meetings, he was now a fugitive, a “parolee at large,” but he couldn’t have been happier. He had bought a new laptop, which he showed me, and said he was taking classes at “a nearby college” that he was reluctant to name because he wanted his whereabouts kept secret. He told me he was enrolled in a class on the philosophy of Nietzsche, whom he had mentioned as an interest before, and was particularly taken with what he described as Nietzsche’s idea that if a law or system is unjust, to break it down, to go against it, is not wrong. Apparently, the unfair system Gilkey had in mind was one under which he cannot afford what he wants while others can. There are books that cost more than Gilkey can pay, or wants to pay, so he steals them. It’s a correction to the system.

Gilkey said he had a part-time job at the waterfront, but wouldn’t give me any details. Living off a part-time job in an expensive city like San Francisco while staying in a hotel, however fleabag-ish, is no easy feat. I asked him what he was living on.

“I spent eighteen dollars yesterday,” he said. “Then I got a Lotto ticket and won nineteen, so I actually finished ahead. . . . I figure I’ve got good luck now. It’s time for a jack-pot.” He was full of energy and optimism. “What a story that would be! I win a hundred million dollars in the lottery and buy a rare book shop.”

I had the sense he was offering me an ending to the book I had told him I was working on. It would not be the first time he had done this, nor would it be the last. The next time we met, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that by the time you’re done with the book, maybe I’ll have read all the one hundred best novels, and maybe I’ll hire an artist to do the work, and I’ll have a show. That would be a good way to finish it.”

After giving that idea some thought, he added, “Unless I do something bad or something . . . but I don’t think so.”

“Have you been in any trouble lately?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”

WHILE GILKEY WAS still on parole and living, as far as I knew, in a cheap motel in San Francisco, I drove to his family’s house in Modesto to meet his mother, Cora, and sister Tina, a meeting he had helped arrange.

The Gilkeys live in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses with modest lawns bordered by rows of tall liquidambar trees shedding piles of leaves onto the sidewalks. It seems like the kind of town that thirty years ago rang with the sounds of bicycle bells and hollering mothers. I walked through the front door and into the dim living room, where every corner, wall, table, and shelf was hectic with collections. In one corner sat brass candlesticks, in another, English porcelain, “not like the cheap Chinese knockoffs,” Gilkey’s mother pointed out. There were Filipino fabrics, silver spoons, dolls from around the world, Norman Rockwell plates, salt and pepper shakers. Gilkey had said that his mother wasn’t a big collector, but I doubt he had been trying to hide the fact; it had simply never occurred to him to think of her that way. To amass large quantities of similar objects, to collect, was like sitting down to dinner in his family: one didn’t stop to take notice of something so natural.

Cora was a petite Filipino woman in her eighties with clear brown eyes and the slender, unlined hands of someone much younger. Her hearing was going, and her voice faltered, but her intellect and memory were sharp. After inviting me to take a seat on a dark leather couch that took up much of the room, she told me about how she had met her husband, the father of their eight children, in Okinawa while he was a serviceman, how they had moved to Sacramento, then there, to the house in Modesto, where collections of objects multiplied alongside their growing family.

“I got a lot of antique cups,” she said in slightly broken English, pointing to a collection as she led me around the house. “And bells, brass, books, clocks. John says it will be worth something. . . . Here’s a collection of cameos. John says to me, ‘Don’t sell it now.’ . . . I love collecting Chinese engraved silver. Hummels. That’s English, too. You go in the store, they don’t look like that anymore. John gave this to me, a candle. And that, he gave that to me,” she said, pointing to a brass candlestick. “You see all those angels there? John buy me all those angels. I got a lot of things. I told them [John and Tina], ‘Don’t let the others [siblings] get them.’ When I’m gone, it’s got to be divvied. But now they [the siblings] don’t even come see me. . . . One of my daughters already grab a whole station wagon and fill it with my old hats. Patricia did that.”

“My mom had these old hats from the sixties,” Tina explained.

“I said to Patricia,” remembered Cora, “‘Help yourself with this hat,’ but she took all of them.”

We walked into the family room. “You see: books, books, books,” said Cora. “All those are Franklin Mint books up above there. Crimes and Punishment . The old crimes, the old cases. Down below, piles of books down there. A lot of them are his, wrapped in plastic,” she said of her son. “And there is his metal detector to find coins.”

When we sat down to talk, Cora was eager to tell me about John. When she recalled him as a boy, she laughed. “He created stories and then just talked from his head!” she said. “And he loves to read. He can finish a whole book in one day or one night. . . . He has so many different collections and movie posters. He orders it, buys it, and knows he’s gonna make a profit. So he makes money.” She was awash in maternal pride. “You seen him lately? Oh! He’s big. And well built. And one thing about him, of all my boys, he’s the one with the real good posture. Always straight. My other sons, they don’t have that.”

Tina sat in an armchair at a distance from Cora and me, and seemed to be weighing whether or not she should join the conversation. Even with barely perceptible Asian features, like her brother, she strongly resembled their mother. Eventually, she told me how her brother liked to playact as a young boy. He would stand there, in the living room, make up stories for the family and tape them. Echoing her mother, she said, “They were often funny.”

When I broached the subject of Gilkey’s thieving, however, the laughing stopped. I asked how they thought he had gotten into so much trouble with the law, and Cora tried to convince me that he had been wronged.

“I mean, it’s innocent. Maybe he was just wandering around or looking around with the book, and he must have forgot about it, and then he got caught,” she said.

I wondered whether she was deluded about her son’s criminal activities or was trying to delude me.

“His father,” said Cora, her eyes darting in Tina’s direction, “I think it was his influence.” She nodded toward Tina, waiting for her daughter’s agreement, but Tina was having nothing to do with this line of speculation. Cora went on. She suggested John’s father’s desire to live profligately influenced him, in fact forced him into trouble with the law. She looked again to Tina for confirmation, but Tina shook her head in disagreement. Cora then explained how when her husband left her, he took then nineteen-year-old John with him.