Small Town

Small Town Page 21

“Actually,” she said, “you sound like your old self.” He flexed his fingers, looked at the computer screen. He’d been at a natural stopping place when the phone rang, and had picked up without really thinking.

“My old self,” he said. “That’s pretty interesting.”

“Not that the John Blair Creighton we all know and love can’t be a cynical bastard. And ironic. Didn’t Kirkus comment on your almost diabolical sense of irony?”

“Devilish, actually, but that’s close enough.”

“Devilish is better, it sounds more playful. Well, ironically enough, you old devil, this may not be an entirely bad thing.”

“How’s that?”

“I know what you’re going through, to the extent that it’s possible for anyone but you to know it, and I don’t want to minimize it, but—”

“But there’s a bright side? I’d love to know what it is.”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but all in all it’s not a bad career move.”

He got a cigarette going and smoked it while she talked. She’d had a phone call from an editor at Crown, where his most recent book had been published. Sales had been disappointing, and his editor was no longer with the publisher, had in fact jumped ship before his book hit the stores, which certainly hadn’t helped his cause. It was the second book in a two-book contract, and Crown had had no further interest in him, or he in them, truth to tell, but this editor, whose name he didn’t recognize, had called Roz to talk about something else entirely.

“And then it just happened to occur to her to ask about you. I represented you, didn’t I? She thought she remembered that. And of course they’d published you, and people there had good feelings about your books, in spite of the fact that sales hadn’t been what any of us had hoped for, quote unquote.”

“Jesus wept,” he said. “They want me back?”

“There was no reprint sale on either of the two they published,” she said. “No paperback, trade or mass-market, and this fact popped into my head, and I said, you know, I was glad she’d called, because I’d been meaning to call her to get rights reverted on the two books, considering that they’ve long since gone out of print.”

“And?”

“And I got some hemming and hawing, and the reluctant admission that they’d had some recent interest in both books from a mass-market publisher. So I vamped a little myself, and admitted with some reluctance that you were hard at work on a major project, and that they should hold off on any reprint sale for the time being. She was on that like a pike on a minnow, John. As your loyal publishers, of course they want your new book, and of course they realize on the basis of my description that it’s clearly a more commercial venture—”

“How did you describe it?”

“I didn’t. Major project is what I called it, and how descriptive is that? I know it’s tacky, John, but in addition to being the designated suspect in a murder case, you’re also a hot ticket. Now I know that right now writing, or even thinking about writing, is the last thing you feel like doing, but hear me out, okay?” He leaned back, blew a smoke ring. “Okay,” he said, amused.

“You could use a few bucks, sweetie. I don’t know what Maurice Winters charges, but he’s got to be billing at a base rate of six or seven hundred dollars an hour, and it doesn’t take long for that to add up. And didn’t you say something about a private detective?”

“Yeah, and the guy’s bar bill alone . . .”

“The point is it would be good if you could make some serious dough, and all of a sudden it looks as though you can. Soon as I got done with your new big fan at Crown, I made a few well-considered phone calls to a few top people here and there.” She named some names. “I got interest and enthusiasm from everybody I talked to,” she said, “and they didn’t even bother trying to conceal it.”

“And nobody found it unacceptably crass to cash in on a book by an accused murderer?”

“No. You think I’m being crass, John?”

“No, not at all.”

“You’re my client,” she said, “and you’re on the spot financially, along with whatever else you’re going through. If you can get a big transfusion of cash, it’s got to take some of the pressure off.” She stopped herself for a moment. “On the other hand,” she said, “it’s not as though I’m going to waive my commission. If you make a fortune I make fifteen percent of a fortune, so I’m very much acting in my own interest here, as well as yours.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Makes the world go round, or so I’m told. One way to look at this, life handed you a lemon and we’re opening a lemonade stand. Can I tell you what I want to do?”

“By all means.”

“I want to get back to all these nice people who say they can’t wait to hear more from me, and I want to put a package into play involving your next two books plus your backlist titles, the ones we control the rights to. I’ll tell them I’m going to run an informal auction, but I’ll be open to a really solid preemptive offer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get one that’s good enough to take.”

“How good would it have to be?”

“High six figures. That surprise you?”

“No,” he said, “not the way you’ve been talking. Ten minutes ago it would have surprised the shit out of me. Now it seems perfectly logical, in a cockeyed kind of way.”

“Cockeyed’s the word for it. Sweetie, before I start selling something, it would help to know if I’ve got something to sell. I’m sure writing’s the last thing you feel like doing, the last thing you even think you’d be capable of doing, but it might get you through the days. At the least it’ll give you something you can do without leaving the house, and it might even be therapeutic, and . . . what’s the matter, did I say something funny?”

“Funnier than Hannah’s bat mitzvah,” he said. “After I got off the phone with you, I started writing.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor. Hold on a sec.” He went to the Tools menu, selected Word Count. “Eight hundred and eighty-three words,” he said, “and where would we be without computers? A few years ago I’d have said I was on the fourth page, but now I can apprise you of my progress with pinpoint accuracy.”

“That’s great, John. You went back to work on the book? That shows you can write, and if you’re really into that book, well, you should stay with it, but . . .”

“But what?”

She took a breath. “I don’t want to tell you what to write, John.

That’s something I never want to do. But if you were ever going to write a book with more deliberately commercial potential . . .”

“Now would be the time for it, huh?”

“From what you showed me of the book you’re working on, now there’s nothing wrong with it and a lot that’s right with it, and it could certainly work as the second book in a two-book deal, but right now . . .”

He said, “Roz, that’s not what I was just working on. I looked at it, I felt completely out of touch with it.”

“Oh.”

“So I started something new.”

“Just now, we’re talking about.”

“Right.”

“That you’ve got eight hundred words done of.”

“Eight hundred and change.”

“And does it have, how to put it, commercial elements? I know it’s early to say, but is there any way it could be described as a thriller? Literary of course, anything you write is going to be literary, which is all to the good, but would it, uh . . .”

“Tie in with my present circumstances?”

“Thank you. Would it?”

“Remember the story we were talking about? ‘A Nice Place to Stop’?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s it.”

“The story expanded to novel length,” she said thoughtfully. “I can see how that might work. Flashbacks to give you more of a sense of who the characters are, and—”

“No, that’s not it. The novel’s not an expansion of the story, it starts with the story. Only I’m rewriting the story, of course, in fact I just plunged right in without even re- reading the story, because I have a very different perspective on the characters now. I mean, look how many years it’s been since I wrote the thing, plus all the time since the incident that inspired it.”

“Of course.”

“It starts with the story,” he said, “and he knocks her out with the tire iron, and then changes his mind, but it’s too late. So he does what he planned on doing, buries her deep and lights out for the territories, except he’s in the territories, and what he lights out for is New York.”

“And it’s how he gets pursued and caught?”

“He gets away with it.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know what happens,” he said, “because I’ll find out by writing it, but it feels as though I do know what happens, all of it, except not on a conscious level. But it’s all down there waiting for me to dig it out.” He leaned back in his chair. “Anyway, I’m what, eight hundred words in? I’ll be covering old ground for the first several thousand words, but it’s all preface to his life in New York, and what it’s like for him to create a life founded on having gotten away with murder. How that’s empowering in certain ways and constraining in others. I guess sooner or later it all has to come back and bite him in the ass, but just what bites him and what part of his ass gets the tooth marks, well, I’ll wait for the book to tell me that.” He took a breath. “So? What do you think?”

“What I think,” she said, “is that Maury Winters isn’t going to have to worry about getting paid.”

IT WASN’T WHATshe’d expected.

It was an apartment, first of all, on the fifteenth floor of a thirty-story postwar apartment building on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. She’d known as much, really, but had somehow pictured the place as a ground-floor hole-in-the-wall with a hand-lettered sign over the door, T*A*T*T*O*O P*A*R*L*O*R in curlicued, over-elaborate script, and a window full of tattoo art and needles and scary-looking equipment. Inside it would be cramped and claustrophobic, with nothing more comfortable to sit on than those three-legged stools they gave you in Ethiopian restaurants.

And Medea would be a sort of cross between a pirate and a gypsy, oily and squat and swarthy, with a head scarf and a gold tooth and a trace of a mustache, perched on a stool of her own and assessing her with a cataract-clouded eye, sizing her up, deciding whether to pierce her flesh as requested or drug her and sell her into white slavery.

And of course it was nothing like that. The building had a concierge, resplendent in maroon livery, who called upstairs before directing her to an elevator. Medea, waiting in the doorway of 15-H, was about Susan’s height, with a long oval Modigliani face and almond-shaped eyes. She was wearing a simple white sleeveless shift that stopped at her knees, and she had calves like a dancer’s and arms like a tennis player’s.