About the Author (34 page)

She was, however, less forthright in certain other areas of her police testimony. Unwilling to admit to any criminal activity of her own, she denied carrying out a blackmail plot against me; disavowed any knowledge of my having purloined a manuscript; and staunchly insisted that she had chosen New Halcyon as a place to escape to simply because “I love the hills and shit.” She explained the large sum of money I had given her as being “just a
loan
—I was gonna pay him back.” Les’s recalcitrance on these issues was unfortunate, because I (at Carston’s urging) had already come clean to the authorities about my literary theft and imposture—since admitting to the lesser transgressions was my only hope of avoiding being convicted of the greater one. So it was Les’s word against mine, and at that point, the authorities were taking a decidedly dimmer view of my character than they were of hers. Besides, despite my careful spelling out to the police of the complicated series of events that had led me from a life of penniless womanizing in Washington Heights to that blood-soaked room in the Halberts’ house, I could see that they did not believe a word of it. And frankly, who could blame them? In my anxious, stuttering, shamefaced retelling, the events sounded, even to
my
ears, like the kind of lame-assed Scheherazade tale that a child dreams up to escape, or forestall, punishment.

Fortunately for me, however, there did exist a highly compelling piece of physical evidence to support my testimony: a certain handwritten manuscript of some 297 pages. Discovered in a garbage pail in my home and seized by police on the morning of my arrest, this document (which I of course had been so concerned to keep hidden) now proved, in an irony of cosmic proportions, to be my savior, acting (as Carston put it during a pretrial session with the prosecutor and judge) “as nothing less than a corroborating witness to the events my client has described.”

The notion that a person could, through the process of writing, act as a legal “witness” to his own life struck me as a singularly elegant, and apt, description of the literary enterprise. The DA’s office naturally felt otherwise, however, and at first countered that the manuscript was itself was clearly a fraud, a “false confession” penned as an “
a priori alibi”
to a heinous, ingeniously premeditated crime. I think even the prosecution knew that this argument strained credulity, and the DA’s objections gently collapsed, anyway, over the following days, as Carston and his crack team of investigators methodically turned up a mountain of evidence to bolster the facts detailed in my manuscript. Oh, they dug up that red-lipsticked motel desk clerk in Quebec; they hunted along the Ghost River and found Les’s abandoned canoe, containing the paddle with my fingerprints on it; they were very thorough indeed.

The most salient piece of evidence of all, though, was Stewart’s laptop. The contents (including the original manuscript of
Almost Like Suicide
and the diary entries spelling out his relationship with me) verified and dovetailed with everything I had said, and acted as the final nail in the coffin of the prosecution’s case. They also exploded Les’s claims of complete innocence in regard to the events I’d described. Realizing that the jig was up, she (in exchange for immunity from prosecution) confessed to the theft of Stewart’s computer and the subsequent blackmailing of me. One day later, the murder charges against me were dropped. There did remain the question of whether I should be tried on charges of attempted murder for having steered Tommy to Les’s hiding place at the Halberts’ house, but a number of factors mitigated against it. Chief among them was that Les (deeply grateful for my having called 911 and thus saved her life) now emerged as my most outspoken champion, even mounting a vigorous public campaign to clear my name. The media, delighted at this fresh turn in a story that had seemed about to lose its legs, performed an abrupt about-face in regard to me, whom they had always depicted as a monster just a step or two above Hannibal Lecter. Now painting me as a man who had become enmeshed in a set of circumstances that had pulled him reluctantly into a life of duplicity and deceit (but not murder), they began to crow for my instant release.

The effect was immediate. The DA, sensing that the public mood had dramatically shifted (and facing a tough campaign for reelection), abruptly announced in mid-October that “insufficient evidence” existed to pursue a case against me for attempted murder. I
was
hit with a misdemeanor for unlicensed possession of a handgun (a technicality stemming from my appropriation of Les’s revolver when I fled from the Halberts’ house). Otherwise, all charges against me were summarily dropped. I was a free man, an astonishing turn of events that means that, at the end of the day, I owe my freedom, and my life, to the two people who, once upon a time, seemed my worst nemeses: Stewart and Les. The former has had his name reinstated on the cover of his novel and has joined John Kennedy O’Toole (author of
A Confederacy of Dunces
) as perhaps the single most famous posthumous writer in America; the latter has become a regular guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, where she routinely submits to games of “butt-bottom bongo,” parades the breast implants she secured with the advance for her soon-to-be-released “as told to” autobiography,
Les Is More
, and continues unwaveringly to defend me against all jokes and criticism from Howard and the gang, bless her heart.

My legal difficulties, however, were far from over. While no one (thank God) seemed in any hurry to level criminal charges against me for stealing Stewart’s manuscript, I did face a nasty civil suit brought by his parents, who, despite their earlier efforts to quash their son’s writing career, shortly emerged as his greatest literary champions. They demanded all profits, advances, royalties, licenses, options, and other income generated by
Almost Like Suicide
and were also suing for an as-yet-unnamed sum associated with the “pain and suffering” inflicted upon them by my “literary impersonation” of their deceased son. Phoenix Books, too, had brought suit against me for fraud and for damage to its reputation, and was demanding a sum equal to the advance it had paid me for the novel. After settling these suits (and paying Carston’s catastrophic legal bills), I would be destitute, consigned to a lifetime of debt, more broke than I had ever been in my days as a stockboy at Stodard’s Books.

I remember the day when this realization broke upon me. I was scheduled to have lunch with Blackie Yaeger, agent extraordinaire, whom I had heard virtually nothing from during the dark days of my imprisonment but who now, after my release, insisted that we get together for lunch. Ensconced at what I wistfully thought of as “our” table at Michael’s, I was a pretty desultory lunch companion. That is, until Blackie (who had been busying himself with the preprandial cocktail ordering, the menu, the exact placement of the napkin on his lap) finally trained his two curiously iguanalike eyes upon me and said:

“So where’s the manuscript?”

“ ‘Manuscript’?” I innocently echoed. I was not being disingenuous. The events of the preceding months had driven all thoughts of my scribbled statement from my mind.

“Yes,” Blackie said with exaggerated patience. “The
manuscript
, your
confession
, the
narrative
that the entire world has been slavering to read.” (I should explain that up to this point, no one besides Carston and the prosecution lawyers had seen the document. Placed under seal by the judge, it had not been available to reporters, much to their chagrin.)

“Well,” I told Blackie, “I guess it’s with Carston.”

“Get it away from Carston,” he said. “And get it to me.”

I did as I was told. Two days later, Blackie called me up.

“At first I was thinking about suing you
myself
—for libel,” he said, laughing. “Then I realized that your descriptions of me will only contribute to the myth.” He then laid out his plans. Claiming that the manuscript was the most extraordinary personal account he’d ever read (“It was wet armpits the whole way, Cal, and
I
knew how it turned out”), Blackie said that the obvious way to pitch the thing was as a memoir; he said he wouldn’t listen to less than a million for the advance, and the same for the movie rights. He said he’d already checked with Carston, and there were no legal prohibitions against my publishing and profiting from the story (since I had not been convicted of any crime). “Cal,” Blackie roared, “we’re back in business!”

At which point I was obliged to tell him, “Not so fast.” It was one thing to have had my dirty laundry endlessly aired and picked over by the press; it was quite another to make public my own account of the shameful events, to publish my innermost thoughts and emotions.

“You’re saying it’s too private?” Blackie shouted into the phone.

“Well, you’ve got to admit it’s pretty . . . embarrassing.”

“Jesus Christ, Cal,” he said. “Does the word
memoir
mean
anything
to you? Folks sleeping with their parents, folks cutting themselves up with razors, folks puking themselves to death, folks parading their parents’ excruciating deaths for gain—anything goes, Cal. The messier the better. Not to mention all the free advertising your story has already generated! Cal, fiction’s dead—check the sales of your beloved Roth and Updike and Bellow. Look, if it’s a memoir they want, we’ll give them a fucking
memoir
. We’ll give them a memoir that’ll make Frank-fucking-McGoo wish he’d never left Ireland!”

I reminded Blackie that this so-called
memoir
touched on lives other than my own. By which I meant, of course, Janet’s. “Things with her are still a little delicate right now,” I said.

That was putting it mildly. Janet was still trying to come to grips with the notion that I had lied to her about everything of any importance. On her bad days, she insisted that she could
never
forgive me. Now legally separated from me, with divorce hovering in the wings, Janet lived on in our house while I occupied a small rental apartment in nearby Darwin. We spoke daily on the phone—if
spoke
is the word I want. Often we both simply sat in silence, or one of us begged and pleaded while the other voiced recriminations. She said I had destroyed her life, a contention I could not easily refute, given that my actions had subjected her to six months’ worth of public castigation and ridicule as the betrayed wife of an accused murderer, philanderer, thief, and con artist—not to mention that the lawsuits were threatening to wipe out all our savings and force the sale of her ancestral home. Still, I believed her when she told me that it was not these worldly disasters that had so devastated her; it was the fact that I had been lying to her all along, that (as she put it) “we never had a genuine, private moment together because our entire marriage was built on your lies.” I told her that she was wrong, that
love
itself could never be a lie, but those words sounded pretty inadequate next to the deeds I had committed, and their consequences for our smashed lives.

I explained all of this to Blackie that day on the phone, when he tried to talk me into publishing my so-called memoir.

“Has she read the goddamn thing?” he interrupted.

I admitted that she had not.

“Give her the fucking thing to read,” he said.

I protested that I couldn’t possibly—

“Trust me,” he said.

I sent it to her. Three days passed. I heard nothing. I telephoned her repeatedly and always got the machine. On the fourth day, I was putting on my jacket in the cramped vestibule of my shabby studio apartment, preparing to drive to New Halcyon to see her, when I heard a knock on the door. I opened it. She was standing there, the manuscript clutched against her chest. Her eyes were glistening with tears, but her quivering lips were trying to form a smile. Then she was in my arms, the manuscript was in a messy pile at our feet, and she was clinging to my neck and sobbing into my ear. “You should have
told
me, darling,” she cried. “You
could
have told me!” She said that now she finally understood why I had done what I did, acted as I acted. Even today, I’m still amazed by this reaction, yet I suppose that despite this memoir’s revelations of my many character flaws, it leaves no doubt about my love for her.

Janet insisted that I publish what I had written, that even if no publisher wanted it, she herself would pay to have the manuscript privately printed by a vanity press. She was convinced that the book was the best accounting I could give of myself and of our marriage—the best antidote to all the poisonous lies and rumors that had been disseminated by the press. I told Janet that I could change a few things—for example, remove the parts about her and Les—but she said that I must not change a word, that she was ashamed of nothing, and that the
truth
was what was important now.

“I’ve even come up with a title,” she said. “I think you should call it
About the Author
.” She explained that the title punned on the idea that I was “just
about
the author” of the famous novel published under my name, of
Almost Like Suicide
.

“But,” I nervously ventured, “do you think that’s fair to . . . Stewart?”

“ ‘Fair’?” she said, shrugging slightly and looking away. “He stole your book from you in the first place.” She shook her head sadly. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but until I read your manuscript, I’d forgotten what a cold and calculating person he could sometimes be.”

I could have married her all over again for that.

The next day I called Blackie and told him about Janet’s reaction.

“What’d I tell you, kid?” He liked her title, too—though for practical, as opposed to strictly literary, reasons. “It begins with an
A
, so it’ll be at the top of any lists of new books for the season,” he crowed. “Now lemme get out there and
sell
this fucker!”

As contemporary devotees of such news organs as
E!, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly
and
inside.com
know, Blackie did sell the book, fetching a then-record-setting advance for a memoir, $2.75 million. (“You may be a fraud,” he said, laughing, “but you’re a
brand
now.”) One week later, his L.A. operatives shilled the movie rights to Dreamworks for a staggering $3.5 million. At a stroke I was able to settle my nettlesome lawsuits, with more than enough money left over for Janet and me to rebuild our Eden. I rejoined her in our home in New Halcyon and was greeted by the townfolk with a spirit of forgiveness and protectiveness that has made me feel more welcome, more a part of the community, than I ever did before the “troubles.” We are expecting our first child in two months.