Foul Matter (23 page)

Maybe he could have another talk with Paul Giverney. No. Pure wishful thinking. Still, he didn’t think Giverney meant he wanted Ned Isaly dead, for God’s sakes. Just out of the publishing arena, that’s all. But what in hell had Ned done to arouse such enmity?

Clive sat there rolling the pencil for another minute or two, then yanked out the Verizon, thumbed through its Yellow Pages wondering whether it was “Investigators” or “Private.” He found it. There must be hundreds of them; why was he surprised? This was New York, wasn’t it? He didn’t much like the idea of picking a name out of the Yellow Pages; there was the randomness of it, the gamble. It was hardly any more of a gamble than what was already going on, though. He closed his eyes and thought of people he knew who’d used a private detective.

Helen Shearling. She could recommend one; she must know a dozen. She’d got out of marriages one, two, three, and four with all of the houses, the BMW, the Mercedes, the Porsche, the condo in Cancún, in addition to hefty alimony payments that should keep the ex-hubbies in hock for the rest of their lives. It was all owing to the PIs and their cameras, catching hubby (one, two, three, four) with his current inamorata.
Flash. Click.
“How sexually puerile,” Helen had said on seeing the photos as she chose among them for two or three to present to her lawyer, who would in turn present them to the husband’s lawyer. What Clive couldn’t understand was why none of these husbands had turned the tables, given that Helen was no stranger herself to sexual puerility.

The trouble was he didn’t want a private investigator whose work was largely finding the bedrooms of unfaithful husbands or wives. A recommendation—Clive sat up suddenly. Of course! There was always Danny Zito. He searched through his desk drawers, through layers of paper clips and rubber bands and then remembered he’d copied the number from Bobby’s Rolodex card onto a scrap of paper that might still be in his overcoat pocket. He moved to the closet and went through every pocket. Right!

Clive picked up the receiver, dialed the number.

“What is it with you guys you spend half your time whacking people?” asked Danny, cheerfully. “How the hell do you get any books published? I sure hope you got a few minutes left over to read my manuscript when you’re done with capping your authors.” Danny fake laughed a
ho-ho-ho.

Lowering his voice without actually whispering, Clive said, “Cut it out, Dan—I mean Johnny—”

“Jimmy, fuck’s sake. You can’t even get the fake name right?”

“Okay, okay, sorry. Anyway. I’m not trying to cap anybody. I just want someone, you know, followed.”

“Yeah, sure, I bet, and I want the Pen/Faulkner Award.” He paused, Clive assumed to turn up a name. “Yeah, I do know somebody. Just don’t go thinking this person’ll take out Candy and Karl, man. We don’t gun down our own—I mean not unless it’s war declared. But on a daily basis, no way. We got scruples, unlike you publishing wanks that don’t give a shit as long as you can get some birdbrain on the best-sell—”

Clive broke into this building rave with, “Okay, okay, Danny. Spare me the lecture. You can get in touch with this person?”

“Have you forgotten I’m in the fucking witness protection—”

“Yes, yes. I mean should we handle it the same way? I meet you—”

“At the Chelsea Piers. Same place, same time. Tonight if you want. Listen, I got nearly a third of my book done.”

“Danny, how could you have that much? It’s only been a few days since we saw each other.”

“I write all the time. Me, I’m another Trollope, who I’ve been reading—well, glossing over kind of. I do what he does. I set my clock beside me and write two hundred fifty words per fifteen minutes. Actually, I can even go faster. I’ll bring along what I done.”

The writing habits of Danny Zito. What the world is waiting to hear about. Clive cast a weary look at Dwight Staines’s pages and shook his head. Nothing could be worse than Staines. “Why not, Danny? See you.”

Rarely did Clive veer from their main corridor, the one hung with posters and framed Mackenzie-Haack book jackets, at the end of which was Bobby Mackenzie’s office. But today he did turn a corner to a narrower passageway off which Tom Kidd sat in his book-swamped little room. Clive pulled up at Sally’s desk, situated outside Kidd’s open door.

“Is he in?”

“You’re taller, you tell me.”

Clive went up on his toes, looked over the stacks of books on Tom’s desk, then came down again. “Nope.” He was really here to see Sally, not Tom, hoping he could pry some information out of her, since he’d seen all of them in the Old Hotel last night. Isaly’s last book, what was it called? Shit. It started with an
S,
he remembered that. It was one word, he also remembered:
Sadness? Sorrow?
No. Oh, let it go.

He sat down in the hard, uninviting chair placed to one side of Sally’s desk. It occurred to him then that he had, for a change, a conversational opener. “Saw you last night in the Old Hotel.” Just having been there should be enough to engage anyone, given how difficult it was to get into the place.

It didn’t engage Sally, however, for she didn’t respond. He thought she looked a little grim and not because he was there.

“I was eating upstairs”—Clive poked a finger toward the ceiling, toward which Sally raised her eyes. He had never noticed it before, but Sally had, at times, a medieval look with all that thick dark hair and those peasant dresses—“with Mort Durban.”

Sally made a face, straightening up some manuscript pages. “I didn’t see you.”

“Great place, isn’t it, the Old Hotel?” said Clive.

She smiled and looked now as if the memory of it were coming back.

“For some reason, it makes me feel—” Clive stopped. There it was again, the impossibility of putting it into words. “—I don’t know. Kind of . . . homesick, or something.”

Sally’s expression changed again to the gloomier one of before. “It must make Ned feel that way because he’s leaving.”

Clive’s spirit soared. Was it possible? Could it
be
? “You mean he’s leaving Mackenzie-Haack?”

No, it couldn’t. “Of course not. I only mean he’s going home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh?”

She looked almost wounded, as if she’d defend this city to her dying day. “Well, people do live there, after all. And what’s wrong with Pittsburgh?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.” Oh, thank you, God, for this free information. “For how long?”

She shrugged as if a day or a year made no difference. He was going, that’s all. “Three days, maybe.”

Clive zipped his thumb along a stack of pages. “Huh. Does he have a house there? His parents still live there?”

“No. They’re dead. They were the ice cream people, you know, the Isaly’s Ice Cream people. It’s that really famous ice cream in Pittsburgh, probably still is.” If it weren’t, wouldn’t Ned have said so? It was his favorite topic after writing, Isaly’s. “He’s going to stay at some hotel.” She pretended to have to dig for the name, which was branded into her brain. “The Hilton, I think that’s what he said.”

“I’ll be damned.” Clive rose, stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets. “I guess I won’t wait for Tom. I’ll come back. Uh, when’s he going? I mean, you know, in case we need him for something.”

Sally looked at him with suspicion. “What would you need him for? Tom’s his editor. And Bobby probably wouldn’t know Ned if he fell over him.”

“Oh. Well, Ned’s supposed to get his new manuscript to us in a couple of weeks. I think that’s what the contract says.” He wondered why Sally glowered at him.

“I’ve never known us to hold anyone to the exact
day,
or even
week
before. So what if the manuscript’s late?”

“Oh, well, nothing, really. I only meant the book’s due soon. Anyway, he’ll probably be back by then.” Clive thought that was quite smooth.

Her suspicion appeared to deepen. But she said, “Wednesday morning, I think he said that’s when he’s going.” She
knew
he’d said. She just didn’t want to tell Clive, who now took his leave looking considerably more pleased than when he had sat down.

As he walked back up the corridor, Clive said the name—Pittsburgh—as if, with it, he might call spirits from the vasty deep.

But will they come when you do call for them?

Who’d said that? He looked around. Not him, that was certain. And even more certain, not Dwight Staines.

Sally’s sigh back there had been so heavy Clive wondered about her feelings for Ned Isaly, scion of the Isaly’s Ice Cream family.

Now he’d have to call Paul Giverney again. Paul wanted to be kept informed of whatever was going on with Ned. Probably, Paul hadn’t meant something like Ned taking off for Pittsburgh, but if Clive told him about it, then it would certainly make it appear he was bending over backward for Paul. Christ, it was as bad as Candy and Karl. You’d think Giverney would rather
not
know Ned Isaly’s movements.

Paul Giverney was getting to be a royal pain in the ass. That’s the way it was with these big-time writers; they thought they owned the publishing house lock, stock, and barrel. Probably, they did.

He picked up the receiver and wearily dialed the number.

Y
ou’re
what
? ” Lily was close to a shout loud enough that it would push through the McKinney walls and windows across the ample lawn and into their nosy neighbors’ house next door, the Thinpugs’. The Thinpugs were sure Jimmy was gay—married or not, children or not—because he wrote poetry. (“Poor Lily,” they enjoyed saying.)

Lily did not wait for Jimmy’s answer, not when she could easily supply her own: “Like hell you are!” She had been making brownies (which Jimmy hated because of their name, poets living under the iron hammer of language) and brought the dough-sticky spoon down on the dough-sticky pastry board.

The money that would come to him via Jimmy’s commission on Paul Giverney’s books hadn’t, in the long run, made up for Jimmy’s potential six-month absence, if it came to it.

“Yaddo. What the hell is Yaddo?”

“I told you. A place where you can have your own cottage and just write. They even deliver your lunch to your door.” Jimmy tossed in that detail just to stir the pot of her anger. He couldn’t help himself. He had grown that detached. “It’s not absolutely certain yet.”

“What isn’t? That you’ll be Giverney’s agent?” A piece of news she’d met with martinis and merriment. “Or deserting me and Mikhail?”

“Mikhail” was actually Michael (or Mike), their son, who’d ostentatiously changed the spelling of his name to align it with some Russian polemicist, even though Mike didn’t read, or at least Jimmy had never caught him doing it.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Jimmy poured himself another martini, ice diluted. “We’ll have enough money, as you were eager enough to acknowledge when I told you about the Giverney commission. A commission from a three-book contract would easily double what I’m getting now. All you have to do is continue your present life-style (a Barneys one, a Bergdorf one, he didn’t add). You can keep on with your tennis lessons at the country club and Mike can continue his teenage-jerk lessons.”

The spoon came down again, clattering among the aluminum mixing bowls. “That’s terrible! That’s a terrible thing to be calling your own son!”

Jimmy kicked himself, mentally. He had no desire to get derailed onto the subject of his teenage-jerk son. “Only kidding.” Heh, heh. “You’d have all the money you needed, Lil, don’t you see that? You’d want for nothing.”

Nothing except the prospect of Jimmy’s enjoying his life without her there to act as umpire.

With the back of her hand, she swept her red hair (“—
her famous hair
”) back from her forehead in a cliché gesture of “little woman baking brownies.” His entire life, Jimmy had decided, was a cliché. It made him shudder, comforted only by poetry, his or others’.
(“Not even Lilith, with her famous hair.”)
How stupid of him to think the money he would get as an agent for Paul Giverney would overshadow, for Lily, Jimmy’s leading his life out from under her control. Control was what she thrived on.

“You and your poetry,” she said, as one might say to Robert De Niro, “
You and your movies.”

“. . .
Nothing . . . that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.
” Was this, Jimmy wondered, going to be a line his mind tossed up as it did lines of Robinson and Frost?

Lilith was still complaining and all the while running knife lines through the pan of brownies. “You and your poetry are amateurs, the both of you.”

His face burned at that, but he kept his voice level. “Actually, publication takes you out of the amateur league. Because you get money for it. It’s like an athlete going with a national team. I’m a professional.”

“Ha!” The door bounced shut on the oven. “So now you’re Michael Jackson!”

“Jordan. You mean Mikhail Jordan.”

“Six months in some cabin and a lot of other writers. You really think that’s all it takes to improve your poetry?”

Before they had married seventeen years ago, she would have bit out her tongue before she’d said that. And even ten years ago she’d been excited when he’d published
Lapses.
Being utterly unaware of publishing—even though he was an agent—she’d assumed a lot of things would come their (her) way because he had become a published poet. Parties, fame, fortune. There had been one party; there had been little of the other two elements. That the book had brought in its wake respect, both Jimmy’s own self-respect and that of a few others, meant nothing to Lily. That Jimmy had remained utterly thrilled by his book’s being published for a long time afterward made her think he was a sap.

But he wasn’t a sap and he knew that. It was the difference between himself and Mort Durban. Jimmy understood what the siren song of publication meant to a writer, what a writer felt when a book was bought and published and he held it in his hands. Even if writers appeared to have lost this naïve delight in their books, Jimmy knew they hadn’t. Even if they appeared to be laboring for a big advance and bucking for a place on the list, Jimmy knew they weren’t. No, it was something far more important; it was finding the right word, it was
knowing
what the right word was. It might even have made them God-fearing if God had been, in that moment when exactly the right word came, at that point, necessary.