Hard Case Crime: Blackmailer (2 page)

Miss Dahl was smiling.

She got up from the window and walked toward me. We were standing very close. It was so quiet that I could hear both of us breathing.

“Listen, baby,” she said. She was still smiling. She put her hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back into my chair.

“Listen, baby,” she said. “I have the only copy in the world of the book Charles Anstruther finished before he died. If you want to buy it, I’ll sell it to you. But the sale has to be fast. There’s another customer interested in it. I don’t care who buys it. I don’t care about that at all. What I care about is the money.”

I started to get up.

She pushed me down into the chair again.

“You can have till tonight to decide. I’ll get in touch with you and you can give me your answer then. If you decide you’re interested, I’ll show you the rest of the pages. Then tomorrow you give me the money, and I’ll give you the book. Think it over. You’ll hear from me.”

I started to get up.

“Don’t bother, baby. I can find my way out.”

Twice, after she had gone, I picked up the receiver to call Pat Conrad and twice I put it down again.

The phone on my desk buzzed.

I lifted the receiver very gently, trying not to break the spell. I didn’t want to wake up and spoil the beautiful daydream I was having.

I walked into Pat’s office (in the dream) and casually tossed the manuscript (347 yellow pages, typed, with pencil corrections) on his desk.

“What’s this?” Pat asked.

“Oh,” I said, “a book...”

“What book?”

“The new Anstruther,” I said casually. “If we rush it into galleys we can have it for spring publication.”

Pat was aghast.

Feverishly, with trembling fingers he seized the manuscript and began to pore over it, eagerly, hungrily scanning the pages. “Dick! Where—how—I don’t understand...” He was kissing me on both cheeks and blubbering when the buzz of the phone snapped me back to harsh reality.

“There’s a Red Arrow messenger here with a letter for you,” Miss Dennison said. “You’ll have to sign for it yourself.”

“It’s from some author’s wife,” I said. “She thinks she’s pretty smart. I’ll sign for it, but I won’t read it. I’ll just notice her name and I’ll deduct the quarter I have to give the boy from her husband’s royalties.”

I told Miss Dennison to send the boy in. I signed my name on the proper dotted line, and gave the boy a quarter. When Miss Dennison and the boy had gone, I looked at the letter. It was not from an author’s wife. I opened it and read:

MAX SHRIBER, LTD.

ARTIST’S REPRESENTATIVE

CARLYLE HOTEL, NEW YORK

Mr. Richard Sherman

Conrad, Sherman, Inc., Publishers

New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Sherman:

This is to inform you that I have been engaged by the literary executors of the late Charles Anstruther to represent and to negotiate the sale of
The Winding Road to the Hills,
a novel which was completed by Charles Anstruther shortly before his death.

I am hereby offering your firm the opportunity of publishing this book. However, because of the intense interest in this, the last work of America’s leading novelist and Nobel Prize winner, I can only extend to you a twenty-four-hour option. I must have a definite answer from you not later than noon tomorrow. I will be in my office from nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I will be expecting to hear from you.

Sincerely,

M
AX SHRIBER

I sat at the desk with the letter in front of me, trying to consider the matter calmly.

In the first place, I had never heard of a literary agent named Max Shriber.

In the second place, until less than an hour ago, I had not been aware of the existence of an unpublished novel by Charles Anstruther. Now, suddenly, it had been offered to me not once but twice.

I don’t know how familiar you are with the book publishing business in New York, but believe me when I say that the odds against a firm like Conrad, Sherman, Inc., ever publishing a Charles Anstruther manuscript were probably better than a thousand to one.

Conrad, Sherman was basically a textbook house. We did a novel or two when we could lay our hands on one, but the closest thing we had developed to a bestseller was our “Triple-Cross-O-Grams,” books of puzzles for which there seemed to be an ever bottomless market.

I walked over to the bookshelf and took down a copy of
Who’s Who in America
and thumbed through the A’s until I came to:
Anstruther, Charles, American novelist and short story writer. Born 1895 in St. Louis, Mo.

The entry covered a whole page. It listed his ten books, his five wives, and gave his permanent address as Key West. Under hobbies it said:
Big game hunting, skiing, stunt flying, military strategy, deep-sea fishing, fencing, and judo.

I smiled, remembering the story that had been current
a few years before. Anstruther, in filling out the form for Who’s Who, had included one other hobby, a short picturesque word in the participle form which he himself had been one of the first to use in print. The editors of Who’s Who had, naturally, deleted it.

Anstruther was probably not a better writer than Steinbeck, Hemingway, or half a dozen others. But he was more colorful. I had met him twice. He had been a large, violent-looking man with a red face and shaggy hair.

I had met him first at a formal dinner in his honor at which he had turned up, quite drunk, wearing boots and a flannel hunting shirt.

The second time had been in the office of the publishing house for which I was then working. We talked for a few minutes, or, rather, he had talked and I had listened in awed silence. He had come to the office to get a second advance on a novel that he had not yet begun. The subject of the conversation was limited to what he proposed to do if the advance were denied. He told me in great detail how he would punch the head of the firm in the belly, throw typewriters out windows and make merry with the young lady at the reception desk. He elaborated on this theme for perhaps fifteen minutes until the head of the firm appeared with a large check. The novel, incidentally, was ultimately completed and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that year.

A number of questions had begun to form in my
mind. I am a methodical, plodding soul, with a memory like a sieve. I took out a pencil and a scratch pad and began to write down the questions as they came into my mind.

1. Who is Jean Dahl? And if there is a new Anstruther novel, what is she doing with it?
   
2. Who is Max Shriber? And if there
   is
   a new Anstruther novel, what is he doing with it?
   
3. If either of these people do have the new Anstruther, why in God’s name would they both want to submit it to us?
   

I looked at the three questions and could not answer any one of them.

In fact, there was only one thing in the whole business that I
was
sure of.

Before joining Pat to form Conrad, Sherman, Inc., I had worked as an editor at the large, successful publishing house which had, in the past, published Anstruther’s books. I had had the privilege of working on two Anstruther manuscripts. I knew the way he typed, I knew his handwriting, I knew the quality and weight of the yellow paper he generally used. I knew (and this was something few people did know) exactly which words he invariably misspelled. You would have to have worked on his original manuscripts to believe that Charles Anstruther, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, had gone to his grave under the impression that immediately was spelled with one m.

What I was getting at is this: I was prepared to swear that the page Jean Dahl had showed me had actually been written by Charles Anstruther.

This did not prove that she had the other three hundred and forty-six pages that would go to make up the rest of a novel. But the possibility did exist.

It was certainly true that Anstruther had had time to write a new book. He had published nothing during the six years before his accident, and during that time he had periodically announced (from Cuba, from Paris, from Korea, from the dozens of places where he was always turning up) that he was at work on a new novel.

However, his drinking, which had always been a problem, was so far out of hand during the last years of his life that no one was greatly surprised when no new manuscript was found among his effects.

The end had been both tragic and a little foolish. Anstruther had accidentally shot himself while cleaning a hunting rifle. He had been, it was later revealed, in an advanced alcoholic stage at the time of the accident.

I picked up the phone and told Miss Dennison to get me Max Shriber’s office at the Carlyle Hotel.

The operator said that Mr. Shriber was out. She said she had no information as to when he would be
back. I asked if there were any place where I could reach him. She said that he’d left no message.

“Fine,” I said. “That’s helpful. That’s real helpful.”

I hung up the phone. Then, for the third time, I started to call Pat. And for the third time I decided not to call.

I was still sitting at my desk at one-thirty when Miss Dennison buzzed me to say that Lorraine Carstairs was outside. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she added spitefully, “you’re taking her to lunch.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. I
had
forgotten. It is very easy for a man to forget that he’s taking Lorraine Carstairs to lunch. “Tell her I’ll be right out.”

Lorraine Carstairs is the middle-aged alcoholic who is the author, or inventor, or whatever you call it, of the Triple-Cross-O-Gram. Triple-Cross-O-Grams are a combination crossword puzzle and twenty-question game. I have never been able to solve one. I have never desired to be able to solve one.

But we had published six volumes of them and they had never sold less than forty thousand copies. The most recent volume had reached eighty thousand and would probably go on to one hundred.

The first time Lorraine and I had had lunch together I had modestly suggested Schrafft’s. Lorraine had said a short, unprintable word and expressed a preference for Twenty One.

At first I used to take a tablespoonful of olive oil before I went to lunch with her. But it didn’t work. It did no good whatever and only gave me a mildly
sickish feeling for the rest of the day. Now I just drink lunch with Lorraine, and assume that the rest of the day will be a total loss.

“See what you can do about getting us a table downstairs,” I told Miss Dennison. “I forgot all about it again.”

Then I went out to meet Lorraine.

None of this is very important or has very much to do with anything. What is important and
does
have to do with something is the fact that I was at Twenty One that day and saw Janis Whitney having lunch. With a friend.

Lorraine had had five martinis before we got around to ordering food.

Then she ordered a sixth drink and began to get a little noisy.

I looked nervously around the room. People at neighboring tables were beginning to turn and stare at us. Two captains were hovering nearby, waiting.

“You’re not paying attention to what I’m saying,” Lorraine said. “I can’t talk to people when they don’t look at me.”

“I’m listening to you, Lorraine. I’m hearing everything you say.”

Lorraine’s voice droned on in my ear. I looked surreptitiously around the room.

When I first noticed her sitting at the table against the wall my only thought was, What a pretty girl. It took a second or two to realize who she was.

“What are you staring at now, Dick?”

“That girl—the dark-haired one in the corner—do you know who she is?”

Lorraine did not know who she was. Nor did she care a damn.

“That’s Janis Whitney,” I said. “You must have seen her in pictures.”

Suddenly I was completely sober.

She hadn’t changed much in ten years. She was more beautiful now, if anything. She was talking in a very animated way to a dark, heavyset man with thin black hair plastered to his bullet-shaped head.

“I used to know her,” I said to Lorraine. “We used to be very good friends. Would you mind if I just went over to say hello?”

Lorraine minded strenuously.

I looked across the room again and saw that Janis Whitney and the dark-haired man were getting up to leave.

“I just want to talk to her for a minute. Find out where she’s staying. Please excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

I pushed my way past the crowd at the bar.

Janis and the dark-haired man were in the doorway, and the doorman was signaling for a car.

“Janis!” I called. “Janis Whitney!”

She apparently didn’t hear me.

A Cadillac limousine with a uniformed chauffeur pulled up and Janis and the dark-haired man got in.

“Hey—wait a minute!”

But I was too late.

I looked foolishly after them as the car headed up Fifty-second Street toward Fifth Avenue.

“That was Janis Whitney, wasn’t it?” I said to the doorman.

He nodded.

“Do you happen to know who was the man with her?”

“He’s a big agent,” the doorman said. “Name’s Max Shriber.”

I stood there in the sunlight blinking for a moment. A big agent—named Max Shriber!

Then one of the captains touched my arm.

“Mr. Sherman,” he said, in his discreet headwaiter’s voice. “The lady with you. I think perhaps she has had too much—to—ah—drink. She is beginning to create a disturbance. I wonder if you would...”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll take care of it immediately.”

I went back in, paid the check, got my coat, and piloted Lorraine to the street. I got her into a cab and finally poured her, protesting all the while, aboard a train bound for Westport.

Then I took a cab back to my apartment.

I lay down on the bed with all my clothes on.

The room spun a little when I lay down. I propped my head up with a folded pillow and after that it was all right.