The Agency (17 page)

“It sounds lovely.”

“Well, we’ll do it then, it’s settled. And how are you, Tessie? You are always so busy, busy, busy. And now this agency, how exciting is that! But I worry about you, so lonely over there, always working. I miss Alan every day. We had thirty-five years together, but it wasn’t enough, I would give anything for more time with him. Love is what life is all about, Tessie, so promise me you will find someone and settle down, all right? You shouldn’t spend your whole life alone. It’s not natural. And you’re such a delightful girl, you have so much to give. Don’t you worry about getting older, you have plenty of time.”

I never really worry about getting older until someone tells me not to worry about getting older. Suddenly, thirty-six felt like fifty-seven.

“I’m still looking,” I assured her.

“And what about Emma? How is she? She’s coming with you to your new agency, isn’t she?”

“Yes, of course. Emma’s in love again. An actress. Very pretty.”

Dorothy winked. “She hasn’t talked you into playing for the other side, has she?”

“No, although there are days when I think it would be easier to be gay.”

“I don’t believe many gay people would agree with you, my dear.”

“No, that’s true,” I admitted.

“Well, come in, come in, come in, it’s so good to have you back here again. I wish you lived in New York. It would be so nice if we could see each other more often. Don’t you think? Maybe you and Sally could get an apartment here together. You’d both love that.”

Dorothy waved her hand and led the way into her living room, which was vast, in the way that New York lofts are like warehouses. The floor-to-ceiling windows stared west toward the park and the Hudson. Dorothy sat primly on a bone white sofa, where her feet dangled above the floor. She wore a pink cocktail dress that fell below her knees. Her face was narrow and pale with two rosy blooms of rouge on her cheekbones and gaudy diamond-studded hoops glittering on her earlobes. She had a pinched nose with tiny nostrils that always made me wonder how she could breathe. Her gray hair was coiffed and sprayed so heavily that it probably hadn’t moved an inch in thirty years. Back in the days when spray cans had fluorocarbons, Dorothy probably launched the earth on its path of global warming.

The big loft and big couch made tiny Dorothy look even smaller than she was, like a child in a castle. She was everyone’s little old grandmother, which played well on the morning shows. If you had to build a children’s writer from scratch, you’d wind up with Dorothy. Sweet, not New York rough. A blithe innocent in the mean city. The small-town bookworm from Icarus, who never had kids of her own, was now an unofficial grandmother to the world.

Dorothy had already red wine poured into two balloon glasses. Good stuff, expensive stuff. I sat down and took a drink and realized I was exhausted. By my body clock, it was well after midnight, and only the excitement of the city was keeping my eyes open.

“You look tired, dear,” Dorothy commented. “How was the flight?”

“Fine. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t.”

“You should do what I do. Put on a silk mask and take a whopper of a pill. I sleep like a baby. They have to wheel me off the flight.” Dorothy giggled.

“How’s the kinkajou?” I asked.

“Kinky? He’s a hoot! He runs around like he owns the place, although he can be a teensy bit destructive. We’ll have to go downstairs later so you can meet him. Did I tell you he’s allergic to strawberries? I just find that so funny, because he eats most other fruit. Especially bananas. He usually sleeps during the day, so we’ll have to be careful if we go down there not to wake him up too suddenly.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Well, kinkajous will scream, charge, and bite viciously if they’re startled.”

“Let’s not startle him,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be alarmed, he’s quite sweet.” Dorothy’s brow knitted in annoyance, and she put her glass of wine down and folded her matchstick arms across her chest. “To think that poachers hunt them for fur and meat! Little things like Kinky! Is there any animal who is safe from butchery by people? It makes me so mad. I actually volunteered to do one of those ads, you know, where you take your clothes off to protest? They were kind, but they said no. I suppose it’s mostly models who do that sort of thing, but I wanted to make a statement.”

I figured this was a bad time to ask about good steakhouses nearby.

You have to understand about Dorothy and animals. She’s not a Dorothy-come-lately on the subject; this is and has always been her life’s passion. When I first met her in Icarus, she was the chair of the board for the local Humane Society, and her walls were already plastered over with awards, letters, citations, and photographs from the work she had done for organizations like PETA, the WWF, and the Nature Conservancy. And that was when she had no money. Since becoming a zillionaire, Dorothy has ramped up her efforts all over the world, and I don’t imagine there’s a zoologist or animal rights activist anywhere on the planet who
doesn’t know her name. Even her panda books are thinly disguised morality tales about animal conservation. Scratch the surface, and there are lessons about habitat destruction, climate change, endangered species, and human greed, starting with Filippa, the archnemesis of the pandas, who may as well have been a sister to Cruella de Vil.

I love animals, but it’s all a little over the top to me, and I’m not about to give up lamb chops just because the little guys are so cute. You won’t hear me saying that to Dorothy, though.

“Maybe you’d better tell me about David Milton,” I said.

Dorothy got up and paced, wringing her hands. “Yes, of course, yes. Oh, I just cannot believe this is happening. I can’t believe anyone could do this to me.”

“Let me worry about it, Dorothy,” I told her. “Just tell me who he is. What does he do, where does he work. That sort of thing.”

“He’s a lawyer,” Dorothy said.

Figures.

“He has an office on the Upper East Side. I met him at Tavern on the Green. He seemed like such a nice boy. About your age, I’d say, late thirties, somewhere around there. How old are you now, dear? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”

“Thirty-six,” I said. I hope your kinkajou eats a strawberry.

“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry—it’s not that you look older, although stress isn’t good for people’s appearance, you know that, don’t you? No, it’s me, I get confused when time passes.”

“David Milton?” I prompted her.

“Yes, I met him at Tavern. He’s nice looking, I suppose, tall, but everyone is tall to me. He has a rather odd nose with a kind of fold in it that makes it point a bit in the wrong direction, like it’s making a left turn. And you can’t help but stare, even when you try not to—do you know what I mean?”

“Do you have his office phone number? And his address?”

“Oh, yes, of course, I have his card.”

“I’ll see him tomorrow morning,” I said. “Tell me about Tom Milton. His father. Anything you remember.”

Dorothy nodded. She stopped long enough to take a sip from
her glass of wine and smiled with a faraway stare. “Oh, Tom, Tom, what a sweet man. Very quiet, didn’t say much at all. We both joined the Ithaca library around the same time, when we were in our thirties. He was an animal lover, too, like me, so we had a lot in common from the start. Poor Tom. He had been married for a short time—that was where David came from, but David lived with his mother in Albany back then, so I don’t think they saw each other very often. Tom never remarried. If I had to guess, I would say he was one of those men who was gay but had difficulty admitting it to himself. He was very private, very reserved. Liked to wear bow ties all the time. I don’t believe he and his son were close; he rarely talked about David, and I only met the boy once or twice in the ten years that Tom and I worked together. Alan and I had Tom over for dinner regularly. At least once a month for ten years, isn’t that nice? And always bow ties. A tweed sport coat, like a professor. He was allergic to shellfish, didn’t know it until he ate a shrimp at our place and puffed up like a sumo wrestler. Well, it wasn’t funny—we rushed him to the hospital, but he was fine.”

Never say “anything you remember” to Dorothy.

I’m not a lawyer, but I knew one thing. No lawyer would want to put Dorothy on a witness stand or have her face a deposition. In my occasional dealings with the legal world, I remember being told one thing. Answer the question and stop. Don’t elaborate. Don’t embellish. Dorothy had never met a question she couldn’t embellish for half an hour.

“What about Tom’s writing?” I asked.

“Oh, well, I think I told you that Tom and I both loved children’s literature. It was our specialty at the library. Isn’t that funny? Tom and I had so much in common, whereas Alan and I were like opposites, and yet the heart knows what it wants. I find that interesting, don’t you?”

“You said that Tom asked you to read a book he wrote,” I nudged her.

“Yes, he did. Tom had aspirations of being a writer, which I never really did back then. It was never my life’s ambition. Tom wrote short stories and had me read them. He never published any
of them, the poor man. He hated rejection, and when publishers and magazines said no, it crushed him. He couldn’t take it. He kept writing, though, which I thought was admirable. I encouraged him to keep trying.”

“Were his short stories about animals?” I asked.

Just please tell me they weren’t about pandas.

“Not that I recall, not really. I mean, there may have been animals in them, but no, I believe many of his short stories were scary, rather Gothic, with ghosts and monsters. The kind you’d read around a campfire, that sort of thing. Not at all like mine.”

Thank God.

“What about his manuscript? You said there was something longer. A novel.”

“Yes, as I recall, I read a longer work that Tom wrote years earlier. I believe he told me he had gone back to it off and on over the years. This was not long after I met him, so it was years ago. I’m afraid the book didn’t make much of an impression on me, although I would have been kind, because that’s the way I am. I have a recollection that the book was in the Gothic vein, too, like his stories, but I don’t know that for sure. Anyway, if it had been the slightest bit like my own books, then I would certainly remember, wouldn’t I? And I don’t.”

“Tell me again, when did you start writing? Was Tom still alive then? Did he see any of your books?”

Dorothy laid her index finger over her lips. “Tom died ten years after I met him. Very sudden, very tragic. How terrible that was. I don’t recall when I started fooling with
The Bamboo Garden,
but I certainly didn’t finish it while he was alive, and I know he never read it. I do credit him for being an inspiration, though, as I said in the acknowledgments, because I’m not sure I would ever have tried my hand at writing if it weren’t for Tom and his little stories. It seemed to give him such joy to do, and when I tried it, I understood.”

“You’re sure you don’t remember anything about that original manuscript that Tom wrote?”

“I really don’t, my dear, I’m sorry. Is it important?”

“Well, keep thinking about it, and maybe something will come to you. Did David Milton actually show you any portions of his father’s manuscript?”

Dorothy shook her head. “No, he just showed me a note I had written to Tom, which I didn’t remember, but I’m sure it was my handwriting. My penmanship has always been distinctive, I’m rather proud of that.”

Elaborate, embellish, elaborate, embellish. Sigh.

Dorothy sat down on the sofa again. “Tell me honestly, dear, do you think I should be concerned? I’ve been just frantic since this happened.”

I reached over and patted her hand. “I know you have, darling, but I’ll get this all straightened out. If David Milton didn’t show you this so-called manuscript, then I suspect that means he has something to hide. For all we know, he found your old note to Tom and thought he could use it to scare us into a settlement. That’s the way lawyers work, the slimy bastards. I’ll be in his office first thing tomorrow morning, and unless he can produce that manuscript, I’ll tell him exactly where he can shove his lawsuit. Okay?”

Dorothy’s tiny chest heaved. “Oh, that is such a relief.”

“I know.”

“Well, I’m just so pleased to get this nonsense cleared up. Would you like to have some dinner? My chef prepared a vegetarian lasagna. But maybe we could run downstairs to Starkwell South first and you can meet Kinky.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to muster appropriate enthusiasm.

“But remember, don’t startle him.”

Screaming. Charging. Vicious biting.

“No, I definitely won’t do that.”

MIRACULOUSLY, A CAB WAS DEPOSITING
a man half a block from Dorothy’s building when I left an hour later. I waved at the driver, elbowed a nun who was running in the same direction—okay, I’m kidding about that—and fell into the backseat with a groan. We headed uptown on Sixth. My eyes kept blinking shut, and I propped my chin on my palm as I stared through the dirty cab window. It was eight thirty at night, still daylight in May if you were up in a skyscraper, but gloomy and gray down on the street.