The Man Who Lived by Night (26 page)

I’m not terrible at it. Two No. 1 best-sellers, in fact. My background as an author of fiction certainly helps. So does the fact I myself used to be a celebrity. I know how to handle them. A lot of the lunch-pail ghosts don’t. On the down side, being a pen for hire can be hazardous to my health. A ghost is there to dig up a celebrity’s secrets, past and present, and there’s usually someone around who wants to keep them safely buried.

Danger is not my middle name.

My juices did finally return. Not like before they’ll never be like before. But I did actually finish the second novel,
Such Sweet Sorrow
, the bittersweet story of the stormy marriage between a famous author and famous actress. Somewhat autobiographical. I felt certain it would put me back on the map. A choice paperback sale. Movie deal. Great part for Merilee Nash. Tailor-made for her, in fact.

Deep down inside, I also hoped it would help me win her back — she and Zack had split for good over his drinking and carrying on. But things didn’t quite work out that way. For starters,
Such Sweet Sorrow
was not exactly a critical success. “The most embarrassing act of public self-flagellation since Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech,” wrote the
New York Times Book Review
. “The plot sickens.” That was actually the kindest review I got. Written, incidentally, by Tanner Marsh, who, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is not one of my eight or nine million favorite people. But I can’t blame the book’s utter critical and commercial failure on Tanner. No one liked it. Particularly you-know-who. She called me in tears after she finished reading it to say she felt like she’d been stripped naked in the middle of Broadway, beaten to a pulp and left in the gutter, bleeding, for bums to urinate on. Her words, not mine. She also said she never wanted to speak to me again. And she hadn’t.

That spring found her starring with Jeremy Irons in Broadway’s hottest ticket, Mike Nichols’s revival of
The Petrified Forest
. Sean Penn was bringing the house down as Duke Mantee. And Merilee was considered a shoo-in for another Tony nomination for her portrayal of Gabby Maple, the Arizona truck-stop waitress who reads François Villon and dreams of running off to France.

Me, I was facing the gloomy realization that my season in the sun had passed. I was closing in on forty and didn’t have much to show for it — two small rooms, $657 in the bank, some yellowing clippings, a huge ego, and a basset hound who eats Nine Lives canned mackerel for cats and very, very strange dogs. I had no future. I was looking for one when Boyd Samuels called.

His assistant returned with a steaming
Bang
coffee mug. I thanked him. He lingered, examined the carpet. He was painfully shy. Not a positive quality in an agent, unless it can be harnessed into naked ambition.

“For what it’s worth,” he finally got out, “I thought
Such Sweet Sorrow
was an even better novel than
Our Family Enterprise
. I really loved it.”

“That makes you and my mother — and her I’m not so sure about.”

“What I mean,” he added, reddening, “is I think the critics were wrong to punch you out.”

“Could be. But don’t forget they weren’t necessarily right when they lavished praise on me before. They simply misunderstood me to my advantage.” I sipped my coffee. “Todd, isn’t it?”

“Why, yes,” he replied, startled. He was not used to people remembering his name.

“Thank you, Todd.”

“Sure thing,” he said brightly.

“Been working for Boyd long?”

“Ever since he started out. We were friends in college. Well, sort of friends. What I mean is … ”

Before he could finish explaining, Hurricane Boyd hit. The man seemed to explode into the room. He was a human exclamation mark. “Whoa, sorry about the delay, amigo!” he exclaimed as he hurled his bulging briefcase on his desk, whipped off his Ray-Bans, and stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet ya! Indeed!”

I shook it, half expecting to get an electrical shock.

Boyd Samuels was burly and bearded and over six feet tall in his ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He had thick black hair and he wore it shoulder length and didn’t bother to comb it. He wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thick, hairy forearms, a bola-string tie of turquoise and hammered silver, and pleated khaki trousers.

“Coffee, Toddy!” he ordered as a greeting to his assistant.

“Right away, Boyd,” Todd said, hurrying off.

Lulu stirred on the sofa next to me. Boyd fell to his knees and patted her. “Hey, pretty baby, what’s happening?” She yawned in response. He made a face, turned back to me. “Jeez, her breath smells kind of … ”

“She has funny eating habits.”

“What’s she eat — old jock straps?”

“We’re going to pretend we didn’t hear that.”

Todd came back with the coffee. Boyd took it, dropped into his desk chair, and gave him the name of an editor he wanted on the phone at once. Todd nodded, retreated.

There was a bottle of Old Overholt rye whiskey in his desk drawer. Boyd poured a generous slug of it into his coffee, then offered me the bottle. I was starting to reach for it when a soft, low growl came from the sofa next to me. My protector. She was concerned that I was slipping back into my bad habits I had before when things went sour. I glowered at her. She glowered right back at me, baring her teeth like Lassie trying to protect Timmy from a hissing rattler. I was definitely losing the upper hand.

Boyd put the bottle away, struck a kitchen match against the sole of his boot, and lit an unfiltered Camel with it. Then he sat back with his boots up on the desk, smoking, sipping his laced coffee. The whole routine was pretty down-home shit-kicker; especially for an optometrist’s son from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Only the eyes spoiled it. The eyes taking me in from across that desk were shrewd and alert and as piercing as twin laser beams. The man didn’t blink.

Not until his phone buzzed. Then he reached for the cordless headset on the desk and put it on. It had a mouthpiece and earphones and an antenna sticking out of it. It looked like a prop left over from an old episode of
Star Trek
, the one where somebody stole Spock’s brain. Boyd jumped to his feet and paced around the office as he talked, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other.

“Yo, amigo, you sound like shit in a microwave! Gotta start living clean like me! How’s the little baby? … That’s beautiful, man. Beautiful.” Boyd shifted from chummy to grave. “So, listen, I have a firm offer on the table — buck and a quarter up front.” (Translation: another publisher had offered one of Boyd’s clients an advance of $125,000 for their next book.) He shifted to confidential now — the man worked through the gears as fast and furious as Emerson Fittipaldi. “None of this would be happening if it was up to me. You and me, we’re like family. I want you to have it. And if you’ll just match their figure by the end of today, you’ll get it, okay? … Sure, sure think it over.” He said good-bye, yanked off the headset, and flung it carelessly onto the desk. Then he sat back down, chuckling to himself. “Between you and me, the cheap bastard’s been all alone in the bidding since seventy-five thou. But what he doesn’t know won’t piss him off, right?”

“I thought that sort of thing wasn’t done,” I said.

“It wasn’t — yesterday. But that was when publishing was about books. It’s about bucks now, and anyone who says it isn’t is doing a yank on your frank.” He picked up a football from his credenza and gripped it by the seams. “I know, I know. A lot of editors think I’m a douchebag, and guess what — I like it that way. It means I’m doing my job. What’s important to me is that my clients are happy. And believe me, they are.”

He tossed me the football. It had been autographed by a drug-dependent pro quarterback whose memoir Samuels had peddled for six hundred thousand. Happy indeed.

He took me in with his nonblinking lasers. “What would you say if I told you I’ve convinced Cam Noyes’s publisher to accept a work of nonfiction for his second book instead of a novel. Exact same money.”

“I’d say,” I replied, “you’re almost as good an agent as you think you are.”

“It’s going to be a kind of portrait of his time,” he went on. “His life, his friends, his scene. Charlie Chu is doing original portraits and illustrations for it. An explosive collaboration, really. Like a labor of love for the two of them. Actually, there’s no existing term to describe what it is.”

“I can think of one — home movie.”

Boyd’s nostrils quivered, but he kept right on coming. “We’re talking about the top writer and top artist of this generation. There’s no doubt that it’ll be major.” He seemed utterly sure of this. And he was. Like all topflight salesmen, he was his own best customer.

“What’s happened to his second novel?” I asked.

“Too soon. Cam has to wait for his ideas to percolate — especially because everybody expects so much of him. In the meantime, he needs product out there. And some help — pulling it together. He needs a good editor is what he needs, only there are maybe three in the whole fucking town and his isn’t one of ’em. You interested in helping him out?”

“That’s not my specialty. There are plenty of competent free-lance editors out there if you —”

“You’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you, amigo?”

“That’s not my specialty either.”

He sighed, started to nibble irritably on the cuticle of his left thumb. Abruptly, he stopped himself. “Look, Cam Noyes is a cottage industry now. He has promotional commitments, personal appearance tours, speaking engagements — twenty grand a pop on the college campus tour. His time has become too valuable for him to spend it alone in a room generating material. Literary stars of his magnitude, they’re stepping back from the day-to-day writing. Subcontracting it. At least the smart ones are. They’re becoming like the great Renaissance artists. Those guys had a whole staff of studio artists grinding the shit out for ’em. Then they’d sign their name on it. Same thing.”

“I still don’t see anything here for me.”

“What, you need to hear the words?”

“It would help.”

“Okay. I want to hire you to ghost Cams … ”

“Labor of love?”

“I can’t offer you any kind of coauthorship of course. But if you —”

“Not interested,” I said, getting to my feet. I started for the door.

“Whoa, hold on, man! If it’s the money —”

“It’s not. You’re talking about a book I wouldn’t read. No one will. It’ll sell seventy copies. The rest will be recycled into low-cost housing material.”

“So make it a book people
will
read.” It was a challenge.

“How?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”

I hesitated. He had a point there. Besides, $657 doesn’t go far these days when you have two mouths to feed. “First, I want you to tell me the part you’re not telling me.”

He lit a Camel and narrowed his lasers at me. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“You want beating around the bush, get George Will.”

He let out a short, harsh laugh. “What I’m not telling you … Okay, you got it.”

I sat.

“I’ve known Cam Noyes since we were kids,” he began. “I don’t think of him as a client. I think of him as a brother.”

“You forget, I already know how you treat family,” I pointed out, indicating the headset on his desk.

“I’m trying to tell you I love this guy, okay?”

“And?”

“And … he’s in danger of wearing out his welcome in this town. He’s brought a lot of that on himself with his mouth. Genius or no genius, people are ready to bury him — no shit. And he doesn’t care one bit. All he wants to do is party and chase puss. I keep telling him if he doesn’t deliver some kind of class manuscript and deliver it on time, the party’s gonna be over. But he won’t listen to me.”

“What makes you think he’d listen to me?”

“You’ve been there. You know the pitfalls.”

“I didn’t exactly step around them.”

“But you understand what he’s going through. He’ll respond to you. You’re what he needs right now. I sure ain’t.” He scratched his beard ruefully. “Will you talk to him?”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m not in the market for a kid brother. Especially one who makes more money than I do.”

“Just talk to him,” Boyd pleaded. “You’re gonna love the guy. I’m sure of it. Want to know why I’m so sure?”

“Not particularly.”

He sat back in his chair, hands behind his head, and smiled expansively at me. “Cam Noyes is going to remind you of your favorite person in the whole world.”

“And who might that be?”

“You.”

W
HEN HE GOT DONE
groaning and sputtering Cam Noyes asked me what the fuck was going on.

“What’s going on,” I told him, “is we had a lunch date three hours ago and you stood me up. I don’t like to be stood up.”

“I noticed. Sorry, I fell asleep.”

“I noticed.”

He sniffled and reached for a Marlboro on the nightstand. He seemed unconcerned by his nakedness. Also by the fact that he was sitting in ice water. He lit the cigarette with a silver Tiffany’s lighter, pulled deeply on it, and let the smoke slowly out of his blood-caked nostrils. There was a mannered quality to the way he did it, as if he had practiced it in front of a mirror a few thousand times. When he put the lighter down, he noticed the lipstick Lulu had found. He picked it up and stared at it a moment, gripping it tight enough for his knuckles to whiten. Then he hurled it against the wall. It bounced off, rolled across the floor, and right back under the bed where it came from. Then he yawned, ran his hands through his hair, and smiled at me. It was a smile of straight white teeth, gleaming blue eyes, and long blond lashes, an unexpectedly warm and trusting smile with a hint of bashfulness underneath. It was a million-dollar smile.

“Cam Noyes, Mr. Hoag,” he said.

“Make it Hoagy.” I shook his big callused hand.

“As in Carmichael?”

“As in the cheese steak.”

“Are you from Philadelphia?”

“I am not.”

“Father was,” he said.

“I suppose someone has to be.”

Lulu put her two front paws up on the bed and barked.