TWELVE

Abby had not yet come down from the psychic buzz, the figures laid on her by Jack in the cab, as she was dialing a number in Seattle on the phone from her hotel room.

Abby had put Jack up in a room down the hall in the hotel for a night until she could think of what to do. While he was waiting for his room to be cleaned, Jack sat sprawled in a chair in the corner munching peanuts from a bag he’d taken out of the snack bar near the television set.

The phone rang twice. “Starl, Hobbs and Carlton, law offices.”

“Katie. This is Abby. Is Morgan around?” Abby looked at her watch. It was early on the West Coast and she was hoping that Morgan would be there.

“Let me check.” The phone went dead while she was put on hold.

“You never told me who this guy Jenrico was,” said Jack.

“He was married to a friend of mine. He beat the crap out of her and she divorced him. I handled the case.”

“So now he has it in for the two of you.”

“You could say that.”

“How much does he know about the book?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, he must know something if he got the film people to buy into the fact that he wrote it.”

“I don’t think he knows anything.”

“What about your friend? His wife. What’s her name?”

“Theresa.”

“What does she know?”

“She wouldn’t tell him.”

“So she knows you wrote it.”

“Yes, but she wouldn’t tell Joey.”

“If she did, or if she does, you’re gonna have a problem,” said Jack.

“What’s that?”

“He has something to hold over your head that could be worth two million dollars, the truth about the book. If it came out at the wrong time. In the wrong way. That could do some real damage.”

He was right, and if he got to Theresa, it wouldn’t take Joey long to figure it out. She was worried about something else, too, but she kept it to herself.

“I guess you think I could do the same thing,” he said.

She looked at him and wondered for a moment if he could read her mind. Before she could speak, the receiver came alive at her ear. It was Morgan’s voice, the sound of someone rational whom she knew and trusted. She was beginning to wish she had taken his advice and abandoned the charade with the pen name, or used Morgan, regardless of his age. She was beginning to wonder if age was really an issue. Jack was forty-three. She’d demanded a look at his driver’s license in the cab. There was only two years’ difference between him and Morgan. But there was something else. Like Redford, Connery, and Newman, Jack had something special.

“Good to hear your voice,” he said. “How’s it going back there?”

“As they say, there’s good news and bad news,” said Abby. “The good news first. The book is worth a lot of money.”

“How much?”

“Are you sitting down?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“I’m hearing millions.”

“A million dollars?”

“With an ‘s’ on the end,” said Abby.

There was stone silence from Morgan’s end of the line, followed by a long low whistle. “You’re kidding?”

“Not unless the agent is blowing smoke.”

“Well, that’s wonderful. Hey, when you’re famous, can I tell people that I once knew you when?”

“You can tell them you still know me.”

“Can I borrow money?”

“That we’ll have to talk about.”

He laughed and so did she.

“Now for the bad news. Some flake has bulldozed his way into my life and now has Owens believing he is Gable Cooper.”

Jack looked at her from under arched eyebrows. A hurt expression.

“Who?” asked Spencer.

“His name’s Jack. The brother of another flake. The guy I talked to down in L.A.”

“The Flake Brothers. I like that,” said Jack. “It has a kinda ring to it. We could take it on the road. Maybe do a little leopard skin butt flossing.”

Abby turned her back to him. He thought she was pissed. She was having a hard time keeping from laughing.

“Do you want me to deal with him?” said Morgan.

“No. No. Besides, what can you do from there?”

“I could fly out.”

“No. There’s no point. I’m just gonna have to work it out somehow. Did you get the copyright done yet?”

“I’m working on it.”

“When will it be filed?”

“I’ll get it finished tonight and file it overnight express in the morning. I’ll call the registry at the Library of Congress and see if we can get it expedited. We should have the registration back in a week, maybe ten days.” Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem. A common law copyright would be in effect the moment Abby typed the manuscript and put her name on it. The problem here was that her name was not on it.

“Good. The publisher won’t have time to file in Gable Cooper’s name before then. They don’t even have a contract yet.”

Given what was happening, the copyright was Abby’s life line. Without it, plus dealing with the enormous sums that were now being discussed and with a man she didn’t know and might not be able to control, she would have no evidence of ownership. At least she had Morgan.

“Listen, I’m worried about you.” Morgan sounded concerned. “I shouldn’t have let you go back there alone.”

“I’m a big girl.”

“I know. But if anything happens to you . . .”

“What’s going to happen? It’s fine. It’s just that I’m tired.” Things hadn’t worked out the way she thought they would. Abby didn’t like surprises, and Jack was a big one.

“There’s one other thing,” said Abby. “Do you remember Theresa?”

“Sure.”

“You remember Joey, her former husband?”

“Never met him. But how could I forget?”

“Somehow he managed to get his nose under this particular tent.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the book. Somehow he found out about it and managed to hook up with some people interested in film rights.”

“There’s a film?”

“There’s serious interest. It’s part of the millions,” she told him.

“Jesus. This thing really is exploding. Watch yourself with this guy. What’s his name?”

“Jack Jermaine,” said Abby. “But right now I need help with Joey. I’ve got to get him out of the middle of this and put the fear of God into him. Any ideas?”

“I can put an investigator on him. Have him talk to the guy and tell him if he doesn’t stay out of it we’ll sue him for interference with contractual relations. Maybe threaten to have him arrested for fraud.”

“The first one won’t mean anything to Joey. He doesn’t have a pot to piss in. But jail. That’s something Joey understands. Your investigator, do you have somebody who’s large?” said Abby.

“I can find somebody. Why? Is the guy dangerous?”

“Usually just to women. But you never know.”

“I’ll make sure our man has a firearm permit. That he’s packing,” said Morgan.

“It’s probably unnecessary, but just to be safe,” said Abby. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Take care of yourself. And Abby. Be careful with this guy.”

Abby looked at Jack, lounging in the arm chair, his leg thrown lazily over the arm, tossing peanuts into the air and catching them in his mouth like a trained seal.

“I will,” she said. “Good-bye,” and hung up.

“You have a choice,” she told him.

Abby and Jack sat in a coffee shop in the lobby of an office building a block from Carla Owens’s office. It was eight o’clock in the morning. They had an hour before she and Jack were to appear in Carla’s office and Jack was supposed to sign the agency agreement. Abby had made a decision.

“You can either do as I say, or I’m prepared to come clean with Owens now, tell her everything, that I wrote the book, that I own the rights, and have her throw your ass down the back stairs.”

Before he could speak, she added, “I know the book may not be worth as much if she finds out. But I’m prepared to take that risk.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” Abby was going to set the rules now. She had no intention of allowing Jack to call the shots. He had already pushed his way too far into the deal by talking to Owens without Abby being present the day before. She was not going to have it happen again.

“Are you in or out?” she asked. Moment of truth.

He took her measure with a calculating look. “What’s my cut?”

“I thought you talked to your brother?”

“I did. But we didn’t discuss money.”

“You came all this way and you didn’t discuss money? You’re not interested in how much you’re going to be paid?”

“Part of me is,” he said. “The mercenary part.”

“And the other part?”

He thought for a moment. “I suppose you’d have to call that curiosity, mixed with a little envy.”

She looked at him, a question mark.

“I wanted to see exactly how they publish a big book.”

“How did you know it was going to be big?”

“As soon as Jess told me the story line, read me the opening on the phone, I had a hunch.”

“And where did you gain this remarkable sense for commercial fiction?”

“Maybe I was born with it.”

“Maybe you ought to be a writer.”

“I am. I’ve got a chest full of finished manuscripts.”

“You’ll have to show them to me sometime.”

“I’ve got a drawer filled with tattered rejection letters that go along with them.” He didn’t tell her how the letters came to be tattered.

Abby could have lied to him. She could have told him that his compensation would be five percent of whatever she got; her original offer to Jess. But it was not the figure Jess had finally negotiated. She looked into Jack’s blue eyes, the tanned face. If anything, he was better-looking than Jess, rugged and more mature. And there was something else. It wasn’t so much an air of mystery as it was a look of danger. Jess was an Adonis, good-looking, but a child. Jack had some wear on him, a sort of lived-in look that you didn’t get with a model. It showed in the craggy lines of his face, and the steely gaze with which he held her eyes at this moment. You had to wonder what other things those eyes had seen. Peering out from a television screen, or from the back of a novel’s dustcover, it was the look to launch a million-dollar book, and Abby knew it.

“If you do everything I say. Do a good job. Play the role. Become Gable Cooper.” She looked into his eyes. “I’ll pay you ten percent of everything I get.”

“That’s very generous,” said Jack. “And I want you to know that I appreciate your honesty.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you didn’t try to cheat me. To pay me less than you offered Jess, cuz maybe you’re pissed or something.”

“I thought you didn’t talk to him about money.”

“I lied,” he laughed. “But I really do appreciate your own sense of ethics. That’s really special.”

“Give me a break.” She got up and started to walk away from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To tell Carla that I wrote the book.”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

“Well I just did,” said Abby.

“Listen, I’m sorry. It was a joke. I give up.” He held both hands in the air like she had a gun. “Don’t throw this away. You’d be out of your mind.”

“You think you’re that valuable?”

“Well . . .” He thought about it for a second. “Yeah.”

“No one will ever accuse you of modesty.” She was still walking at a good clip. Abby reached the counter of the coffee shop, handed the girl the check and three dollars, and didn’t wait for the change. She was out the door with Jack on her heels.

“Listen. You’re making a big mistake.”

“No, I made a big mistake when I got involved with your brother and ended up with you.” She stopped and turned and faced him on the cold sidewalk near an intersection. “Listen. I don’t know when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth. And when I have to trust somebody in a situation like this, that’s a real problem. You may consider it funny. I don’t.”

“I was only testing you.”

“Well, I don’t like to be tested. I thought maybe we had something in common. That you were a writer. Unpublished, but still a writer.”

“That part was true. Scout’s honor. I can show you the manuscripts. In fact I’d love you to read them.”

“In my spare time,” said Abby.

“I mean it. Listen. You can pay me five percent. That’s what you wanted to pay Jess.”

She looked at him, wondering where the hook was.

“I don’t want to see you lose this,” he said. “How often does a deal like this come along? You’ve written an incredible novel. All the ducks lined up. How often do you think that happens?”

Abby had thought about it a lot in the last two days. “Not very often,” she said.

“Once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky,” said Jack. “Do you think it will happen to you again?”

She looked at him but didn’t answer.

“Don’t count on it,” he told her. He sounded like the voice of experience. “Do you think you’ll ever be able to produce a book like this again?”

Before she could speak, he put his hand to her mouth. “Don’t answer that. Anybody who’s ever put a word on paper would say no.”

He was right. It was the insecurity of the writer.

“Commercial or literary, it doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Whenever you’ve written something good, that you think is really good, your mind says, ‘I will never be able to do that again.’ Now maybe you will. But at that moment of completion, your mind says ‘no.’ Until you actually do it again, you will believe it is impossible. And if your mind says no I can’t do it, too often and for too long, you never will.

“The good news is that for the moment you don’t have to worry about it. What you have to worry about is not allowing these people to squander what you’ve written. Because that’s what they’ll do if you walk away from this thing now. Like abandoning a child,” said Jack. “They will leave it to die.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might have been able to do it before, to come clean, to tell them the truth. But believe me, if you tell them now, they’ll be offended that they were taken in, and embarrassed to let the world know it. They will take your confession as a sign of weakness, that you had ’em by the throat and lacked the courage to finish the kill. The law of the corporate jungle,” said Jack. “They will tell you not to worry. They’re gonna blow it out, take it to the top. All the while they’ll be movin’ on to the next project, somebody else’s big book.”

He understood much more than she thought.

“You’ve been published before,” said Jack. “How did it feel?”

She gave him a quizzical laugh. “Five thousand copies,” she said. “There were heads of lettuce that had a longer shelf life than my books.”

“Right,” said Jack. “And they’ll do it to you again if you let them. They’ll tell you they’re doing a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar ad campaign, and they’ll do ten. They’ll put your book on the street and if it doesn’t grow legs and walk on its own in three days they’ll pull the plug and watch it die. Even if the book starts to take off, they’ll cap your press runs to avoid taking returns.”

Returns were the curse of the industry, stores sending back unsold books to the publisher for a refund, an age-old industry practice. Publishers, the smart ones, protected themselves by capping the numbers that they shipped. A store would order twenty and receive five and the author was never told.

“And they’re going to do all of this to me because your face is not on the cover?” said Abby.

“No, because you blinked. Because they’ll know you didn’t have the courage to reel them into the boat when you had your hook in their gill. If you pull out now and tell them the truth, oh, they’ll publish your book. But they won’t back it. You’ve passed the point of no return, Abby. You’ve taken a chance. If you don’t finish it, they’ll finish you.”

He was right, and Abby knew it. The first battle of publishing, the only one that really mattered, was with your own publisher. Win that, and the war could be over.

They stood in silence, the winds whistling through the canyons of Madison Avenue, people milling past them on the sidewalk. Jack held Abby’s gaze for a long moment, their eyes locked. She couldn’t be sure if she could trust this man, a stranger she didn’t even know. But there was an ultimate truth to his words that sad experience had taught her she could not deny.

Jack left New York that day. Before he did, there was a tussle in Owens’s office, hard-core dealing between Abby and Owens over the terms of the agency contract.

Carla had given Jack her standard form; in effect a personal services contract for life. Carla would have a piece of all of his future works even if he left her at some point and hired another agent to sell them. It wasn’t until they were headed for the door, refusing to sign, that Owens opened another drawer in her desk and pulled out the real thing. It was what lawyers call an “at will” contract. She was free to leave them and they were free to fire her at any time. It was the only thing Abby would let Jack sign. Beyond this, Carla got ten percent of everything she sold, except for foreign rights, where she would take ten, and the foreign agents she employed would get ten. It was standard fare. In the end, Carla learned one thing: Abby knew more than she let on about the business of publishing.

After signing at Owens’s office, Jack begged off. He’d had enough of business, told them he had things to take care of from his trip to Mexico, and asked Abby if she would stay behind to work out details with Carla for the sale of book rights. After all, she was the lawyer.

It was their plan. He told Carla he was going back to Seattle to write. Then he flew to Coffin Point. Inside the old plantation house he unpacked his luggage and repacked it with clean underwear and clothing, checked his mail, and dialed a phone number in California.

“Skytell pager. Please leave your message.”

He punched in his phone number and hung up. Then he grabbed his bags and went downstairs. In his study, he gathered a brightly colored box from one of the express overnight carriers. Jack had an account. It was red and blue, about the size of a shirt box. Jack had used them to send manuscripts to publishers and agents in the past, as well as a few other things. He assembled the box and filled out the packing slip, addressing it to himself at a hotel in Seattle for morning delivery the next day. He had made the reservations the night before from New York. As he was finishing the slip, the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Jack. How’d it go?” It was Jess in Los Angeles. He’d gotten the message from his pager.

“Hey, you know when you called I was a little pissed off,” said Jack.

“Yeah, I know. Interfered with your beauty sleep. You gotta get a life, brother. Come out here and party. We don’t hit the sheets ‘til the sun’s peaking over the mountains. And California girls are sweeter.”

“Pop was right. You never would have made it in the military,” said Jack.

“Hey, let me sleep ‘til noon with a blond in my bunk. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

“You’re soft, Jess.”

“Well, Semper Fi to you, too, but let’s stick to the subject at hand. What’d you think of her, this Abby chick?”

“Not bad. Fix her hair a little and get some decent clothes.”

“That’s not what I meant. This stuff with her book?”

“That’s why I called. I’m headed out to Seattle. There’s a loose end out there I have to take care of.”

“Jeez, you’re really into this stuff. I hope she’s paying you for all this.”

“Some things you do as a labor of love. Someday you’ll learn that.”

Jess laughed.

“She went weak on me yesterday. Got scared and wanted to pull the plug on her plan. But I saved her from herself.”

“I’ll bet,” said Jess. “Oh please, Jack. Take me. Ravage me.” His voice played a high falsetto and then he laughed. “And I thought you were just doing this as a favor to me. You dog. So is she good in the sack?”

“I thought maybe you could tell me.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Leopard skin butt flossing,” said Jack.

“What? Aw no. What did she tell?”

“She doesn’t kiss and tell.”

“Whatever it was it’s bullshit. I never touched her.”

“Don’t bother, Jess. She told me all about it.”

“Hey, listen.”

“She even told me about that little birthmark. The one on your thigh.”

“Hey, now I know you’re lying.”

“If she’s with child, we’ll know who to call,” said Jack.

“Right. Well it sounds like you had your chance to pull out . . .”

“You should really watch your choice of words, brother.”

“Cut it out. You know what I’m sayin’. If she wanted to pull the plug on the book, you coulda gotten out. Why didn’t you?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Jess. Let me give you a little advice. The next time you hand something like this off to somebody else, you might check to see what it’s worth.”