On the flight back from Detroit, Wolfowitz eased off his loafers, sipped a Bloody Mary and took his time rereading the pages of Diary of a Dying Man. He was impressed. The concept was brilliant and the writing was vintage Mack—funny, touching and morbid. He wasn’t surprised that a dolt like McClain had mistaken it for the real thing.
Thank God for McClain. Until his call, Wolfowitz had no idea where Mack was or what he was up to. Then, yesterday, Claire had buzzed him and said, “There’s a man on the line who says he’s a friend of Mack Green’s and it’s urgent that he talk to you—”
Wolfowitz signaled the stewardess for another Bloody Mary and idly hefted the purloined chapters of Mack’s novel. He could see that the McClains were another Mack Green pickup, sidekicks like Tommy Russo, like himself, people for Mack to charm, to use and eventually to betray. This time, though, thanks to John McClain, it wasn’t going to work out that way.
They had met that morning in the coffee shop of the Pontchartrain Hotel in downtown Detroit. “Thanks for flying out here on such short notice,” McClain said.
“Mack’s more than an author to me,” said Wolfowitz. “He’s a friend.”
“I know. He’s told me a lot about you.”
“Some of it good I hope,” said Wolfowitz, the hick expression coming easily to him; back in upstate New York, he had known a lot of dummies like McClain.
“I brought a copy of the diary,” said the big ex-cop. He handed it to Wolfowitz gingerly, as if he were afraid the words might spill off the page onto the floor.
Wolfowitz raced through the first entries, making sure to furrow his brow and occasionally grunt with concern. “Thank God you called me,” he said finally. “It looks like Dr. Ephron was right.”
“Who’s Dr. Ephron?”
“Mack’s shrink. After you phoned yesterday I got in touch with him. Naturally he didn’t want to say much—”
“Naturally,” said McClain. “Those guys never want to talk for free.”
“But between the lines he let me know that he’s been expecting something like this. Apparently Mack’s been sounding suicidal for months. Ephron wants to see these”—he tapped the papers in front of him—“and whatever else Mack writes from now on. Can you get it?”
“Long as he stays with us,” said McClain. “Breaking into my own desk is a snap.”
“Excellent,” said Wolfowitz, smiling to convey admiration for the big man’s professional skills. “Send me copies say, once a week, and I’ll pass them on. That way Ephron can monitor Mack’s state of mind.”
“What happens if he, well, decides to go through with it?”
“Dr. Ephron said that Mack probably regards you as surrogate parents”—Wolfowitz shrugged to indicate his own inability to understand such abstruse psychiatric reasoning—“and that it isn’t likely he’ll do anything rash while he’s with you.”
“You ask me, what Mack needs is a good woman,” said McClain. “He’s lonely. It comes through on every page. I was like that until I met Joyce. You married?”
“Happily,” said Wolfowitz. “Very happily. I won’t be, though, if I miss my flight back to New York.” He made a rueful, you-know-how-wives-are face and scooped Mack’s pages into his briefcase. “Just keep sending me the pages and I’ll stay in touch.”
“This Ephron, you’re sure he knows what he’s doing? I mean, some of these shrinks—”
“Relax, John,” said Wolfowitz, taking his elbow to convey manly intimacy. “Ephron’s the best in his field. He won’t let things get out of hand. Trust me on this, okay?”
“You know what they say about guys who say ‘trust me,’ ” McClain said. Wolfowitz looked at him sharply and McClain grinned. “Hey, just kidding,” he said, tapping the editor’s briefcase. “I wouldn’t be giving you this if I didn’t trust you. If there’s one thing I am, it’s a judge of character.”
The pilot announced the plane’s descent into LaGuardia. Wolfowitz fastened his seatbelt and considered his next move. He took a small, leatherbound address book from his briefcase, checked under “H” and found what he was looking for: the phone number of Walter T. Horton.
Six months ago, Walter T. had come to him begging for help. He was HIV positive, had no health insurance and was desperate for money. “I’d even be willing to ghostwrite,” he said.
Wolfowitz had nothing for him then, but he did now. Walter T. Horton was going to write a suicide diary of his own. Like Mack’s, it would be the story of an author with a year to live who goes back to his hometown and moves into his old house. Its structure, plot, even some of its characters, would be strikingly similar to The Diary of a Dying Man. Only Horton’s novel, published by a small house in which Wolfowitz was a very silent partner, would be on sale before Mack Green’s diary was even due.
Naturally, Horton’s extraordinary work, given force and drama by his personal circumstances, would get a lot of publicity. Wolfowitz would discover, to his horror, that Green had stolen the idea for The Diary of a Dying Man from another author—one suffering from AIDS, no less. Gothic would be forced to sue, the news would, of course, leak out—and Mack Green’s career would be over; no publisher in America would ever touch one of his books again. As a bonus, the scandal would generate huge sales for Horton’s novel.
Maybe, after all that, Mack might really commit suicide—there was a morbid core to The Diary of a Dying Man that encouraged Wolfowitz to hope. Or maybe he’d just spend the rest of his life as a drunken, dazed pariah. Either way, Dr. Ephron wouldn’t be much help because there was no Dr. Ephron. Wolfowitz smiled, relishing the irony of inventing a fictional character to bring about the destruction of Mack Green. Maybe I should become an author myself, he thought, as the plane touched down on the runway.