The Other Devil's Name

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Would mean a lot to anybody,” Parr said, mostly to himself. “Harris Jr. gave me the impression that the lean years were very lean indeed. Wasn’t he into the bank for a couple of million or more?”

  “About two. But George was hanging in. And, as I said, he was optimistic. He seemed sure of himself.”

  “Would it have been realistic for him to think that one good list—how many books is that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe thirty-five…”

  “Well, could those books alone have got him out of debt?”

  “Point is he believed it. While he believed it, he had something to fight for, and while he had something to fight for, he would not have given up. Not George.”

  Parr didn’t mind her getting angry. As long as she didn’t cry. He sipped his coffee and nodded reassuringly.

  “What time did you leave his office?”

  “Around 9:30. We were going to continue the interview next week. I was to call him today and set up a time. He thought he would have a drink with Marsha Hillier and me this afternoon.”

  “Who?”

  “Marsha Hillier—a publisher in New York. She’s coming because it’s my birthday.” That’s the second time she had brought up the birthday in less than half an hour. Last night she hadn’t told her friends, now she insisted on telling the policeman. Perhaps early senility?

  “I’m sorry.”

  Why was he sorry? It wasn’t his birthday.

  “Did you and Harris leave his office together?”

  “No. He said he had some work to finish and phone calls to make. He had a lot to do still. He couldn’t have been planning to kill himself.”

  Once Parr had collected his raincoat and she was alone, Judith lit her first cigarette of the day and poured herself a generous Bloody Mary.

  “That’s for you, George,” she said as she took a sip. “You never liked long faces or dreary people and you were a firm believer in Bloody Marys before noon.”

  She tidied up the kitchen and the living room, then took out the two frozen Quiches Lorraine she had been saving for a special occasion. They would defrost slightly by late afternoon.

  It might be wise to invest in a dishwasher, she thought. Kids didn’t like washing dishes any more than she did. If only she could get a big enough assignment, she might even prevail on the plumber to come and they’d have two working toilets again. You couldn’t revel in such luxuries on $1,500 a month—when the going was good—and two growing kids. That’s another thing: at fourteen and sixteen, respectively, shouldn’t they stop growing soon? It would make a hell of a difference to the clothes budget. Even if Jimmy enjoyed having his jeans in tatters, he did like them to reach his ankles.

  Hard as she tried to fill it with trivia, her mind kept returning to George Harris. What in heaven’s name would he have been doing on the subway late at night? What, now that she thought of it, would he be doing on the subway at any time? George drove a car. His office was nowhere near the subway line. He never traveled by subway. Not even in dire straits. Hell, when the company was almost bankrupt, he still took first-class air tickets. Always a man with a sense of style. If he couldn’t drive, he’d get a cab. He’d walk, for chrissakes! Worst came to the worst, he’d stay where he was. Let them come to him. Strange how the failure of his business to make money had affected George. The poorer the firm became, the more style he got.

  She took out her interview notes which, as usual, were copious. Out of two hours with George Harris, she had recorded over thirty pages of tightly packed shorthand.

  She had read through the first twenty when the managing editor of Saturday Night called. Had she heard the news, and could she get the story in by the end of the week? Now that George had died, there would be a number of stories. Hers was farthest ahead and they wanted it for the next issue. She said she would try, though she didn’t think she could pull it together so quickly, at least not while there was any question of suicide.

  The managing editor was quite convinced that they shouldn’t probe into the suicide theory. The family wouldn’t want that to be a topic of public discussion. They were entitled to some privacy.

  After she had hung up, Judith finished reading her notes. Just as she remembered, George had been positively ebullient, really enthusiastic about the future. A few years ago he had had to restrain the publishing list, but those had been hard times in all spheres of business. Now he felt his debts were manageable. He anticipated that the whole industry would benefit from the federal government’s new policy paper, and his firm, strong in its history of support for Canadian talent, would undoubtedly benefit the most. He planned to go to the American Booksellers’ Association convention this year, for the first time in seven, because he had some important properties to discuss with American publishers. And he had just accepted an invitation to be the luncheon speaker at the annual meeting of the Canadian Authors’ Association in Vancouver. He was going to talk about the importance of publicity for the success of a book and had a number of jokes and personal anecdotes already sketched out.

  Would a man who was about to kill himself be inventing jokes?

  Chapter Three

  Now that she saw how miserable Judith looked, Marsha wished she’d been able to come last night, but Jelinek had staged an auction for Reginald Montgomery’s new multi-generational saga, and Marsha had to be in on the bidding. It had opened at 4:00 p.m. with a floor price of $50,000, not an unhealthy start by Morrow (she guessed it was Morrow; the agent would sooner have sat on a hot griddle than reveal any names) and risen to $88,000 by 5:30. At 6:00 Jelinek had suggested she stop screwing around, which was his way of saying that the bidding was not going as high as he had in mind, but he noted her offer of $5,000 up anyway. The second round took over an hour. Marsha was ready with $100,000 when Jelinek called again, but they were at $120,000 already.

  She had been obliged to call in Marketing for help. That meant giving young Markham a chance to parade his opinions while she forced herself to listen. She knew he had been waiting to be consulted because he had two sheets of statistics clutched to his chest, including sales figures for books she had never encountered. It was 6:30 and he had been waiting in his office for the phone to ring. Ambition without talent is a terrible thing, Marsha thought, but Larry Shapiro had insisted she call Markham if the price went over $100,000, and she had so much wanted to land Montgomery.

  It wasn’t over until 9:00. She’d lost the bidding and her temper at $150,000, Markham was still talking strategy, and it was too late to catch the last flight to Toronto.

  She picked up the flowers on the way to La Guardia this morning, having guessed Judith would deny it was her birthday, so that there wouldn’t have been any flowers yesterday. They were only daffodils, a perky glowing yellow, but they would brighten Judith’s living room gloom. Marsha could never understand why Judith had stayed in this house after her divorce. Surely, she could have found something less dreary, even if she believed remaining in the neighborhood was essential for the kids. Too many changes would unsettle their delicate minds, Judith’s mother had insisted. Marsha knew what the little lady really wanted was a restoration of the marriage. Even though it was James who had walked out, Mrs. DeLisle concluded Judith had been at fault. That was mostly what she decided about everything.

  Marsha held Judith at arm’s length, grinning, the daffodils between them. “How is the big girl today? Don’t look a day over thirty, if you ask me. Not that it matters. Older is better. It’s gentler, they say, more understanding. You’ll love it.”

  “I hate it,” Judith mumbled into Marsha’s shoulder as they hugged each other.

  “Did you ever think we’d make forty?” Marsha laughed. “Did you? No? That means you’re doing better than you thought. Not even halfway through if you discount the years you’re trying to forget…”

  “I’m trying to forget last night and this morning.”

  “Too much celebration?”

  “Too many martinis…”

>   “You’re entitled.”

  “… and then George Harris died.” Now Judith was crying into Marsha’s shoulder.

  “George Harris died?”

  “Last night. Jeez, I’m getting your blouse wet. Come on in. I’m afraid I won’t be much fun today…” She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, exactly as she had used to when they were growing up together at Bishop Strachan School for girls, and told Marsha about her interview with Harris and about the policeman.

  Marsha had known George for years, not closely. She had admired his enthusiasm, his willingness to take chances, and to push his authors with the Americans, who remained breezily unreceptive. She had made time for him when he came to New York and called on him when she was in Toronto. She had even allowed herself to be talked into publishing some of his authors, not because she always agreed with his assessment of their unsurpassed talents but because she had decided to back his judgment. He had often been right.

  “Shit. He could have chosen a better time to do it.” Marsha tried to snap Judith out of her gloom. “But I’m not going to let him ruin the whole day. Let’s go to that ritzy restaurant you promised me, I want to treat you to something sumptuous—like carpaccio and zabaglione, and linguini with cream. You said it was Italian, didn’t you?”

  Marsha selected the dress and the shoes. She brushed Judith’s hair and distracted her with David Markham and the auction.

  “He actually believes in five-year strategic planning and comparative financial analysis, he refers to books as units and authors as elements, and he only laughs when he doesn’t mean to. He whinnies if you ask him a question he hasn’t anticipated.”

  “Why do you put up with him?”

  “Larry hired him. He thinks we need some fresh thinking about marketing. He’s fresh all right, wet-behind-the-ears fresh… I think he’s angling for VP by next year.”

  In the event they had linguini with red wine and radicchio salad, and Judith told Marsha it wasn’t going to work out with Allan Goodman, after all. OK for occasional companionship, but no point fooling herself there was any magic.

  “Magic is fine for a month, kid, but it has no staying power. It’s whether you can joke about making love when you wake up in the morning, and both laugh. That’s the real magic.”

  “Allan is scientific about making love, and he doesn’t think that’s funny.”

  “I don’t think my mother and father ever laughed together. About anything. He probably wore his vest to bed to make damned sure she wasn’t going to touch him. I don’t know how they managed to produce me; in those days there was no artificial insemination. I can’t imagine them in bed together.”

  “You never could,” Judith said. “Some thoughts we are never old enough for.”

  “Like what?”

  “Understanding our parents.”

  They both had zabaglione, and Marsha gave Judith her birthday present: a round-trip ticket to New York for the coming weekend.

  “It’s what you wanted. We’ll go to the theater. Have brunch at the Sherry-Netherland. We’ll go back to the Frick.”

  “I have to finish my George Harris story. Now he’s dead they want it in a week. You know, Marsha, he couldn’t have planned to kill himself.”

  “Then get an extension and find out why he changed his mind. It’ll make for a better story. But give it a rest for the weekend. You write better after a rest. Remember your group therapy story? It was fabulous.”

  “Yeah. I got sued.”

  “Nobody sues over boring stories.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to get away—with the kids…”

  “Come on, they’d be glad to be alone for the weekend and you know it. Let your mother loose on them for mealtimes. They’ll forgive you by the time they’re thirty-eight.”

  “I still have the Nuclear Madness story to finish…”

  “The one about closing the plant in Pickering?”

  “And Whitby. It’s $1,500. For the Globe Magazine.”

  “Not enough. Besides, it’ll wait, and I can’t. I’m in London the weekend after.”

  In the afternoon Marsha was going to visit M & A’s Canadian subsidiary in Don Mills. She had to review the upcoming summer promotions and be back in New York in the evening. There was a reception for a British expert on contemporary papal diplomacy and its role in maintaining world peace. The event promised to be dreary but she had given Peter Burnett her word that she would attend. The expert was one of Peter’s touring authors.

  Judith was glad she hadn’t asked Marsha about Jerry. Why spoil a perfectly pleasant lunch?