Final Edit

by Robert A Carter

  Dear Nick Barlow:

  I have just learned about the terrible thing that has happened to Parker Foxcroft. I am shocked beyond measure by his murder, and I know you must be too. How could such a thing have happened?

  If there is any way I can help, I hope you will call on me.

  Sincerely,

  It was signed “Susan Markham,” and included both a home address and a phone number.

  Sitting back in my chair, I put the note away in my inside coat pocket, not without first rereading it and giving it some thought. Susan Markham… I had not expected to hear from her after the ABA, not after the cavalier way I had rebuffed her overtures, if “overtures” wasn’t too strong a word to describe her conversation with me. It occurred to me that it might be useful—informative, perhaps—to follow up on her offer to help.

  Just then Hannah buzzed me.

  “Lieutenant Hatcher is on the phone,” she said.

  I picked up. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Mr. Barlow,” he said in the clipped, uninflected way he had of speaking, “we’d like you to come over to headquarters for further questioning. If you don’t mind.”

  “Well…”

  “You’re free to bring your attorney, of course.” I got the distinct impression that he thought bringing a lawyer would be a good idea.

  “I thought I’d told you all I know,” I said in a futile appeal to Hatcher’s better nature.

  He waited a couple of beats before replying. “There are still some… loose ends? You know… to tie up.”

  I looked at my watch. “When would you like me to stop in?”

  “How about eleven o’clock?”

  “I’ll see if my attorney can meet me there, and let you know.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  I got Alex Margolies on the line as quickly as Hannah could find him. Alex is both my lawyer and a friend; he has also been trained as a CPA, which makes him useful on many fronts. Much as I rely on the good Mortimer Mandelbaum, I would not dream of filing taxes without having the forms vetted by Alex.

  “You’re lucky, Nick,” he said. “I was supposed to be in court this morning, but we got a postponement.”

  “So you’ll meet me at the Thirteenth Precinct.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I gave him the address, hung up, and sat there, swearing under my breath. The last thing I needed was another of what Hatcher called “interviews” and I was beginning to think of as inquisitions.

  I asked Hannah to confirm my appointment with Lieutenant Hatcher and picked up the Publishers Weekly again. The first thing I turned to was the best-seller list, and I was gratified to see that Herbert Poole’s Pan at Twilight, like Abou Ben Adam, still headed the list.

  I met Alex Margolies in the anteroom of the Thirteenth Precinct house shortly before eleven. We looked around, taking in the general shabbiness and congestion of the place. There were three sergeants at the reception counter—two male, one female—and half a dozen assorted citizens either at the counter or seated on benches nearby.

  I didn’t need to fill Alex in on why were there; he is as avid a reader of the crime reports as I am.

  “Other than your finding the corpus delicti,” he said to me, pitching his voice lower than usual, “what reason have the cops to suspect you?”

  I told him about the quarrel and about my decision to get rid of Parker.

  “But I didn’t mean to get rid of him that way.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll see what this Lieutenant Hatcher has to say for himself.”

  Suddenly, as though summoned by the mere mention of his name, Hatcher appeared, virtually at my elbow.

  “Mr. Barlow,” he said, “I appreciate your coming.” He turned to Alex. “And you’re…”

  “Alexander Margolies, attorney-at-law.”

  Hatcher nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Counselor. Won’t you both come in my office?”

  We followed meekly after him, through a hallway with a water fountain and a pay phone, both in use at the moment by uniformed patrolpeople. There were also posters on a bulletin board—the ten most wanted, perhaps? The walls were painted in what we call “men’s-room green,” a shade both bilious and antiseptic.

  Hatcher’s office was private if not what I would call inviting. His desk and chair; a couple of well-worn visitors’ chairs; several file cabinets; a computer terminal and printer; and nothing hanging on the walls but a Sierra Club calendar. I don’t know what I expected Hatcher’s desk to look like; it was actually rather neat: an in-box, an out-box, a blotter, and a phone—nothing else except a file folder, which he now opened. Alex and I took our seats and waited. After a long few moments of leafing through the file, he finally arrived at what appeared to be my dossier; at least, I assumed that’s what it was.

  “A few routine questions, Mr. Barlow,” was his opening line. I braced myself. Is there anything routine about a murder investigation? Yes, I suppose so. And yet every murder is different, and every murderer. There are an infinite number of changes to be rung on the original crime, which started, after all, with Cain and Abel.

  “For starters,” said Hatcher, “I’d like to know more about your relationship with the victim.”

  “I’ve already told you what our business arrangement was.”

  Hatcher sighed with evident weariness. “I mean how did you get along?”

  “Well enough to work together,” I said.

  “Yet I’ve learned from interviewing your staff that you have had a number of run-ins with Foxcroft. That doesn’t sound to me like you were able to work with him all that well, does it?”

  He apparently expected an answer to his question; I merely shrugged.

  “You were thinking about getting rid of him, weren’t you?”

  “That would give Foxcroft more reason to kill me than the other way around, Lieutenant.”

  “Just what kind of financial troubles is your company having, Mr. Barlow?”

  I looked at Alex Margolies, who shook his head. “That’s privileged information, Lieutenant, and I’m advising my client not to answer your question.”

  “Okay,” said Hatcher, visibly shifting gears. “Do you own a gun, Mr. Barlow?”

  “No, I do not.” I was going to add that I despise guns and the havoc they wreak in our society, that if I could wipe them all off the face of the earth by a wave of my hand, I would do it in an instant, and while I was being godlike, I would also dissolve the National Rifle Association, like this: Bang! You’re dead. However, looking at the police special in Hatcher’s shoulder holster, I thought it better to keep my opinions to myself.

  “But you are familiar with firearms.”

  “Only what I read in mysteries and crime novels, Lieutenant. And as I’ve already told you, I was in Air Force Intelligence, so of course I had to know how to handle a forty-five.”

  Hatcher pressed on, looking occasionally at his file. What did I know of Foxcroft’s relationships with other members of the firm? With this Harry Bunter, for example? With Lester Crispin? With Sidney Leopold? I was noncommittal in every instance.

  Finally Alex rose to his feet and said: “Lieutenant, I’m going to advise my client not to answer any further questions, especially those concerning other members of his firm. Those questions are not relevant. I assume,” he added, “that my client is not being charged with any offense?”

  “Not at this time,” said Hatcher, also rising from his chair.

  Not at this time? I thought. Why, you son of a bitch!

  “Anyway,” Hatcher added, “have a nice day.”

  I might have known his tag line would be that dreary cliché.

  Once Alex and I were free of the cozy atmosphere of the station house, I turned to him and said: “He’s not going to let up on me, is he?”

  Alex nodded. “It would appear that at the moment, you’re the only suspect he has.”

  I knew what I was going to do when I got back to the office. Call Joe Scanlon with an SOS.
r />   Chapter 12

  “Look, Nick—I don’t know if I can help you or not.”

  Lieutenant Joseph Scanlon opened his hands in the classic gesture of “coming up empty.” He had been in my office that Friday morning for almost an hour, while I had run through everything I could tell him about Parker Foxcroft and the events leading up to Parker’s murder. He leaned forward in his chair, hunching his shoulders, his forehead creased in a frown that quickly slipped into a wicked grin.

  “Here you go again, Nick, as a recent president was fond of saying.”

  “Hey, Joe—man, this is definitely not the way I like to spend my time—or yours. I didn’t choose to be mixed up in this business. But I do need help.” Did I protest too much? I don’t think so. I was beginning to feel beset, even paranoid. But as Sam Spade would have said if he’d been in the book business, when someone kills your editor, a publisher’s supposed to do something about it…

  “I can see that. However, I can’t really stick my nose into a murder in another precinct than my own. Especially when I’m on leave.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  He was silent for a few moments. Then: “Well, maybe I can get some information for you, if that would help. Sergeant Falco was with me at the Police Academy, and I’ve sort of kept in touch. Given him a call every so often—had a drink with him once in a while—that sort of thing. He might be willing to share what he knows. After all, I’m still more of a cop than a civilian.”

  “Make that ‘author,’ Joe.”

  “If you say so, Nick. And I suppose I might do a bit of digging into the life and times of Parker Foxcroft, if that would help.”

  I felt an immediate surge of relief. It seemed to me that if not home free, at least I was no longer alone, I had help. And I couldn’t help but also feel elated that I was once again faced with a real mystery, and not just another paper puzzle.

  “By the way, Joe—have you done anything about getting representation?”

  “No, not yet.” I had suggested more than once, since Scanlon had turned in the first draft of his book, that he ought to have an agent. I know—even Shakespeare had something to say about them: “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.” However, when it comes to the publishing business, I cannot help but think of Joe Scanlon as a naïf among rogues, a true babe in the woods. I am not implying that I would cheat him, heaven forfend—but I want him to make as much money from his book as possible, and that means a whopping paperback reprint deal, movie and television sales—all beyond my power to generate, but always possible with an accomplished agent.

  “Have you got anyone in mind?” Scanlon said.

  “Yes. Kay McIntire.” Actually I didn’t have anyone in mind, but hers was the first name that popped into my mind, I suppose because I had a lunch date with her in two hours. “I’ll speak to Kay about representing you.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Nick.”

  God, how wonderful! Scanlon was still appreciative. That is because publication—and possibly fame—still awaited him. In this virginal state, authors are almost always grateful for whatever favors are done them, and so they should be. After all, no one asked them or any other author to write their first novel. As Thomas Wolfe put it: “Nobody discovered me. I discovered myself.”

  Scanlon and I parted with his promise to report to me as soon as he had information from Falco—though not before I reminded him that his revised manuscript was due on the first of August.

  “I’m on schedule, Nick,” he said.

  I took his elbow and steered him toward the door. “Good man,” I said.

  Some observers of the publishing scene have argued that lunch is the most important part of anyone’s day, and that nothing either preceding or following the midday meal is of any consequence. I have myself divided publishing folk into two types: those who must be pressed for decisions before they have gone to lunch, and those who are best approached after lunch. Which type am I? Definitely the former. After the wine has been poured, I do not trust myself to be a hardheaded businessman.

  Lunch that Friday, however, was an exception. After it was over, I could hardly wait to get Herbert Poole to ink a contract.

  The three of us—Poole, Kay Mclntire, and I—met in the waiting room off the front door of the Century—more exactly, the Century Association. The club was given its name because its progenitors, in the year 1847, invited an even hundred gentlemen engaged in or interested in letters and the fine arts to join; forty-two accepted and became Founders; another forty-six joined during the first year. Nowadays there are many times one hundred—up to twelve hundred, to be exact—on the membership roster.

  If The Players is my second home, my pit stop, so to speak, then the Century is where I hold court. I am a member as my father was a member, and probably for that reason; it was his favorite haunt. It is everything, I suppose, that people who don’t care for private clubs, the populists, would despise. An imposing Stanford White building hardly two blocks from Grand Central Station. A great many overstuffed leather chairs, in which occasionally a member may be found sleeping. A security system at the door as good as any, probably, in the halls of government. Uniformed servitors, most of them African-American, who seem to have been there since the Crash of 1929. It does not have bedrooms, like the Yale and Harvard clubs, though there is a basement with a few billiard and pool tables—hardly any of them ever used these days—and a splendid library. The service is prompt, efficient, and unobtrusive. I am not aware of any scandal connected with the club, and publicity is shunned like a carrier of the HIV, although one brouhaha over the club’s sale of a $2-million painting in order to pay for much-needed renovations did make the local papers, and the original refusal to admit one of my publishing colleagues—a woman—as a member broke into print as well, along with a few very proper names.

  We climbed the marble stairs to the spacious second floor, and soon were seated around a low coffee table in a large foyer adjoining the Member’s Bar and facing the spacious East Room, me with the usual vodka martini, Kay with a margarita, and Poole contenting himself with a club soda and lime. I can be comfortable lunching with an abstainer, but I do prefer to feel that my guests, like me, are enjoying the quiet satisfaction brought by that first drink of the day.

  I was eager to get down to business, but mindful of the courtesies I owed my two guests, I made small talk for a while. Anyway, the Century, like The Players, frowns on business discussions, which of course go on there all the time. As a consequence, the club has had to admit women members, after a century of gentlemanly discrimination, though it had to be practically dragooned into doing so. The sole ladies’ before “liberation” was on the ground floor somewhere near the coatroom. Several others have since been constructed.

  “Kay,” I said, “I have an author who’s looking for an agent, and I’ve already recommended you.” I told her then about Joe Scanlon.

  “Well,” she said, “I do have a fairly full stable of writers just now…”

  “Couldn’t you squeeze in one more?”

  “But, I was going to say, your man sounds interesting.”

  “He is that, all right—and a good writer.”

  “I’ll meet with him anyhow, and we’ll see what happens.”

  While we were talking, I took the opportunity of looking over Herbert Poole, who showed a polite interest in the conversation Kay and I were having. I made Poole out to be in his early or mid-thirties, just shy of six feet, lean, and good-looking in a fashion-model way, the kind of looks I usually don’t pay much attention to. I like a face that shows more wear and tear, a face that has been around the block a few times. His voice was deep and rather grave—with just a touch of the Old Dominion in it—pleasing to my ear.

  “Working with a real cop must be interesting for you,” he remarked when there was a brief silence.

  “It is that,” I admitted, but I was thinking of Parker Foxcroft, not of Joe Scanlon’s book.

&nbs
p; “It’s a novel?” said Poole.

  “Yes, but not what you’d expect, a police procedural. It’s a novel about a criminal lawyer whose client is accused of murder—rather like a latter-day Perry Mason.”

  “As Kay has told you, Mr. Barlow,” Poole said, leaning in her direction, “I’m intrigued by the idea of writing a mystery.”

  “It never ceases to amaze me how many mainstream writers are,” I said. “How many writers, period. What do you suppose the fascination of the genre is?”

  “I rather think that it’s the satisfaction of writing about something outside themselves and their egos, their ordinary or extraordinary problems.” It was Kay who spoke, and I nodded in agreement. “In the straight novel, character is all-important; in the mystery it’s story. There’s always a story, usually a strong one. It must always have a beginning, a middle, and an end—and in the end, the criminal is caught, and the crime is solved. Q.E.D. Everyone is satisfied, the reader as well as the writer.”

  “That’s not to say that character isn’t important in a mystery,” I said. “What character in fiction is more memorable than Sherlock Holmes, for example?”

  “I wonder,” said Poole, “if anyone has ever written a mystery in which the criminal is not caught, and the crime has not been solved.”

  “It’s been done,” I said, “and there are crime novels in which the criminal is sympathetic—the hero, in fact. Patricia Highsmith’s hero Ripley, for one. Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder, for another. But it would probably prove frustrating for the reader in most cases. I speak as one myself. I don’t like loose ends; I want things neatly tied up.”

  “I’m not saying I’m going to write one like that,” Poole said in his limpid drawl. “Like most authors, I write of what I know best.”

  “In the case of your current best-seller,” I said, “sex.”

  Poole smiled. “I prefer to think of it as love, Mr. Barlow.”

  “Please—call me Nick. And I stand corrected. Love, certainly.”

  At this point Kay interrupted us. “Herbert has an idea which I think may appeal to you, Nick.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.