Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  “I really don’t have a great deal to say,” Meredith Kline told me. “Other than what I told you on the phone.” She was a lovely young woman with chestnut hair and a very short black skirt and a man’s black plastic digital watch, which she had conspicuously consulted at least five times between the reception area and her office. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick.

  “Look, I wasn’t here at the time of the, um, incident,” she told me. “Miles is a legacy author for me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Meredith Kline clicked her chewed-up fingertips on her desk. “He’s been on our list for a long time. He was very very successful back in the day, but now . . . Well, I sort of inherited him. He sends us manuscripts once a year and we slap a cover on them and put them out.” She shrugged. “But his work doesn’t do well anymore. He’s an artifact of an earlier age, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “He’s a tough guy. Broads and dames, yadda yadda yadda. Tough guys are out.”

  “Oh. Who’s in?”

  “Women, mainly. Softer, richer, denser material. Character-driven vehicles. Bigger concepts.” She said this airily, like I should be intensely impressed at her savoir faire.

  I smiled politely. “So do you know who he actually shot?”

  She looked at me curiously. “Oh, he didn’t shoot a person, I don’t think. He just shot a hole in the wall.” Another deep, profound consultation with the cheap watch. “We still have the hole.” She smiled tightly. “I could show it to you on the way out.”

  We went back through the rats’ maze of cubicles. The door leading out of the reception area was made of greenish glass. Sure enough there was a bullet hole in it. A small rectangle had been etched in the glass, with a tiny label next to it—also etched in the glass in six-point type—which read, HOLE FROM BULLET FIRED BY BEST-SELLING PADGETT AUTHOR MILES DANE.

  “Best-selling?” Meredith Kline said, squinting. “Not lately. We really ought to get rid of this. The whole concept is extremely tired.”

  “So do you know who actually saw this bullet get fired?”

  Meredith Kline frowned. “You know something? I’m thinking here. Okay? I’m thinking, and it occurs to me, the editor who acquired Miles back in the Jurassic, he’s still here. Daniel Rourke. I bet he’s the one who saw it.”

  “Oh?”

  She pointed one black fingernail at the floor. “A few years back, they kind of, ah, shelved him downstairs in our . . .” She lowered her voice slightly. “. . . paperback division.”

  Seven

  “Diana’s dead?” Daniel Rourke’s smile of greeting faded.

  I nodded. I had introduced myself as Miles’s lawyer, then come right to the point.

  “Good God.” Rourke’s face grew blank, and he looked distantly at the wall.

  Rourke was a fat man with bright, corrupt-looking blue eyes, a thick mop of white hair, and wild black eyebrows. He must have been well into his seventies. His office was large but windowless, with huge piles of dusty manuscripts and papers lining the walls. A faint smell of mildew hung in the air. Meredith Kline hadn’t been kidding: His office was literally in the basement next to the boiler room. A half-empty bottle of Cutty Sark sat on the desk—though whether it was some kind of prop, or whether he was actually drinking from it at two o’clock in the afternoon, I couldn’t tell.

  “Diana was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” he said after a moment. “Not just physically beautiful. There was a sort of penetrating decency about her.” The canny light came back into Rourke’s eyes. “Penetrating decency. I think I’ll write that down.” He scrabbled around in the mound of papers on his desk, scribbled something on an envelope, then tossed it on the floor. “See? Working on my memoirs.” He pointed at a pile in the corner. It looked like someone had kicked over a trash can.

  “I bet that would make for interesting reading.”

  Daniel Rourke’s blue eyes grew slightly chilly. “You’re patronizing an old fat man, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Do you mind my asking what your relationship to Miles was?”

  “I was his literary mentor. He was my creation.” Rourke said it in a tone that was half-grandiose and half-ironic.

  “So you were his editor? Or what?”

  “I was a wunderkind once.” Again his tone hung somewhere between self-aggrandizing and self-mocking. “A publishing prodigy. Did you know I pulled one of the best-selling books of the forties, Anatomy of a Trial, out of the slush pile when I was twenty-three? Then I became a young lion. Executive editor at Lippincott at twenty-eight. Then on to Elgin Press, where I became a titan, then on to here, where I entered my éminence grise phase. Padgett is the top publisher of commercial fiction in America, and I’m the one who put them there.” He laughed brightly. “These days, of course, the children upstairs joke about me and condescend to let me put out a few paperback originals every year, but I’m not taken seriously. I’ll never finish my memoirs, and if I did, who would care? Who would publish it? Stories about old writers, my little creations, has-beens like Miles Dane.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but can you tell me about this shooting Miles was involved in?”

  But Daniel Rourke seemed to have lost interest in me. “Miles Dane was my greatest invention. When he came to me, he was a nice kid from the Midwest. Short, awkward, bad skin, a little shy. But his work was wonderful. Mean, spiteful, angry stories about small-town losers who did terrible things to each other. Not polished, of course. He’s never been polished, never been a stylist of any note.

  “I started publishing him in paperback back in the late sixties. That was the end of the great heyday of men’s action books. He wrote six books for me there. Savage Hands, The Ravaged, Ladykiller, Guttersnipe—some others. They never sold especially well. But I saw that he had . . . there’s a sort of indefinable energy in his work, wouldn’t you say?”

  As I said earlier, I was never a great fan of Miles Dane’s books. But there was something compelling about them. “Yes. Energy’s exactly the right word.”

  “There you go, patronizing me again.”

  When I laughed, the old man joined me. He was testing me, feeling me out.

  “Television finally killed off the men’s action book market in the seventies. But I saw that Miles had the goods to move upmarket. Fatten the books up a little, give them more scope, a hair more presence, bigger concepts. But there was something else. In the late sixties Jacqueline Susann had showed us all what publicity could do. Turn an author into a celebrity, a star. I suggested that Miles think about doing something to change himself. Adopt a sort of persona, you see.” Rourke’s wild eyebrows shot up and he smiled fondly. “I had no idea how successfully he would pull that off. I got him booked on The Dick Cavett Show. You should have seen Cavett’s face when Miles walked out there with that shoulder holster. The gun was fake, of course. But who knew?”

  I could see why Daniel Rourke had been consigned to the basement. He didn’t really seem to live in the present anymore.

  “Miles was enormously disciplined about it, too. Once he put this persona on, he hardly ever took it off. In public I’m talking about. It was as though one of those angry tough bastards in his books had come to life inside his skin. Before, he’d been a real sweetheart. Deferential, polite, easygoing. Suddenly, you took him out to a restaurant and anything could happen. He’d abuse the staff, come on to a good-looking gal at the next table, you name it. As soon as you were out of the public eye—fffft!—off it came.”

  “May I ask you a question, Mr. Rourke?”

  Rourke blinked as though he’d forgotten I was there. “By all means, young man.”

  Young man. I hadn’t been called that in a long time. “Miles has not been arrested. I want you to understand that. But it’s possible that he might be. If I put you on the stand and asked if you think Miles could have killed his wife, what would your answer be?”

  Rourke’s
little blue eyes examined me for a long time. “Absolutely not. He loved Diana in a way that few men ever love a woman. And I suppose she loved him just as much.”

  “When did they marry, do you know?”

  “Sure. They married when he was about twenty. Right after he’d written Savage Hands, his first book. He was bussing tables at some fine old restaurant, and she came in with her mother and her brother. The way Miles told me, they looked at each other, and it just happened. Bang. Like that.”

  “So she’s a New Yorker?”

  The shaggy black eyebrows went up again. “You didn’t know? She’s the original New Yorker. She comes out of the old New York WASP elite. Brearley, Bryn Mawr, social register, house in the Hamptons, that whole thing. Her family, the van Blaricums, started out as Dutch slavers, then moved into banking. Don’t suppose anybody in that family has worked in a century, though. Naturally they hated Miles. They disowned her or something after she married him.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about her family?”

  “Mother, awful harridan. Father, decent fellow as rich men go. Only met them a time or two. There was a brother, can’t remember his name. Robert? Roger? Something. Supercilious character with a grotesquely exaggerated sense of his own self-worth. He kept hounding me to publish a book, ancient Japanese erotica or some tedious thing. One of those rare people you actually enjoy sending rejection letters to. Saw a lot of him for a while there. It seemed like he and Diana were awfully close. But then once the family ditched her, he disappeared.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She was this beautiful, serene, debutante rich girl. First impression, you would have thought she’d never been touched by anything harsh or unpleasant. If that were all there was to her, she would have seemed a little shallow, a little smug maybe. But after you knew her a while—it was almost imperceptible—but there was a sense about her that she had seen real sorrow. It gave that serenity of hers a depth that was . . .” Rourke’s eyes grew dark for a moment. “Well. I fell in love with her myself. I was married; she was married; I couldn’t do anything about it. But I became almost obsessed with her for a while. Awfully unhealthy thing. My wife saw it in my eyes, and our marriage was never the same.” He raised his hands, taking in his shabby, dim shambles of an office. “She left me a couple of years later, and now this is all I have left.”

  He gave me his sly little smile, as though what he said was not to be taken seriously.

  “Diana, she was everything that was best about the old New York gentry. The lovely manners, the beauty, the grace—a kind of otherworldly quality. No one cares about these things anymore. Good manners? There’s no such thing today. It’s all middle fingers and shouting today. The world has lost something without people like Diana. We’ve spent the past century merrily pissing on our aristocracy, and it’s too damn bad. The world needs aristocracy. The world needs Diana van Blaricum, and it’s too damn bad, it’s too damn bad, it’s too damn bad.”

  The old man began to weep silently. After a while he looked up and grunted. “Was there something else you needed?”

  “The shooting,” I said. “What about the shooting?”

  “The shooting here?” Rourke’s sadness seemed to pass quickly. He studied me with his crafty blue eyes, then laughed sharply. “There was no shooting here.”

  I frowned. “Then where did the bullet hole up there come from?”

  “I told you that Miles Dane is only a mask.” His eyes kept twinkling at me.

  “So now you’re playing with me.”

  He picked up the bottle of Cutty Sark, made as if to pour some of it into a glass. “May I offer you a drink?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “The shooting, quote unquote, was a publicity stunt.” He screwed the top back on the bottle of Cutty Sark and set the bottle down. “Late one night we brought in a sculptor from Hollywood and he carved the ‘bullet hole’ with some sort of diamond-tipped drill. Looks quite authentic, don’t you think? Then we called the Times, Publishers Weekly, a few others, gave them a ‘tip’ that this had happened. But it was all fiction.” Rourke sighed. “His career was on a bit of a slide by the early nineties. We were hoping to pump things up a little. But . . . In this life, when the sea decides to suck you down, you sink. That’s a piece of cheerful wisdom for you to take away with you.”

  I smiled in what I hoped wouldn’t seem a patronizing way. “I’ve heard there are a number of incidents,” I said. “Fights with movie stars. Things like that. Were they all staged?”

  Rourke studied my face for a while, then finally sighed. “Of course they were.”

  “You’d be prepared to testify to that effect?”

  “Is he really going to be charged with killing Diana?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  Rourke scowled. “It’s ridiculous. Underneath the mask, he’s a sweet man. He’d never do a thing like that.”

  “So you’d testify? If it came to that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

  “I’m sure it won’t.”

  I wished I was equally confident.

  Eight

  Since there was nothing more for me to do in New York, I took an early flight home the next morning. My cell phone rang as soon as I got off the plane in Detroit. It was Miles Dane.

  “Charley?” Miles sounded shaken. “I’ve been trying you and trying you.”

  “I’ve been on a plane. What is it, Miles?”

  “I think . . . I think I made a mistake.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I talked to that woman again. Chantall Denkerberg. The cop.”

  “Miles, what did I tell you? Talk to nobody without me? Remember that?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Charley,” he snapped. “What I’m trying to tell you is she just called and asked if I was going to be home for the rest of the day. I don’t think she wants to talk.”

  “Sit tight, Miles. Keep your mouth shut, stay calm, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “This is scaring me a little, okay?”

  “Sit tight.”

  Nine

  The largest, most expensive houses in Pickeral Point are on Riverside Boulevard. The view of the river that separates Michigan from Canada is spectacular, the trees are large and old, and the houses are grandly massive. These days the smallest house on the road would easily run you a million five.

  Riverside Drive is not the sort of place you expect to see squadrons of police cars, certainly not twice in one week. But as I pulled up in front of Miles Dane’s house, that’s what I found.

  I jumped out and found Detective Chantall Denkerberg standing on the street, her hands on her hips, a cigarillo dangling from her lip. Chief Bower was there, too, along with about fifteen patrol officers. More ominously, a black panel truck that read S-TAC in gold letters on the side was parked half a block down from Miles’s house. Standing around the van were six or eight muscular young guys wearing black BDUs and Kevlar, and carrying machine guns. Great. S-TAC was the Sheriff’s Tactical Unit, recently created by the megalomaniacal new sheriff of Kerry County. As I was pulling up, the Channel 5 news van screeched in behind me and began hoisting its satellite dish so they could broadcast live to the newsroom back in Detroit.

  I breezed past Detective Denkerberg and went straight to Chief Bower.

  “What in the name of God is going on here?” I said.

  “Hi, Charley.” Chief Bower gave me the dry, appraising look that is about the most enthusiastic greeting I can expect from law enforcement people. “Your client seems to have wigged out on us.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Detective Denkerberg was coming to talk to him, and he assaulted her.”

  “What do you mean assaulted her?”

  “He pulled a gun on her, punched her, and now he’s barricaded himself in the house with a weapon.”

  “Did she come to talk? Or to arrest him?�
�

  Chief Bower briefly avoided my eyes. “We haven’t released the crime scene yet. She’s well within her rights to come back for a crime scene follow-up.”

  “And what’s up with S-TAC?” I said. “Do you really need those trigger-happy morons here? This isn’t even their jurisdiction.”

  “I requested their assistance,” Bower said. “Your client is making threats and waving a pistol.”

  “I’m extremely upset about this,” I said. “I told your pit bull Denkerberg if she wanted to talk to him, to call me.”

  “Look—”

  “Forget it. I’m going in to talk to him.”

  “You can’t go in there,” Bower said. “He’s got a gun.”

  “So do half the people in this state,” I said. Then I smiled pleasantly and started striding across the yard toward the front door. I admit, I don’t cut much of a figure, but I do my best. Chin up, big smile on my face. I knew some eager cameraman over in the Channel 5 van was rolling tape by now, so every move I made counted. The spin was starting this very minute. If I went creeping in like I was afraid of being shot, that would show up on the news, making Miles appear to be a dangerous nut.

  My rational mind told me I was in no danger, but my heart was beating hard as I knocked on the door. I turned and waved pleasantly at the mob of police, gave them a big cheesy thumbs-up.

  After a moment the lock clicked and the door opened. Miles Dane stood there, ashen-faced, hair uncombed, clutching a big Smith & Wesson with a custom grip. Every time I’d seen him before, he had looked taller than his five-foot-six-inch frame; he was enlarged somehow by his physical energy. But now, he looked very small, like something had been drained out of him, causing his body to wither and shrink. I forced my way past him, quickly slammed the door shut. I didn’t want any visuals of Miles Dane and his trusty revolver showing up in the media.