“I think that’s fair, yes.” He smiled, aw shucks—but there was something just a shade condescending about his manner.
“What sort of publisher is Elgin?”
“We’re the second largest publisher in the United States, a subsidiary of the German publisher Hauer-Stern Verlag. We publish everything from children’s books to mass-market fiction to biography to religious books.”
“Are you familiar with the defendant in this case?”
“Yes I am. Mr. Dane published six novels at Elgin Press. The first was published in 1968, the last in 1973. I believe all of his subsequent books were published by Padgett Books. At any rate, over the years we have retained the United States paperback publishing rights to all six of those novels.”
I stood slowly and said in my most weighty and wounded tones, “Your Honor, I’m sure Mr. Gough is an interesting fellow, and I’m sure the jury is just as fascinated by the subject of how the publishing industry works as I am. But I’m really going to have to object. I think everybody is well aware of where this testimony is heading. We are about to head into deeply irrelevant and obscure—not to mention fictional—territory, which, if allowed, would be terribly prejudicial to my client’s case.” Again, I was preaching to the jury, with not a prayer of getting anywhere with the judge.
Mark Evola favored me with a bright smile. “Mr. Sloan. Next time feel free to say, ‘Objection, relevance. Or objection, prejudicial,’ before launching into another lengthy oration. Particularly regarding a matter on which I’ve already made a very clear ruling. Your objection, if that’s what that speech was, is denied.”
“Your Honor! Surely you won’t deny me the opportunity to argue my client’s case?” Again, this was strictly a show for the jury.
“Surely I will. You’ve had that opportunity, and I have ruled. Mr. Olesky, please continue your examination of this young man.”
Stash smiled. “Mr. Gough, you said earlier that Elgin Press owned the rights to publish six books written by Mr. Dane. Have they remained in print all these years?”
“No, they haven’t. There’s a legal process by which Mr. Dane could have regained his rights to these books, but he never exercised that option, and so we continued to own the rights through a great many years.”
“So did you bring any of those six books back into print?”
“Yes, we did. We brought one of them back in a fresh new edition. New cover art and so on.”
“Why the sudden interest in a new edition?”
Bob Gough smiled a little. “When Mr. Dane was charged with the crime that is at issue in this trial, I perceived that there would be an increase in demand for Mr. Dane’s work. It came to my attention that we still owned the rights to these six titles, so I moved ahead forcefully to meet that demand.”
“So you’re basically in it for the money.”
Bob Gough didn’t appear at all nonplussed by the question. “Of course. Elgin Press is a business. We published three books on the O.J. Simpson trial, Monica Lewinsky’s unauthorized biography, a book about the tragic deaths on Mount Everest. It’s just a reality that tragedy and titillation sell. In this case we felt that there would be significant demand for some of his old titles.”
“Any book that’s been particularly successful in this regard?”
“Yes. I don’t think it would surprise anyone in this room that Mr. Dane’s third novel has sold quite a few copies recently.”
Stash took a new paperback book with a bright red cover off his table. “Let me get this marked as Exhibit 59. Thank you, Mrs. Wilson.” He handed the book to Bob Gough. “Is this the novel you’re talking about, Mr. Gough?”
Bob Gough ran his fingers through his long goatee, studied the book, then said, “Yes it is.”
“Can you read me the title?”
“It’s called How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It.”
The courtroom had been silent all morning, but suddenly there was a rustling in the back of the room. Somebody yelled, “You murdering bastard!”
Judge Evola leveled his gavel at the back of the room. “Bailiff, remove that woman. Any more of that, and I clear this courtroom.”
The rustling and hubbub slowly subsided.
Judge Evola turned to the jury, and said, “At a later time, ladies and gentlemen, this court will give you some very clear, written, formal instructions with regard to how and why you are to consider the contents of this book as regards Mr. Dane’s guilt or innocence on the charges at issue in this case. But I think it’s imperative that I point out to you right from the get-go that the testimony you are about to hear is going to involve a work of fiction. That means that what happened in this book is just a story dreamed up to entertain people. Just because the character in this book says, ‘I did so-and-so,’ doesn’t mean that Mr. Dane did so-and-so. Continue, Mr. Olesky.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. Gough, is it your understanding that every word of this book was written by Miles Dane?”
“Yes.”
“Could you turn to the first page I’ve marked there, yes, with the paper clip, right there—I guess that would be the title page? And would you read the highlighted passage?”
“Sure. It says, ‘This book contains the unexpurgated text of the original novel, How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It, copyright 1971, Miles Dane.’ ”
“Unexpurgated, meaning . . .”
“Nothing has been removed. This used to be standard boilerplate language in paperback reprints, but it’s hardly ever used today. We just threw it in to reinforce that this is the exact same book he wrote back in ’71.”
“And to your knowledge this is a true and accurate statement? Nothing has been changed?”
Gough shrugged. “Hey, there could be a couple of typos or something. Point is, we didn’t change a bunch of clues to fit the charges against him, we didn’t alter the story line, or anything like that. We took the old edition, sent it to the typesetters; they typed it up; we proofed it and printed it. That was pretty much it.”
“You proofread it yourself?”
There was the briefest of pauses. “My assistant did. She’s a very competent editor in her own right.”
Stash Olesky nodded. “Couple of questions about the details of this novel. First, would you read the cover?”
“Be glad to.” Bob Gough took out a pair of odd-looking tortoiseshell glasses and perched them on his nose. “At the top in, oh, I’d say this is about fourteen-point type, it says, ‘The astonishing best-seller that reveals . . .’ There’s an ellipsis after that.” He went bip bip bip in the air with his index finger. Then, sounding more than a little pedantic, he turned to the jury, and said: “You know, three little dots?”
“Go on, Mr. Gough.”
Gough cleared his throat. “ ‘The astonishing best-seller that reveals . . .’ ” Bip, bip, bip. “Great big letters: ‘How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It.’ Then underneath that it says, little letters, ‘the controversial story by,’ huge letters, ‘Miles Dane.’ Then under that it says, ‘Find out why! Find out how! The terrible truth!’ ”
“Okay, let me stop you for a moment. First thing, this is a work of fiction, is it not?”
“Oh, absolutely. It’s a novel. It’s made up, just like a fairy tale.”
“And yet, there’s nothing on the cover to indicate that it’s a novel.”
“Strictly speaking, that’s absolutely correct.”
“Isn’t that misleading?”
“It’s what we in the industry call sizzle.”
“Mr. Gough, I don’t mean to be rough on you, but it sounds like sizzle is a code word for misdirection.”
Gough chuckled noiselessly. “Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That’s how it’s done. Look, at Elgin we market certain books to people with sophisticated literary sensibilities. We market other books to people who are trying to better themselves. We market books to people who want to learn about science or philosophy or history or religion. When we sell a book like tha
t, we try to be sophisticated in our sales approach. But this is not one of those books. We marketed this book to appeal to a segment of the American population who are looking for crass sensationalism. And I think we did a darn good job of that.”
“Okay, fair enough. Mr. Gough, could you give me an outline of the plot?”
“Sure. The narrator is a young man named Lowell Wink, who is married to this shrill, demanding, just really awful woman named Vanessa. Now Lowell, he grew up poor in some jerkwater little town in Michigan.” A quick grin to the jury. “No offense. Anyway, his wife is rich. She’s an heiress whose family are New York social register types. The circumstances of their marriage are left somewhat obscure, so we don’t really know why this oddly matched pair actually married. But basically the book is about how this guy Lowell plans and executes the murder of his wife, then walks away with her trust fund while more or less thumbing his nose at all of her obnoxious rich relatives.”
“I’m going to ask you to read a section on page twenty-one,” Stash said. “There, where it’s been highlighted in yellow? Good.”
Bob Gough flipped through the book. “Okay, here we go. It says, ‘Oh, yes, on the outside, my wife is all sugar and cream. When we go out together, she’s the picture of loving devotion, of grace, of sweetness, of attentiveness. If I sweat, she wipes my brow. If I thirst, she serves me water. But it is all an act. In the confines of our home, the real Vanessa arises like a creature from hell. Bitter, foul, evil, manipulating. But tomorrow that will all be over. I have endured her taunts, her pettiness, her little jealousies, her peevishness, her selfishness, her domineering for long enough. Tomorrow her blood shall be spilled on the altar of my suffering.’ ” Bob Gough paused. “ ‘Oh, yes, and tomorrow I shall have her family’s millions.’ ”
“So is he just after her money?”
“Well, at the beginning of the book, he seems like this sad sack who’s being pushed around and controlled by this vicious woman, and so at first it’s like he’s just trying to get out from under her thumb. The way the murder unfolds initially, it seems kind of defensible. But after he kills her, he has to do a bunch of scrambling around to get himself off the hook. Including framing his best friend. And in the course of doing that, we begin to see that he really is a lot more manipulative and resourceful and sleazy than we first thought. That’s part of the charm of the book. Lowell is what we call an unreliable narrator. Basically he lies to the reader. At the beginning he tells you all about what a horrible person his wife is, and so, like I said earlier, at that point he seems quite sympathetic. But then as you get further into the book, you begin to see that everything she said and did in the first few pages of the book, stuff that looked really nasty and mean . . . well, there’s a second way of interpreting it—one that, let’s just say, makes good old Lowell not look like the poor, oppressed loser that he had made himself out to be. And one that makes her out to be a lot more decent than she was. See, the way the book works and what makes it so ingenious is that Mr. Dane kind of sucks you into sympathizing with this guy, and then as time goes on, you start to see that this character is really a monster.”
Stash Olesky looked like he intended to let this sentence linger in the air for a while, so I took the opportunity to rise and say, “Your Honor, I want the record to reflect my continuing objection to this outrageous line of questioning. This book is fiction, fiction, fiction and it appalls me that the jury is being subjected to this blatant attempt to slander and slur and smear Mr. Dane with—”
I intended to run on in this vein until Judge Evola stopped me. Which he did very quickly by slamming his gavel down several times. “Sit, Mr. Sloan. The record already reflects your objection. You seem to have gotten the idea that you can just pop up at will and slow these proceedings down with pointless, groundless interruptions. Would an evening in jail do anything to disabuse you of that notion?”
I looked sorrowfully at the jury and shook my head, hamming it up a little—underdog Charley trying to hold his own while the foot of a tyrannical bureaucrat was pressing down on his neck. “I apologize, Your Honor.”
“Good. Mr. Olesky? Pray continue.”
Olesky said, ‘Turn, if you would, Mr. Gough, to page forty-six. Just start there on the highlighted paragraph.”
Gough began reading, “ ‘I have had an interest in Oriental weaponry for some years. On occasion Vanessa would grudgingly allow a centime or two to slip through her fingers so that I could add to my collection. I owned gleaming and ancient Japanese swords, ivory cudgels of peculiar and insidious design, razor-sharp bits of iron that could be coated with poison and hurled secretly at an assassin’s target, Chinese poleaxes, knurled sticks attached together with lengths of chain, dirks with handles carved deeply with coital dragons . . .’ ” Gough looked up and grinned. “It has a wonderfully purple quality, doesn’t it? Nobody writes this way anymore.”
Stash smiled back, but not with a great deal of warmth. “Just keep reading if you would.”
“Sorry.” The young editor looked back down at the book. “ ‘I lingered with my collection for a few moments, letting my gaze trail across the lovely, savage curves of wood and steel. When finally I chose my weapon, I reached for simplicity. It was a peculiar curved black stick, pure ebony, which I am told is used by Japanese swordsmen to practice their killing techniques. Its black, impenetrable surface mirrored my own dark mood.’ ” Gough looked up. “You want me to keep going?”
“Please.”
“ ‘I stealthily crept up the stairs, careful not to wake my slumbering wife. As I eased open the door of her chamber, I froze. Her breath had caught for a moment and she stirred uneasily in her bed. The silk sheets sighed beneath her lovely form. Oh, the ugliness her beauty concealed!
“ ‘Suddenly the rage rose in me as all the accumulated slights she had hurled at me over the years frothed to the surface of my fevered brain. I leapt forward and swung the black stick, striking her as she lay. The ebon instrument . . .’ ” Gough grinned and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but, God, the ebon instrument? Please, that is too classic. It sounds like Anne Rice porno, doesn’t it? Anyway, let’s see . . . ‘The ebon instrument fell perfectly as I’d aimed it, the air splitting with a sharp crack as it crashed into her right temple.
“ ‘I had expected her to simply die, but she did not. She let out a groan, as if in the throes of passion and one arm spasmed, ripping open the pure white silk dressing gown to reveal her soft, full bosom. How many times had she toyed with me, allowing me a glimpse of those perfect breasts, then laughing at my desire and sending me away? How many times had she teased me with the power of her beauty before banishing me to the wilderness of my cold, lonely bed?
“ ‘I felt an almost carnal pleasure. I had intended simply to kill her. But instead I mounted her and had my pleasure as she lay gasping and inchoate, mouthing garbled syllables of pain. When I was done with her, I rose and took the black stick in my hand and began to beat the life from her. First, I beat the beauty from her face, the beauty which, alone, had given her the power to control me. Then I beat the rest of her body, reducing that temple of magnificence to a broken shell. And still she would not die, but lay instead, moaning on the bed.
“ ‘But the end, I knew, must come soon. So I sat and watched as her red lifeblood seeped away, as the moaning faded, gaining strength with every moment of her suffering, recovering some sense of the man I’d once been—not the weak, cringing tool she’d made of me, but something simple, proud, and strong. I don’t know how long I stared at her, but finally the urge overcame me again, and I struck her lifeless body several more times, purging myself of the last of her bitter poison.’ ”
I looked over at Miles. His face was white, his lip trembling slightly. He covered one eye with a pale hand.
Stash Olesky jumped in, and said, “Thank you. Now, if you’d turn to page fifty-one.”
Gough flipped a couple of pages and began reading. “ ‘I busied myself making it appear as though a break-i
n had occurred. I upset the lamp and took a handful of my wife’s jewelry from her bedside table, hurling it out the window into the river. Then I removed my clothes and walked naked to the basement. I placed the clothes in a paper bag, which I secreted behind the furnace. After that I showered, shaved, pomaded my hair, put on a white silk robe, and lit a cigarette.
“ ‘I felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. There was a slight question as to what I should do next. A phone call of course. But who should I call first? Better safe than sorry. I dialed the number of Joseph Dancer, Esq., the finest criminal lawyer in the city.
“ ‘ “Yes,” I said, when he answered. I put a quaver in my voice. “Mr. Dancer! Something terrible has happened!” ’ ”
Stash interrupted. “That’s fine, Mr. Gough. Now if you’d skip over to the following page where the . . . yes, that’s it.”
Gough turned the page. “Here. Okay. ‘The stick! The bloody clothes! It had been my intention to dispose of them at my leisure. But I realized that I could not hide them in my house. They would have to be stored somewhere—somewhere near our home, but not on our property. I looked desperately out the back window. Up the river I saw my salvation: a twenty-one-foot cabin cruiser owned by my neighbor and best friend, Horace Bellows, was moored at his dock not five hundred feet away. It was winter, frigid. The likelihood of anyone using the boat in this terrible weather was minuscule. I ran out the back door, up the shoreline, clambered aboard the cabin cruiser, and hid the bloody clothes and the ebony sword behind a cluster of life preservers. I was home just seconds before my lawyer, Dancer, arrived.’ ”
“Alright, Mr. Gough, I apologize for all the reading I’m making you do, but we’re almost done.” Stash consulted his notes. “Here we are. Turn to the last page of the novel, if you would, and read the final paragraph.”
Gough did as he was told. He seemed to be stifling an urge to smirk as he read: “ ‘And so it was over. This verdant suburb, I knew, was not for me. I would return to the town where I had grown up, poor and despised. At first they would laugh behind my back and make jokes about me. But I would drive a Cadillac and live in a grand house by the river and keep a gardener and a maid and I would leave sizable tips on restaurant tables. In time they would forget the boy I had been. In time I would become someone new, someone greater, someone who could not be despised or hated or sneered at. Because in the end people don’t care about the past, not in Pickeral Point, Michigan.’ ”
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