Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

“Wait!” I said, but of course it was too late.

  So I called him back, and when I got through to him I said, “Since, Dewey, I know you would call me at the other number and leave a message on the machine, why don’t I tell you this phone number here and save some time?”

  “I just found it,” he said.

  “The phone number?”

  “His name is— What?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The man who’s suing you. He’s Harold Muddnyfe of Muscatine, Iowa, and he’s suing on behalf of his wife Maureen.”

  “And what am I supposed to have done to Maureen Muddnyfe?”

  “Stolen her idea for The Christmas Book.”

  “WHAT?”

  “The suit says it was her idea, and she was in correspondence with many of the same people you appoached, and you stole her idea and she wants all royalties plus punitive damages.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “The reason it’s the husband doing it is because his wife is in an iron lung.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe this.”

  “She’s been confined to this iron lung for the last twelve years, so all she can do is read, so she’s written a lot of letters to writers over the years, she’s been in correspondence with all these people, and three years ago she got her idea for a modern book about Christmas, with things written especially for it by all her favorite writers, the book to be called Joy to the—”

  “Tacky. ”

  “—World, and she wrote to a bunch of writers, and they all told her it was a great idea.”

  “Sure they did,” I said. “Of course they did. The woman’s in an iron lung in Muscatel, Iowa—”

  “Muscatine.”

  “Who’s going to rain on her parade? Did she ever approach any publishers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  Dewey coughed. “Well, us, for one.”

  “Oh, that’s just—” I said, and the doorbell rang, the upstairs doorbell. “Don’t go away, Dewey,” I said. “Do not, under pain of death, go away.” I put the phone down and ran to the front door and opened it, and standing in the hall was a woebegone man with a big nose and a tan raincoat and a folded packet of papers. He said, “Thomas Diskant?” “Yes?”

  “Here,” he said, and gave me the papers.

  “Whats this?”

  “You have been served in a civil suit,” the man said, and walked away.

  Son of a bitch! Slamming the door, I ran back to the phone to find that Dewey—astonishingly enough—had not gone away. “I’ve just been served,” I said, fumbling to open the packet and talk on the phone at the same time.

  “I knew they’d probably find you,” Dewey said, with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction.

  I said, “Is there correspondence between Craig and this Mudsill woman?”

  “Muddnyfe.”

  “Yes, here it is,” I said, reading the indictment against me. “Muddnyfe. She has correspondence from Craig?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a copy of the carbon. It just says thank you for your letter, it’s an interesting idea, if you do the book we’ll be happy to consider it.”

  The standard brush-off. “What’s the date?”

  “Well, it’s two and a half years ago.”

  “So it’s prior to me and she can prove access. This is terrific. Who signed the letter?”

  “Well, it’s kind of unreadable,” Dewey said. “Nobody seems to know who it is, and the initials on the lower left are all smudged.”

  “Is there a job title under the unreadable signature?”

  “Associate editor.”

  A slush-pile reader. A recent college graduate, or maybe somebody’s wife or boyfriend, long out of that job. There’s nobody to say what happened to Maureen Muddnyfe’s query letter once it arrived at the Craig, Harry & Bourke offices, no one to swear that it wasn’t shown to me (already a Craig author, leave us not forget), no one to state that he or she was the only person connected with Craig, Harry & Bourke who read or saw or had any knowledge of that letter. “I think, Dewey,” I said, “I think I ought to call my lawyer.”

  “Listen, Tom? Can I ask a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Get the idea from this letter.”

  “Someday, Dewey,” I said, “I shall unscrew your head and bowl with it.” I hung up on his flabbergasted silence— gee whiz, what was old Tom mad at now?—and phoned my attorney, Morris Morrison, who had taken today off because it was the start of the Labor Day weekend.

  Labor Day. Another damn holiday. This one was dreamed up by the Knights of Labor, a kind of nineteenth century American Wobblies, a secret society founded in 1869 and dedicated to organizing all workers, skilled and unskilled, clerical and professional, and even including small businessmen, into one huge union. By 1880 they’d come out of the closet and had started attracting a lot of membership; almost a million by 1886. However, they were a little too radical for their time, and believed rather too enthusiastically in confrontational strikes. Also, the AFL and other craft unions were coming along and didn’t want to give up their autonomy to be in this huge amorphous organization. The result was, by 1890 the Knights had been unhorsed, never to return, and by now they’re just about completely forgotten.

  Except for Labor Day. It was their invention. They chose the date, the first Monday in September, and on that date in 1882, 1883 and 1884 they paraded in New York, demanding a holiday for the workingman (as though the goddam workingman doesn’t have enough holidays as it is; but you know what they meant). Every other labor organization joined the effort, and in 1887 Oregon became the first state to make the first Monday in September a holiday devoted to big-L Labor. New York and New Jersey and Colorado (with all those miners to pacify) soon followed, and in 1894 (after the Knights were already kaput) Congress made the affair national. So the Knights of Labor finally accomplished, after heroic effort, just one thing: a day off.

  Well, but it’s a lot more than one day off by now, isn’t it? It’s a looooonnnnng weekend, with people taking off Friday and probably Tuesday^ as well.

  Oh, my God, I just looked at the calendar, and Rosh Hashanah starts next Thursday! And then Yom Kippur after that. Next Wednesday is the only day in the foreseeable future when I will be able, if I am very very lucky, to talk with my attorney.

  If Dewey had only phoned me here yesterday. . . .

  If Dewey. Is there any point in a sentence that starts, “If Dewey. . . .”?

  Monday, September 19th

  I’VE been talking to this typewriter less because I’ve been talking to Mary more. (She’s out at the library, and I’m waiting for Annie to call back re Hallmark and the greeting card book.)

  At first, I was extremely cautious about talking to Mary, not wanting to sit through any more verbal sex scenes, but they seem suddenly to have stopped. There hasn’t been one in the five weeks since I moved my office back here, a change I try not to look at too closely. There has certainly been nothing sexual between Mary and me in these five weeks, and yet the other stuff has stopped. All right, it has stopped; I avoid asking why. I merely accept with gratitude the opportunity to talk with Mary again.

  In the old days, she and I would discuss the projects I was working on, the editors I was dealing with, all the nuts and bolts of this endless extrusion of words, and her manner back then was unfailingly calm and encouraging and receptive. It was so unfailingly all those things, in fact, that I gradually came to the conclusion I was boring her. Ginger takes a much more emotional part in my day-to-day business affairs, being angry or excited or fearful or expectant on my account, so there’s never any question as to whether she really means it. Up till now, I’ve much preferred Ginger’s style to Mary’s.

  The problem now is, Ginger’s emotionalism is precisely the wrong reaction to this lawsuit mess. If I mention it at all to her, she just gets mad (as I did at first), accuses the Muddnyfes of being frau
ds and conmen, and demands variously that I countersue, that I have nothing to do with the matter, that I write a strongly-worded letter to PEN insisting they take my side in the case, that I sue Craig for letting the situation develop, that I phone Harold Muddnyfe direct and give him a piece of my mind, that I write strongly-worded letters to all the contributors of The Christmas Book demanding their moral, emotional and financial support, and other similarly helpful suggestions. If I seem less than totally enthusiastic about any of these windmill-chargings, Ginger gets mad at me, accuses me of knuckling under, assures me I have a secret urge to fail which is very common among white males of my age and background, informs me I have no backbone, lets me know that I’m afraid of publishers in general and Craig, Harry & Bourke in particular, says I might as well get a job somewhere because I’ll clearly never make a living as a freelance, and in other such ways improves the shining hour. So I tend not to bring the subject up.

  Mary’s calm, on the other hand, has never been more useful. Her assumption (which I now agree with) is that the Muddnyfes are sincere but naive, and that they have merely misunderstood the situation. What good that does me, and whether they will ever smarten up, I do not know, but at least it’s comforting to believe that I’m not the object of a conspiracy nor in the grip of a gang ot knowing clever confidence men.

  Its also comforting to be able to turn to Mary after I’ve had a conversation with either Dewey (my sole remaining contact at Craig), or with my attorney, Morris, who assures me this case will take "years to resolve, Tom, years. A fascinating case.” You do not want to hear your attorney tell you you have a fascinating case.

  No matter what happens, even if I am totally vindicated (as I damn well ought to be), this thing is going to cost me, starting with Morris’s fee and the loss of my own time. Craig’s attorney’s went to court last week to try for a summary dismissal on the basis of the Muddnyfes’ action being “frivolous and without merit,” but the judge denied the motion, saying a trial would best determine whether the suit had no merit. (Apparently he too thinks it’s a fascinating case.)

  Now Craig’s attorneys are initiating a countersuit, declaring the Muddnyfes’ action to be a deliberate “nuisance suit,” of a kind fairly common in publishing (apparently, there are a lot of creeps out there who figure it doesn’t cost that much to sue, and maybe a big publisher will give them a few thousand bucks to go away and not cause too much trouble), but Morris thinks the Muddnyfes’ obvious sincerity and unimpeachable background doom that effort. After all, how much crime or moral turpitude is possible to a woman confined to an iron lung? Nevertheless, Craig and I are contractually lashed together in this enterprise, so I am listed as a party in the countersuit, which I think a jury in the main suit (if it ever comes to trial) is likely to hold against me.

  Then there are the Muddnyfe attorneys. They have one in Iowa, whose competence, according to Morris, doesn’t extend much beyond the drawing up of farmers’ wills, but they have a New York attorney as well, since this suit will be tried under the laws of New York State, and their New York attorney is in Elm/ral What do they know of big-city life, out there in Iowa, of the difference between New York, New York and Elmira, New York, which are just as close together as anything on the Rand McNally map? And what do they know of the publishing world in Elmira? Nothing. (Apparently, the Elmira attorney and the Iowa attorney went to college or camp or the Army or the daycare center together, way back when, which is the normal, rational way things happen in this world.)

  For one happy millisecond I believed the incompetence and ignorance of my opponents’ attorneys might be good for me, but Morris burst that bubble at once: “If they had a New York guy,” he explained on the phone, “somebody who knew the publishing business, he’d know right away what the story was and what his chances are, and we could maybe resolve this thing. As it is, I’m on the phone to Elmira, he’s on the phone to Iowa, none of those people know what they’re talking about, it’s gonna take years for them to gain the expertise to be able to have a negotiation and know what the fuck the terms are.”

  “Tell me less,” I said.

  But he told me more: “To begin with,” he said, “their dollar expectations are through the roof. They see Norman Mailer, they see Mario Puzo, they see Arthur C. Clarke, they say, ‘Each of those guys gets millions, so a book with all of them must be in the zillions.’ So they want a discovery proceeding on the publisher’s financial records, and you’ve already got three of your contributors going to court to block any release of records pertaining to them because they aren’t part of the suit, so that makes Iowa and Elmira doubly suspicious, so even if they do get to see the records, by then they won’t believe them. So they’ll still want zillions.”

  “Tell me less, Morris,” I said.

  “In addition,” he said, ignoring my whimpers, “because they don’t know anything they find it very hard to agree to anything. Initially, they were determined to hold up publication of the book until the suit was settled—”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “—because they didn’t want the book published without the plaintiff’s name on it. Maureen Muddnyfe could breathe her last at any minute—”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t help,” he said. “The estate could, and certainly would, continue the suit. And if you think it’s tough to go into court and beat the bedridden, that’s nothing to trying to win a judgment over the dead.”

  “Hell.”

  “Anyway, they actually went into a courtroom here in New York County—Pudney took the stage all the way down from Elmira—and they demanded the book not be published before resolution of the action. We finally had to show them a couple of the contracts with contributors with the time limit on it—“

  “That was Annie’s idea,” I said. What Annie had done, in arranging the terms by which I would be buying the original material for the book, was put a time limit on our ownership of first publication rights, and the time limit is this calendar year. It helped us get a lot of people who were otherwise reluctant to contribute, because it meant that if for some reason the book never got published, they wouldn’t have to buy their pieces back to publish them elsewhere.

  “Well, thank Annie next time you see her,” Morris said, “because once Pudney understood the reversion clause— which took, I may say, considerable time—and once he had managed to communicate that understanding to the folks in Iowa, they no longer insisted on a halt in the publishing schedule.”

  “I should think not.”

  “What they want now,” Morris said, “is for you and Maureen Muddnyfe to be listed as co-editors, which at least gets—”

  “What?”

  “—her name on the book, so she can see it before she expires. His argument—”

  “Morris! I am biting the telephone!”

  “—is that while this issue is still suh judice and not resolved, you and Mrs. Muddnyfe have equal claim to authorship and—”

  “Morris Morris Morris!”

  “Well, its absurd, of course,” Morris said.

  “Thank you, Morris.”

  “But Pudney doesn’t know it yet. See the problem? You know and I know, and I certainly hope the judge knows, that putting Maureen Muddnyfes name on the book is itself a resolution of the suit, in her favor, but all Pudney can see is that it will make a dying woman happy, so why are we New Yorkers all being so stony-hearted, when eventually the court will decide the issue anyway, no matter what it says on the book.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “We are going to spend the next several years,” Morris told me, “educating our friend Pudney in legal matters that will be of absolutely no use to him in Elmira, New York.”

  “And I’m paying the tuition,” I said.

  “You’re helping,” he agreed.

  Tuesday, September 27th

  I have just received the most astonishing phone call. I was sitting here revising the Mayan piece for Geo—I am havin
g to fudge the fact that we really don’t know much about their interior decorating—when the phone rang and a heavy, loud, authoritative male voice barked, “Thomas J. Diskant?” My first assumption, of course, was that this was something horrible to do with the lawsuit, and I came very close to denying my identity; but then I thought, They'll get me anyway, so I said, “Speaking.”

  “This is F. Ringwald Heffernan,” the voice commanded. He sounded like a cross between a Marine drill sergeant and an oldtime factory owner.

  I didn’t quite catch the significance of the name at first, still having lawsuits on the brain, so I merely said, “Yes?”

  “My son told me all about that book of yours,” he ordered.

  “Son?”

  “Dewey!”

  “Dewey; Dewey Heffernan?"

  “Certainly!”

  “Wait a minute. You’re . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name.”

  “F. Ringwald Heffernan. I’m calling to tell you there won’t be any more trouble from Dewey.”

  I stared at the phone. Who did I know who would play such a bizarre practical joke? I couldn’t think of a word to say.

  F. Ringwald hollered on, without my help: “He told me about that piece of trash he had that fellow draw, told me the trouble you made—”

  “Oh, now—”

  “—I told him, ‘Goddamit, Dewey, what’s the matter with you, boy? You had no business acting like that. It’s that man’s book, Dewey, it isn’t yours, you’re the midwife, boy. Wouldn’t put up with such balderdash in my business, and don’t you forget it.’ Sat him down in the library after dinner, gave it to him straight from the shoulder.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Told him, ‘Crawl before you fly, boy.’ Told him, ‘When you come to work for me, you’d better have all this nonsense out of your system.’ Told him, ‘I sent you out into the world to make your mistakes and get them over with, and they’re turning out to be beauts.’ Told him, ‘Any more of this and I take the car keys.’ Straightened him right up.”