A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  “Tremont. They’re right here in town. They were the last ones to see the manuscript, and I think they kept it the longest.”

  Henry felt trapped. “I have a business of my own. I can’t stop work for something like this.”

  He hoped there was no whine to his voice.

  Barbara leaned in on the small table, her ample bosom as close to him as her face.

  “Henry. I know you. You are not the most ambitious guy I ever met. Work a little harder for a while. You can do this on the side. Help me. Otherwise Sharon is going to end up with a bunch of lawyers, and they’ll take whatever they find.”

  Barbara’s eyes had become darker in the shadow of her own frown. Henry looked at Sharon again, but there was nothing to read there. He decided they were robin’s egg blue. He had seldom actually seen eyes of that color, as often as he had read of it in novels. More, there was no silent plea there for help. She looked at him as if she already knew what he would say and was simply waiting for him to say it. Henry did not like the feeling. He had to get this under control—at least part of it.

  “But it’s not really plagiarism. Duggan will know that. Why would he be worried by any accusations?”

  “Maybe it’s not legally. But it should be. Maybe it’s some kind of conspiracy. It’s at least a fraud. And there is his reputation. He’s at the top. He doesn’t need this kind of thing to get out.”

  Once, less than a year before, Henry had watched as George Duggan had delivered a eulogy for a mutual friend, Morgan Johnson. He had watched the big ruddy man in the dampened light of that church and thought well of him for clearly seeing in Morgan the woman that Henry had known, and not offering the false testimony so common at funerals. Henry had liked Duggan then for his honesty, and it made no sense to Henry now that George Duggan, already successful, would steal another man’s work.

  “But Tremont is not his publisher,” Henry argued.

  “No, but you know that redhead you saw Duggan with at the ball park?” Barbara countered. “She is the editor at Tremont.”

  Henry shook his head. Sex and money. He supposed it could happen.

  His defenses weakened, he tried again, “But what am I supposed to do?”

  Barbara answered over Henry’s last few words. “Draw the connection. Make it obvious. If they think it looks bad enough to the eye, they might settle the thing.”

  Henry looked back to Sharon. She did not seem to have the strength for battle. She was the kind of woman that men liked to protect. It was that urge which discomforted him. He changed the subject.

  He said, “You were never married, but you were the beneficiary of Jim’s will?”

  Sharon smiled. The contest was over. Her teeth appeared translucent at the edges, porcelain jewels aligned and formed, as if intended for a toothpaste commercial. The pink of her tongue passed at the edges as she spoke, unharmed. He had already considered the pale rose red of her lips, and wondered how soft they might feel. He knew that she used that smile as a weapon.

  “He had no will, really.” She paused, pressed her hands together, and looked back directly into his eyes. She would not be denied. “But when we bought the condo together, the insurance was a problem and the lawyer made us sign something which basically said that if anything happened to one of us, the other was the beneficiary and responsible for the mortgage and any other expenses. So when he was killed, I ended up with everything. Jim’s parents are pretty old. He has a married sister who lives in California who is very well off. So, it’s left to me … to see to it that Jim is given credit for his work.”

  Barbara was looking intently at him as well. He was not going to wiggle out of this. “Just help us to put things together. It won’t all be on your shoulders. But we need the help.”

  He usually had difficulty defending himself against one woman. Two women were overwhelming.

  He moved to escape. “I have to get going. Let me think about it. You call me later.”

  He left his coffee untouched. He would just have to get another somewhere else.

  Chapter Five

  “What do you think?”

  Barbara’s voice was too eager for so early in the morning. He held the phone away from his ear. His eyes found the clock. It was not yet nine. He hoped waking him first thing in the morning was not going to be a habit.

  “I’m not thinking. I’m too tired.”

  “Come on. What do you think? You read them both, right?”

  “Yes. I finished the Duggan yesterday.”

  He had just spent the last hour rereading bits and pieces as he drank his coffee.

  “And?”

  “I’m tired. The Punic wars were very tiring.”

  “But do you think it’s plagiarism?”

  He once had a teacher in fifth grade who asked questions in that tone of voice. She usually got the same answer out of him.

  “No.”

  “Why?” Her first word was almost a yelp. “Why not? It’s the same story. It can’t be coincidence.”

  Henry held the phone away from his ear. “You asked me. I’m not a lawyer. I’m tired and I have to go to a book sale this afternoon and I want to take a nap.”

  Was he whining again? He had not slept well. He had spent the early hours of the morning filling orders, sending out emails to buyers and packing books on his kitchen table. Barbara blew air at the phone in exasperation.

  The decibels of Barbara’s voice suddenly dropped and Henry brought the phone back to his ear to catch her words. “What is it then? Duggan is sleeping with the editor who read Jim’s book and you think it’s just coincidence? That’s absurd. You think she talks in her sleep? He stole Jim’s story. They thought Jim was dead and they could get away with it. It’s a conspiracy!”

  Henry was not ready for jumping to such conclusions.

  “Stop! You asked me to help. I’m trying to help. You aren’t talking about plagiarism here. Not technically, anyway. Not as far as I know it. And I’ll agree that it can’t just be coincidence. I will accept that. I think Sharon might already understand the problem. It’s in her letter to them. She didn’t really accuse them of anything. I think she knows.”

  Sharon Greene wrote very well. Her initial letter to George Duggan had been polite, concise, and convincing. She had made each of the points Henry would have made. She did not say Frankowski’s book was plagiarized. She suggested it. She did not accuse him of theft. She only pointed out that it appeared a theft had taken place—that something had happened, and with James Frankowski dead, it was in her hands to see that some fair compensation was made.

  Reading the letter after finally getting the chance to read Frankowski’s book, he was confident Sharon had taken the right tack in making her case. Henry slipped her letter behind the manuscript of Hannibal’s Dance in his lap. This copy was the one originally returned from Little, Brown and had been addressed to Frankowski’s previous editor there, Jean Parsons. It had been inscribed to her on the title sheet. Unfortunately, Parsons no longer worked at Little, Brown at the time it was submitted, and it had been returned unread. As luck would have it, that was the week Little, Brown had reduced its Boston staff by another twelve people in its migration to New York City. Henry had tracked Parsons down the day before at Houghton Mifflin, where she was now in the textbook division. She had been very apologetic that she had never had the chance to see it. She did not think it was appropriate to speak with Henry about the book—but she had said the same thing to Sharon.

  The note James Frankowski had written to Jean Parsons was still paperclipped to the front of the manuscript. “Jean—you will like this even better than the last one. I’m very excited. Let me know your thoughts as soon as you can. Jim.”

  Frankowski had reason to be excited. It was a very good piece of work. Henry had read it through nonstop. Historical fiction was seldom that compelling, because the imagined elements usually took the hard edge off the fact. Henry had never considered Hannibal beyond a cockscomb helmet and metal-clad elephants.<
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  Duggan’s Dreams of Bithynia lay on the couch. Perhaps the comparison was unfair. Henry had started reading the Duggan book only a few hours after he had read the Frankowski story. Duggan’s writing was clean and clear, but lacked the emotion which carried the Frankowski novel. Duggan’s own voice was seldom heard over the methodical progress of the narrative. Frankowski had invented a style for Hannibal’s Dance which avoided most objective description and dwelt in the minds of the characters. It surprised Henry that a historian would spend so little time on the background detail of a period and so much effort to realize the personalities of individuals. Where Duggan spent twenty pages relating the historical hierarchy of Roman politics, Frankowski struggled with the internal demons of giants beset by the adversity of political enemies. Frankowski’s Hannibal was a somber and brooding character haunted by the ghost of his father. Duggan’s Carthaginian was a dynamo wielding his powers with relish. Frankowski’s Scipio was a philosopher and politician thrust upon the events of his time. Duggan’s Roman was a schemer and master of gamesmanship.

  Accusations of Duggan writing too quickly were justified. But he also moved his story along at a faster clip. The climax was more fierce and compelling as it projected the magnitude of the events. In the end, it was the same story told by two different authors. The plagiarism, if that was what it should be called, was in the story itself, not the exact words. It was in focusing so clearly on the imagined last moments of those two men, Hannibal and Scipio, that they overlapped. It was in the character of the servant slaves that they differed most. Duggan used the device as a reason for the men to speak their thoughts. Frankowski used the female slave as a counterpoint to their fears.

  Henry’s own guess, not being a lawyer or wanting to think like one, was that a case of plagiarism would not hold. Sharon was going to lose. Whatever had happened to transfer the idea for this story from the manuscript of James Frankowski to the mind of George Duggan was lost in the shuffle of circumstance. However, it might be in Duggan’s best interest to settle—to avoid the negative publicity of some kind of a suit against himself or Tremont. There was some chance a case of conspiracy would stick. Some effort should be made. It seemed a terrible pity that Frankowski’s good book might be buried in the process.

  He explained this as best he could to Barbara, who listened with little comment. When he was finished, the eagerness had left her voice.

  “All right. Do you have any ideas?”

  He could only say, “I’ll have to think about it.”

  Barbara said, “Thanks.”

  And then the phone was dead.

  He did not want this job. He would do it for Barbara, but he was not going to pretend he was happy about it.

  Shelagh had once told him something—no, she had told him more than once. His sister had said it whenever he had complained out loud about some unpleasant work—“It’s all in the effort. Do not count on the results. Make the effort count.”

  Where had she gotten such an idea? Henry had never heard his father use those words, and the old man had a habit of repeating himself. Henry sat back and wondered if this was something his mother had told Shelagh, but he had missed.

  He would have to call his sister. He had not spoken to her in weeks. He could ask her. But there never seemed to be a right time.

  Henry awoke to the sound of a violin, clear and close above. His neighbor Sasha was practicing in her kitchen. He had dozed. The afternoon breeze was from the side of the house, and it carried the smell of tomato leaves and freshly turned earth.

  He jolted upward. He had a book sale to get to.

  Chapter Six

  There was a hum to the warm air, or perhaps it was more of a continuous sigh, but the early morning dark was not silent. He was seldom out at this hour, in any case, and it was not a sound he was used to. With what little traffic there was passing a block away at Central Square, few cars disturbed the haze of streetlights on this back street. One distinct noise was the clink of deposit bottles and the accompanying timpani of cans as trash pickers rifled the repeated knots of garbage set out on the thin rope of curb which trailed beneath the lights.

  Albert, lodged in his seat in the truck, rubbed his hand over his face to bring the blood back, as Henry leaned toward the open window from where he stood on the curb.

  “I got a full day ahead of me, Henry. Would you please hurry it up?”

  Henry’s first couple of guesses had been wrong. The houses looked too similar in the dark. Street numbers were too often missing or obscured. His investigation of the first two piles he had chosen had been fruitless.

  “Maybe they didn’t put the stuff out.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then it’s got to be the one closest to the mailbox. It’s the only one left on this side.”

  He pointed to the larger mound of black plastic bags piled loosely there. As he did, he could see the movement of another garbage picker with a “borrowed” grocery cart slant across the street toward the spot, undoubtedly drawn by the same magic that brought flies to a piece of pie. The metal of the cart rattled on the uneven pavement. Albert gunned the engine of his truck, shifted gears, and moved forward faster than Henry expected. Henry ran in the street after him. The truck stopped short of the cart by a foot or two. The startled eyes of a child stared over the top of the already full basket.

  Albert waved at him through his open window. “Sorry kiddo.”

  The wide bulk of the mother wearing a yellow cloth coat, perhaps to be better seen, already hovered over the bags. Henry moved as quickly as he could, grabbing the bulging plastic without inspection and tossing the bags over the gate of the truck into the back.

  The woman scowled. “You a garbage man?”

  Henry answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You too early to be a garbage man.” Her tone had not accepted his answer for fact.

  Henry pointed at the words emblazoned across the truck door as he spoke. ready refuse removal.

  Albert had gotten out of the truck now and grabbed several bags at once. The women bent over the bag she had cut open with something in her hand.

  She said, “Just books.”

  Henry pulled a thin fold of bills from his jeans and handed a twenty to her.

  When she stood erect and grabbed the bill, he scooped the torn bag up and tossed it over the gate. The thump of loose books drummed in the silence as they broke free and hit the bed of the truck.

  He answered, “Just books.”

  They stopped the truck ten minutes later beneath the streetlight which illuminated the dumpster behind the Blue Thorn. Tim had given Henry his okay earlier. It took them until the grey of dawn to open each of the bags and discard most of the contents.

  Henry did not know exactly what he was looking for. It was instinct. Eddy Perry was not likely to have anything of value he had not already sold for cash. But booksellers were odd people. Eddy was odder than most.

  When phone calls had produced nothing but malfunctioning answering machines on the previous Friday, Henry had gone around to find out what was happening to Eddy’s stuff. It was the tenant on the first floor who had tipped Henry off to the fact that the room was already rented and that Eddy’s property was in plastic bags in the basement, ready to be tossed. The basement door was locked. Wednesday was garbage day. So they had taken the chance.

  The books were mostly thrillers: several Thomas Harris titles, every one a book club edition; a dozen Jack Higgins and Clive Cussler titles, all hardcover and discarded from the Cambridge Public Library. Obviously Eddy had liked Tom Clancy, because he had at least a dozen of those. Six or seven other authors were less familiar, perhaps forty books in all. In the fifteen years since Henry had stopped working in a bookstore, it was clear that the end of the Cold War had ruined a thriving industry of cover art incorporating the Soviet hammer and sickle. More recent titles had drifted back to the old standby of the Nazi swastika and evil Germans. Henry put them aside to donate to the Salvation Army. He was n
ever able to throw a book away.

  Then there were bills. Unpaid bills. Yellow notices. Pink notices. Blue notices. One bag alone was primarily bills. Not a single personal letter.

  Four bags held all the clothing Eddy had worn, summer and winter, most of it was probably too cheap to even donate.

  Henry finally found what he was looking for with a pile of magazines. Whoever had cleaned the apartment out had obviously piled things by size. The slick covers slipped away, and in his hand was the manuscript.

  “Penny Candy by Edward Perry,” Albert said out loud as Henry held the binder up to the light.

  Henry flipped the thick pack of paper to the last pages and turned. “Look here—it says, ‘End.’ I guess he finished it.”

  A small clear plastic frame fell from a bag filled with newspapers. It was a picture taken at a beach. The woman in the picture, slightly overweight and wearing a bikini which did not fit well, was not familiar. It probably was not Eddy’s mother. Henry put the frame in his pocket.

  Henry wondered what had happened to the typewriter. He had always liked old typewriters.

  After breakfast at Charlie’s Sandwich Shop, they reorganized the day. Albert wanted to go home and make up with Alice for skipping out at three in the morning without telling her where he was going. Henry wanted to get rid of the rest of the stuff in the truck before going home to bed.

  An hour later, having waited with an unhappy Albert until the doors were unlocked at nine, he carried the bags into the Salvation Army store, two at a time, and set them by the desk as the clerk watched stolidly—making three trips back and forth before the women finally bothered to tell him they “weren’t taking any more books at the present time.”

  He stared at her, wordless.

  “Books don’t sell,” she said in explanation. “We have too many already.”

  Henry began to carry them back to the truck.