“So presumably not many people know what Ship Shape’s about either.”
“Not for another week, when it will hit New York City. And then it will only be Madison House and book club and chain-store people till the bound galleys are ready. Of course TV and the film studios often share the same corporate parent as the major publishing houses, or they have moles inside the smaller publishers to alert them to hot properties, so confidentiality is never assured.”
“Ms. Wells doesn’t have some sort of critique group of other writers who read her stuff as she goes along?”
Lark shook her head. “Chandelier doesn’t feel anyone knows nearly as much about what she’s trying to do in her fiction as she does herself.”
“Sounds a little egotistic.”
Lark made a face. “In my experience, writers are all egotistic. How else would they keep going?”
I laughed because I guessed she was right and because at one point in my life, I’d wanted to write a novel, which made me an egotist myself. “Are her agent and editor both in New York?”
“Their offices are there, but at the moment they’re here in San Francisco. Ever since Chandelier became a bestseller, they always come out for the launch party.”
“I’d like to meet them before this show goes on the road.”
Lark nodded. “I thought we could do that tomorrow. Chandelier’s hairdresser and personal shopper are coming to the house at noon to get her ready for the party. I won’t be needed, and Sally and Amber are free as well. I thought we could all meet for lunch.”
“Sure.”
“Where?”
“Wherever.”
“You’re near North Beach, right?”
“Yep.”
“How about the Black Cat? Or Tavolino?”
“They’re a little steep for my budget.”
She looked away to avoid augmenting my embarrassment. “We’d be paying the tab, of course.”
“Still.”
She frowned in thought. “Enrico’s?”
“Fine.”
“One o’clock?”
“One it is.”
I handed back the manila folder. “You won’t need it?” Lark asked.
“Not until I have a suspect. Speaking of which, Ms. Wells suggested that she’d given you some ideas along that line.”
The shift in focus seemed to discomfit her. “Oh. Yes. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them suspects.”
“Then what would you call them?”
“Possibilities, is all.”
I got out my notebook. “Give me a rundown.”
Lark leaned back on the couch. Although she put up a good front, at bottom she seemed exhausted, or bored, or exasperated, but something definitely less than chipper. I had a feeling that a day tending Chandelier Wells could do that to a person. After four years of it, well, I’d be surprised if Lark remained unmedicated.
She held up her index finger. “First and foremost, there’s the ex-husband.”
“Name?”
“Mickey Strunt.”
“Address?”
She consulted a Rolodex beside the phone and read off a number on Judah Street.
“Where’s that? Out near the ocean?”
She nodded. “A block away, I believe. Mickey used to be a surfer.”
“Other than the obvious, why does Mickey lead the list?”
“They’ve been divorced for twelve years but he still comes around and asks for money and threatens to make trouble if he doesn’t get it, which he does, usually, though in smaller amounts than he claims to need.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
“Last year, twenty-four thousand dollars. Two thousand a month.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Not to Chandelier.”
“And now he wants more?”
“He always wants more. And lots of it.”
“How much?”
“Half. Of her assets.”
I blinked. “On what basis?”
“That back in the early days he worked like a dog to give Chandelier the time and the inspiration to write. That she would still be nothing if he hadn’t urged her to write that first book. That she took the basic character sketches from him and ran with them.”
“Is any of that true?”
“Not according to Chandelier. She started to write so she could afford to leave him, basically.”
“What’s Mickey do for a living?”
She laughed. “Nothing discernible.”
“Is he violent?”
“Not so far.”
“A drunk? A doper? A nut?”
“According to Chandelier, he’s been all of those at one time or another. Plus a surf bum.”
“Police record?”
“I think so, but nothing major. Public intoxication. That kind of thing.”
“I’ll check him out. Who else makes the list?”
Again, Lark seemed uncomfortable with casting a net of suspicion. Which made me like her even more than I did already, which was a lot.
“Well, there’s Viveca Dane, I suppose,” she said grudgingly.
“The name’s familiar.”
“She’s a writer, too. Or was. Queen of the field, until Chandelier came along.”
“Why’s she a suspect?”
“Thanks to Chandelier’s success, Viveca’s career has been pretty much obliterated. She’s not happy about it, understandably.”
“She’s said so?”
Lark nodded. “Often and in print. At her most vehement, she accuses Chandelier of plagiarism. If she wasn’t so pathetic, Chandelier would probably sue her.”
“Where can I find her?”
She consulted her list and read off an address on Francisco Street.
“Nice neighborhood.”
“Viveca made lots of money in her heyday. I guess she managed to hang on to most of it.”
“If she’s rich, why the ire?”
Lark met my look. “They don’t do it for the money, Mr. Tanner.”
I was about to ask Lark what they did do it for when the phone beside her buzzed. She picked it up and listened, then quickly replaced the receiver. “Sorry. I have to go.”
“Home?”
She pointed at the ceiling. “She needs me to take some dictation.”
“You live here in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Any private life at all?”
She grinned. “Thursdays, if I’m lucky.”
“What do you do on Thursdays?”
“I go to the library to get good books and go to the museums and see good art.”
“What sort of books?”
She shrugged. “It varies. Currently I’m quite enamored of William Trevor and Francine Prose.”
She stood up and I did, too. “That’s it for suspects?” I asked quickly.
She closed her eyes to think. “There’s also Thurston Buckley.”
“The real estate guy? He owns half the city. If you believe what Herb Caen used to say about him, he could have any woman he wanted just by snapping his fingers.”
“Well, he couldn’t have Chandelier Wells and that seemed to upset him.”
“How bad did he want her?”
“A lot. He gave her a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton.”
“They were engaged?”
“He thought he was; she knew she wasn’t.”
Lark took two steps toward the door. “One more thing,” I said to stop her.
“What?”
“Be honest with me.”
She blinked. “Of course.”
“It’s occurred to me that this whole thing could be phony. A fake death threat that leaks to the press and becomes a publicity ploy to sell the new book. Plucky author under siege and all that. Any chance of that being the case, Ms. McLaren?”
Her arm swept the room as her eyes chastened mine. “Does it look like she needs more publicity, Mr. Tanner? Or more of anything, for that matter?”
I had to admit that it didn’t. On the other hand, if her life were truly without need, Chandelier Wells would be the first person in my experience of whom that was true.
Chapter 4
She leaned forward to fit her breasts in her bra, then arced her back to fasten the hooks, then tugged her Levi’s up over her hips and pulled her sweatshirt down over her head. When her sneakers were on and tied and her hair was pressed into some semblance of style, she was ready to hit the road. As for me, I was still naked, though covered demurely by a sheet, less out of modesty than in an effort to mask my flab, as though she hadn’t seen every inch of it ten minutes earlier.
“If you’re not going to stay, at least let me walk you to your car,” I said as I tossed the sheet aside.
She gestured toward my milky torso. “Only if you do it like that.”
“The neighbors couldn’t stand the excitement.”
She laughed. “That’s a tad more self-esteem than you’re entitled to, dude.”
I love it when she calls me dude. “Oh, yeah? Well, this doughy body seemed to stir your nether regions a few moments ago, counselor. Those didn’t sound like objections you were voicing.”
She colored nicely and shot me a hip. “So I’m easily aroused. So sue me.”
I raised a brow. “Was that sue me or screw me?”
“Now you’re really dreaming,” she said, then clipped her holstered .38 to her belt, leaned over to give me a kiss on the forehead, waved good-bye, and was gone. Leaving me to wonder and worry whether I was finally and truly in love. And if so, whether that was good or bad, all things considered, in the long run, given the situation. Maybe I had commitment issues.
Her name is Jill Coppelia. She’s an assistant district attorney and she’s tall, dark, and almost lovely, with blue eyes that glow like morning glories, brown hair that gleams like a walnut burl, a nose that’s as elegantly arced as a saber, and a mouth that can turn from insolent to inviting in an instant. When I was with her, I felt like I could whip a bully or write an epic. When I was without her, I wanted to be with her. When we made love, I wanted to wallow in her warmth and wetness, then surrender every last grain of my being to show her how grateful I was for being privy to her body and her mind and her spirit. Okay, I was in love, no question about it.
So sue me.
We met when Jill was assigned to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of my best friend, Charley Sleet, detective lieutenant SFPD. The crucial facts weren’t in dispute, at least not from my point of view—Charley was dead because I shot him to keep him from killing any more cops than he already had, which was three, but mostly to keep him from killing himself. He’d killed the cops because they’d deserved it, at least in Charley’s view, because they were part of a group of rogues called the Triad, which had been serving itself rather than the city for years, committing far more serious crimes than most of the crooks it was supposed to be locking up. I’m not sure that’s the way Jill saw it yet, but she was working on it—the grand jury investigation was still under way.
Since I was conceivably a witness and even a potential indictee, and since grand jury testimony is secret to begin with, Jill was careful not to confide in me. I didn’t know the particulars of the case outside the lines of my own involvement and the rumors that were batted about in the media, but I wasn’t pressing her on the point because I didn’t want to compromise Jill’s independence any more than I was already doing by taking her to bed and occasionally to breakfast.
All I knew was what I read in the papers, which was that a grand jury had been charged with looking into the entire spectrum of police corruption in the city, which presumably encompassed many more individuals than were on hand the night Charley had shot me at the precise moment I killed him. All Jill had said about it of late was that it would help if they could find themselves a Serpico who would deliver the Triad on a silver platter. What I still thought about on a daily basis was how much I missed the cop I’d shot and killed myself.
I looked at my clock radio: 11:15. I could stay in bed and try to sleep, which meant I would wake at five if successful or toss and turn till two if I wasn’t. Or I could get up and read the Ward Just novel I’d just started, or watch Letterman or Leno on TV, or eat something or drink something or more than one but less than all of the above. I opted for option four. But what I did after I poured two fingers of Ballantine’s over two cubes of ice and curled up on the couch with a half-eaten bag of Oreos within reach was think about my birthday.
I was going to be fifty in two weeks. I don’t think anyone knew it—I hoped they didn’t, anyway—but I knew it the way I knew I was in love with Jill—in the stem of my brain and the core of my soul and the sting on my skin when I thought about her. Try as I might to evade the issue, the impending anniversary had rocked me back on my heels like an overmatched middleweight dreading the inevitable big blow.
What do you think about when you’re two weeks from fifty? You think about your life. And if you’re a borderline depressive like me, you don’t think about what you’ve enjoyed and achieved along the way, not a minute of that. What fills your mind like garbage fills a plastic bag is the long list of what you haven’t accomplished. Goals not met. Dreams not realized. Potential untapped. Fantasies unfulfilled. It’s no barrel of laughs, let me tell you. Maybe it’s time for Prozac.
For example. When I was ten, I wanted to be Lash LaRue. When I was twenty, I wanted to be Perry Mason. When I was thirty, I wanted to be Clarence Darrow. When I was forty, I wanted to be Ralph Nader. But I was never any of those guys, not even close. Whenever the subject came up, which fortunately was always internally, I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, all that mattered was if I was happy, and if I was, how I got there was irrelevant. I tried to believe that as long as I treated people with sympathy and respect, and asked no more of life than what I was willing to give to it, I was as valuable as the next guy. The problem was, it didn’t often work.
When my mental masochism became epidemic a few years back, I began a process of self-medication. I drank to forget, I ate to feel better, I took silly risks to agitate my adrenaline, I made love to strange women to elevate my ego. Still not enough. So I tried Saint-John’s-wort, but that only made me exhausted. And I read some self-help books, but that only made me mad. And I saw a shrink for two weeks, but that only made me insolvent. So I make do with Centrum Silver and a C and E supplement and I’ve cut back TV to three nights a week and don’t do anything at all on the Internet, and I’d been feeling pretty decent till this birthday nonsense came along. But the only time I feel great is when I’m with Jill.
Will we stay together? I don’t know. I think I know I want to. And I think I know she enjoys her time with me as well. But I also know for a fact that we never discuss our future, whether joint or separate or somewhere in between, and never pledge undying love or extrapolate the mathematics of our alliance much beyond the end of the week.
There are a lot of reasons for her to move on. She’s a dozen years younger than I am. And a lot more attractive. And earns more money. And has medical and dental and PERS for retirement while I’m barely hanging on to Blue Cross. She likes doing things actively and outdoors and she’s stylish and social and sophisticated. At times her energy is a lightning bolt that threatens to give me a heart attack. But at other times, her incessant buoyancy approaches the transcendental and promises to be my salvation. At times like those, it’s easy to see my future happiness as entirely dependent on her continued presence in my life. Which, among other things, is terrifying.
I read Ward Just for a while, and drank the Scotch and ate the cookies. Then I looked at my watch and did what I had wanted to do in the first place, which was pick up the phone.
“Hi,” I said when she answered.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Just checking to make sure you made it home okay.”
“I always make it home okay.”
“I wish you’d let me drive you.”
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“I’m armed, I’m paranoid, I drive a fast car. What could possibly happen to me between your place and mine?”
Since I’m more than current on crime in the city, I chose not to answer the question. “What I really wish is that you’d spend the night.”
“Not during the week, remember? It throws off my biorhythms or something. We’ve been through that, ad nauseam.”
“Then I wish you’d move in,” I said before I knew I wanted to say it.
She treated it as the caprice it was. “And do what with my stuff? My cat has a larger closet than you do.”
“So we get a new place somewhere else.”
She hesitated. “Not yet.”
“Then when?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jill?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. It’s too soon. I know that. I just get …”
“I know.”
“I like waking up with you.”
“I know.”
“I think I love you.”
“I know.”
“Shouldn’t we do something about it?”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re talking on the phone in our jammies.”
I was back in bed and under the covers before I realized that in response to the flood of feeling I’d spilled so abjectly, Jill hadn’t said a word of reciprocity. Not for the first time in my dealings with women, I felt like a blithering idiot.
Chapter 5
Although the ex-husband seemed the most likely prospect to be harassing Chandelier Wells, I decided to spend the morning probing the jealous rival. Jealousy is always a fertile field, and after a late night contemplating Jill and my birthday, I didn’t have enough energy to go up against domestic outrage.
Viveca Dane lived on Francisco Street a block west of Columbus. The house was a tidy two-story stucco number typical of the city’s residential districts, although this one possessed some grass and some shrubbery in contrast to its more barren brethren out in the avenues. I should probably have called first, but people are more likely to be helpful if they’re knocked a bit off-balance when I show up at the door like a Mormon.
I had rung the bell four times and made ready to retreat down the stairs when the door squeaked open at my back. “What do you want?” a husky voice demanded in the middle of an audible yawn. After it coughed to clear itself of a stew of congestion, it swore like a trucker in traffic. “Nothing happens in here before noon.”
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