by Anna Porter
“We’ll make it as brief as possible.” He flicked open his notebook. “I understand you were interviewing Mr. Harris yesterday.”
“Yes, I was commissioned by Saturday Night magazine to write a profile of George Harris and his publishing house. Yesterday was our second interview.”
“You’ve known him for some time?” Parr said.
“Yes. I worked for him once. Briefly. In the editorial department. Of course, I’ve seen him since. Parties and that. Lunch sometimes. I liked him—a lot. I think everybody liked him. He was that kind of man.” That’s another thing about talking to policemen — they make you prattle on like an idiot.
“Yesterday, how did he seem to you?”
“Perfectly normal, I thought. He did complain a bit about his financial problems, but that’s par for the course. You can’t run a good publishing house in Canada without having financial problems. He seemed very healthy.”
“Did you think he was at all depressed?”
“Depressed? No. Why? . . . You’re not suggesting he committed suicide . . . ?”
“I’m afraid it’s possible he may have,” Parr said gravely.
“I don’t believe it!” Judith gasped. “He just wouldn’t have.” She stood up and turned her back to the policeman, swallowed hard, smoothed over her face and her voice. “Would you like a cup of coffee? The kettle just boiled.”
“Please. If it’s not too much trouble.” He was grateful she had gone into the kitchen. There had been more than enough tears already. The wife had had a hysterical screaming fit, then fainted. That was while he was standing at the door. The son was there, visiting, a fortunate coincidence that saved Parr from having to lug the unconscious Mrs. Harris into her house. Besides, he could not have left Mrs. Harris on her own. Harris Jr. had accompanied him to the hospital to identify the body.
Judith came back with a tray.
“How did it happen?” she asked.
“He fell or jumped in front of a subway train at Rosedale. We don’t know for sure which.”
Judith sighed and took a long sip of hot coffee. He wouldn’t have jumped — not George. He was such a fastidious man. Even if he had intended to kill himself, he would have chosen a much more genteel way. Pills, for example.
“And you’re sure he didn’t seem at all unusual yesterday? What did he talk about?”
“Himself, mostly. And books. He had great hopes that he could pull Fitzgibbon & Harris out of debt by the end of the year. He had a very good list coming up this Fall. He knew he had a big winner. There had been some lean years, but he thought they were now behind him. Of course he knew the company would never get rich, but being out of debt would have meant a lot to him.”
“Would mean a lot to anybody,” Parr said, mostly to himself. “Harris Jr. gave me the impression that the lean years were very lean indeed. Wasn’t he into the bank for a couple of million or more?”
“About two. But George was hanging in. And, as I said, he was optimistic. He seemed sure of himself.”
“Would it have been realistic for him to think that one good list — how many books is that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe thirty-five . . .”
“Well, could those books alone have got him out of debt?”
“Point is he believed it. While he believed it, he had something to fight for, and while he had something to fight for, he would not have given up. Not George.”
Parr didn’t mind her getting angry. As long as she didn’t cry. He sipped his coffee and nodded reassuringly.
“What time did you leave his office?”
“Around 9:30. We were going to continue the interview next week. I was to call him today and set up a time. He thought he would have a drink with Marsha Hillier and me this afternoon.”
“Who?”
“Marsha Hillier — a publisher in New York. She’s coming because it’s my birthday.” That’s the second time she had brought up the birthday in less than half an hour. Last night she hadn’t told her friends, now she insisted on telling the policeman. Perhaps early senility?
“I’m sorry.”
Why was he sorry? It wasn’t his birthday.
“Did you and Harris leave his office together?”
“No. He said he had some work to finish and phone calls to make. He had a lot to do still. He couldn’t have been planning to kill himself.”
***
Once Parr had collected his raincoat and she was alone, Judith lit her first cigarette of the day and poured herself a generous Bloody Mary.
“That’s for you, George,” she said as she took a sip. “You never liked long faces or dreary people and you were a firm believer in Bloody Marys before noon.”
She tidied up the kitchen and the living room, then took out the two frozen Quiches Lorraine she had been saving for a special occasion. They would defrost slightly by late afternoon.
It might be wise to invest in a dishwasher, she thought. Kids didn’t like washing dishes any more than she did. If only she could get a big enough assignment, she might even prevail on the plumber to come and they’d have two working toilets again. You couldn’t revel in such luxuries on $1,500 a month — when the going was good — and two growing kids. That’s another thing: at fourteen and sixteen, respectively, shouldn’t they stop growing soon? It would make a hell of a difference to the clothes budget. Even if Jimmy enjoyed having his jeans in tatters, he did like them to reach his ankles.
Hard as she tried to fill it with trivia, her mind kept returning to George Harris. What in heaven’s name would he have been doing on the subway late at night? What, now that she thought of it, would he be doing on the subway at any time? George drove a car. His office was nowhere near the subway line. He never traveled by subway. Not even in dire straits. Hell, when the company was almost bankrupt, he still took first-class air tickets. Always a man with a sense of style. If he couldn’t drive, he’d get a cab. He’d walk, for chrissakes! Worst came to the worst, he’d stay where he was. Let them come to him. Strange how the failure of his business to make money had affected George. The poorer the firm became, the more style he got.
She took out her interview notes which, as usual, were copious. Out of two hours with George Harris, she had recorded over thirty pages of tightly packed shorthand.
She had read through the first twenty when the managing editor of Saturday Night called. Had she heard the news, and could she get the story in by the end of the week? Now that George had died, there would be a number of stories. Hers was farthest ahead and they wanted it for the next issue. She said she would try, though she didn’t think she could pull it together so quickly, at least not while there was any question of suicide.
The managing editor was quite convinced that they shouldn’t probe into the suicide theory. The family wouldn’t want that to be a topic of public discussion. They were entitled to some privacy.
After she had hung up, Judith finished reading her notes. Just as she remembered, George had been positively ebullient, really enthusiastic about the future. A few years ago he had had to restrain the publishing list, but those had been hard times in all spheres of business. Now he felt his debts were manageable. He anticipated that the whole industry would benefit from the federal government’s new policy paper, and his firm, strong in its history of support for Canadian talent, would undoubtedly benefit the most. He planned to go to the American Booksellers’ Association convention this year, for the first time in seven, because he had some important properties to discuss with American publishers. And he had just accepted an invitation to be the luncheon speaker at the annual meeting of the Canadian Authors’ Association in Vancouver. He was going to talk about the importance of publicity for the success of a book and had a number of jokes and personal anecdotes already sketched out.
Would a man who was about to kill himself be inventing jokes?
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Image © Charles Scott
Born in Budapest, ANNA PORTER is the award-winning author of seven books, both non-fiction (The Ghosts of Europe, Kasztner’s Train, The Storyteller, and Buying a Better World) and mystery novels (Mortal Sins, Hidden Agenda, and Bookfair Murders). She co-founded Key Porter Books, an influential publishing house she ran for over 20 years. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has received the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her husband and the occasionally behaved dachshund, Gustav.
Copyright © Anna Porter, 2017
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Editor for the press: Susan Renouf
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover images: chain bridge, Budapest © Pyrosky/iStockPhoto; painting, Titian’s Woman with a Mirror, c. 1515, in the public domain
Author photo: Charles Scott
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Porter, Anna, author
The appraisal / Anna Porter.
ISSUED IN PRINT AND ELECTRONIC FORMATS.
ISBN 978-1-77041-410-5 (softcover)
ALSO ISSUED AS: 978-1-77305-115-4 (PDF)
978-1-77305-116-1 (ePUB)
I. TITLE.
PS8581.O7553A66 2017 C813’.54 C2017-902412-4 C2017-902991-6
The publication of The Appraisal has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
