“Uh huh,” Masterson said. “I see. Look, who’s walking point on this claim?”
“Um, I am, I guess,” Rep said.
“I mean who’s the partner in charge of the file?”
“Me again,” Rep said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be walking point, would I?”
“I mean—” Masterson paused in apparent perplexity. She dropped her right hand to the legal pad on her knees and gazed at Rep’s framed eleven-by-fourteen photograph of Melissa.
“Okay,” she said then. “I know that you’re technically a partner—”
“Thank you,” Rep said.
“But is Arundel really just staff and you’re line on this? I mean, if you’re actually the senior line officer for this claim, then no offense but this whole thing is a shit detail that isn’t going to get anyone’s ticket punched except the wrong way.”
“How could anyone possibly take offense at that?” Rep asked. “It would be like claiming that overuse of military jargon is sex discrimination because war is a male-dominated activity.”
“So you’re really telling me to ignore Chip Arundel’s suggestion and follow your instructions on this case?”
“By one o’clock on Monday afternoon,” Rep said apologetically, “I need agents, projects, and claims. If you have any spare time between now and then, please feel free to research a RICO memorandum to impress Mr. Arundel.”
Masterson stood up slowly. Raising her arms, she joined her palms just above her forehead and inclined her head and shoulders slightly.
“I bow to the Buddha nature in you,” she said solemnly. “To everything that is true and good in you and in all living creatures.”
“Uh, thanks,” Rep said. “But I thought you were a libertarian atheist materialist, platinum member of the Ayn Rand Book Club and that kind of thing.”
“Though the void contains nothing, it is defined by everything and everything therefore exists in relation to it.”
“I guess that would follow,” Rep said.
Masterson was four steps out of his office before the light bulb came on.
“Minority religion,” Rep muttered to himself. “Protected class. She figures that taking orders from me means she’s about to be fired.”
Chapter 4
Rep waited until the thirty-sixth minute of his forty-one minute office conference with Charlotte Buchanan on Monday morning to mention the risk that even a favorable court decision on her claim might include nasty and hurtful comments. He did this as tactfully as possible.
“When kids are twelve, they think sarcasm is worldly. Most of us outgrow this. Those who don’t become judges. Plagiarism cases bring out their worst instincts.”
With this low-key finesse he approached the climax to his let-her-down-gently interview. Avoiding legalese, he had laid out the pros and cons of suing Point West Productions. He had conveyed the implicit message that he was salivating at the prospect of ripping Point West’s lungs out, but felt constrained by a professional sense of Sober Responsibility to ensure that Buchanan had No Illusions. (This is known in the trade as Making the Client Say No.)
“This is a case that could be won,” he said now. “It could also be lost, and the road to any victory will be long, hard, expensive, and uncertain. The only sure thing is this: If you do give us the green light, at some point along the way you’ll say to yourself, ‘If I had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t do it.’”
“So what do you recommend?” Buchanan asked innocently.
“Tough question,” Rep said with a well-practiced rueful grin. “If it were my money, I don’t know if I’d have the wisdom to walk away from a claim that’s morally right and might be legally viable. But I hope I would, because if I did the odds are that twenty-four months from now I’d be richer and happier.”
“I see. Well I have some issues with that.” She paused for two or three seconds—long enough for Rep to acquire the first inkling that he was no longer in control of the conversation. “This isn’t my money, this is my life.”
Buchanan didn’t yell these words or sob them or spit them. She spoke them with a steely, quiet intensity that seemed to hit Rep with physical force. Her eyes gleamed with the kind of zealous glow Rep associated with street preachers.
“When you have a rich daddy people assume that his money and influence explain your own achievements, from making the girls’ volleyball team in high school forward,” Buchanan said then with the same tautly leashed fervor. “I’m not doing a poor-little-rich-girl number on you. Rich is good, and on balance I’ll skip the credit and take the trust fund. The worst part, though, is that you don’t really know yourself. Did I really get into Brown on my boards and my grades, or did I get in the same way the Eurotrash did? Did I make my quota the very first quarter I was on the road for Tavistock because I know how to sell chemicals, or did my dad make some phone calls and give me a creampuff client list?”
“I see,” Rep said, trying to suggest some interest in the esoteric problems of millionaire self-esteem.
“Well,” Buchanan said, “And Done to Others’ Harm is one thing I know dad had nothing to do with. Underwriters return his calls before lunch, but there’s not a single string he can pull in the publishing business. I can put that book on my tombstone: ‘She was a spoiled rich girl and her marriage to a fifth-round NFL draft pick fell apart after eight months. But by God she wrote a story that one thousand eight hundred thirteen people read.’ When someone steals that from me I’m not going to walk away based on a cool, calm, carefully calibrated cost-benefit analysis.”
Gift for alliteration, Rep thought, then immediately regretted the flippancy. What he’d just heard was neither a tantrum nor an act. He recognized that. At the same time, though, he wondered what Buchanan expected him to say. You want a second opinion? Okay, you’re an idiot—that definitely wouldn’t qualify as letting her down gently. He asked himself the question any lawyer has to ask in this situation: Whom do I have to sleep with to get off of this case?
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if an attorney in whom you have more confidence examined this issue,” Rep said.
When Buchanan responded by reaching into her purse, Rep figured she was taking him up on his suggestion. If she wasn’t going after cigarettes—and Rep would’ve bet the house that she didn’t smoke—the most plausible guess was a cell phone so that she could call daddy and have him bounce Rep off the case. Behind his contact lenses a tiny, mental Rep punched his fist in the air and yelled “YES!”
A moment later, though, Rep’s heart started racing and his gut clinched. What Buchanan pulled out of her purse was neither a cell phone nor a cigarette case. It was a hairbrush.
Not one of those dinky, longish, plastic hairbrushes, either. An old-fashioned hairbrush. Oversized. Oval. With what looked like a very sturdy wooden back. Cripes, he thought, does she know? How COULD she know?
“Fortnum and Mason,” she said, flourishing the brush in the midst of brisk, no-nonsense strokes through her hair. “Picked it up in London a month ago. I don’t usually handle personal grooming in other people’s offices, but my shrink says it’s a key stress reflex for me.”
She knows, Rep thought. Fortnum and Mason hairbrushes from London won consistently high praise from spanking enthusiasts on the net.
The conclusion left him hollow bellied and jelly-legged. It wasn’t just the risk of acute embarrassment from having colleagues and clients learn about his special little interest, though that was plenty. It wasn’t even the thought of Melissa enduring arch remarks about it, though that shredded his gut like five-alarm chili.
The subtle blackmail implicit in Buchanan’s gesture threatened the very core of the life-strategy Rep had started working out on that magical day in Antitrust class. Arundel and his peers thought they were winning, but they weren’t because Rep wasn’t playing. Rep met their mega paychecks and corner offices not with gnashing teeth but with politely superior indifference because what mattered to them didn’t m
atter to him. He didn’t care what they thought of him; they were his partners, not his heroes.
But this was something that couldn’t possibly not matter to him. They would all know from primal male instinct that it had to matter. They’d have the chink in his armor, the gap in his defenses, the area of vulnerability. And they’d exploit it. The mere thought of how they’d exploit it dried his tongue and iced his viscera.
This is my life, Rep wanted to shout. But he didn’t think that would help, somehow.
“As I was saying,” he managed, “if you’d rather—”
“I don’t want another lawyer,” Buchanan said. “I want you.” (Why? Rep thought with astonishment.) “But I want you for real and not for show.”
“Ms. Buchanan, if you feel that I have approached this problem with less thoroughness than it warrants, then the necessary course—”
“Skip it,” she instructed him. “If my father walked into this law firm with a bet-your-company patent claim or hostile takeover bid pinned to his fanny, you wouldn’t treat it like you were handicapping the third race at Aqueduct. You’d say this is war, we’re pulling out all the stops, we’re taking our stand here, we’re going to the wall, no retreat and no surrender.”
“Okay,” Rep said.
“That’s what I want to see before anyone talks to me about blowing my claim off. I’m the victim here. I want some passion. I want some emotional commitment. I want a little enthusiasm.”
I don’t do passion, Rep thought insistently as he tried to banish an uncomfortable mental image of a fifth-round NFL draft pick getting this pep talk in bed. Enthusiasm is for litigators.
Rep instinctively reverted to a reserved calm that he couldn’t have made any more subdued without losing consciousness. Those passionless logical processes in his cerebral cortex that Buchanan had just slighted whirred and clicked and in one-point-three seconds spat out the correct fall-back position: Call The Client’s Bluff.
“Telling a lawyer that money is no object and he should vet a claim to his heart’s content can be expensive,” he said as he glanced at his watch and his calendar. “Tell you what. I’m leaving for New York at three-fifteen this afternoon because I have a client meeting there first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll be back in Indianapolis by four tomorrow afternoon. Can you get in touch with your agent, your editor, your publicist, and your West Coast contact by then and tell them to expect calls from me?”
“Be careful what you ask for,” Buchanan said with a smile that didn’t do a thing for Rep. “You might get it. Where are you staying in Manhattan tonight?”
“Hilton Midtown.”
“Tavistock’s Gulfstream is supposed to drop me on Long Island around two because my coast contact is visiting Manhattan and I want to talk to him. I can have you across a table from him and my agent by seven-thirty tonight. I’ll send a driver for you at seven.”
Rep viewed optimism not as a rational attitude but as a psychological defense of last resort. It was something you fell back on when no hope lay in any other direction. He resorted to it now.
Maybe she doesn’t know after all, he thought. Maybe it was just some kind of grotesque coincidence. Or maybe it was projection or displacement or one of those Freudian things. When you got right down to it, really, how could she possibly know? After all, she hadn’t said that the hairbrush was brand spanking new, had she?
Chapter 5
She knows all right, Rep thought as he slid out of the Chrysler Imperial that had taken him and Buchanan to 101 East 2nd Street in lower Manhattan.
The restaurant called itself La Nouvelle Justine. Anyone who had passed too lightly over the Marquis de Sade’s oeuvre to pick up the allusion would have gotten an even heavier-handed clue from the drawing of the nearly naked woman on the marquee. She was on her knees, bent over at the waist, with her hands tied behind her back.
Inside, the waiters would have looked pretty much like waiters anywhere if they’d been wearing shirts. A tall and less than slender hostess nodded unsmilingly at Buchanan’s murmured introduction, then brusquely beckoned one of the decamisado waitstaff. Before Rep could absorb much more ambience, a voice that reminded him of air brakes blared through the dimly lit interior.
“What’s the matter, Charlotte, you couldn’t get reservations at Paddles or The Loft?”
Buchanan led Rep in the voice’s direction. The source turned out to be a woman in her fifties with abundant, graying hair and the general manner of a hippie who had impulsively dressed like an investment banker and was waiting for everyone to get the joke. She shared a table with a pudgy man who looked about ten years younger.
“We’re from the unjaded Midwest, where decadence is still exciting,” Buchanan said as they approached. “This is Reppert Pennyworth, my lawyer. Mr. Pennyworth, I have produced, as promised, Julia Deltrediche, my agent, and Bernie Mixler, who tried to peddle And Done to Others’ Harm on the coast.”
Rep smiled, shook hands, sat down, parked his laptop case under his chair, and opened the menu that the pouty waiter handed to him. The left side offered a predictable selection of salads, chops, and seafood. Under a heading misspelled “Special Fares” the right side proposed an array of more exotic choices at $20 each. These included “Dinner Served as Infant’s Fare in the Highchair,” “Foot Worship,” “Public Humiliation,” and “Spanking.”
Rep ordered steak and salad. As soon as the waiter left, he shoehorned a miniature legal pad onto one corner of the table and turned an all-business expression toward Deltrediche.
“Where did you shop the manuscript before you sent it to Saint Philomena?” he asked.
“No befores, all at the same time,” Deltrediche said dismissively. “Saint Phils, SMP, Dutton, NAL, Mysterious Press, HarperCollins, Scribner, Back Door. I don’t believe in exclusive submissions.”
“When did you send the manuscripts out?”
“Seventeen months before publication. Got a quick hit and ran with it.”
Rep tore a page from mini-pad and slid it across the table to Deltrediche along with a ballpoint.
“Please write down the names of the editors or readers you submitted it to at each place—”
“Any property I’m willing to represent, I don’t send it to some reader making sixteen thousand a year three months out of Smith. Senior editor and up. They know my name and they look at what I give them. That’s why writers come to me.”
“And well they should, I’m sure,” Rep sighed. “Please write down their names, and next to each one the name of his or her Hollywood contacts.”
“You think if these people had Hollywood contacts they’d be working in print?” Deltrediche snorted. “That’s why I have Bernie.”
“Well, yes, I do think they have Hollywood contacts, actually,” Rep said. “I think they each have one or two people on the coast that they call confidentially when they stumble across something that looks like it might be really big or offbeat enough to be interesting out there. I think these people on the coast cultivate your senior editors for exactly that reason, so they’re not behind the curve when everyone else in town goes after this year’s version of The Joy Luck Club or The Bridges of Madison County.”
“Savvy schtick from flyover country,” Deltrediche said with the hint of a nod and a we-only-kid-the-guys-we-love nudge. “Entertainment Weekly must be offering hayseed discounts again.”
“If you would please just—”
“I’m writing, I’m writing.”
“I thought publication established access all by itself,” Mixler said.
Tell you what, Rep thought, you hustle books and I’ll practice law.
“It does,” Rep said, “depending on timing. We know when In Contemplation of Death was released, but we don’t know when the first script was done. More important, we don’t want just the bare minimum evidence we need to squeak past a summary judgment motion. We want a verdict in our favor. So I need to take Charlotte Buchanan’s story in every p
ermutation it had and trace it through every twisted highway and byway it followed until it turns up beside the word processor of a writer doing script revisions for In Contemplation of Death during principal photography. Which is where you come in.”
“Oh?” Mixler responded, gazing bemusedly through chocolate brown eyes under heroically bristling eyebrows.
A deafening glass and metal crash eight feet away intervened before Rep could respond. They all looked up to see a waiter with his hands clapped theatrically to his cheeks as he stared in hammy dismay at a tray he’d just dropped. The hostess stalked over to him.
“Clumsy fool!” she shouted melodramatically, evoking a cringing whimper. Then she bent him over an empty table and administered the kind of spanking you’d expect (with the genders reversed) in a high school production of Kiss Me, Kate. The waiter howled in unconvincing agony quite disproportionate to the severity of the two-dozen open-handed smacks that peppered the seat of his leather trousers.
“A few more turns of the lathe before that one gets his Equity card,” Deltrediche commented, shaking her head.
Rep was grateful for her assessment, because it gave him time to get his breathing back under control. The performance might have been pure camp, but it had sent his pulse rate soaring and his loins twitching all the same. It was one thing to see it on videos. Live and eight feet away was, as a Charlotte Buchanan character might say, something very else. Doing what he could to suggest blasé indifference, he turned his attention back to Mixler.
“Did you start pitching the story on the coast before publication?” Rep asked.
“Sure. First thing I did when Saint Phil’s said yes was make twenty-five copies of the manuscript.”
“You charged me for fifty copies,” Buchanan said.
“Musta been fifty, then.”
“Any left?”
“Long gone.”
“Whom did you send them to?” Rep asked.
“Everyone.”
“You’ll probably need more than one page then,” Rep said patiently, tearing out several leaves from his pad and sliding them across the table. “I’ll need everyone’s name, and the name of everyone’s agent. Also, a copy of the short written treatment you used. Who wrote the treatment, by the way?”
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