“What about The Joy Luck Club, and books like that? They seem to do pretty well.”
“Yes, but no one knows why. That’s the problem—no one knows how to make that kind of performance happen. Sometimes it does, to be sure, but not often enough to change the assumptions and priorities of the business.”
I held up the manuscript he’d given me. “Yet you think this one will beat the odds.”
Bryce nodded morosely. “But I won’t get it if it goes to auction. The only way I could even come up with a quarter million is if I sold some things—my best first editions, the manuscripts I’ve collected over the years. I have the original typescript of The Glass Key, did you know that? It’s worth thousands. It would be like surgery for me to part with it. But to save Periwinkle, I would.” He made the prospect sound as barbaric as selling children.
“How about Margaret? Won’t she back you on this?”
Bryce shook his head. “Margaret’s out of the picture.”
“Maybe you should let her read the book. If it’s as good as you say, she might change her mind.”
“It would be a waste of time. Did she tell you about this wrangle she’s into with her ex-husband?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s absorbing all her time. She’s becoming a financial wizard trying to figure out how to stop him. Until it gets cleared up, she couldn’t finance me even if she wanted to. Periwinkle’s my baby now, Marsh. For better or worse.”
I looked down at the pages in my lap. “How many people have handled this since it got here?”
“Just two, as far as I know. The receptionist and me. After I read it and realized its potential, I locked it up.”
“Do you read everything that comes in the door?”
Bryce shook his head. “I pay a pittance to a grad student over at Berkeley to screen submissions for me. But this one gave off vibrations, maybe because of the way it looks, all tattered and torn, as though the author wrestled with it for years. Or maybe it was the way it just materialized one day, like a supernatural phenomenon.” His eyes glazed over, as though the possibility was real and not absurd. “In any event, for some reason I thought Hammurabi might be special, and after reading the first few pages, I knew I was right. You can tell after a page or two, you know, whether you’re dealing with a real writer or a hack.”
I listened to the high whine of his excited breaths. “You really think this is hot stuff, don’t you?”
His nod was fervent. “It’s amazing, Marsh. The story isn’t all that new—hell, there are only a dozen plots in the world, anyway; everything’s basically a variation. But the depth, the symbolism, the unconscious levels of meaning. I was enthralled the whole time I read it. And the proof of its greatness is, when I read it a second time, it seemed to speak to me in an entirely new voice.”
Bryce drew a deep breath. “I really want to publish Hammurabi, Marsh, and not just for financial reasons. Think of the stories that will be coming out of Eastern Europe now that the lid is off. For every Kundera who left, there must be a dozen like Havel who stayed behind. Maybe not as brave as Havel, or as talented, but nonetheless with stories to tell of struggling to maintain some level of spiritual and intellectual integrity in a brutally repressive society. They could be thrilling testaments, Marsh; I’d kill to publish them. I’m so certain Hammurabi could make that possible, even if you don’t find the author for me, I may publish it anyway.”
I raised a brow. “That’s risky, isn’t it? I mean, there are laws against that, as I recall from the course in copyright I took in law school.”
Bryce grimaced. “What are they going to do, shoot me? If I lose Periwinkle, I’ll be as good as dead anyway.”
For the merest moment I envisioned Bryce still and silent in a casket, in a freshly fashioned grave beneath a granite stone that was etched with tiny flowers.
I shook the vision from my head. “Do you have a Xerox machine around here?”
“Of course.”
I held up the manuscript again. “Could someone photocopy the first five pages of this for me?”
“Sure. I’ll do it myself.”
I untied the twine and gave Bryce the sheets off the top and he disappeared through the door behind me. I put the remainder of the manuscript on the floor and helped myself to a second jigger of Black Label. The photograph on the corner of the desk—a young girl in a sweater with a large letter S on the front—watched me with a cencorious frown, implying I’d already had enough.
I downed half the scotch in spite of the tacit temperance lecture and was about to return to the bookcase to browse some more, when I heard a noise, low and grating, so out of place in the customary quiet of the library that it took me a second to conclude there must be a private elevator to the office from the street below and that someone must be using it. A moment later, the chugging stopped. After a glitch of silence, a door in the corner of the room slid open and two people entered the office.
The young woman looked enough like her pictures to identify her as Bryce’s stepdaughter. But the resemblance to the fresh-faced youngster in the snapshots was at best tenuous. Live, her expression was dour and sunless, fiercely guarded, without a trace of the eagerness of youth. Her hair, formerly neat and pertly coiffed, was a clump of frizzy, fuzzy blonde brush, as though each strand had been set with a live wire. Her peasant blouse and short black jerkin topped a miniskirt of acid-washed denim. The black stockings that swathed her legs disappeared into black ankle boots that were fringed and tipped with silver—appropriate were she sitting on the back of a horse. The shine in her eyes was of the sort that used to indicate panic or passion but now can indicate anything from a dalliance with drugs to a new pair of contact lenses.
Her mate was even taller, so thin as to seem fleshless, also blond, also with silver tips on his shoes, which wouldn’t have been appropriate anywhere I had ever been. His long black coat covered everything between the silver-tipped shoes and the wrap of a red knit scarf that, in the crepuscular light of the office, allowed me to think for a moment that his throat had just been slashed. Still and silent, he remained by the elevator, toying with a curl that fell in a perfect drip of insolence across his blue right eye. The other eye was on me.
For her part, Jane Ann floated toward me like a ghost, her skin colorless, almost albino, an effect I hoped was a triumph of sunscreen or Elizabeth Arden rather than symptomatic of disease. The shadows in the room allowed her to be sitting behind the desk and reaching for a lower drawer before she even noticed me. And even then it took a word from her friend to warn her.
“Chill out,” he said, the meaning obvious, at least to the girl.
Her hand froze in midair, as her eyes met mine. “Oh. I didn’t … Who the hell are you?”
I told her.
“I … are you supposed to be here? Bryce has some valuable stuff around; I don’t know if—”
“He was just here,” I interrupted. “He went to copy some things for me. We were taking a meeting.”
My show-biz slang and my claim to legitimacy left her flustered. “Sorry I barged in; I didn’t think anyone …” She gestured meekly in my direction.
“No problem.” To give her time to calm down, I glanced from her bemused countenance to the photograph on the desk and back again. “You’re Jane Ann, aren’t you?”
“Do we know each other?”
“Not since you were about this size.” I held my hand at waist level.
She frowned. “Tanner. I remember. You’re the detective. You had a grimy little office on an alley near the Pyramid and you bounced me on your knee.”
“Yep.”
“And gave me all those licorice whips.”
“That’s me.”
“Bryce used to talk about you all the time. He’d tell my father to be sure to let him know if I ever ran away, so he could hire you to bring me back.”
Jane Ann laughed at a joke known only to herself while I enjoyed her secondhand tribute to my tracking skills. Then
, in a sudden twist of mood, Jane Ann’s countenance turned grave. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Bryce?”
She nodded.
“What makes you think so?”
I’d reversed our roles and she resented it. “How should I know?” she countered brusquely, then sensed her tone was inappropriate and quickly softened it. “It’s just … he’s seemed sort of strung out lately is all. He and Mom tiptoe around each other like they were afraid of catching herpes or something. It’s gotten pretty weird around here. Which makes it weird squared.” She paused, then glanced toward the young man, who seemed to belie the notion that humans can’t sleep standing up. “And now there’s a private eye in his office,” she added when no instructions had been forthcoming. “That’s pretty weird in itself.”
“As far as I know, your dad’s not in any trouble. Not that I—”
“He’s not my dad,” Jane Ann corrected quickly. “He’s my step-dad.”
“Right. Lucky for you, Bryce doesn’t seem to feel that’s an important distinction.”
The ensuing silence embarrassed both of us. Jane Ann bristled from what she concluded was an insult as I tried to manufacture an apology for an implication I neither intended nor understood.
“So what are you doing these days, Jane Ann?” I managed finally.
She shrugged. “This and that. Taking some art courses, fixing up a loft on Jefferson Street, living with a pit bull and a saxophone player.” She glanced to the sentinel by the elevator once again, as though to be sure she hadn’t gone too far. Reassured by something invisible to me, she met my eye. “Trying to keep from growing up is how my mother puts it.”
I smiled. “How do you put it back?”
“That as far as I can see, growing up doesn’t make you anything but drab. But you look pretty fresh. What do you do for giggles? I haven’t seen you around the SoMa clubs, I don’t think.”
I shook my head. “I doubt if we patronize the same establishments.”
“So where do you hang out?”
“Mostly where it’s quiet.”
“Sounds terminal.”
“I suppose it depends on the company.”
“Yeah? For instance? A significant other? Herb Caen? Huey Lewis? Who?”
“Mostly just with me.”
She rolled her eyes in obvious disappointment. “I get it. The well-examined life, and all that. Didn’t you hear, Mr. Detective—that went out with the seventies. Life’s a cabaret again. Glitz and glamor is what it’s all about; everything else is a nuisance.” She glanced at her companion once more, and this time got a thin grin of agreement.
Jane Ann’s smile was more endearing than her sociology. “I’ll try to pick up the pace, just for you,” I said, hoping Bryce would return and get me out of wherever Jane Ann was trying to put me. “But you’ll have to help—is sushi in or out these days?”
“Sushi who?” Jane Ann was saying with a wonderfully supercilious smirk just as her stepfather came back to the office.
“Jane Ann,” Bryce gushed when he saw her. “I didn’t know you were coming by tonight. You should have gotten here earlier, so you could meet Matilda.” His delight in the young woman sitting at his desk was obvious. Jane Ann’s feelings were less scrutable.
“You know me, Bryce,” Jane Ann was saying wryly, her expression controlled and calibrated. “A veritable woodsprite, popping up here and there, bringing joy wherever I go. Is Matilda the bald one?”
Bryce nodded. “A fashion victim, I’m afraid, but she could become a gifted poet.”
“So could a million nerds with a million word processors.”
Suddenly the young man made a speech. “I got to take a leak and make a call. Meet you in the Jag.” He punched a button and was gone.
Bryce was still digesting his brief presence when Jane Ann asked a question. “Mom around?”
“In the conference room. Why?”
“My beemer got stolen.”
“When?”
“Last week some time. I left it on Folsom for a few days.”
“Why on earth did you do that?”
Jane Ann shrugged casually. “Some guy offered me a ride in a Ferrari.”
Bryce glanced at the groaning elevator. “Does that mean you and Lloyd are through?”
Jane Ann waited till he looked at her. “It means Lloyd doesn’t have a Ferrari.”
Bryce seemed less pained by the implication of promiscuity than by the news that Lloyd was still in her life. “Did you report the theft?” he managed.
“That’s what I’m doing now,” Jane Ann said, and flounced out of the room in search of some reinsurance from her mother.
Bryce looked at me with the parent’s familiar stew—a mixture of pride and pain. “She’s a wonderful girl—bright, talented, articulate—and I love her very much. But I’ll always be the ugly stepfather, I’m afraid. Which is too bad, since she’s going through a rough time right now, trying to decide who she is and what to do with her life. Wild parties, lots of drugs I’m quite certain, living with that young man—he calls himself a musician but he doesn’t seem to own an instrument.” Bryce smiled bleakly and shook his head. “They always think they can put a stop to it before it gets out of hand, don’t they? But sometimes they can’t. Right, Marsh? Sometimes they just get lost in the hubbub.”
I decided not to mention Margaret’s similar concern. “A pretty common situation,” I said instead.
“I just wish I could be more of an influence. Her father has always lavished far too much money on her—at some point he became afraid to say no to anything Jane Ann asked of him, I suppose because she always threw such tantrums when she didn’t get her way. So she got the impression early on that money and the things it buys would solve all of her problems. But it obviously hasn’t, because beneath that outrageous exterior Jane Ann’s essentially insecure. Perhaps even frightened. And Margaret’s response to the situation has been to keep doing more and more of what’s already been done, because she feels guilty about not being close to Jane Ann in her early years.” Bryce shook his head sadly. “Both of her parents act as though a ton of money will keep Jane Ann out of trouble, when in my opinion the opposite is more likely to occur.”
“If you’re so worried, why don’t you do something about it?”
Bryce shook his head. “Whenever I try to interfere, one of them makes reference to Periwinkle’s latest balance sheet, which calls into question my competence and effectively shuts me up. But someone needs to do something—Jane Ann seems to be becoming increasingly manic and self-destructive. But as long as she sees me as little more than a leech upon her mother’s assets, I won’t have any influence for the better.”
His expression became the frame for a heartfelt plea. “Which is why this book is so important to me, Marsh. It could save my business, and maybe Jane Ann, too.”
He handed me the photocopies. My thoughts more on Jane Ann than on his manuscript, I gathered the papers in my lap and left Bryce Chatterton to the potent devices of his wife and stepdaughter and the ominous lad named Lloyd.
Oblivion is delivered by a variety of servants—booze and drugs, music and madness, quite often by theology. Since I first read Robinson Crusoe and The Deerslayer, my own assistant has been fiction—I’m more familiar with the sleeping streets of Gibbsville and the teeming fields of Yoknapatawpha than I am with the grandeur of Pacific Heights or the raucous blocks of Mission Street, though I’ve never been out of California.
But in the circumstances in which I find myself, to be oblivious is to die.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 88
4
After dodging a transient in search of a doorway to inhabit for the night, I found a phone booth two blocks down. Luckily, I came up with enough quarters to establish the occurrence of a minor miracle—Charley Sleet, Detective Lieutenant, SFPD, wasn’t doing paperwork at the Central Station or gulping espresso at the Bohemian Cigar Store or patrolling the greasy streets of the Tenderloin; Charley
was at home. Because his normal nocturnal behavior is to roam the most disreputable areas of the city till well into the early morning, alert for pleas for help both audible and otherwise, I knew he wouldn’t stay home long, so I angled over to Market and drove up the eastern slope of Twin Peaks as fast as the perpetual state of street construction would allow.
Back in the early seventies, Charley and his wife had finally fulfilled a promise they had been making to each other since they’d risked her father’s wrath and run to Reno to be married some twenty years before—they bought a house. It was a tidy little stucco place just off Upper Market, five rooms and a single bath, postage-stamp yard in front, the lump of Twin Peaks a sobering presence out the back. They’d paid just under fifty thousand for it, and Charley had had heart palpitations for the next six months worrying how he was going to keep current with the deed of trust. But the payments had been made on time—Charley would have auctioned off a vital organ rather than default on an obligation—and Flora had worked her magic both inside (a cozy sun porch and delicate terrarium) and out (a steeply terraced rock garden that decorated the plunging hillside). Thanks to the improvements and the fifteen years of feeding frenzy that went under the name of the Bay Area’s real estate boom, the house is worth eight times that today. Not that Charley cares, though, because Flora is dead and Charley maintains the house less as a home than as her memorial. Which means it’s too painful for him to bear until he’s sufficiently exhausted to make sleep a certainty.
I parked in front of the house, grabbed the five sheets of manuscript pages I’d had Bryce copy for me, and rang the bell. Charley must have been on his way out, because when he opened the door he had his jacket on, tie askew, shoulder holster strapped in place, and a look on his face that said this better not be nonsense, like borrowing a lawn mower or suggesting that he spend an hour discussing how badly God wants us to consult the Book of Mormon.
Book Case Page 4
