The Salinger Contract

by Adam Langer

  “What’s that?”

  “People gave a damn about what happened to them.”

  “They might give a damn about you after they read the story,” I said.

  “You’re getting the idea.” Conner smiled as if I had already agreed to something, when the truth was that I hadn’t decided. He shook my hand, then leaned across the table to embrace me, thumping me twice on the back.

  “Well, I’m finally giving you your chance, pal,” he said.

  “What chance?” I asked. “To prove I can act like a decent human being?”

  Conner nodded.

  “I suppose you think that makes you a hero,” I said.

  “Depends how you write the story,” said Conner.

  IV:

  Upon

  Publication

  I knew wherever I went, someone could find me. And I knew whatever I wrote, someone might use it for reasons I never intended.

  Adam Herstein Langer, The Tenth Father

  53

  I started writing the story about a week after my last meeting with Conner. I figured someone would buy it, and since neither Sabine nor I had found a job yet, we certainly needed however much money it might bring. Our house in Bloomington had been on the block for three months and we hadn’t had an offer. The only people who showed up at our open house were our neighbors, the Macys and the Lahns, and some of my wife’s soon-to-be-former colleagues, who came by to commiserate or gloat. Dr. Joel “Spag” Getty, who was now at Princeton but still had a couple of girlfriends in town, brought hash brownies and asked Sabine if anyone had ever told her she looked like Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise. Dr. Lloyd Agger popped by shirtless en route to a squash game and advised us to drop our asking price.

  Meanwhile, Sabine and I were getting ready for our students’ midterms while we waited to see which magazine or newspaper would hire me for an editorial gig, and which university might want to take Sabine on. But it was as shitty a time to be looking for work as it was to be selling a house. The unemployment rate had gone down a bit, sure, but only because people had abandoned their job searches. Yes, Sabine was a multilingual Ivy League product with nearly a decade’s worth of experience at top-twenty schools, but none of the old geezers she should have been replacing were retiring—professors in their seventies had lost their savings in real estate or the stock market, and they had to keep working to support their spouses and their underemployed children. The best either of us had been able to come up with were adjunct teaching gigs in Chicago or northern New Jersey that paid five grand a semester. At home, all of us were getting on one another’s nerves and I looked forward to the time I spent writing on my laptop at the Owlery, a vegetarian diner downtown where the owners were new to town and thankfully had no idea who I was.

  Writing the story was easy, at least at first. I hadn’t taken any notes during my conversations with Conner, but I had a good memory and so I just began writing it the way he had told it to me. The scene of Conner’s confrontation with Margot Hetley was especially fun to write, though I did tone down some of her swearing. For the stories of the theft of the flash drive and also the bank heist in Devil Shotgun that had supposedly inspired Dex too, I gleaned some details from the newspaper accounts of those crimes, neither of which had ever been solved. As for the rest of the story, I relied solely on what Conner had told me. There was no mention of Dex Dunford in any of the biographies and articles I read about J. D. Salinger, Jarosław Dudek, Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, B. Traven, and the like, and neither could I find out anything about the stories they had written that had inspired Dex’s crimes. Dex himself was impossible to locate. There were a few Dex Dunfords on Intelius.com, but none seemed to be the right one. And as for Conner, just about all the biographical information on the Internet had been lifted from the profile I had written about him for Lit. Other than his publisher’s website, I was the only cited source on his Wikipedia entry and I had taken Conner’s word for everything he had told me. On Lexis-Nexis and ProQuest, I did manage to find some of the articles he had written when he had worked as a crime reporter for the New York Daily News, so that stuff was true. And I found a notice regarding his marriage­ to Angela De La Roja in the Morning Call, but as for the rest of his biography—his childhood in South Philly, the time he spent in the US Navy, the college degree he’d gotten from Fordham—I couldn’t find a thing. I found out even less about Angela.

  Still, I didn’t start trying to seriously research and verify Conner’s story because I doubted it; I just wanted to make it more credible by adding the sorts of details Conner always worked into his own stories. In my own writing, I have always tended to be lazy; I wrote Nine Fathers as fiction because I had neither the desire nor the commitment to discover the true story; at Lit, I was master of the one-source profile: run the minidisc recorder; ship the disc to Bangalore for transcription; send it to the copyeditor; write a 150-word introduction and run that baby as a Q&A. But I thought I owed Conner something more. I truly wanted to believe the story because I liked Conner and I especially liked the faith he seemed to have in me. And to be completely honest, I also wanted the story to be true because I thought that would make it easier to sell.

  But when I found myself unable to verify much of what Conner had told me, I became suspicious. Each problematic element of Conner’s story was explainable in and of itself, but the sheer number of those elements was troubling. The fact that no Dex Dunford was living in the penthouse of 680 N. Lake Shore Drive was easy to explain; he might have died from his gunshot wounds, and even if he hadn’t, he might not have wanted to return to that address. It didn’t surprise me when I discovered that the doorman at 680 Lake Shore was a good deal younger than the man Conner had described, that his name wasn’t Pynchon and that nothing was noteworthy about his teeth; Conner had told me “Pynchon” looked close to retirement and that he might have hallucinated the name anyway. I was unable to find any information in any crime blotters or on Everyblock.com about any gunshot victims at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on the night Margot Hetley had supposedly shot both Dex and Conner, but that information might not have been made public. Still, the cumulative effect of all these unexplained incidents made me wary, and more important, since I was writing nonfiction, I figured that they would rouse the suspicions of any even moderately scrupulous editor. I tried to get Conner on the phone, but the cell phone he called me from was no longer in service, and when I tried to find a number for a Conner Joyce in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, I learned his house was being sold and the real estate agent couldn’t put me in touch with the seller, not even when I offered to pay her.

  Ultimately, what made me doubt Conner’s story more than anything else was the fact that he was relying on me to tell it. Who was I other than some random dude who had written one novel, edited a now-defunct magazine, and had been living as a house husband in Indiana? I had asked him “Why me?” and he had smiled and said, “I think you know why.” And now I did. I was the schmuck who believed his stories, who took them at face value and never bothered to check if they were true, who one time fought my publisher to have the cigarettes airbrushed out of Conner’s photos, who let him tell the story he wanted the world to believe.

  The more I worked on writing Conner’s story, the more I grew to resent him—the way he called me “buddy” and “pal,” as if we had actually been friends; the way he talked about the millions Dex had paid him but never offered me any money, just told me that if I wrote the book, he might give me a “surprise.” I resented the self-aggrandizing tone of his references to John Le Carré’s novel The Russia House, as if he were a heroic master spy and I was a once-renowned but now disaffected publisher, when the truth was that we were just a couple of guys trying to make a buck—a common condition, to be sure, but hardly a noble one.

  I picked up a copy of The Russia House from the Monroe County Public Library and I tried to read it, but I didn’t get all the way through. I was too
stressed out for a four-hundred-page Cold War espionage novel. I streamed the movie that starred Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer instead, and as I did, one line resonated, but it wasn’t the one about heroes and decent human beings. The line that kept echoing in my brain was spoken by an intelligence agent who realizes his spy is betraying him: “He’s crossed over,” the agent says. “My Joe’s crossed over.”

  All this time, Conner had been setting me up, and though at first I wasn’t sure what he had been setting me up for, the more I thought about it, the better idea I got. He had shown me the flash drive; it had been stolen, all right, but maybe he had done it himself; maybe everything he had told me about Dex was made up. Maybe Dex didn’t even exist. Conner’s publisher had let him go, Conner knew about the flash drive, and when the time was right he had committed the crime on his own. Maybe Angie had been in on it too; she was good with guns, and she knew enough from her time on the NYPD to understand that if they did it right, they could get away with it. “One crime,” Cole Padgett had said. “A man can get away with any crime if he commits only one in his life. He just has to choose which one it will be.” “I trust you,” Conner had kept telling me. Wasn’t that how all con artists operated—made you think they were putting all their trust in you so that you would trust them? I thought about when Beatrice had seen a picture of Conner in the aisle of the Borders and she had seemed frightened. I should have trusted the kid’s instincts; they were always better than my own.

  I kept writing the story, but it was no longer the story of a crime writer caught up in a plot that spun out of control when his book became the basis for a crime. Now the story was becoming one of a con artist who found his perfect mark in the form of a gullible­ Chicago-­born, Indiana-based writer who would tell his tale and clear his name. I wasn’t exactly sure who would buy that story, but I had a feeling somebody would. I could tell you I felt guilty about contemplating the idea of betraying someone I had considered a friend, but Conner had taken me for granted, had tried to take advantage of me, had treated me like a naïve sap.

  As I neared the end of the story, I no longer considered the possibility that Conner might have been telling the truth—at least, not until I called up Shajilah Shascha Schapiro to tell her about the story I was writing, and she offered me $1.2 million for it.

  “Double it,” I said.

  54

  James Merrill Jr. Publishers was a once-esteemed boutique publisher that had fallen on hard times by the time it had published Nine Fathers. So I was looking forward to seeing the sleek interior of Schreiber & Sons. I wanted to ride the elevator up to Shascha’s office. I wanted to watch all those important editors doing all their important work. I wanted to play the part of Pip in the old movie version of Great Expectations—I wanted to throw open Shascha’s blinds and let in the light. But when I spoke with Courtney Guggenheim to set up a time to meet with Shascha, she said it wouldn’t happen at her office. I wound up meeting them both on a bench near the carousel in Central Park, a few blocks away from S&S. That carousel had played an important role in Catcher in the Rye, but it didn’t inspire any nostalgia in me, and not only because of my indifference to Salinger’s work. Despite the lovely summer weather, I found it a seedy spot, and being there without my kids made me feel like a creep. There was no calliope music; a tinny amplifier was playing Fine Young Cannibals tunes. I knew the publishing industry, like just about every other industry, was struggling, but still, I expected a little more fanfare for my second book than a meeting on a park bench where I had to buy my own Coke and talk loudly so I could be heard over “Ever Fallen in Love.”

  Shascha was already waiting on the park bench with Courtney when I arrived, checking her e-mail on her phone and flipping through manuscript pages. She was indeed striking—the sort of person who seemed used to having doors opened for her and voices going quiet the moment she entered a room. And Courtney Guggenheim was so lovely and polite that, like Conner, I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t secretly plotting Shascha’s overthrow. The two had dressed down for our meeting—Courtney wore jeans, sneakers, and a white virginia is for lovers T-shirt; Shascha wore a belted black dress that looked as though she’d slept in it, and she kept her sunglasses on the whole time. Courtney shook my hand, but Shascha didn’t even bother.

  “You know where Conner is?” Shascha asked.

  I said I didn’t, then added, “Try Cornish, New Hampshire.” Neither Courtney nor Shascha cracked a smile.

  “How about Dex Dunford?” she asked.

  “All I know is what I wrote,” I said. “You’ve got it all down there.”

  Courtney nodded, but Shascha seemed resigned, as if she understood that I had told her everything I knew.

  “Should we be talking to your agent?” asked Shascha. She spoke sharply yet quietly. I didn’t feel like an author meeting his new editor; I felt like a narc wearing a wire.

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “I used to.”

  “Who was it?”

  I told her the agent’s name and she snickered. “What about a lawyer?” she asked.

  “Do I need one?”

  “No. Better if you don’t,” she said. “We should keep this just between us.” She gave Courtney a brief nod, and Courtney unzipped her purse and took out two copies of a contract that had been folded in three. I didn’t look the documents over too carefully; to be honest, the only part that interested me was the money, and the number was the same one we had discussed. I never cared much about contracts; I figured people honored or broke them all the time, and whatever happen­ed, I would do what I wanted and apologize for it later if I had to.

  “Do I sign it now?” I asked.

  Courtney handed me a pen. It wasn’t a Salinger fountain pen; it was a crappy Bic. I signed both copies and handed them to Shascha, who signed and handed one back to me. Then Courtney handed me the check, which I folded and stuffed into my jeans.

  I had other questions, but Shascha acted as if our business together was already finished.

  “Might there be a movie deal in the future?” I asked. I thought Conner’s story might make a pretty good film.

  “You’re giving us all those rights; we’ll handle that,” said Shascha.

  “And what about selling the story overseas?” I asked. Millions of people were fascinated by Margot’s stories; I felt sure they would want to know the story behind the crime.

  “We’ll deal with all that, too,” Shascha said.

  Shascha didn’t have anything to say when I asked about book covers or publicity campaigns or any revisions she might want me to make. The contract looked much shorter than any I had ever seen. There were no installments, just one lump sum paid “upon signing,” plus the confidentiality agreement that forbade me from discussing the contents of the book with anyone before it was published.

  “Are you going to want me to do any speaking engagements? Interviews? Book tours?” I liked imagining Sabine, Ramona, Beatrice, and I flipping channels and ordering room service in hotel suites.

  “It’s too early to talk about that,” said Shascha.

  “Why?” I tried to look directly at her, but all I saw in her sunglasses was my own reflection. It was then that I realized Shascha wasn’t buying my book at all; she was buying my silence, and the reason was because she knew Conner’s story was true. Margot Hetley was the franchise, and she had to protect the franchise at any cost. As long as no one learned Margot’s story, the franchise was safe. Shascha had the rights to the story; she could publish it or not, change it or leave it as it was. I had signed away my rights in exchange for the check, and I had nothing more to say in the matter. I felt a little twinge of guilt, and a little sorry I hadn’t asked for even more money. But I sensed I’d get over all that. I tried to peek at the manuscript pages Shascha was holding. I thought I saw the name “Dudek” on the title page, but my eyes were probably deceiving me.

  “Ar
e you ever going to publish my book at all?” I asked Shascha. “Are you ever going to let anyone know the real story?”

  Shascha got up from the bench and started walking away, but Courtney Guggenheim told me all I needed to know. I could hear her singing over the music that was blaring from the carousel—“Dee-dah-dee-dah-dee.”

  55

  Well, you screwed me, pal,” Conner told me with a heavy sigh. “You screwed me big-time.”

  I had wondered when or if word would get back to Conner that I had written his story but had sold it to Shascha. I wondered what he would think if and when he learned no one would ever read it aside from Shascha, Courtney, and me.

  For the first few days after I returned to Indiana from my trip to New York, I felt nervous and had the distinct sensation that cars were following me, but I may have just imagined it. After Shascha’s check cleared, I turned my attention to more pressing matters, such as walking the dog, dealing with Ramona’s and Beatrice’s ear infections, getting one or both kids out of the house so that Sabine could write some more job applications, and trying to figure out what we would do with our lives. At least now, with the money Shascha had paid me, we had time to try to figure that out.

  I was in Chicago. My kids and I were visiting my mother for Fourth of July weekend while Sabine was in Bloomington to oversee yet another open house. Ramona was with my mom at the North Park Village Nature Center and I was pushing Beatrice’s stroller through Lincoln Park Zoo when I became conscious of a presence behind me. The presence became considerably more noticeable as I approached the coyote habitat. Beatrice had fallen asleep shortly after we got out of the car, so I hadn’t really been looking at animals, just pushing the stroller so that she would stay asleep.

  The coyote was small—a good deal smaller than my own dog. His fur looked coarse and reddish-brown, and I was staring into his indifferent ice-blue eyes when Conner approached me; his hair was nearly all white now. He was wearing a pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and new blue jeans. He carried a black backpack over one shoulder.