The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Saw him four times,” Bryce said. “That’s a lot.”

  “You’d think so,” Johnson said. “But not everybody’s as observant as we’d like.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “The man told the doorman his name was Wayland,” Johnson said. “Does that ring a bell?”

  Oh, clever Wayne, Bryce thought, realizing at once what he must have done. Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t know anybody named Wayland. No first name?”

  “No, unless that is a first name.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Ms. Proctorr definitely knew him,” Johnson said. “She told the doorman to send him up.”

  “Wayland,” Bryce said. He shook his head.

  “It seemed as though they might have gone to dinner,” Johnson said, “in the neighborhood, given the time they went out and how long they were gone. So we canvassed local restaurants with Ms. Proctorr’s photo, and we’ve got a waitress at a place called Salt on Columbus Avenue who thinks she might have seen Ms. Proctorr that night. She’s not absolutely certain, and she didn’t notice the man that much.”

  “But maybe,” Bryce said.

  “The man paid cash, so we don’t get a name from a credit card,” Johnson said. “The witnesses disagree on several points, so this is limited to what they could agree on.” And at last he brought out the artist’s drawing.

  Which didn’t look at all like Wayne! Astonished, Bryce held the picture and stared at this stranger, trying to see, if not Wayne, someone he knew in there. This was some sort of tough guy, with thinner lips and flatter ears and a higher brow and darker, bushier hair than Wayne. The high forehead could have come from the waitress, seeing him from above.

  Staring, Bryce could finally see Wayne’s eyes, they’d got that part right. Wayne’s eyes, in a stranger’s face. Wayne in a mask. “No,” he said. “I’d know if I’d seen this man before.”

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Johnson said.

  Handing back the picture, Bryce said, “So this is the guy, anyway, you’re sure of that much.”

  “Well, no,” Johnson said. “It looks like a date rape that got out of hand, but it could be something else entirely.”

  Bryce shook his head, showing bewilderment. He was feeling hollow, more and more hollow, as though a cavern were in his chest. A high cavern, with cold sharp stalactites. He said, “What else? What else could it be?”

  “Well, it could be robbery,” Johnson said. “Those buildings over there are pretty secure, all in all, but it’s possible someone got in, saw this man leave Ms. Proctorr’s apartment, waited till he got into the elevator, then went and knocked on the door, pretended to be the man coming back.”

  Save Wayne, Bryce thought. He said, “You think that’s possible?”

  “Possible, yes,” Johnson said. “Some jewelry was taken, drawers left open, that sort of thing. But it had a kind of stage-set look. And apparently she had a week-at-a-glance type datebook, and that’s gone missing, too.”

  “Ah,” Bryce said.

  Johnson smiled at him. “No burglar’s gonna be in the datebook, is he?”

  “No, I guess not,” Bryce said.

  Johnson shook his head. “But then,” he said, “you turn it around, let’s say the burglar took the datebook so we’d blame the fella she had the date with.”

  “Tricky,” Bryce said.

  Johnson nodded. “A lot of them look tricky at first,” he said. “Sooner or later, most of them turn out to be simple.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Bryce and Isabelle were seated quietly in the living room, both reading magazines, when the phone rang. He answered, and the voice said, “Hi, it’s Wayne.”

  Coldness ran through Bryce’s body. How dare you call me? he raged, inside his head. How dare you speak to me, how dare you show your face? He said, “Oh, hi, Wayne, hold on a second.”

  “Sure.”

  Putting the phone down, standing, he said to Isabelle, “Business. I’ll take it in the office. Hang up this one when I pick up, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  He went to his office, sat at the desk, and picked up the phone there. “Okay, Isabelle.”

  There was a click, and Wayne said, “Isabelle. That was fast.”

  “You probably want to talk about the book,” Bryce said. He didn’t need Wayne to tell him that it was fast to have Isabelle here.

  “I sure do,” Wayne said.

  “I thought I should wait a week,” Bryce told him. “The funeral was this morning.”

  Wayne said nothing. Bryce waited, then said, “Next Monday, or maybe this Friday, I’ll call Joe Katz, he’s my editor, I’ll say the book’s finally done, then send it over.”

  “That’s terrific. Thank you, Bryce.”

  Bryce couldn’t help himself, he had to say, “How are you?” Meaning, how are you now that you’ve beaten a human being to death?

  “Oh, fine,” Wayne said, but then gave a little laugh and said, “Shaky for a while there.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Things don’t happen the way you think they’re going to happen, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess I do,” Bryce said.

  “Well, I’ll be here, Bryce,” Wayne told him. “I’ll wait for your call.”

  “Okay.”

  Bryce hung up, and looked grimly at his computer, silent, unforthcoming. Wayne’s there, he thought. He’ll be there, right there, from now on. Forever.

  Twelve

  Wayne wished they’d all just leave it alone. The story was as dead as Lucie; why wouldn’t they let it die?

  What they had was skimpy enough. Somehow, they’d traced Wayne to Salt, and they had an artist’s drawing of the suspect that was ridiculously off. Laughing at it in the paper, Susan said, “Is that the man I married?”

  But after that, nothing. No new leads, no clues, no suspects, no changes or additions of any kind. But the newspapers and the local television news programs had to rehash the same damn empty details day after day. Even the networks touched on the story in their news broadcasts.

  It was the usual, and Wayne knew it was merely the usual, and that it shouldn’t bother him, but it bothered him. The usual was the mix of sex and celebrity, but to Wayne’s eye this was a pretty watered-down version of both. It’s true Bryce was a best-selling author, a commodity, a name brand, but he wasn’t O.J. Simpson, for God’s sake. And the police kept saying there was no sign of sexual attack, but the media didn’t care, they went with it anyway. If a beautiful blonde has been bludgeoned to death, there’s got to be sex involved in it somewhere.

  “Beautiful blonde bludgeoned” was the nicely alliterative phrase most of the media had settled on, though Wayne could have told them they’d got that all wrong. It hadn’t been like that at all. Bludgeoning a beautiful blonde hadn’t in any way been what it was about; more like beheading a snapping turtle.

  He and Susan had started watching the TV news again, once the story went public, but Wayne was regretting that now. Still, he could see Susan was as caught up in the story as if she didn’t know what was actually going on. She’d become another spectator among all the spectators of the bludgeoning of the beautiful blonde.

  There was something else also building in Susan, he could tell, but he didn’t know what it was. They were having sex more frequently, and during it she was clinging to him more, as though he were a floating timber from the shipwreck and she in a raging sea. But she seemed to like it, whatever was coursing through her mind in those moments, so he knew better than to question it.

  Then, Wednesday night, as they were about, Wayne thought, to go to sleep, she asked him, in a very low, almost little-girl voice, “Can I ask you a question?”

  Of course, she didn’t have to mention the topic. I’m not going to like this, he thought, but there was no way out of it: “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “Was it a turn-on?”

  “No!” He was appalled she could ask such a thing. “
How could it?” he cried. But then he realized that the bald denial wasn’t enough, it wouldn’t quiet her doubts or change her mind or alter whatever picture she’d formed in her head, so, with the disgust he still strongly recalled, he said, “She shit her pants.”

  “Oh!” A shocked silence from her side of the bed; and then, “I’m sorry you told me that.”

  “I’m sorry you asked.”

  Another longish silence. Then, in the little-girl voice once more, “I won’t do it again.”

  “It’s all right, Susan,” he said, sorry he’d been harsh. “I know it’s natural, you want to know and at the same time you don’t want to know.”

  “I don’t want to know. Not now. Maybe some day.”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking that, hoping when it’s, when it’s all calmed down and long over, we could sit down someplace and I could tell you the whole thing.”

  “But not yet,” she said.

  “No, not yet.”

  He knew part of the problem, for both of them, was this empty period of waiting. There was always suspense when a novel manuscript was submitted to its editor. Even after years of writing, and however much success, there was always that blank tense period between handing in the manuscript and getting the editor’s reaction.

  And this time, it was so much more complicated. It wasn’t even his manuscript, not any more, and it wasn’t his editor, and he had no control over the submission. He just had to wait, and wait, and that’s why the continuing crime-of-the-moment attention from the media was getting to him so much.

  It was affecting his work, too. He’d done damn little this week on The Shadowed Other. Last week, before they’d gone away for their driving weekend in New England, he’d been racing through the book, but this week it was coming hard. The characters resisted him, refused to let him know how they would act and react, and more important, why they would act this way and not that way. He didn’t necessarily have to explain all the motivation to the reader, but he had to know. He had to know them well enough to be absolutely certain how they would react to any possible stimulus, and he was just having trouble, this week, seeing his people clear.

  And then, Thursday afternoon, as he sat glooming at the computer, wondering how this one important character in the book—not the lead, but still important—would behave in response to a piece of bad news he’d just received, the phone rang, and it was Bryce. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “the book’s gone in.”

  “Oh, Bryce, that’s great!”

  “I phoned Joe Katz this morning and told him it was done, and he sent a messenger up this afternoon, and he’ll read it over the weekend.”

  No one had ever sent a messenger to pick up a book of Wayne’s before. That detail pinged off him like ironic revelation, and made him smile. “Oh, I hope he loves it,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t he?” Bryce said. “We both gave it our best.”

  Wayne beamed from ear to ear. “Yes, we did, didn’t we? Bryce, on Monday, I’ll be waiting right here by the phone.”

  “We both will,” Bryce said.

  Thirteen

  Joe Katz called just after eleven Monday morning. “Well, Bryce, it’s terrific,” he said.

  Until that instant, Bryce hadn’t realized just how worried he’d been. Scenarios had run through his head, and he’d squelched them, in which Joe would call this morning and say, “What is this crap, Bryce? You didn’t write this,” or, worse, “Bryce, I hate to tell you, buddy, but you’re slipping.” It’s a cuckoo’s egg you’ve got there, Joe, but which the cuckoo and which the foster parent?

  He’d been hiding all these doubts from himself, but now that Joe had said those wonderful words—“Well, Bryce, it’s terrific”—he could let all those goblins out of their cupboard, let them all fly away out of his head and into the air as he beamed into the phone and said, “I’m glad to hear it, Joe.”

  “And this has some of the best writing in it you’ve ever done.”

  Bryce’s beam faded slightly. “Thanks, Joe,” he said.

  “As always, you know, I’ve got to pick a few nits.”

  “Oh, sure, I’m ready,” Bryce said. “I trust your nits, Joe, you know that.”

  “Thanks. You’ve got the manuscript there? We could go over a few points, I don’t need answers now, we could do lunch later in the week, or whenever you’re ready.”

  “Sure, wait a second, just pulling it out of the drawer here, okay.”

  For ten minutes, they discussed the story and the characters and the pacing, with smallish problems that Bryce could usually fix right away, over the phone. But then Joe said, “Here on page three twelve, Henry lashes out at Eleanor and storms out of the diner. Later on, here, page three forty-seven, they seem to be back together again, no problem. I suppose we could figure out what happened in between, but I just felt as though you might have left a scene out there that we could use.”

  In fact, Bryce had added a scene, Henry’s departure from the diner. In Wayne’s version of the book, Henry’s rebellion against Eleanor had been all internal, not turning into action at all, and Bryce had found that just too undramatic, particularly in a section of the book where not much else was moving forward. He’d thought the reader would understand that a gesture of independence from Henry at that point would be no more than a gesture, and wouldn’t need to be told why Henry was still under Eleanor’s thumb the next time they appeared. Leaving out Wayne’s original version, he tried to explain his approach to Joe, but Joe just didn’t see it.

  “Henry was building toward something all along through there,” Joe said. “I could sense it. So when he finally spoke up, I really expected some sort of follow-through. I mean, he can wind up at the status quo ante, that’s fine, in fact he has to for what happens later in the book, but I just need to see the step that turned him around again. You know, if on three twelve he didn’t explode, if he kept it all internalized, then I could see that that’s where the fuse is getting wet, the spark is going out, and Henry’s stuck forever.”

  Wayne’s version, in other words. “I felt,” Bryce said, “we needed something dramatic at that point in the book.”

  “Oh, I agree with you on that,” Joe told him. “I’d hate to lose that little moment of rebellion. But then you’ve got to bring him back down again, I think, show us how it fizzled out. If it doesn’t fizzle out before he makes his move, then it has to happen afterward.”

  Joe was right, and Bryce knew it, but he couldn’t help resisting, because he also knew that only one reader in a thousand would ever even notice the problem. Henry wasn’t the hero of the book, he and Eleanor didn’t constitute the main story. “I felt,” he said, “that we would know why he was back with Eleanor, that even when he was leaving, the reader would say to himself, ‘He’ll be back.’”

  “Yes, but that just makes Henry a joke then,” Joe said, “if we don’t see the process of the turnaround, and he’s too important later on to turn him into a joke at this point.”

  “Joe, I’m gonna have to think about that one.”

  “Fine, fine. Let’s move along.”

  They had another five minutes or so, Bryce taking notes, continuing to do the smaller changes immediately, and then he hung up and spent the rest of the day trying his damnedest not to think about Henry and Eleanor.

  The fact is, he didn’t know how Henry had managed to succeed with his rebellion, even briefly. The way the man was written, he’d do what Wayne had suggested in his version of the book, he’d plan to escape and then he’d fail. When Bryce had changed that, his own motives had been plot-driven, not character-driven, and damn Joe Katz was good enough to have picked up the glitch.

  How had Wayne worked it? Bryce had thrown away the original manuscript, not wanting anything around here that would suggest the true origin of this novel, but now he wished he’d held on to it a while longer. But it was gone, and all he had was his own version, and it was a connect-the-dots spot where the dots si
mply refused to connect.

  Well, he was supposed to call Wayne anyway, so at four that afternoon he did, saying, “I just heard from Joe Katz.”

  “I just about gave up for today,” Wayne said. “I figured you’d hear from him tomorrow.”

  “I think Joe had editorial conferences most of the day,” Bryce said, feeling vaguely guilty for not having phoned Wayne immediately, this morning. “Anyway, he thinks the book is terrific. That’s the word he used.” He didn’t see any reason to mention the “some of your best writing” remark.

  “That’s nice,” Wayne said. “That’s a real relief. You don’t know what a help this is.”

  “Well, I think we helped each other,” Bryce said, because it seemed to him that somehow Wayne was leaving out the other part of their collaboration.

  “I know we did,” Wayne agreed, “and I’m glad we could, you know?”

  “I do know,” Bryce said. He wanted to say, How could you have done it, Wayne? But that was the one question that would never be asked. “Well,” he said, instead, “we’ve got this book to think about now, and I need to ask you something about it.”

  Sounding surprised, Wayne said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Joe had some little problems,” Bryce said, suddenly awkward, because he was going to have to admit this one lumpish revision he’d made in the book, “and we dealt with all but one of them, but on that one I’m kind of snagged.”

  “Something I got wrong?”

  “No, as it turns out,” Bryce said, “something you got right, and I got wrong.”

  “Oh. Some change you made.”

  “You know where Billy almost leaves Janice?” Using the names from Wayne’s version of the book.

  “In the diner? Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, I felt we needed a dramatic scene there, more—”

  “Oh, no, you didn’t. You had him walk out?”