The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  A doctor? He’d have to do an awful lot of research, but that was all right. He’d never written about a doctor before.

  A doctor who finds a disease where it shouldn’t be, something that’s only found above the Arctic Circle, say, and his patient has never been north of Tarrytown, and . . .

  Not a doctor.

  He hadn’t known he was dreaming about Lucie, but Isabelle must be right about that. Beating Lucie in his sleep. And then the dreams were always gone in the morning, leaving nothing but a sense of heaviness, weariness, sorrow.

  Life was supposed to be better without Lucie, that’s what it had all been about. And it was better, the financial crunch was over, the aggravation was over, the book deadline had been solved. He was the only fly in the ointment, he was the only reason things weren’t better. He was doing it to himself.

  A real estate salesman finds drug money hidden in the basement of a house he’s offering, and the drug dealers want it back. No; older money. Prohibition money from the thirties, a third-generation private eye has been looking for it, like his father and his grandfather. Yesterday and today, linked. Neither of them has any right to the money, so both of them have the same right. But the private eye is tough and ruthless, and the real estate agent is just an ordinary guy, trying to keep from being swallowed up.

  Is the real estate agent a woman? No. Bryce didn’t think he’d ever successfully written from a woman’s point of view, not for more than a few pages at a time. He’d get too many things wrong. He didn’t even want to think about the sex scenes.

  He and Isabelle hadn’t had sex for almost two weeks. He hadn’t even noticed, not till this second. Nothing in Connecticut last weekend, nothing here since, nothing here last week. Connecticut, two weeks ago. Her idea. And he hadn’t noticed.

  These characters weren’t characters, they were wallpaper. He breathed on them, and they failed to stir into life.

  Maybe he should just take the train to Connecticut today, not wait till tomorrow, see if the change of scene—

  The phone rang. Isabelle, he thought, though he knew it wouldn’t be. He picked up, and it was Wayne. “Oh, hello,” Bryce said.

  He’d felt strange today in Joe’s office, with Wayne, almost as though he were jealous, as though he didn’t want them to get along. It was irritating they lived in the same neighborhood, he wasn’t sure why.

  Wayne said, “I just got home, and—”

  “You and Joe got along great, I see.”

  “—your Detective Johnson was on my answering machine!”

  Oh. Isabelle was right, Johnson wasn’t finished. Bryce could hear panic in Wayne’s voice, and panic was the last thing Wayne should do right now. Making himself sound calm, unconcerned, Bryce said, “Yeah, he’s making the rounds, Isabelle told me, he talked to her on Tuesday.”

  “But what does he want with me? Why does he even know about me?”

  “Well,” Bryce said, “my guess is, he talked to Janet whatever her name is, who directed that play—”

  “Higgins.”

  “—and from there to Jack Wagner, and Jack would have said he’d introduced you to Lucie at the play, so now he wants to know what you and Lucie talked about, and did you ever see her again, and you never did.”

  “I never did.”

  “Have you called him back?”

  “Not yet, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “It’s not a big deal, Wayne,” Bryce said. “He’s following every lead, that’s all, that’s what his job is. You won’t give him any reason to look twice at you, and he won’t look twice at you.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Call him now, Wayne. If you don’t call him back, he will look twice at you.”

  “All right. I’ll call him now.”

  They hung up, and Bryce continued to sit at the computer, but he’d stopped trying to think of a character. He was thinking about Wayne instead.

  Wayne had done what Bryce had sent him out to do, and it was supposed to stop there, but it wasn’t stopping there. Wayne kept moving, acting, and Bryce didn’t like the ways he was going. Cozying up to Joe Katz. And now, going into a panic, just because a cop wanted to talk to him. Cops had talked to Bryce, cops in Los Angeles and cops here, and he’d handled them all with no problem, no problem. Why can’t Wayne do the same? Johnson’s just following his leads.

  But Johnson was a good detective, Bryce was sure of that. Would he smell something on Wayne, see something, sense something? Don’t the good detectives begin with that sixth sense, the feeling that something’s wrong, not yet knowing what?

  Wayne had a power over Bryce that Bryce hadn’t truly appreciated until now. When they’d made their agreement, that day they’d met at the library, they’d put themselves in each other’s hands, they were absolutely dependent on each other’s solidity and reliability. Bryce was solid, Bryce was reliable, God knows he’d proved that.

  Is Wayne going to be a problem for me? Bryce wondered. If he’s going to be a problem for me, what do I do about it?

  Sixteen

  The appointment with Detective Johnson was for eleven the next morning. Normally, Wayne didn’t like to dose himself indiscriminately with drugs, but this morning, after Susan left for work, he took half a Valium. It was her prescription, rarely used, for those times when her job became too stressful. Wayne had almost never taken one, and didn’t want to be zoned out when Johnson got here, but that would be better than being hopped-up, manic.

  He hadn’t mentioned Johnson to Susan yet, because what was the point? She’d have all day to worry about it, for no reason. When it was all over, he’d tell her what had happened. With, he hoped, a relieved laugh.

  Johnson was exactly on time, and when he came in he didn’t seem threatening at all. A moderately dark black man, tall and not too heavy, mild in his manner, he seemed more like somebody who worked in a bank or for some bureaucracy than a homicide detective. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Prentice,” he said, as though Wayne had had a choice in the matter.

  “Anything I can do,” Wayne assured him. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Johnson smiled. “Oh, I better not,” he said. “I drink coffee all day long sometimes, I think I’m putting the people at ease, the end of the day, I got the heebie-jeebies.”

  Wayne grinned, liking the man. “Then I guess we just sit down,” he said.

  They sat in the living room, and Johnson said, “You know what this is about.”

  “Lucie Proctorr.”

  “You met her fairly recently, I believe,” Johnson said. He wasn’t taking notes, seemed just to be having a casual conversation.

  “I guess it must have been the weekend before she died,” Wayne said. “Or the Thursday, really.”

  “It was at a play?”

  “Yes. The playwright introduced me. I asked him to.”

  Johnson was interested in that. “You asked him to?”

  “I’m an old friend of her husband’s,” Wayne said. “Bryce. We knew each other twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, here in the city, we were both trying to make it as writers.”

  “You did some novels yourself,” Johnson suggested.

  “Yes, sure,” Wayne said. “When the first one was published, I went to Italy for a year, research for the second book. When I got back, I’d lost touch with some of the people I knew, including Bryce. Then he became famous, and I didn’t”—Wayne shrugged—“it seemed awkward to get in touch with him, after a while.”

  “But you did it, finally.”

  “No, he called me. What I think it was,” Wayne said, “when his marriage broke up, I think maybe he was lonely, or the friends they’d had were mostly her friends. I think he looked up people he hadn’t seen for a while, including me. We met a couple of times, we had coffee—” Wayne broke off, and laughed, and said, “Not too much coffee.”

  “No, that’s good,” Johnson said, and smiled. “But how did you get from there to this play?”

  “Well, Bryce reall
y talked against Lucie,” Wayne said. He’d been working out this story in his mind since yesterday afternoon, and thought it was solid now. “Any time her name came up,” he explained, “there was more from Bryce about how rotten she was. You begin to wonder, can anybody really be that bad? I finally said it to him, I’d like to meet her, see for myself, he said be my guest.”

  “So he’s the one who knows Jack Wagner, the playwright.”

  “I don’t know any of those people,” Wayne said. “I went there, I didn’t know a soul. Usually there’s at least somebody you know vaguely, but not there, no. Bryce couldn’t go because Lucie was going, because the director was a friend of hers, so Bryce called Jack Wagner and asked if I could go instead, and Wagner said yes. I don’t think Bryce said I wanted to meet Lucie, but I told Wagner that myself, at the party.”

  “And that it was curiosity.”

  “Sure. An old friend’s horrible marriage, what does it look like?”

  “Like rubbernecking at an auto crash,” Johnson suggested.

  Wayne laughed. “Guilty,” he said. “That’s just what it was. You know, like when Tom Sawyer charged his friends to look at his wounded toe. Everybody wants to see the really icky things.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Johnson said.

  “Which in this case,” Wayne said, “was Lucie Proctorr.” And without warning there came into his memory, as clear and vivid as a movie poster, that final moment when Lucie Proctorr had been the icky thing. It stopped his breath, it stopped time, it almost destroyed the flow of the story he was telling, but then, desperate, afraid Johnson would see something, guess something, he used it, sitting back, letting the shock show on his face, crying, “My God, what am I saying? That’s horrible!”

  Soothing, Johnson said, “That’s okay, Mr. Prentice, I know what you mean. The question is, what did you think of Lucie? As bad as you thought?”

  “No,” Wayne said. “She couldn’t have been as bad as Bryce was saying, nobody could, but she wasn’t very good, either.”

  “You didn’t like her.”

  “Not at all. I’m sorry to talk about her like that when she’s dead and all, but I thought she was just negative, and a put-down artist. I mean, it was her friend who directed the play, and she’s there as a guest, drinking their wine, and all she wanted to do was talk about what trash the play was, and how her friend Jane deserved better than that, she should be directing at the Public Theater.”

  Johnson smiled. “I take it you didn’t talk with her for long.”

  “Maybe five minutes. Then I thanked Jack Wagner for inviting me, told him what a great play it was—it wasn’t really very good, but you don’t say that—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “And I came home and told Susan about it. My wife.”

  Johnson looked interested. “She didn’t go along?”

  “No, she didn’t want to,” Wayne said. “She wasn’t interested in Bryce’s ex-wife, in fact she’s never met Bryce. And she didn’t care about the play, and she has a full-time job, so she didn’t feel like coming out with me. She had dinner that night with a woman friend of hers, and was home before I was.”

  “When Lucie left the theater that night,” Johnson said, “do you have any idea who she was with?”

  “Not at all,” Wayne said. “I was gone by then. I was probably the first one to leave the party.”

  “You didn’t know anybody,” Johnson suggested, “and the mission was accomplished.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you discuss Lucie with Bryce Proctorr, later on?”

  “Not really. I mean, just a little bit. I told him what I thought, what I just told you, that I more or less agreed with him that she wasn’t a very nice person.”

  Johnson nodded. “I guess Bryce must have felt Lucie mistreated him quite a bit,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Did he ever tell you he wanted revenge against Lucie?”

  Startled, because everything had been so easygoing, Wayne said, “Revenge? No, all he ever said was he wanted it over with, the lawyers were dragging it out.”

  “But he wanted it to end.”

  “He sure did.”

  “Did he ever suggest there might be any kind of shortcut to end it that he might take?”

  “You mean, like killing her?”

  Johnson grinned. “Well, that’s one way, sure,” he said. “But I was thinking, some of these rich fellas, they just pack up everything and leave the country, and tell the wife, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

  “I don’t think that idea ever even occurred to Bryce,” Wayne said. “He’s got his life here. Besides, whatever money he gets paid, that’s here, too, in New York. I don’t think it would do him any good to go to Europe or anywhere.”

  “That’s probably true.” Johnson seemed to consider for a minute, and then he said, “Do you think of Bryce Proctorr as a good friend?”

  “In a funny way, yes,” Wayne told him. “We hadn’t seen each other for years, whenever I thought about him or saw his name in the paper, what I mostly felt was jealousy, because he was so much more successful than I am, but now that I’ve seen him again for a while I like the guy. He isn’t stuck-up or anything like that. I don’t say we’re close, but we get along. Yeah, I like him.”

  “You didn’t mind his success.”

  “It’s his. He isn’t stealing anything from me.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Johnson said. “And what are you doing these days, Mr. Prentice, if I may ask?”

  Acting surprised, Wayne said, “Still writing.”

  “Really? Novels, like before?”

  “Sure. I’ve been using a pen name, the last few years,” Wayne told him, “but I’m thinking of going back to my own name with the new one.”

  “You’re working on a book now?”

  “I’m always working on a book.”

  “To tell the truth, Mr. Prentice,” Johnson said, “I’m something of a wannabe writer myself. I won’t inflict anything of my own on you, don’t worry about that, but I wonder. Could I take a look at what you’re working on?”

  “Sure,” Wayne said. “Come along.”

  As they left the living room, it occurred to Wayne that he might actually be a suspect in the case, even if just in the way that everybody is a suspect at first. Or had Johnson recognized some element from that drawing of the suspect in Wayne’s face? Susan had finally seen some similarity in the eyes, but not enough, she thought, to lead anyone else to the likeness.

  But asking to see his novel in progress. Wasn’t it likely that Johnson wanted to know if Wayne could support himself with his writing, or if he was somebody who needed money, maybe needed it enough to kill a pesky ex-wife for an old friend? You won’t get me that way, Detective Johnson, Wayne thought.

  They went into Wayne’s little office, which Johnson admired, calling it “compact” as though that were a synonym for “efficient,” and then Wayne had him sit in front of the computer while he booted in the disc of The Shadowed Other. It didn’t have a title page, because he wasn’t sure of the byline yet, but began with Chapter One.

  “Well, look at that,” Johnson said. He read the first paragraph, then scrolled a dozen pages or so, read another paragraph, then sat back and shook his head in amused wonder. “You professionals make it look so easy,” he said. “That’s why I know I’ll never get anywhere.”

  “Everybody started,” Wayne told him. “No one was born a pro.”

  “That’s very nice of you to say,” Johnson told him, and got up from the computer. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Prentice,” he said.

  And that was that.

  Seventeen

  Bryce couldn’t seem to get out of his temporal confusion. He usually took the train up to Connecticut sometime on Friday, spent the weekend, left Monday. This week, the New York apartment had just become too oppressive by Thursday, so he’d taken the train up shortly after Wayne had told him about the message from Detective Johnson,
and now it was Friday morning, and he was already here, and he just couldn’t keep the day straight in his mind.

  He phoned several weekend friends, wondering what if anything might be doing, this early in December, not yet massively Christmas, but of course none of them were here. Today is Friday, he had to keep reminding himself, and they are in New York. They work in New York. They live in New York. This is their weekend place.

  And me? Where do I work? Do I work? Where do I live? Where do I call to find me?

  He still didn’t have his new story, and he needed it, he needed it now. Story ideas had never been a problem for him, there’d always been more ideas than time to write them, he’d reject one perfectly good notion because he felt more simpatico toward a different one. But of course he could never go back to any of those ancient story stubs, they wouldn’t still have juice in them.

  For him, creating a novel was like gardening: you choose your seed, you treat it exactly the way the package says, and gradually a thing of beauty—or of sturdiness, or of nutrition—grows up and becomes yours. The seed you don’t nurture doesn’t wait to be doted over later; it shrivels and dies.

  One seed, that was all he needed. Of course, also this weekend he had to do the tiny remaining revisions on Two Faces in the Mirror, but that was no problem. No matter when he turned the work in, Joe Katz surely wouldn’t read the pages until after the holidays. Two Faces in the Mirror was scheduled now for June, which was tight, in publishing terms, but Bryce Proctorr was a known quantity—and a known quality, too—so there was no doubt in anyone’s mind the manuscript would be ready in time. And it had been too long since a Bryce Proctorr novel had been published, so the sooner the better.

  Meaning the sooner the better, as well, for whatever was to come next. He should already know what it was by now, so he could do some preliminary plotting out, so he could spend the winter months in whatever travel and research might be necessary, spend the spring writing the book, turn it in in June just as Two Faces was being published. That was the kind of scheduling a publisher liked; the new one comes into the shop as the old one goes out the door.