About the Author (15 page)

“Hey, no prob!” she said. “It’s been cool meeting you. It was totally worth the trip.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Well, good-bye.” I closed the door. Or rather, I tried to. She had inserted her blunt-toed black boot into the gap between the door and the frame. Confused, I looked at her through the narrow span. She smiled at me, a sly, twisty little grin.

“You really don’t recognize me?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

She jammed her hands into the pockets of her shorts and straightened up, causing her small, high breasts to strain against the thin cotton of her T-shirt. “We were pretty close. Back in New York. At least for
one
night.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Although I was starting to.

Ever since the publication of my novel, I had been half expecting one of my conquests from my New York bachelor days to wriggle from the woodwork. And now, evidently, here one was. Whether through the power of suggestion or an actual act of memory, I now thought I did recall something about the quick, almost furtive, movement of her pale-blue irises, the pillowy way her lips protruded as they closed over her slightly uneven teeth. But what was she doing here? The term
paternity suit
whispered somewhere in my brain.

“By the way,” she said, smiling, “you owe me an apology. I
told
you that you were gonna get rich. And you just blew me off.”

She lifted her hand and showed me her mottled palm. “Check it out,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward my hand.

Automatically, I glanced into my palm. There, staring at me from my own hand, was the pattern of creases that formed, forty-five degrees off the vertical, a large M.

I looked at her. She was smiling at me now, waggling her wheat-colored brows. Lesley. Les for short. The girl who had robbed us back in Washington Heights. It all came flooding back: Stewart’s and my frenzied search of our burglarized premises, the trip to the Thirty-fourth Precinct to report the theft, the wild-eyed, or stoned-out, or utterly blank eyes of the girls in those mug shots.

For several eternity-in-an-instant heartbeats, I could do nothing but gape at her—in shock. Yes, I
did
remember her now: the broad, flat forehead; the rounded cheeks abruptly tapering to a pointed, shallowly cleft chin; the pert body with its short waist, insolently cocked hips, and trim legs. I also registered other memories that now could only horrify me, those particulars of physical intimacy that forever link lovers, no matter how brief their partnership, no matter how long their separation. I was thinking (or rather trying
not
to think) of the way her agile tongue had once worked its way, snakelike, around my tonsils; of the odd way she had had, during the act itself, of nipping my flesh between her thumb and index finger with devilish hornet-sting pinches, in order (as she later explained) to prolong my performance; of the voracious way she had applied her lips and tongue to any object or orifice, without squeamishness or inhibition.

“What,” I said, “are you doing here?”

“I guess I oughta apologize for ripping you off,” she said breezily. “It was nothing personal. Can I come in?”

I repeated my question.

She shrugged, flipped her hair back. “Well,” she said, “I
told
you that I loved your
book
.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m calling the police.” I reached for the cordless phone that sat on a table just inside the hallway to my right.

She hit the door like a fullback, the door bursting inward, the knob striking me a nasty blow above the groin, knocking me off balance, knocking me backward into the mail table from which, twenty months before, I had stolen the FedEx package containing Stewart’s manuscript. I regained my balance and was starting to move at her off the table, the phone raised over my head, when something flashed around my face, a black-handled knife with a tremendous curved, cutting edge.

“Don’t be stupid,” she panted, pressing me back against the wall with her free hand.

I could feel the coiled strength in her wiry little body. The table cut into the back of my thighs. Her odor, a citrony perfume with a base note of underarm sweat, stung my nose. Her left hand was clutching at the collar of my shirt, bunching it up under my chin. Her other elbow she held high, aiming the knife point at the thin flesh that throbbed over my carotid artery. There was a wild look in her eyes, and her tongue kept darting out to wet her lips.

“Drop that fuckin’ phone,” she said.

“It’s cool, it’s cool,” I absurdly said, propping the cordless onto the table behind me. I slowly raised both hands, as if she were training a pistol on me. “Just—just put that thing away. Please.”

“First you’re gonna invite me in.”

“Of course, of course.”

And so, knees trembling, heart convulsing, never taking my eyes off her (as she treaded a few paces behind me, knife at the ready), I walked backward through the hallway, past the den, and into the living room, where I stopped in the center of the Oriental rug, my hands still held high.

She pointed with the blade toward the blue velvet armchair beside the picture window. Warily, obediently, I stepped over to it. I was breathing hard, as if I had just dashed up several flights of stairs. I sat, making a mental note of the heavy brass lamp on the end table nearby and trying to figure out whether I could use it as a weapon if she suddenly lunged at me.

But she showed no signs of doing that. Instead, she twitched her head from side to side, apparently looking for the best place to sit. Her eye fell on the sofa, some five paces across the carpet from me. Returning her eyes to me, she walked over, pulled the knapsack off her shoulder, dropped it on the coffee table, then slowly lowered herself onto the sofa. After stagily wriggling her small bottom into the cushion, she crossed her bare legs, twitched her hair back off her face with a jerk of her head, then smiled at me ironically. She began absently stroking the flat of the knife blade against the flesh just above her knee, like a barber working a straight razor against a strop.

I watched as she slowly took in the room, her eyes lingering on its appurtenances of domesticate tranquillity. Finally, she spoke.

“You sure done good since I last saw you.”

“If it’s money you want, you can have it,” I blurted out.

“Yeah,” she went on, as if she hadn’t even heard me, “that book earned you a
ton
of money.” She looked at me. “Too bad you didn’t write it.”

Have I properly established how paradisiacal that May day was? The sunshine igniting the white froth of the cherry blossoms and the dogwood trees down in the pasture; the frilly birdsong that trilled on the hillside; the light-spangled surface of the lake. I had always imagined that when the stroke fell, it would be in darkness, in the dead of winter. But things never go the way you expect.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Yeah?” She leaned forward and plunged her arm into her knapsack, then withdrew a bunch of papers—perhaps twenty pages in all. These she extended toward me. “C’mon,” she said. “Take ’em.”

Rising a little off my chair, I stretched out a hand and took them. On the top page, in sans serif computer lettering, I saw the hideous words:

“ ’Course, that’s just the first chapter,” she said. “I didn’t want to lug a copy of the whole
novel
up here.”

I looked up. She read, easily, the incredulous question on my face.

“I printed it off his computer,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It was on the hard drive of his laptop.”

I have mentioned my aversion to, and ignorance of, computers. So as I sat there with those awful pieces of paper in my hand, I understood only vaguely what was happening to me: a copy of the novel had somehow been stored in the laptop that Les had stolen. Later, when I went to the library and studied a small volume entitled
Your Friend the Computer
, I would learn of the miraculous way in which a laptop can hold, in the form of microscopic magnetic particles, tens of thousands of bits of information—thousands of pages of print—in a space no bigger than an attaché case. The ghost in the machine. Stewart’s ghost. Abroad again.

Of course the clues had been there for me to read all along, if only I could have deciphered them. For instance, the
accordion-folded printout
I burned in Fort Tryon Park! A rough version of the novel which (I later came to understand) Stewart had printed off his hard drive before his laptop was stolen, and which he would have used when typing the fair copy on his Underwood. My
friend
the computer, indeed.

I placed the pages on the coffee table. The girl was watching me closely. She screwed up her eyebrows.

“At first,” she said, “I couldn’t figure out how you stole his book from him. Figured you maybe
killed
him. So I looked up his parents’ number in his computer. I phoned them. They said he got killed on his bike. Or some fucking thing.” She grinned, bringing out a pair of symmetrical dimples in her baby-fat cheeks. “That made more sense. I didn’t really have you pegged for a murderer. A thief, yeah. But not a killer.”

She stood suddenly and began to walk slowly around the room, running her eyes over Janet’s paintings, pausing to finger a silver vase, then a crystal bowl. “It’s pretty fuckin’ sad to read his diary,” she said, inspecting the underside of a candy dish. “All about how he’s gonna get his book published and how some chick is going to fall in love with him when she reads it.” (
Janet
, I thought. She’s talking about
Janet
.) “I mean, he had his whole
life
wrapped up in that book. Then
bingo
, he’s dead, and you”—she jabbed the knife point in my direction—“steal his work.” She put down the dish and placed her free hand on her hip. Apparently it was my move.

“Who else have you told this story to?” I said.

“No one.
Yet
.”

I thought about how easily her story could be corroborated. The detective would look with great interest at the dates of Stewart’s death and my first contact with Blackie Yaeger; he would read Stewart’s diaries, which, according to this person, contained much incriminating stuff about his hopes and plans for the novel. As to telling the authorities that the computer was actually mine, and the diary entries mere “writing exercises,” I shot down this possibility as quickly as it occurred to me. An enterprising sleuth would check the complaint that Stewart had filed at the Thirty-fourth Precinct on the day of the robbery. Stewart had given his laptop’s serial number to the cops; they
already
possessed a written record of its ownership. She had me.

I had already rejected any fantasies of springing at her and disarming her. She was a lithe little thing, and I was sure to wind up stabbed through the heart. Besides, even supposing that I managed somehow to wrest the knife from her—then what? Frog-march her out at knife point? She would still have the laptop. She would still have me under her thumb. The only other scenario—carving her up with the blade right there on the oriental carpet—was, of course, unthinkable. Not to mention messy. No, the only way to get her out of the house was to accede to her demands. For now.

“How much do you want?” I said.

She walked back to the sofa and settled herself back against the needlepoint throw pillows. Recrossed her bare legs. She began to tap the knife blade against her kneecap. The point bounced, like a drumstick.

“Twenty-five thousand in cash, up front,” she said. “Then regular payments of maybe . . . I don’t know, a few grand a month?”

It was not as bad as I had imagined. That is, it could have been worse. She could have asked for everything. I tried not to let my relief show when I spoke.

“How do I know you’ll keep quiet?”

She looked insulted by the question. “You got my
word
.”

“Not good enough,” I said, feeling bolder now. The terror of imminent death-by-stabbing had abated. She had come to blackmail me. I was of no use to her dead. “I want the laptop,” I said.

She made a goofy face, tilting her head to one side. “Duhhh,” she said. Then she straightened up. “But you’re not going to get it. That’s
my
guarantee that you’ll keep paying.”

We sat regarding each other, like poker players. Her eyes had taken on a curious flatness, a dullness, like stones in the bottom of a murky pond. Perhaps half a minute passed.

“Look, I’m not gonna
tell
on you if you keep
pay
ing,” she cried, her pale forehead bunched into wrinkles of incredulousness. Her tone was one of pained exasperation, as if she were trying to get through to an idiot. “Think about it. What do I get out of blowing the whistle on you? Dick-all. They take all the money you made off of Stewart’s book and put you in
jail
or something, and I’m broke again. So it’s best for both of us if no one finds out what a scumbag you really are. It’s
our
secret. Together. Forever.”

For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. Until death do us part
. A macabre marriage. It was as if everything that had happened to me in the past year had vanished, as when you wake up from a transporting dream only to find that you are still mired in your shabby, desperate, depressing, hideous life. This girl sitting across from me—this two-bit, chiseling, thieving blackmailer—was my partner in crime, my soul mate, my true wife.

“So what d’you say?” she asked, suddenly extending her legs and propping her big black boots on the coffee table. She lifted her free hand and placed it behind her head. A considerable sweat stain darkened the cotton stretched over her armpit. “Believe me, I’ll go to the cops. I’ll go to the newspapers. I bet
Hard Copy
would pay pretty good for a story like this.”

Part of me wanted to give up immediately, to say to her
, “Go ahead. Squeal to the police, the TV shows, everyone! I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of living with this secret. I’m sick of fending off Stewart’s phantom.” But there was another part of me, the fierce, cornered rat, that was determined to fight, to chew my way to freedom.