Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (167 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

WE FINISH BREAKFAST. ROGER pours himself another Bloody Mary, and Suzanne and I freshen up our coffees. She sits back in her chair like she’s trying to catch some serious rays.

“Here’s the short and long of it, Moonlight,” she exhales after a time. “Roger here and I are in trouble. Big trouble. Perhaps even the type of trouble you might consider life threatening. And trust me when I say it has absolutely nothing to do with a few prank phone calls. That, my friend, is child’s play compared to what you’re about to hear.”

I sip my coffee, listen.

“You see, Moonlight,” Suzanne goes on, “after the trouble I had in New York when I was more or less run out of town, I nearly went mad. The literary industry was my life, and I was considered a rock star amongst agents.”

“You’re still a rock star,” Roger breaks in. “The greediest, most ruthless, iron-fisted woman I know.”

She smiles.

“Thank you Roger,” she says, kissing him on his bearded cheek. Then her eyes back on me. “I would have done anything to get back in the game in a big way. That’s when I did something I never thought I would have done in a million years.”

“She contacted the mob,” inserts Walls.

The hair on the back of my neck begins to itch.

“The mob,” I repeat. “Italians, I presume.”

“No,” she says.

“Irish? Jewish? Chinese?”

“No, no, and no.”

Now the hair on the back of my neck stands straight up.

“Russian.” I swallow.

“Exactly,” she says.

“Oh fuck,” I say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SUZANNE PAINTS AN EXQUISITE picture of how a Russian ex-patriot by the name of Alexander Stalin, a supposed lost great grandson of Uncle Joe Stalin, sent her an idea for a “true crime” manuscript about living with the Russian Mob. He wanted to call it
Russian Reign of Death
or something intensely clever like that. While Suzanne thought the idea had potential, it would need the hand of a professional ghostwriter. That in mind, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to take the project on. Therefore she set the manuscript idea and all of Alex’s contact information in the “maybe” pile. That’s when the shit hit the fan over the manuscript title she borrowed from Ian Brando and she was run out of town like a recurrence of the plague.

Some months later, after she settled with Brando out of court and knew she had no choice but to move out of the city up to Albany, she met up with Roger to discuss the future of their position in the publishing world. Which, it turns out, wasn’t entirely optimistic for either one of them. Suzanne was suddenly without a client list and Roger was still without a manuscript even after ten years of trying to write something. Anything.

What was left of his fortune was being swallowed up by his ex-wive’s support payments, coupled with a new wife who had a taste for cocaine, booze, and other men. To make matters even worse, not only did Roger not have much in the way of ideas for a new novel, but existing sales of his backlist had faded to almost nothing, causing many of his former publishers to pull the plug on any future contracts. In a word, it would take a miracle for them both to fight their way back to the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list. Or the
Amazon.com
list anyway.

“Enter the Russian mob,” I say.

“Bingo,” says Roger, draining his glass and quickly filling it up with his third bloody of the morning. “Suzanne agreed to take on Alexander’s project with me acting as the ghostwriter in exchange for a little, shall we say, cooperative assistance.”

I turn to Suzanne. Look her in the eye.

“Let’s have it, Suzanne,” I say.

She sits up straight, clears her throat, stares down into the darkness of her coffee cup, as if this will help her remember.

“I asked Alexander if he would be interested in utilizing all his powers of persuasiveness to get me into the good graces of the most powerful publisher in New York.”

“The Chance House Publishing Group,” interjects Roger.

“Persuasiveness,” I say like a question.

Suzanne adds, “My new Russian friends could convince the house’s most senior acquisition’s editor of signing us on for
Russian Reign of Terror
with Roger as the ghostwriter.”

I steal another sip of coffee.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Roger’s famous. A bestseller. A household name. You are, or were, the most powerful literary agent in the world. Why resort to illegal measures in order to get somebody to publish one book that he’s ghostwriting?”

“You mean why sell yourself to the devil?” says Roger, drinking the last of his present bloody and pouring another before he’s swallowed what’s in his mouth.

“Good question for somebody who has no idea how this business works,” says Suzanne. “You see, Moonlight, Roger is indeed a famous writer. But his sales over the past ten years have dried up to a trickle. After his contracts were cancelled, no one wanted to touch him. On top of all this, it’s the twenty-first century. Macho, Hemingwayesque writers are no longer all the rage.” She sets her hand on Roger’s thick arm. “Real men like Roger are no longer seen as valuable commodities. He’s a bad boy. The type of writer a woman loves to hate.”

“And most readers are women,” I add.

“Young women,” Suzanne agrees. “They love Harry Potter, Amish romance, and sexy vampires. Not drunken bar flies who bang loose broads in the back seat of their Chevy then head back into the bar for more shots.”

“I like that stuff.” I smile.

“You’re in the minority,” Suzanne says. “The only way Roger and I were going to come back in a major way, was to convince Chance House not only to sign Roger as the ghostwriter for the new book but to offer him an advance never before heard of in publishing. Something that would generate a major media buzz.”

“How much were you going to ask?”

“Hold onto your chair, Moonlight,” Roger says, taking a drink of his newly poured
bloody
, some of the red staining his mustache.

“Twenty-five million,” Susanne says.

I nearly drop my coffee cup.

“You heard correct. Twenty-five million. Upfront. No conditions. No contingencies. Finally, literary advances would match those of the sports world. Baseball. Football. Basketball. And half those professional cocks can’t even read at the eighth-grade level.”

“An ambitious plan,” I say.

“Up until now, the largest advance paid to any single author has been fifteen million. This kind of advance would set us all up for life.”

“After the Russians took their cut,” I add seeing precisely where this is going.

“The Ruskies were so into it, so convinced they had a deal that would make them famous beyond their wildest dreams, they even offered me a pre-advance,” Roger says.

“How much?”

“One million. Cash. Delivered in duffel bags to the place of my choosing, in exchange for a first draft manuscript to be delivered within six months. They would of course provide me with all the research material and interviews via email and internet. It would all be very efficient, of course.”

Suzanne sets down her coffee cup. “That one million would allow Roger to write stress-and worry-free. It also would represent about eight hundred thousand more than we would have ever hoped to secure if we had gone about things legally. But once the book was written, and the Russian’s forced Chance House into making a deal they couldn’t possibly refuse, I’m convinced we would have made history.”

A small breeze runs through the yard. It combines with the weighted silence.

“So how’s the book coming along?” I ask, knowing I probably just hit a nerve.

Walls looks at Suzanne over his left shoulder. He then lowers his head.

“We hit a snafu,” Suzanne says.

“Yeah, a real snag,” Roger adds, “the least of which is not making our sixth-month deadline.”

“I’m listening,” I say.

“I lost the money,” Roger says.

Me, shaking my head. “You mean, like you lost it on the ponies? Or the dogs?”

Roger, shaking his head. “No, no. I lost it. Literally lost it.”

“Who loses a million in cash?” I say.

“He does,” Suzanne says. “The Russians arranged to drop the money off in a couple of individual duffel bags inside two lockers in the Albany-Rensselaer train station, which they did. Problem was, Roger decided to head straight to the station bar for a couple of pops before heading back to my office so we could safely secure the money in safety deposit boxes.”

Roger slaps the table top. “It didn’t happen exactly like that, Suze. A friend showed up on her way back from New York City. I kindly offered her a drink. She accepted. We had a couple rounds, while the duffels were safely hidden under our table.”

“What girl?” I ask.

“Erica Beckett,” he says. “The girl you were with last night. Your cute little, um, deputy.”

“Oatczuk’s perky-titted student assistant,” Suzanne adds.

I picture the brown-haired young woman standing me up at Ralph’s to be with Roger, even after we’d sucked some face out on the sidewalk. The word cock tease comes to mind. But I keep it to myself.

“Did you tell her what was in the bags?” I say.

“I might be a writer, Moonlight,” Roger says. “And a drunk one at that. But I’m not entirely stupid. I simply told her I was coming back from a reading in Buffalo, and that that was my luggage. When I got up to take a leak I didn’t think twice about it. Who would know what was really stored inside the bags?”

“And when you got back from said leak?”

“The bags were gone,” he says, his eyes wide and glistening like the pain in his heart is still intensely profound. “Naturally I asked Erica if she saw anyone take them. But she swore she didn’t see a thing.”

“How could she not? She was standing with them at the bar.”

“Well, yes and no. She too decided to use the lady’s room. It probably didn’t occur to her to stay with my bags for a minute while I was pissing.”

“So what happened next?”

“I searched everywhere. The entire train station. Erica even helped me look. But they were nowhere to be found.”

“At first I suspected, Erica,” Suzanne jumps. “But then she couldn’t exactly have hidden them up her tight little ass.”

“Very well put,” I say. “And the Russians? I assume you’ve let them in on your little problem?”

“The Russians were not happy,” Suzanne adds. “They lost their money, we’re three months past the six months deadline, Roger’s drunk most of the time, and they still have no book. And not even the Russian mob wants to put the grease to a Chance House editor if they don’t have a manuscript in hand to back it all up.”

“They want their money back,” I intuit. “They want out of the deal.”

“But we have no way of paying it back.”

“So?”

“They came up with some other ways for us to pay them back.”

I recall Sissy’s coke. How she claimed to have gotten it from Suzanne.

“You became a dealer for them,” I say.

Suzanne lowers her head, stares back down into her coffee cup.

In the back and front of my mind, I’m wondering why the Russians didn’t just tell Suzanne to go to hell instead of entering into an impossible deal like she just laid out for me. But then, I was sure it had to have something to do with ego, the desire for this Alexander character to get a book published by the most powerful publisher in the world and written by a famous author, and to have it be the basis for a reality television show. My built-in-shit-detector was speaking to me too. It told me that Suzanne didn’t just present the possibility of Alexander getting published, she promised him publication, fortune, and fame. All it would take on his end was a little mob-like persuasion directed at the publishing house’s editor in chief, maybe in the form of a late night B-and-E, the barrel of a .9mm pressed to the temple.

“You didn’t just hire me to find Roger,” I say, after a time. “You hired me to find him
and
maybe to help him find that money.” I’m reminded of those rednecks who tried to rough me up out in Chatham. I recall seeing a third man pop his head up inside the cab when I was racing away. I had to wonder if that third wheel was Alexander Stalin, the Russian mobster and Uncle Joe’s great-grandson.

“You’re a professional snoop,” Suzanne says. “Maybe you can think of something I haven’t. We’ve tried everything. But we can’t think of who could have stolen it. Maybe if you could ask around. Some of your more unsavory friends might know a friend of a friend. Something like that.”

“Something like that,” I say. “Believe me, if I had a friend who knew about a friend who stole a million bucks, the both of them would be far away from Albany by now.”

Suzanne sits back, exasperated.

“Well, at least you got Roger back for me.” She stands, her coffee cup in hand. “Listen Moonlight, if you’d like me to pay you what I owe you I’m happy to end our little relationship and relieve you of any further trouble.”

“There’s just one problem, Good Luck,” I say.

She and Roger stare at me.

“The cops think I might have killed Sissy,” I say. “And now, from what you’re telling me, I think it’s possible your Russian friends could have killed her. Either way, if foul play is suspected, I’m screwed.”