Authors: Barbara Paul
Kill Fee
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Barbara Paul
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1985.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paul, Barbara, 1931â author.
Title: Kill fee / Barbara Paul.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2016. | Series: Dover mystery classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004713| ISBN 9780486805337 (ISBN-13 : paperback) | ISBN 0486805336 (ISBN-10)
Subjects: LCSH: AssassinsâFiction. | PoliceâFiction. | Murderâ InvestigationâFiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Detective and mystery stories. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3566.A82615 K5 2016 | DDC 813/.54âdc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016004713
Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley
80533601 2016
Contents
CHAPTER
1
Leon Walsh was the first one they found out about. Walsh got rattled easily and consequently did a poor job of covering his tracksâor of covering that other man's tracks, rather, the man everyone was looking for. Walsh was a good editor, even inspired at times; but he was all thumbs at everything else. His intentions were good and he tried hard, and yet the world steadfastly refused to fall neatly into place for him. Two wives had left him. Dogs bit him. Automobiles broke down when he tried to drive them. The normal abrasions of everyday life defeated him utterly; department store clerks made him feel inferior. He certainly had no head for businessâwhich was why he'd needed a partner in the first place.
Leon Walsh got rattled easily and knew it; he deeply resented the intrusion of the mundane. The New York offices of
Summit
magazine made up Walsh's world, and anything that didn't pertain directly to
Summit
belonged off on Uranus or Neptune, to Walsh's way of thinking. As long as he stayed inside his fenced-off domain, he had
life
under control. He was a careful reader; he respected his writers' copy as much as he could, and he had an instinct for spotting talent that was fast becoming a lost art in the shovel-it-through-and-print-it world of periodical publishing.
Walsh's partner sometimes laughed at him, not exactly good-naturedly, for being a purist.
Purist
was a dirty word in the personal lexicon of Jerry Sussman, the partner, a man who said "between you and I."
Summit
carried both fiction and nonfiction, but Walsh insisted upon literate if not literary style in everything he published. Above his desk hung a sign:
AVOID EMBARRASSMENT:
dangle no modifiers, split no infinitives.
Jerry Sussman laughed.
He was laughing right then, or maybe sneering was closer to what he was doing. "Leon, you don't 'explain' things to advertisers. You either listen to them or kiss the account goodbye. And don't sayâ"
"Good riddance."
"â'good riddance.' Grow up, for chrissake. You don't just write off an advertiser like Mueller Electronics. Even you know that," he added, insultingly.
Walsh leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out under the desk, trying to look relaxed. "IBM didn't threaten to withdraw when we ran a computer-menace story."
"Because computer-menace stories are so old hat nobody pays attention to them any more," Sussman growled. "Look, Leon, I know how great it must be, sitting up there above all the petty bullshit like keeping the advertisers happy and seeing the bills are paid. But you
ought
to try living in the real world like the rest of us once in a while. That story you're so hot to run makes the entire electronics industry look like it's made up of self-seeking incompetents who don't give a damn about the product or even consumer safety."
Look as if,
Walsh thought,
not look like. Number one.
''Why are you so dead set on running it?" Sussman went on. "It's not that great a story."
"Have you read it, Jerry?"
"A summary, that was enough."
Walsh muttered under his breath. Somebody in the office was keeping Jerry Sussman notified as to what was scheduled for publication. Not that there was any reason Sussman shouldn't know; he was the majority stockholder. But the behind-the-back-ness of the way Sussman kept himself informed irritated Walsh. He wondered who the ''spy" in the office was.
Walsh cleared his throat. "You're meddling, Jerry. This is my bailiwick." They'd had that out when the partnership was first formed; Sussman would not interfere with the creative side of the magazine and Walsh would leave all money decisions to his partner. It was an agreement that Sussman had violated almost from the outset. Walsh let a little of his anger show. "Damn it, Jerry, I'm getting tired of this.
I
choose what goes into
Summit."
"Of course you do, of course you do," Sussman said hastily, falsely soothing, insincere and not giving a damn who knew it. "If it was an exposé sort of thing, a researched article, one of those kind, I wouldn't say a word!"
Number two
â
one of those kinds (plural) or one of that kind (singular).
"
But it's not," Sussman went on. "It's only fiction. I don't see why you're so stuck on it."
Only fiction.
"What have you got against fiction?" Walsh asked mildly, pleased with himself for keeping his temper.
His partner was at the window, looking down on Sixth Avenue. "It's chickenshit writing," he said bluntly. "Like that electronics story. Guy doesn't have any facts, so he calls his story fiction and says whatever he damn well pleases. No responsibility to the truth. I want you to kill the electronics thing, Leon. We can't afford to offend Mueller. They haven't been in this country long enough to roll with the punches. Between you and I, Mueller Electronics is running scared."
Number three.
"How do you know that?"
"I know." That was
his
bailiwick. "They're not going to advertise in a mag that undercuts their line of work in the fiction department. I want you to kill that story."
Leon Walsh got rattled easily; and just then he felt his certainty about the story oozing away under the onslaught of that flat voice of authority Sussman could turn on and off at will, a voice that never questioned itself nor permitted questions from others. Walsh knew better than to make any decisions while caught in the throes of berattlement, so he said what he always said when he wanted to get rid of Sussman: "I'll think about it."
Sussman stared at him suspiciously for a moment, but then nodded curtly and left without another word. A big, florid man, Sussman always left a wake behind him when he moved.
Walsh sat motionless for a while, waiting for his resentment to abate. He picked up a pencil and made a notation on his desk calendar: JS = 3. Only three errors today; that would lower Sussman's average for the week.
Walsh
had started counting his partner's mistakes in English nearly two years ago, as a way to amuse himself during a long, boring conference that seemed as if it would never end. But when he'd done it once, he found he couldn't help but keep on doing it. He'd actually developed a compulsion to count his partner's grammatical lapses! Adolescent. Every day that the two men talked, Walsh would make a little note on the calendar. He had close to a two-year record. Of value to no one, but unthinkable to discontinue it.
Leon Walsh hated Jerry Sussman. He hated his appearance, his voice, his success, his vulgarity. He hated everything about him. But most of all he hated what Sussman had done to
Summit.
Walsh had often tried to moderate his hatred by telling himself that any profit-oriented partner would have taken the same steps that Sussman had takenâbut it didn't help. In his more melodramatic moments, Walsh cursed the day he'd agreed to a partnership.
Not that he'd had much choice. It was either Sussman or bankruptcy court and fold the magazine. Things had been so simple when he'd first started out; twelve years ago he'd founded a literary journal to be published four times a year in Summit, New Jerseyâthe town just west of Newark that gave the periodical its name. Walsh's goal had also been simple, almost pristine (he liked to think) in its simplicity: he wanted to publish the very best short fiction and nonfiction available to him. That was all. He didn't want to shape people's tastes or expand anybody's consciousness or make the world a better place in which to live. He just wanted to publish quality writing.