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  I frowned. “Not particularly. Why?”

  “This is his swan song,” Margaret said, the final words a spondee of satisfaction. “I’ve warned Bryce that at the end of the fiscal year I’m pulling the financial plug. When I do, I’m afraid his lovely little Periwinkle will rapidly begin to wilt.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said truthfully.

  “Why?”

  I thought of the hours I’d spent in the presence of nothing but a book, beginning at about age six with a boys’ biography of Kit Carson. Laid end to end, the hours would encompass years. The best years of my life, arguably. “Because books are nice things to make, I guess,” I muttered with an odd embarrassment. “And because Bryce enjoys his work more than anyone I know.”

  Margaret pointed toward the wall. “How did you like Thin Wind? That was our best seller: eighteen hundred copies.”

  “I, ah …”

  “I’m sure Bryce sent you a galley. What was your favorite part? The celebrated blizzard scene?”

  “I guess so. Sure.”

  Her laugh was the comeuppance I deserved. “Thin Wind is set on a banana plantation in Costa Rica; there is no blizzard. That is, if you discount the blizzard of adjectives that is that particular novelist’s most egregious affectation.”

  There was nothing I could say that would take us anywhere I wanted to go, but in a mysterious shift of mood, Margaret looked up at me with uncharacteristic contrition. “Don’t be embarrassed, Marsh; actually, I’m flattered that you cared enough to lie to me. And I didn’t intend to be mean—I’ve told you this so you’ll help if Bryce starts behaving childishly after I’ve taken his toy away. I do care for him, you know,” she added as though she knew that among more than a few of her husband’s friends it was a subject of debate.

  In the echo of her final sentiment, I glanced to where Bryce was regaling a bevy of presumably would-be writers with one of the publishing anecdotes he related so irrepressibly, this one having to do with an autograph party at which no one but the author showed up. “He doesn’t look too broken up over Periwinkle’s imminent demise,” I observed carefully.

  “Because he doesn’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “Does all this have something to do with why I’m here?” I asked when she didn’t elaborate.

  “Bryce thinks he’s found a substitute for me,” Margaret muttered, her gaze fixed on her husband, her injured feelings obvious. “Or for my money, at least.”

  So Bryce has a mistress, I thought. Good for him, I thought next, then wondered why I wasn’t ashamed of myself. “An investor, you mean?”

  She shook her head. “A book.”

  I was confused. “What book?”

  “A new one. Not yet published. Something Bryce feels could be a true best seller.”

  I felt myself redden. “There are already plenty of books about San Francisco private eyes,” I demurred insincerely. “Both real ones and imaginary ones.”

  I expected her to try to convince me otherwise, but Margaret’s cockeyed squint meant I was refusing an offer that hadn’t been made, which made me redden even further. I had blurted the unnecessary disclaimer because the reference to a mysterious masterpiece had exposed my deepest secret—a secret I’d kept even from my secretary and Bryce Chatterton: some day I wanted to write a novel. Hatched during the reading rampages of my college years, the desire apparently remained so strong some three decades later that it had led me to grasp at an opportunity that wasn’t real and indulge myself in images of dust jackets decorated with my photo and book spines resplendent with my name.

  Margaret seemed telepathically attuned to my discomfiture. “Bryce doesn’t want you to write a book; he wants you to read one.” Her smile turned thuggish. “You do read books, don’t you, Marsh?”

  “Once in a while,” I said, angry at myself for my irrational fantasizing, angry at Margaret for so readily rebuffing me. “But what I get paid for is reading people.”

  She raised a brow. “Oh? And what do you read in me?”

  “A mystery,” I said roughly. “Gothic, I’d say.”

  “Heavens,” Margaret Chatterton replied airily, then made as if to probe the assessment further.

  But I didn’t give her the chance. Before she could question me again, I excused myself and headed for a mood modifier more reliable than punch, put to a pathetic rout by the resurrection of what was at once the most persistent and arrogant of my ambitions.

  Before it was summarily stolen from me, I considered teaching the most noble profession of them all. Though now I am in many ways its victim, I still think that: the most noble; and the most treacherous. Perhaps that is nobility’s essence, that it cannot exist without peril. Which would explain why, in a society that so maniacally seeks to obviate risk, a champion is so seldom seen.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 31

  2

  The office was much smaller than the conference area, in its relentless clutter and confusion less a room than a cavern carved out of a mountain of books and manuscripts. The only items of decor not related to publishing and Periwinkle were a stack of Bang & Olufsen components in a cabinet behind the desk and an array of photographs of a young woman that was on display in the many nooks and crannies of the room.

  After examining the stylized stereo close enough to decipher how to turn it on, I pressed some buttons until I got the tuner locked on KJAZ and the opening bars of a James Moody ballad, then got comfortable in the desk chair, feeling exalted and at home in the cozy room. To pass the time I leafed through a recent Newsweek, stopping only to read the cover story on the delectable Michelle Pfeiffer and a review of the new novel by Richard Russo. I put down Newsweek and picked up Publishers Weekly. An article listing the American media companies now owned by foreign corporations lent further support to a common prognostication—that by the end of the century America will be little more than a satellite of foreign powers, vulnerable to their policies and preferences, significant solely as a market for their wares.

  The radio shifted to the Brecker Brothers, and I grew as restless as their rhythms. After discarding the dregs of the Sunday Punch in a pot of pansies and filling the void with Bryce’s Black Label, I left the desk and wandered around the room, pulling books off the shelves as I went, taking the best measure of a man there is next to examining his diary or his tax returns.

  Most had been written by well-known Bay Area authors, present and past, from Frank Norris and Dashiell Hammett to Herb Gold and Anne Rice. Almost all were first editions and many were inscribed to Bryce with sentiments ranging from careful courtesy to effusive thanks. After three or four examples of the latter, I found myself taking pleasure in the fact that so many eminent people shared at least one of my opinions—that Bryce Chatterton was a nice guy.

  After enjoying an elegantly brief tribute to Bryce from the pen of Alice Walker, I turned my attention to the manuscripts. There was a yard-high pile of them beside the desk. I selected one entitled Rampage. The postmark indicated it had been mailed to Periwinkle some three months before, from a man in Hobbs, New Mexico. I thumbed aimlessly through the bright, crisp typescript, wondering if the author rushed to the mailbox each day awaiting word of its fate, wondering if Bryce had become too jaded to marvel any longer at the dreams that lay pressed as hopefully as four-leaf clovers between the pages he so routinely received and presumably, in all but the rarest of cases, dispatched with a rote thumbs down.

  I stopped at page 251: “The blood from her breast spurted onto my face like wine from a goatskin, and was thick in my throat as I drank it.” For some reason the image made me laugh. Mercifully, the door to the office opened and spared me a further dose of what Faulkner might have become if he’d tried to sell as many books as Stephen King.

  Although I was expecting her husband, it was Margaret who succeeded me behind the desk. “Bryce will be in shortly,” she informed me as she rummaged through the pile of papers in front of her, her features dense with preoccupation. “The herd has
finally been sufficiently fattened and he’s driving them toward the exits.”

  “Good.”

  When she didn’t find whatever it was she was looking for, she looked up. “I want to apologize if I seemed uncharitable in there,” she said, looking less apologetic than crafty. “I’m still not certain I’m going to shut Periwinkle down; it all depends on my ex-husband.”

  “Why him?” I asked without much interest in the answer.

  Margaret raised a brow. “I assumed Bryce told you that Marvin’s money paid for all this.”

  I shook my head. “Marvin who?”

  “Gillis.”

  My interest turned real—I knew Gillis a little, less personally than by reputation; I had even done some work for his law firm, though not on the corporate side of which Gillis was top gun, but rather for the lowly litigators.

  “I thought everyone knew,” Margaret was saying. “Actually, I thought my divorce settlement was in the nature of a scandal.”

  “I guess I skipped the columns that week.”

  She bristled in self-defense. “Marvin made lots of money. It was only fair that I was given a share of it.”

  Margaret had put it mildly. Marvin Gillis specialized in incorporating new ventures and taking a block of stock in return as his fee. Thanks to the law of averages and Marvin’s participation in the zoom of high tech down in Silicon Valley, portions of that stock were eventually worth millions. At one point I heard that only Jobs and Wozniak had a bigger bite in Apple than Marvin did, but I didn’t know if it was true. I did know that if Margaret Chatterton had been awarded even 10 percent of her ex-husband’s rumored accumulation, she had enough to float Periwinkle over the next century.

  “Marvin is still being a grouch,” Margaret was saying, “even after all this time.”

  “How?”

  “He’s overextended himself in the past few years, so he’s trying to finesse me out of my holdings, refinancing and reorganizing this company and that, issuing Class C stock and nonsubordinated debentures and other nifty instruments that have the sole purpose of diluting my stake in his companies. My lawyer says he’s being fiendishly clever. If I can’t stop him, Periwinkle will go down the drain.” She closed her eyes. “But that’s not your concern, is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t hear me. “I’m sure you have more important things to worry about. I know I do.”

  “Like what?”

  She blinked. “It’s really none of your business.”

  I shrugged. “You look the way a lot of my clients look, Margaret—that you need to talk to someone about something.”

  She tried to smile. With Margaret, that’s as good as it gets. When Bryce first introduced us, I kept trying to decide what I’d done to annoy her. I finally realized that it had nothing to do with me, that Margaret simply resented her husband’s interest in anything other than herself.

  “Perhaps I should try idle conversation at this point,” she said glumly. “I’ve tried everything else.” She paused for effect. “I’m worried about my daughter.”

  “Jane Ann?”

  She nodded.

  I recalled the snapshots of his brand-new stepdaughter Bryce had brought by the office several years before. After I’d approved in spades, he’d presented me with a cigar in honor of the occasion. Cuban, in fact. The next day I gave it to Charley Sleet. He said it was the best he ever smoked. Since Charley’s a cop, he also said they were illegal.

  I gestured to the photo on the corner of Bryce’s desk, which was the oldest version of the rest of them. “Is that her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s all grown up.”

  “In some ways, yes; Jane Ann’s very precocious. But in other ways she’s frighteningly … regressive.”

  The modification hinted at complex psychology, in both Margaret and her daughter. “Why are you so worried about her? I mean except for the ways parents usually worry about their kids?”

  Margaret closed her eyes, as though better to picture her distress. “Marvin and I divorced when she was nine. For reasons that seemed important at the time, I chose to let Jane Ann grow up with her father. So …” Her shrug was massive enough to encompass her daughter’s infancy and adolescence. “Still, she survived, for which I’m thankful—so many don’t these days. But it wasn’t easy, for any of us. When she was seventeen she rebelled against Marvin’s strictures, his conventional values, his excessive expectations. She dropped out of high school just before graduation, refused to go to college even though she’d been admitted to one of the finest in the country, and began to associate with peers who were even less responsible than she was. And now she …”

  “What?”

  She sighed heavily. “That’s just it. What does she do? I haven’t the faintest idea. She is talented in art and takes lessons twice a week but she never seems to actually paint anything. She has no job, yet cruises the city in an expensive convertible, lives in a chic apartment, carouses to all hours. She’s had one abortion that I know of; she was arrested for possession of drugs when she was eighteen, though thankfully the case was weak and Marvin got it thrown out on a technicality. Her driver’s license is suspended, though that doesn’t seem to slow her down. I just … don’t know what to do.” A tear appeared in a corner of her eye. “She has always craved excitement. She lived on the roller coaster at Santa Cruz one summer; she adores those horrid slaughter films; she wanders the most frightening areas of the city without a thought for her safety. I’m afraid she …”

  “What?” I prompted again.

  Margaret struggled for the words. “I guess I’m afraid she’s gotten herself involved in something dangerous. And quite possibly criminal.”

  “Like what?”

  She opened herself to me for the first time, her bleak and bloodshot eyes a pink patina above a desperate plea for help. “Who knows? These days young people don’t seem to experience pleasure unless they’re committing an antisocial act.”

  There was some truth to that, particularly with regard to the children of the very poor and the very rich, but I decided not to point it out. “You don’t have any clue at all to what she might be mixed up in?”

  Margaret shook her head. “Just that she seems so edgy lately. She lives like she’s on the run—changing phone numbers frequently, spending lots of money with nothing to show for it, showing up here late at night in the company of a young man who looks more like a bodyguard than a boyfriend. I just …” The enormity of the puzzle silenced her.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “It’s gotten worse in the past month, but she’s been a problem for years.” Margaret looked away from me, to one of the photos of her daughter, this one showing Jane Ann waving happily from the back of a horse. In the one next to it she was several years older and on crutches, as though the years of adolescence had crippled her. “I have to tell you that it’s not impossible that Jane Ann has used some of the money her father and I have given her over the years to finance an illegal enterprise,” Margaret concluded grimly, “and that somehow it’s gone bad.”

  “If it’s drugs, she could be in serious trouble. The nuances of the social register don’t mean much to the Colombians.”

  She nodded timidly. “That’s why I was wondering if you could look into the situation for me.” Her expression congealed and became beseeching. “I know you think I’m a hard woman. And I am, in many ways. I’ve had to be. But I love my daughter very much. I neglected her for a long time, under the illusion that I wasn’t competent to rear her. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to her now that I’m in a position to prevent it. Could you help me, Marsh? Please?”

  Because it was in such contrast to her usual demeanor, I found the entreaty moving. But nevertheless I shook my head. “Bryce called first, Margaret. I have to see what he wants me to do. If it’s something I think I can handle, I have to give that priority.”

  “I see.”

  “Your problems with
Jane Ann sound like they need someone full-time. I’d be happy to recommend an investigator for you to talk to. A woman, if you think that would be preferable.”

  “What if I persuade Bryce to use someone else?”

  “I’m afraid the answer’s still no.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t mix friendship and business.”

  “You’re willing to work for Bryce.”

  “Bryce is different; Bryce is balancing the books.”

  “What about when the business pays twice your normal rate?”

  Flush with the profitable resolution of my most recent undertaking, I allowed myself a righteous smile. “Friendship pays better. In the long run.”

  “When you get to be my age, the long run is not a viable option.” Her lips curled bitterly. “Look at me. No wonder Bryce spends his every waking hour in here with these stupid books. Who’d want a woman whose flesh drips off her bones like this?”

  She held up an arm for me to inspect. It wasn’t by any means a teen’s, but it wasn’t as wattled as her rhetoric suggested. It was just a badge like the badges that all of us over forty carry around, badges worn within and without, badges we tear at when our lives go wrong.

  I sighed. Despite our disputatious history there was something pitiable in Margaret’s candor. Her inner demons seemed no more blameworthy, nor more governable, than my own. So, since she was fishing for a compliment, I gave her one.

  “You’re still an attractive woman, Maggie,” I exaggerated easily.

  Her smile was almost real. “Maggie. You’re the only one in the world who calls me that. I must admit I like it.”

  Somewhere between us, something softened. As it did, Margaret looked out the window, at the towers of light rising out of the financial district, at the fortress of wealth they defined, at the implication that those of us outside that electric forest were doomed to insignificance.

  After what looked like regretful reverie, Margaret looked back to whatever she saw as our relationship, her aspect firm and businesslike. “Bryce is certain the job he wants you to do for him will be his salvation. And Periwinkle’s. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m standing in the way of that. I love him, too, after all,” she added, as though I’d expressed some doubt.