Small Town

A few days later, he had lunch with Esther Blinkoff. He met her at the Crown offices, where she took him around and showed him off to ten or a dozen people whose hands he shook and whose names he promptly forgot. The younger ones seemed a little in awe of him, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the size of his contract or the fact that he was going to be tried for homicide. Young or old, they all told him how excited they were at the prospect of working with him.

At an elegant French-Asian restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street she told him she felt guilty taking him away from his work. “I won’t ask how it’s coming,” she said, and he told her it was coming along quite well, that he felt good about what he’d written and optimistic about the part he hadn’t done yet. Was there any chance she could hope to see some of it sometime soon? He said he never liked to show anything to anybody until he was done.

“Roz said as much,” she said, “but I thought I would try. Actually, I think you’re right not to show work in progress. The only reason writers do it is it gives them a chance to stop work while they wait for a reaction from us, and the only reason we want to see chapters along the way is to assure ourselves that the writer’s actually doing something, not just drinking up the advance.” She patted his hand. “Present company excepted, I hardly need add. Oh, I have some good news. We just increased the print order on both books, Daughter and Blue Skies. They’re good solid books, John, and I’m afraid we underpublished them the first time around. Of course we’ve had some personnel changes since then.”

“For the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thank you, and I have to say I believe you’re right. I think it’s wonderful that those two books are getting a second chance in hardcover, and Tracy’s going to make sure that they’re received like new books. In other words, reviewed, but more than that we’re hoping they’ll generate the kind of sidebars and feature articles that will serve as a launching platform for the big one. Did you say you had a working title?”

He’d long since decided against A Nice Place to Start, and had had several working titles since, tentative successors to Fucked If I Know. The current favorite was Darker Than Water, and he mentioned it with some reluctance; if she didn’t like it, they weren’t off to the best possible start, and if she loved it he was stuck with it.

“Meaning blood,” she said immediately. “As in thicker than water, but darker instead. John, I think it’s very good. It sounds dark, obviously, and it has the feel of a thriller title, but at the same time it’s subtle enough so that there’s a literary feel to it. And it’s short enough so that the art director won’t have a hard time getting it to look good on the mass-market paperback.”

She’d heard him on New York & Company, and said he’d come across well. Lopate made it easy for his guests, he told her, and she agreed, but said he was effective in his own right. “And that’s important,” she said. “It didn’t used to be, and maybe it shouldn’t be, but the business has changed. How do you feel about touring? Not this fall, we’ve ruled that out even if it were possible, but for Darker Than Water.”

“If I’m free to tour, I’m all for it.”

“Free to tour. Let’s see now. In the most tentative way, because the last thing I want to do is put pressure on you, we’ve sort of penciled the book into our schedule for October of 2003. I know there’s going to have to be a trial — do you mind talking about this?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, we’re certainly not going to publish before next October, and wouldn’t you think the trial will be over by then?”

“It seems likely,” he said. “And if I’m acquitted, I’ll be happy to go anywhere you send me.”

“If you’re acquitted. John, I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt you’ll be acquitted.”

“I think there might be a little doubt over on Hogan Place.”

“At the Manhattan DA’s office? I honestly don’t know why they don’t drop the charges. I’m sure that lunatic killed her. He seems to have killed everybody else who died in the past six months.”

They’d collected a full set of Harbinger’s fingerprints from the Upper West Side apartment he’d abandoned, and someone had matched a thumb print to a previously unidentifiable print left on a quart can of charcoal lighter found in the ashes of a blaze in the Bronx back in the early spring. That was strong evidence that the Carpenter had already been plying his trade well before the Twenty-eighth Street whorehouse murders, and just when he’d begun and how many times he’d struck were the subject of endless speculation.