Small Town

Maybe Marilyn had wanted Creighton to choke her — just a little, just to get her over the edge. Maybe his hands had had a mind of their own.

Maybe she came and went, just like that.

She should run it by Maury. Maybe he could try it as a defense strategy if all else failed. Except lots of people had tried variations of that, hadn’t they? It was rough sex, that’s the way she wanted it, and it just went too far. Had any jury ever bought that one? If so, she couldn’t remember it.

Well, she didn’t want to get what Marilyn got. But she wanted some excitement, a stranger if not a strangler. Where should she go looking for him?

She put on makeup and perfume. Changed her earrings for her amethyst studs. Put on a little black dress with not a thing under it except the gold in her nipples. Slipped on a pair of Blahniks, changed her mind, went with the Prada pumps. Like it mattered, like anybody was going to be looking at her shoes.

She had to wait ten minutes for a cab. “Stelli’s,” she told the driver. “Do you know where that is?”

fourteen

Auction time.

He didn’t see why he should feel anxious. He remembered something Lee Trevino had said in response to talk about the pressure involved in trying to sink a putt in a tournament playoff: Pressure? If you make it you get a million dollars, but if you miss it you still get half a million. That’s not pressure. Pressure’s when you’re in a two-dollar Nassau with five bucks in your pocket.

And where was the pressure for him? Esther Blinkoff at Crown had already given a floor bid of more money than he had ever expected to find on a contract with his name on it. The worst that could happen, the absolute worst that could happen, was that the other four prospective bidders would hear the numbers Crown had put on the board, shrug their shoulders, and go home. And he’d get an advance of $1,100,000.

He’d been up late the night before, fooling around on the computer, then channel surfing. AMC was running Casablanca, and he told himself he’d just watch it for a few minutes, but he’d never been able to turn that film off and couldn’t this time, either. He got misty when they played “La Marseillaise,” the way he always did, and he was still there and still paying attention when Bogart told Claude Rains that it looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It must have been close to three when he got into bed, and not quite eight when he rolled out of it. He was working on his second cup of coffee when the phone rang at ten after nine, and it was Roz.

“The horses are at the starting gate,” she said. “Actually they’re just leaving the paddock, because I don’t start making calls until ten o’clock. Is this your first auction, John? Well, do you know how it goes?”

“The high bidder gets me.”

“I mean the mechanics of it. They’re all at their desks, and I call one of them and tell them where the bidding stands, and they go into a huddle and get back to me, and then I call the next one. It’s not like sitting in the gallery at Christie’s and bing bang boom it’s over. It can take all day, and sometimes more than a day.”

“So this could be continued on Monday?”

“No,” she said, “because everybody’s on notice that today is the day, and by five o’clock you’re going to have a new publisher. Or a new old publisher, if you wind up with Esther.”

“At one point one.”

“Or at x-point-x, if she exercises her topping privileges, which she got by giving us the floor.”

“Do the others all know about the floor?”

“Honey,” she said, “everybody in America knows about the floor. It was in Publisher’s Lunch yesterday. Believe me, all four of them know they can’t play for less than seven figures.”

Publisher’s Lunch was a daily e-newsletter, full of industry news and gossip and free on request. He’d subscribed for a while, then unsubscribed when he realized how much time it was draining out of his day. The fact that they’d reported the floor bid somehow made it more real.

“John,” she was saying, “what I want to know is whether or not you want me to keep you in the picture. I can call you whenever somebody bids or passes, but I know you’re working on the book, and maybe you’d rather not be interrupted, in which case you won’t hear from me unless there’s something I need to clear with you. Or until the auction is over, whichever comes first.”

He said the latter sounded like a good idea. She agreed, and they wished each other luck, and after she rang off he realized she’d sounded faintly disappointed by his choice. And why wouldn’t she be? She was sitting all alone in her office, running a drawn-out auction over the phone, and he was telling her no, he didn’t want to share the excitement with her.