Too Close to Home

“Made a copy?” Conrad said.

I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t have to. I had a lousy poker face. Conrad understood correctly what I had been about to say.

Conrad said, “You know what I think, Jim? I think this is complete and total horseshit, that’s what I think. And I’m surprised at you. I thought you’d moved on. I thought you were enough of a man to leave the past in the past. Ellen, she’s a wonderful woman, but she means nothing to me now and she hasn’t for years. It was a fleeting relationship, a triviality. We have a completely professional relationship now. She’s a valuable member of the Thackeray staff. She puts together an annual literary event that makes this town proud. But I am not having an affair with her. I have a wife. A beautiful wife.”

Funny, how you could hate a guy for screwing your wife, but at the same time be enraged by his insinuation that she wasn’t as desirable as the woman he had now.

“Jim, I’ve tried with you, I’ve really tried, to let bygones be bygones, to be a friend to you, to consider you a friend-”

“Don’t put yourself out,” I said.

“As I was saying, I’ve tried to make things civil between us, not just for the sake of my working relationship with Ellen, but for all of us, as reasonable human beings. So why you’d choose, at this time, years later, to concoct some scheme to discredit me, well, it’s completely beyond me. I am astonished. I’m flabbergasted. And let me make something perfectly clear to you. If you attempt some feeble scheme to try to damage my reputation, I will come back at you with everything I have. I will crush you. I will destroy you. It’ll be fucking shock and awe, my friend. And although I’ll feel terrible about this, there’s no way Ellen won’t be dragged down with you when it happens. And that’ll be a terrible shame. But at least now you know where things stand. I will not be ruined by some petty, lawn-cutting cuckold.”

There it was again. Was it because it almost sounded like “cock” that the word packed such a punch?

I held his gaze through the entire speech. When he was done, I said, “Why’d you only write the one book, Conrad? Your ghostwriter take a fall?”

I thought he’d get angry, but he grinned. “Is that what you think? Oh, Jim, I’d have thought you were above all this. The fact is, I’m just completing a book, something I’ve been working on for years. My New York agent’s up at her place on Saratoga Lake and she’s dropping by this week to fill me in on all the publishers who are fighting to see who gets to read it first. Want me to find out, while she’s up here, if she represents failed artists who get by doing people’s lawns?”

“What’s going on?” It was Illeana, standing just outside the garage door. “What are you two fighting about?”

SIXTEEN

What the hell did you say to him?” Ellen asked me as Conrad and Illeana sped up the lane in his shiny new Audi. “He looked like thunder after you were done talking to him.”

“Maybe I should have found a more polite way to suggest that he ripped off some dead kid’s novel,” I said.

“This is terrific,” Ellen said, shaking her head. “Just fucking terrific. I guess I can start looking for a new job tomorrow.”

“Hey, I was only doing what you suggested,” I said. “I talked to him before going to Barry.”

“You should have let me do it.”

“You already tried, didn’t you? While I was out this morning. You called but didn’t get him.”

“All right, so I wanted to talk to him before you did. Without all the added baggage that you’d bring to things. And if he hadn’t shown up with Illeana, I’d probably have done it before you got back.”

“I gave him a chance to explain,” I said. “I’d call that doing him a favor.”

“And?” Ellen asked. “What’d he say?”

“A lot of things. But none of them included any kind of explanation.”

“What do you mean, a lot of things? If he didn’t explain, what did he say?”

“He thinks this is personal. He thinks I’m going after him because of what happened between you two.”

Ellen started to say something and then stopped.

“I know that’s what you’re thinking, too,” I said. “But what do you think I did? That somehow I came up with this elaborate plan? That I arranged for Agnes Stockwell to have this computer that she could give to Derek, and then somehow I managed to get a copy of Conrad’s novel onto it, knowing Derek and Adam would eventually find it and Derek would show it to me, and then I could use it to start asking questions that would end up destroying Conrad’s reputation? Is that what you think I did? And I did it all because I was still bent out of shape because you fell into bed with that fucking great literary genius years ago? All these years, I’ve been putting this plan together? And if I planned all that, just how did the Langleys figure into it? Did I know they were going to be murdered, so I timed it just right to make the computer disappear when it happened, so somehow Conrad would be implicated? Because I’ll tell you, if I was able to pull all that off, I should be running the fucking CIA.”