Kill Fee, page 3
Walsh stared. "I thought that's what we were doing.''
Dunlop managed a pained smile, as if afraid of hurting Walsh's feelings. "When I say right now, I mean this very minute. Now. So far Summit has done an admirable job of publishing for, well, shall we say for posterity?"
Don't patronize me, sonny.
"But we'd like Summit to go more current, more contemporary. For instance, a few months ago you published an article on Ernest Hemingway—"
Walsh barked a laugh. "You mean to say people aren't interested in Hemingway any more? Come on, Dunlop—you know better than that."
Again that pained smile. "There are always some who still read him, I'm sure. If you'd titled it 'Macho Man Revisited' and gone at it from that angle—well, then maybe it would have said something to the modern reader. But it was the same sort of old-fashioned critique I was forced to read in school."
"When was that?" Walsh snapped. "Yesterday?"
Dunlop smiled the smile of the man who cannot be offended. "I make no pretense to literary expertise, Mr. Walsh. Frankly, it doesn't even interest me very much. We are not in the elitist business here—we deal with popular culture. Today's reader doesn't give a damn about the emasculation imagery in Ernest Hemingway. What he wants is input from today's writers—people like Derek Stanton and Shana Burleson and Kristy Lee."
Walsh had heard of none of them. Admit it? Hell, no. "Flash-in-the-pan stuff. A year from now nobody'll even remember their names."
"Quite possibly that's true," Dunlop conceded. "But we don't want Summit to be for the reader a year from now. We want to publish for right now, for this very minute."
Walsh smirked. "Kind of hard when you have a three-month lead time, isn't it?"
"That's something else—we think three months is too far ahead to schedule. Not really cost-effective, you know. We're going to try for one month."
Walsh's mouth dropped open. "That's impossible," he said flatly.
Dunlop smiled and shook his head.
"I tell you it's impossible," Walsh repeated. "You need time to make alternate arrangements when things get screwed up. You can't always get the grade of paper you want, writers don't always meet deadlines, printers go on strike at the drop of a hat—"
"Mr. Walsh, we know what we're doing. The primary reason UltraMedia has an office here is that New York is the center of the country's publishing industry. Everything we need is here. Have you forgotten we put out weekly magazines? Personalities, Homemaker's Weekly, American News Magazine. We have the techniques, the equipment, the right people. We can put Summit out with only a month's lead time."
"But the quality . . . only a month . . . !" Walsh was appalled. "It'll be a junk magazine!"
"So you see with only a month's lead time, it's quite possible to deal with matters of contemporary interest," Dunlop went on as if Walsh had not spoken. "It's what advertisers want now—immediate feedback. Even Mueller Electronics."
Pow. So he'd saved Mueller for the stinger. Walsh said nothing. He looked at Dunlop sitting opposite him. So young, so sure of himself. The young were always positive they had all the answers—but they didn't sit in offices like this one telling editors of literary periodicals what was wrong with their magazines. What was Dunlop doing here in so responsible a position, where had he come from? Even as he asked himself the question, Walsh knew the answer. Dunlop was here because it had become a young man's world. Walsh was fifty-four and feeling every minute of it; it was only the members of his generation that started at the bottom and worked their way to the top. Today's kids came in at the top, the young did sit in expensive offices and tell experienced men how to do their jobs.
"I'm sorry, Dunlop," Walsh heard himself saying. "I can't ask my staff to do a complete turnabout. It's unthinkable."
Dunlop opened his eyes wide for the first time. "We don't expect you to ask them, Mr. Walsh."
Walsh was confused. Did Dunlop mean that Ultra-Media would give the orders? Or the staff would be replaced by UltraMedia people? Or . . . oh. Oh god. Oh god, no. Finally, it sank in on him. It must have been lurking in the back of his mind all the while—he just hadn't wanted to acknowledge it.
"You're replacing me as editor," he said numbly.
Dunlop spread his hands. "It's simply that we think you'd be happier at a magazine with a more literary orientation."
"Summit has a literary orientation." Woodenly. "Had."
Dunlop actually looked sympathetic. "I know how you're feeling—"
"How could you possibly know? You haven't the first idea of what Summit is all about. How dare you tell me you know how I feel?"
Walsh didn't wait for Dunlop's response. He was on his feet, brushing past the younger man, out of the fancy room. Miss Vulnerable Beauty materialized and steered him toward the tunnel of lights. The revolving colors disoriented him and the feeling of nausea returned. Then he was out of the tunnel, out of the building, on the street.
Head whirling with humiliation, he paid no attention to where he was going. That's the first thing normal people think about when ownership changes hands—Is my job safe? But good old Head-in-the-Sand Walsh, I manage to make it the last.
The rain had stopped, but Walsh didn't notice. He let himself be carried along by the flow of sidewalk traffic until he came to a saloon. Inside, at the quiet end of the bar, one scotch later, he began to come out of his daze.
Fired. By a Boy Scout.
He ordered another drink. Why were they doing this? It seemed to him as if the hydra-headed UltraMedia Corporation had come into being for the sole purpose of destroying Leon Walsh and Summit magazine. His lovely magazine—what were they going to do to it? If they wanted a magazine of the sort that Dunlop described, why not start a new one? Why change Summit into something it was never meant to be?
For the advertisers, dummy. Summit already had the big-money advertisers; but if Sussman was right, they were all whispering the same word: Change. Former advertisers like Mueller Electronics could be brought back into the fold by using that same magic word, change, as bait. Why should UltraMedia start from scratch when there was a nice little setup like Summit just waiting to be taken over?
And Leon Walsh could do nothing but sit there helplessly and watch his life's work go down the drain. Summit was the one thing in his life he was proud of, his one real accomplishment. Had been proud of. Sure, it had gotten a little tainted lately—but nothing that couldn't be cleaned up, made right. The magazine was his life. Take Summit away—and what did he have left? He paid for a third scotch without noticing the bartender had shortchanged him.
What was he going to do now? What the hell was he going to do now? He couldn't live without a magazine to edit. Start over? Build another Summit, start from nothing again. No, he wouldn't have to start from quite nothing, he could get financing now, he wouldn't have to depend on the Jerry Sussmans of the world this time. He could do it. He could start over.
A little voice inside his head laughed unpleasantly. At age fifty-four?
A lot of people start over in middle age, Walsh answered himself.
But you're not a lot of people, are you? the little voice asked.
He was too tired, too defeated. Well, then what? He could go to Saturday Review, wherever it was now, with his tongue hanging out, begging for a job. But SR didn't publish fiction. Harper's, then? Or the Atlantic, in Boston? He wouldn't have anything like the authority he'd had at Summit, but he could probably get some sort of job.
Couldn't he?
Third possibility. Pack it in. Take one grand leap from one of the World Trade Center towers. To hell with everything—who cared anyway? Nobody gave a damn if UltraMedia flushed Summit down the toilet. And would anyone even notice if Leon Walsh simply disappeared from the face of the earth? Why keep fighting?
"He's been on that phone twenty minutes, I tole him it was a emergency, but he don't pay no attention," came a voice from the next barstool.
"What?" Walsh said, startled.
"That fella over there," said the man next to him, gesturing with his head toward a wall phone. "I tole him I gotta call the hospital, but he won't get off." The speaker was a man well into his seventies and stick-thin. "He won't get off," he repeated.
"Yeah, some people are like that."
"I gotta call the hospital to see if they got a room for me. I got cancer and they're gonna cut my stomach out and I don't know if I got a room to stay in. I gotta call the hospital."
A pause. "Ah, I thought the doctor arranged for the hospital room," Walsh murmured, not knowing what to say.
"I thought so too, but he tole me to call. My kids won't do it, they don't take care of me. I wrote 'em all and tole them I was dying and not one of 'em would come. They all had excuses. The doctor tole me not to get my hopes up, he'd just do what he could but he didn't think he could get it all out. Not one of 'em would come."
"I'm sorry," Walsh said, shaken.
"Thanks, mister. Huh—about time." He headed for the wall phone the talkative man had just relinquished.
Walsh slipped an ice cube from his glass and held it on his tongue. Here he'd been thinking of suicide, while that old man—who probably had nothing at all in the world—was fighting for his life right down to the wire. Fighting and needing to talk about it. Well. Wasn't that inspiring. What am I supposed to do? Walsh thought. Feel renewed? Maybe the old man ought to give up too.
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education, D. H. Lawrence had written. Walsh had read somewhere that the more educated the individual, the more likely he was to turn his anger inward, on himself. Educated people were more apt to commit suicide; the uneducated tended to turn to murder to resolve their problems. It was the uneducated man who found it easy to direct his anger outward, toward another person.
It was certainly another person who deserved his anger. Jerry Sussman had gotten him into this fix. Sussman knew how much Summit meant to Walsh, he knew it was his life. But did that stop him? Walsh wondered if Sussman had so much as hesitated before selling him out to Ultra-Media. He doubted it. Sussman had ridden roughshod over Walsh and Summit from the very day he had first bailed them out. Money is power. And Sussman is shit. Walsh sat thinking of the man who had destroyed him; he thought about him in a detached, almost impersonal way.
The cancer victim finished his call and left. Walsh went to the phone, dropped in a dime, and dialed Leila's number.
CHAPTER
3
Fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes James Timothy Murtaugh went off duty, and he was leaving whether the goddam paperwork was finished or not. He pecked away at the typewriter, filling in the form on some stupid kid who'd tried to lift his billfold. Normally he'd have given the kid a kick in the ass and sent him on his way. But Ansbacher had announced before a squad room full of people that Murtaugh hadn't made a personal collar in two months; and when Captain Ansbacher spoke, the world rolled over with its paws in the air.
So there he sat, making out a report on some thick-witted teenager who hadn't even known it was a cop's billfold he was boosting. Murtaugh was a lieutenant, for chrissake, not some patrolman in a prowl car; he was supposed to oversee busts, not make them. "I like my ranking officers to keep in touch with the street," Ansbacher had said, overarticulating as usual. The man was an artist at dealing out small indignities. So Lieutenant James Timothy Murtaugh put the collar on an adolescent pickpocket and typed up the report in quadruplicate. Keep in touch with the street. Hah. The wonderful Captain Ansbacher himself never put in an appearance at the scene of a crime until after the shooting was over, when the arrests had been made and the hooraw had died down and it was safe once again for God-fearing people to walk the streets.
Ten minutes. Murtaugh hadn't watched the clock like that since he was a rookie. The phone rang.
Speak of the. "Murtaugh?" Ansbacher said. "We've got a street shooting, near Fifty-third and Park. I want you to cover it yourself."
Murtaugh groaned; only ten more minutes. "Right, Captain." He hung up. Bastard knows it's the end of my shift.
Fifty-third and Park. Not your usual setting for a street shooting. Murtaugh stuck his head out of his office door to see who was available. "Eberhart! You're coming with me."
Sergeant Eberhart nodded and got up from his desk with no particular show of resentment; he'd just come on duty.
The scene of the shooting was oddly quiet in spite of the number of people there. The rotating light on top of the medical examiner's van served notice to passersby (some of whom stopped to gawk) that something was wrong. Officers in uniform, two patrol cars. Sergeant Eberhart pulled up to a fire hydrant and parked.
A man's body lay dramatically spread-eagled on the sidewalk in front of an office building; an Oriental named Wu from the medical examiner's office was inspecting the dead man's hands. Three uniformed officers were standing guard. Murtaugh knew one of them. "Fill me in, Sodini."
"Hello, Lieutenant. Victim's name is Jerry Sussman, and he has an office upstairs here." Officer Sodini jerked his head toward the office building behind him. "Shot at approximately ten-fifteen P.M. That's forty-five minutes ago, Lieutenant."
Murtaugh closed his eyes. "I know what time it is, Sodini. Who called the police?"
"Sussman's secretary. She witnessed the shooting, sir. My partner took her back inside."
Murtaugh nodded to Sergeant Eberhart, who went into the building to talk to the secretary. "You have his billfold?"
"I didn't touch the body, Lieutenant."
Very proper. "Anybody else see the shooting?"
"The secretary says not. None of these people saw anything." He meant the gawkers.
"I want you—and you and you," including the other two officers, "to do a door-to-door—say one block each side of the street. Anybody who saw anything, heard anything. Look for nightwatchmen, like that. Get going."
The three officers moved off on what they all knew was most likely a time-wasting expedition. Murtaugh hunkered down beside the Oriental examining the body and said, "Doctor Wu," by way of greeting.
"Evening, Lieutenant. Looks like a straightforward one this time."
"What can you tell me?"
"Only that he was shot within the past hour at fairly close range. Could be a forty-five—look at the size of that wound. We'll have to find the bullet to be sure."
"I'm going to need his billfold."
Wu gestured with one hand. "Help yourself."
Murtaugh fished out the billfold and a ring of keys. The billfold said Gerald M. Sussman, home address Central Park West, business cards, credit cards, membership cards to private clubs. A fat cat. "When do I get the autopsy report?"
The doctor shrugged. "When it's done. You got a rush on this one?"
"Not particularly. Mostly I want a confirmation on the caliber of the bullet. We don't see forty-fives so much any more. Everybody's moving to nine-millimeter."
Wu grunted. "I'll call you as soon as I have it. Anything you want here or can we take him?"
"You might as well take him." Murtaugh stood up and watched as Wu's assistants zipped the body into the plastic carrier with some effort. The victim had been a big man; the body was heavy and bulky. They were driving away when Murtaugh went into the lobby of the office building to see what Sergeant Eberhart had found out.
"Lieutenant, this is Mrs. Janice Kluvo, kay ell you vee oh. Lieutenant Murtaugh. Mrs. Kluvo saw the shooting but she didn't get a look at the killer's face. Guy was in a car."
Janice Kluvo was in her fifties, tired, and obviously under a strain even though the initial shock had worn off. She was sitting on a folding chair the young police officer standing nearby had scrounged up for her somewhere. She focused on Murtaugh with effort and said his name.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Kluvo—I know you want to go home, I'll try not to keep you. You say the killer was in a car?"
"That's right, Lieutenant, he shot from the car."
"How? Bang-bang Chicago style?"
"No, it wasn't like that. He was just driving along like everybody else. Then he pulled out of the line of traffic—"
"Dark two-door sedan, no make," Sergeant Eberhart interrupted.
"He drove right up to the curb. We'd just come out of the building—we were working late tonight. Then the man in the car said, 'Jerry Sussman?' Like asking a question. Mr. Sussman went over to the car and the man shot him—just like that!"
Murtaugh and Eberhart exchanged a quick glance. A professional checking to make sure he had the right target? "Did you go over to the car with Mr. Sussman?"
"No, that's why I didn't get a look at the driver."
"Only the one man in the car?"
"I think so. I'm sorry to be so unhelpful, but it was dark and it happened fast and it was Mr. Sussman I was concerned about. I didn't even think to look for a license number." Her face was strained.
"Don't worry about it, Mrs. Kluvo, it was probably a rental anyway. Did you and Sussman work late often?"
"No, almost never. It's just that this month has been especially hectic and the work piled up. Mr. Sussman was selling one project and buying another, and between the two transactions we got a little behind."
"What projects? What line of work was he in?"
"Mr. Sussman is a publisher." She paused, and the men watching could see her think: was. "He was selling Summit magazine and buying into Q. T."
"Summit I know—what's Q.T.?"
"A supermarket tabloid." She pressed the tips of the fingers of both hands against her eyes; Murtaugh could see her hands were trembling.
Suddenly the young police officer who'd been hovering discreetly in the background stepped up to her. "You all right, ma'am?"
Mrs. Kluvo nodded and mustered up a smile for him. Murtaugh felt that quick wave of sympathy he always felt for eyewitnesses. Especially if the witness knew the person he or she had watched die. Mrs. Kluvo probably wanted to scream and scream and scream; but she was still making the effort to be civil.
