Foul Matter by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online

the catalog?”
    Clive grunted and walked back into his office with the book, sat down, and stared at it.
    Danny Zito?

SEVEN
    C live was still looking at Fallguy, thumbing through the book, about to pick up the phone—no, to go to Bobby’s office to ask him what in the hell he’d left the book for. He was thinking this when Tom Kidd materialized in Clive’s open doorway. “Materialized” was the right word for Tom had found a patch of darkness and it was difficult to make out his features, except for the tonsure of pale hair that, lit from behind, foamed around his head.
    Tom was not one for telephone chat or a “Hey, got a minute?” approaches. Clive rarely saw him, and when he did it was usually in a sudden appearance, such as this. Rarely did he have an opportunity to talk with Tom; Clive certainly never made one. Tom was not one to stop by for an editorial chat; he fairly lived in his office, small but with a view that was magnificent, even by New York City standards. The view was meant to keep Tom happy. It was wasted on him; views of Manhattan didn’t interest him, since he doubted the place changed much from day to day (he’d said). Tom had merely found the New York scenery a good backdrop for stacks and stacks of books.
    Clive imagined that even when Tom’s head came up from reading one of his manuscripts, he didn’t really see, as on a winter’s night, the lighting up of Fifth Avenue, all of the lamps in front of the Plaza pressing through amber fog, nor did he see the dark drapery of trees at this end of Central Park. He saw words. Tom would still be seeing the words of the manuscript in his mind—this sentence, this image, this transparent page superimposed upon the Plaza and the park—whose sentence? Whose image? Isaly’s? Gruber’s? Grace Packard’s? describing the scene down there with such precision that the words seemed to melt into the fog and the trees and the snow and become it.
    That, thought Clive, was what editors like Kidd saw. There weren’t many of them. Thank God. Kidd always made Clive feel inadequate; he did this without even trying. All he had to do was appear in the damned doorway.
    Clive would have to rally. “Tom!” he said, rising from his chair.
    “Clive.” Tom was lighting up one of his big cigars. They were quite vile. All of the flack on smoking seemed to have sailed right over Tom Kidd’s head. “I just saw Tootsie Malone.”
    Agent for Clive’s one good writer, Jennifer Schiffler. “Was she coming to see me? What’d she say?”
    “I don’t know. I couldn’t read the balloon above her head.”
    Tom hated agents of all stripes and kidney except for Jimmy McKinney, one of Mort Durban’s agents.
    “I understand you’re signing Paul Giverney.”
    Clive tried for hearty self-denigration, laughed, and said, “Trying like hell to.”
    “Why?” Tom had taken a step into the room and smoke billowed out behind him as he exhaled.
    “Why?”
    Tom nodded. “Why do we need another commercial writer? A new one seems to pop up every day. Now it’s Giverney.”
    “Come on, now, Tom. You know every house in Manhattan is trying to get him.”
    Tom shrugged. “Again I ask, why?”
    “Look, sit down, will you?”
    “No, I’ve got to finish going over Mary’s contract.”
    This was Mary Mackey. Clive saw an opportunity to get off the subject of Paul Giverney. “Mackey’s such a good writer. I’m glad you got her an extra twenty thousand.” He could have bit out his tongue; he was leading right into the subject of advances. Mary Mackey had originally been offered fifty thousand, but Tom had shoved it up to seventy. Still, it was mere change compared with someone like Dwight Staines or Paul Giverney. If Mackenzie-Haack took just 15 or 20 percent of the money it was paying writers like Staines or Rita Aristedes, it would be enough to keep really good writers out of trouble for years. Clive certainly wasn’t going to say this, or Tom would come back with one of