Page 37 of The Lie Maker

The question was for Gwen. “It’s all on you,” she said.

“You see, the thing is, the Russians? They know that about me. They know my weakness. So they’re going to be putting the word out. Keep your eye out for that weaselly guy with the glasses and the weird hair.”

“We’re going to give you a makeover,” Gwen said, “and a hairpiece, if you’ll wear it.”

“Whatever,” he said. “Like I said, they’ll be talking to all their people, telling them one of these days, maybe not this week or next, maybe not next month, but sure as shit one of these days he’s going to show up, and when he does, give us a call, we’ll make it worth your while, believe me, and faster than shit goes through a goose they’ll be there and they’ll scoop me up and take me someplace and have some fun with me, doing the elephant thing for starters, maybe, and probably finishing off by cutting off my dick and shoving it down my throat.” He waved his hands at the food spread out before us. “Come on, help yourself. No one’s eating.”

Gwen and I exchanged glances. I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I was betting she didn’t, either.

“So, Mr.Writer Guy,” Bill said, “how’s that for material?”

Twenty-One

There weren’t any new developments on the death of the retired judge, and Lana wasn’t expecting any.

The prevailing opinion was that the man had lost hold of the leash that was attached to Oliver and gone running after him. And while Oliver was eventually found close to home, it was entirely possible he had at first run off in the direction of the harbor, and that Willard Bentley, in pursuit, had somehow lost his footing and stumbled. Confused after his fall, he had wandered off in the direction of the harbor, walked out onto a pier and plunged into the dark, cold water.

The Willard Bentley story was, for now, over. The glowing tributes had been written. A funeral was scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Originally planned as a major event, it was now a private, family-only affair.

Lana had turned her attention to the missing doctor.

The story got a mention in all the city papers and on the nightly newscasts, but was quickly fading from view. Dr.Marie Sloan, in all likelihood, had taken her own life, and the media tended to soft-pedal suicides unless it was some big-time celebrity. Sloan’s disappearance and possible suicide were, however, a way into a larger story about the stress and persistent trauma experienced by frontline health-care workers. The Star was planning a major takeout on the subject—and not for the first time—but Lana’s editors had assigned it to the special projects team, and that was fine by her.

More recently, her assignments had been more mundane. A tanker truck rollover that brought traffic on the northbound 93 to a standstill for hours. A two-alarm fire that left a family of four homeless. A fatal motorcycle accident in Bunker Hill.

In her downtime between stories, she worked more of her contacts in an attempt to learn what Jack had been hired to do. Her latest theory was that he had been engaged to ghostwrite someone’s memoir.

She knew this was none of her beeswax, as her mother liked to say, but she couldn’t keep her curiosity in check. If she did learn what he was up to, she wasn’t going to tell a soul. Well, maybe Jack. Just to see the look on his face when he learned how crafty she could be. There were moments—fleeting, admittedly—when she told herself it was wrong to pry into Jack’s work life. After all, what if it were the other way around? If she were onto some big story that enlisted the aid of anonymous sources, how would she like it if Jack made it his business to find out who they were?

She’d kill him, that’s what she’d do.

So maybe she should put an end to this. Soon. Just a couple more calls, and if she struck out she’d call it quits. Respect his privacy. Let him work on whatever it was he was working on without her sticking her nose into it.

Even before Jack’s first two books were published, and before she had accompanied him to a few bookstore events, Lana had struck up acquaintances with a few people who worked in publishing. One was a literary agent, another an editor at one of the top houses in New York, and a third worked for one of the websites that kept track of industry news. That person’s name was Lawrence Eckhart, and Lana decided to start with him.

She fired off an email, asking if he had time for a chat, and heard back almost immediately. Eckhart’s email contained a phone number and an invitation to call her the moment she had a chance. Lana wasn’t sure, but the couple of times she’d met Eckhart, she thought he had a thing for her.

“How’s it going?” he asked when she called.

“Great,” she said. “How’s things in New York?”

“Not in the office that much. We worked from home for so long, some of us decided to keep doing it. I go into the office maybe once a week, sit in my chair, spin around, then go home. What’s up?”

“You heard of any major deals lately for memoirs, biographies, that kind of thing? A tell-all book?”

“There’s always a bunch in the pipe. Political ones, celebs, whatever.”

“I’m thinking of ones where the subjects wouldn’t have the chops to write it themselves. Ones where they’d need a ghostwriter.”

“That could be any number of them,” he said. “A lot of these people, they only ever have one book come out, have no skills in that regard, wouldn’t know a colon from a comma, and have to find somebody to do the heavy lifting for them.”

“And the public never knows, right?”

“Depends. Some subjects are open about it, mention the person who helped them write it. Others, yeah, they want you to think they were smart enough to do it all by their lonesome, even though no one believes it.”

“If you were looking for someone to write your story, is there a short list?”

“Lana, you could write your own story. You don’t need someone to do it for you,” Eckhart said. “And I’ll tell you right now, I’ll be first in line to buy a copy. Just so long as you put in all the juicy bits, like that fling with the CNN guy.”

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