The Salinger Contract (8 page)

U
sually, when I was walking Hal, I chose the easiest hiking trails, the ones with lots of benches for rest, contemplation, occasional dog grooming, and all-too-frequent self-assessment, a practice that lately hadn't been leading anywhere useful. Here I was in a nowhere town with one book and two kids and a life story that was interesting only because I didn't really know the details of it. The stories in
Nine Fathers
were fairly dull in and of themselves; what made each story interesting to me was the fact that it could have been true.

Still, having grown up as the only child of a single mom who rarely ever came home before ten at night, I cherished my admittedly boring family life—a house, a wife, two kids, and a dog in south central Indiana. But I had never really thought too hard about what it would take to maintain that life. Lately, whenever I tried to justify my existence, Jack Lemmon squared off poorly against Alec Baldwin in the
Glengarry Glen Ross
of my mind—
“Good father? Family man? Fuck you. Go home and play with your kids.”
Still, my harsh judgment of myself hadn't yet led me to change my habits, hadn't led me to, say, finish writing a story for once, or opt for a “rugged” instead of an “easy” or “moderate” trail.

But with Conner there, I felt self-conscious about my lack of athleticism, and so I opted for the moderate-to-difficult Overlook Trail, which wound upward along a steep and rocky path, then snaked over the sprawling roots of oak trees before ending at a muddy bluff that looked out over the narrow, gray lake and the fishing boats upon it. The walk was challenging, but as long as I could hang on to the dog's leash and the strong animal could help pull me over some of the steeper turns, I felt steady. Occasionally, Conner asked if I needed a hand or if I wanted to rest for a bit, and even though I did, I said of course not; I walked these trails all the time.

“I hope I'm not flattering myself too much, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, buddy,” Conner said once we had reached the highest point of the trail. “But the more I think about it, the more I think you and I have a lot in common.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know I feel a kinship with you,” he said. “You're like the only person I can talk to and trust. I realize that now.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I didn't really understand why that was. Probably because I had written a flattering article about him.

“So you flew in all the way from Pennsylvania to see me and tell me that?”

“Nah,” he said, “I had to fly into Chicago again; you're sort of on my way home.”

“You saw Dex?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“You write that book for him?”

“In a way.”

“Everything go OK?”

Conner choked out a bitter laugh. “I wouldn't say that.” He stopped walking for a few moments. He rubbed his face until his cheeks turned bright red under his beard. “Goddamn, man,” he said.
“Goddamn.”

Conner was looking a little shaky, and sat down on the warped, rickety bench. I sat beside him.

“Well,” I said, “at least you can feel safe that no one's following us or listening to us all the way up here.”

“You can never be sure, ever,” said Conner. “I know that now, my friend.”

“Then are you sure you wanna be telling me about everything?” I asked. “Won't Dex make you give back all the money if he finds out you told me? Wasn't that what he said?”

“It's different with you,” he said.

“Why?”

“Trust me. It is,” said Conner.

And so, there on that hill in Bloomington, Indiana, beneath the graying skies that seemed to mirror the lake below, Conner started to tell me everything that had happened from the moment I last saw him in West Lafayette. Or, at least, all that he wanted me to know.

T
he story began a few hours after we had said good-bye at the Hilton Garden Inn. I had driven home to Bloomington, while he took I-65 to the Indianapolis Airport. By the time he got there, he had decided to take Dex's story at face value. He would do what Dex asked. If the check turned out to be good, he would take the money, write the book as well as he could, and feel blessed that this strange project had fallen into his lap. If it had been good enough for the other authors Dex had employed, it would be good enough for Conner. It was about time his luck turned around.

Back at LaGuardia, he got his car and drove to the Poconos. He felt energized by the prospect of devising story ideas. He hadn't felt so upbeat since he had first met Angela and they had talked about books and she had told him how much she hated contemporary crime novels because they were so implausible, and he had vowed he would write one she could believe was true. He had dedicated that novel,
Devil Shotgun
, to her, had even named it after the brand of exhaust pipe on her Suzuki motorcycle. How thrilled he had felt during those days, typing until dawn while she slept in his bed until it was time for her to get up and get ready for her shift.

Back then, writing hadn't been about making money or trying to appeal to a big audience. It hadn't been about trying to make back the advances he had been paid. The reason he wrote was to forge a deeper relationship with the woman he loved and wanted to marry. Although he had fantasized about publishing a novel at some point, he hadn't thought
Devil Shotgun
would be the one, not until Angela read it and told him it was too good to share with only one person, even if that person was the one who had accepted Conner's proposal to marry her. Everything that came afterward—the agent Conner secured to sell the work; the contract he signed with Shascha's imprint at Schreiber & Sons; the movie deal; the deals for all the Cole Padgett books that followed; the ability to quit his job at the
Daily News
, buy a Porsche 911 and a sprawling 1920s home built on four acres of land with great views, lousy plumbing, and a private path that led down to the Delaware River—all that had been extra. And none of it would have mattered had Angela not fallen in love with him, married him, and agreed to move with him to Pennsylvania and start a family. Even now, he would have given back every word he had ever put down on paper if he could have recaptured the joy he had felt during his first years with Angie.

Angela De La Roja was Conner's inspiration and had been for every book he had written. He had been attracted not only by her beauty, but also by her honesty. “Sometimes, I feel we're the only two honest people left in the world,” he once told her. When he had talked to her as a beat reporter, he was stunned by all the confidential information she provided him, all the background details no other cop had ever given up. And he knew she didn't tell him all this to impress him or to make her bosses or coworkers look bad, but because she was incapable of lying and because she thought he was the only trustworthy journalist she had ever met; journalism was a profession she viewed with as much skepticism as she viewed police work, which was probably why she had seemed so suspicious of me. She had been hurt badly in her life—when she was twelve, her father had died in prison after having supposedly been set up to take the fall for a drug deal he'd had nothing to do with. Becoming a cop had been Angela's form of mourning and vengeance for the lies that had shattered her father's life; she had no time or patience for dishonesty. When a couple of cops she knew had been cleared of police brutality charges for beating confessions out of teenage suspects, Angela told Conner the real story, and his reporting reopened the case. She taught Conner all the little details of police work that her macho colleagues tended to keep secret from their spouses—the frustrating drudgery of the job; the mind-numbing paperwork; her superiors' mendacity and bigotry, no matter their race or ethnicity.

What excited Conner about writing
Devil Shotgun
for Angela was that he knew she would give him her honest opinion and tell him everything that rang false. Her unvarnished speech, her refusal to say what he may have wanted to hear, forced him to bring out his true self, the honesty that just about all writers strive for.

But coming home from LaGuardia, as he drove his Porsche past East Stroudsburg and then took the Delaware Water Gap exit to his house, he realized writing could become almost as exciting as it had been back then. Now he could write with no audience to please other than himself—not even Dex. For, even if he wrote a novel that Dex hated, he would still have his first two payments for whatever he had written, and that would be more than enough to live on for a very long time. He tried to regard Dex less as a potential nemesis and more as a benefactor, a modern Lorenzo de' Medici, his court populated with writers.

The moment he pulled into his driveway and saw Angela nursing Atticus on the front porch, he sensed he had made the right decision. Angela had stuck a For Sale by Owner sign into the front lawn, but Conner pulled it out and ripped it in half. And when Angela embraced him and then walked with him into the house and into the bedroom, where they made love while Atticus slept in his crib, he knew he was right. His only regret was that, for the first time since he'd met her, he would have to lie to her.

But lying to Angie, the one thing she had told Conner she would never be able to forgive, proved surprisingly easy. He told her he was working on a screen adaptation of one of his novels for a Hollywood production company, and she, having no interest in movies after
Devil Shotgun
had been butchered, didn't ask any more questions about what Conner was writing or how it had suddenly become so lucrative.

Conner and Angie tried to be smart about their money. They didn't buy another Porsche; in fact, they sold the Porsche and bought a Subaru Outback with plenty of room for multiple car seats, and started talking about having a second child. They put some of the money aside for Atticus's college fund and spent about ten grand to take care of the plumbing and leakage issues that were still bedeviling the house. They put fifty grand in their checking account and the rest in a money market account. They hadn't gone on a vacation since Atticus had been born, so they decided to take one, but they didn't go anywhere expensive. They rented an oceanfront cottage in a small lobstering community in northern Maine, where they spent their days walking along the slippery shores strewn with seaweed, black rocks, and mussel shells. They dipped their son's feet in the water and watched him toddle along the brown-black sand. In the evenings, after Angie put Atticus to sleep, Conner would take the manual typewriter and some paper and sit at a table by the ocean. He would listen to the cries of gulls and the fizzing ocean. He was full of ideas; words poured out of him.

“That sounds so perfect,” I said to Conner as we sat on the bench above Griffy Lake.

“It really was,” said Conner. “Or almost perfect. But there was at least one thing wrong with it.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“I was writing the wrong thing,” said Conner. “I had ideas for all kinds of books, but I couldn't think of a single idea for a thriller.”

I
t only occurred to me later that I should have felt jealous of Conner and that it was presumptuous of him to burden me with his woes. After all, his troubles seemed far less vexing than mine—he had, at the very least, eight hundred grand to burn. Depending on which newspaper you read, a double-dip recession was either already in progress or on its way; the stock market was doing OK, but Sabine and I had invested our money in a politically correct, socially conscious fund managed by Indiana Mennonites, and all those investments had gone down the crapper. My retirement account, meager as it was, had been cut in half. I had been out of the workforce since our move to Indiana and lacked the appropriate skills and HTML coding and digital audio editing experience and whatever the hell else to jump back into journalism; the colleges and universities where Sabine was applying to teach were offering buyouts and instituting hiring freezes; my wife and I stood to lose not only her job and our comparatively easy lifestyle but also our health care and benefits. Even one-twentieth of the money Dex Dunford had already paid Conner would have allayed some of our fears and bought us breathing room.

But there on the bluff overlooking Griffy Lake, where all I could see was a calm, rippling lake, two small fishing boats upon it, and where no Dex Dunford or any Eastern European henchman was in sight, all I wanted was to listen to my friend tell a story. I just hoped I could prove as helpful to him as he seemed to think I could be. I half hoped he had tracked me down because he wanted me to tackle the writing assignment that had given him so much trouble in Maine. Maybe I could be the one to write the detailed, expertly researched thriller. I felt certain I could do it if the price were right.

“Maybe you need some help,” I said. “A writing partner? Or an outside editor? Someone to bounce ideas off of?”

Conner smiled. “Thanks, man,” he said. “But it's a little late for that. I already wrote the son of a bitch, but it's not exactly what I thought I was gonna write.”

“You wrote a thriller?” I asked.

“Yeah, kinda,” he said with sad resignation. A light rain was beginning to fall from the charcoal-colored clouds. “But you shoulda seen me before I started really writing it, man. For those few weeks, I was on fire. I was writing every sort of story you can imagine. I was writing a love story, I was writing a kids' book. I wanted to write a book for Angie; I wanted to write one for Atticus; hell, man, I was even thinking of writing a book about friendships and fathers and sons. It even crossed my mind that I should dedicate it to you. For real.”

“That's not what Dex wanted you to write, though,” I said.

“Uh-uh. He wanted a thriller, and that's the only book I didn't feel like writing anymore.”

“Did you give up?”

“I thought about it for a while. I figured the hell with it. I tried to call you to get your take, but you weren't around. So I just went with my gut. I told myself I would write the book I wanted to write, see where it led. Maybe I could turn it into a thriller somehow.”

But he couldn't. His mood was too light and thrillers were too dark. He spent a month with Angie and Atticus in Maine, getting more and more frustrated, and during that time, it occurred to him that maybe he could return the money to Dex. Maybe he could say he just didn't have any ideas for thrillers anymore and then he could take all his new ideas and use them to sell his next book to Shascha. Maybe she would like to see a romantic novel or one that he would write for his son.

Conner put the thriller out of his mind and made an appointment to meet with Shascha. “The only thing I wanted was to give Shascha a really good story, the best I'd ever written,” said Conner. “Never in a million years did I think she would give me the idea for a story about a perfect crime.”