Читать книгу Leaving Word - Steven Boykey Sidley - Страница 12

Mogul

By Antonin Corelli

A man dies, mysteriously. He is rich, well respected and powerful. There is not a motive in sight. He is, perhaps, not universally loved (although he is, by many), but liked well enough by the rest. And he has no known enemies. No spurned lovers or burned ex-business partners. But his power is such that a thumbs up or thumbs down from his office can make or ruin lives. He is a large man. Charismatic. About thirty-five. He is found dead at his chair in his office in a modern building near the beach, the headquarters of his sprawling company. There is no sign of trauma.

Detective Spagno stands over the desk and looks at him. The mogul’s head is drooped sideways, a thin line of drool trailing from the side of his mouth onto his collar. Still moist, a very recent death. There are various enforcement officials on the scene— a few cops, a photographer, someone from forensics. Not clear to anyone whether this is a crime scene. Yet.

Standing outside the office, slumped red-eyed against the wall is the executive content editor, Sarah Solmes. He walks over to her, making an effort to soften his face.

Joelle caught her breath and stopped reading and stared. She read it all again. Mediocre start, although not awful. Awkward parenthetical construction in third sentence. Present tense, always a challenge for an amateur. Detached narrator. A little flat, but catches the reader. Dropping into standard procedural fare. A copy of a copy of a copy.

She called Corelli.

‘Detective, Joelle Jesson.’

‘You love the first page?’

‘What’s your game?’

‘What’s my game? You sound like some black-and-white movie from the thirties.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, I don’t. What do you mean?’

‘Your story is the Rappaport story. You know something.’

‘The Rappaport story? No, no. This takes place at a large TV content company, sort of a Netflix.’

‘Close enough. And Sarah Solmes? The executive content editor?’

‘You like her? I think I made her very empathetic.’

‘She is me!’

‘Why would you say that? The character curates video content, not books.’

‘Alliteration! Sarah Solmes? Joelle Jesson? You think I’m an idiot?’

‘Coincidence, I swear.’

‘How does it end?’

‘You have to read it to find out.’

‘Is it a murder or suicide or natural death or accident?’

‘You have to read it to find out.’

‘Jesus, Corelli.’

‘Ah, it’s not Detective Corelli anymore. We’re becoming friends. So you’ll read the whole thing?’

Joelle gave an exasperated grunt. ‘Goodbye, Detective. You are unlikely to hear from me again.’ Which was untrue, but she hung up anyway.

She dove into Google. Antonin Corelli. Thirty-eight. Modestly decorated detective. Divorced. An unremarkable but untainted career. No stumbles, no sparks. Just a city detective doing his job.

She called him back.

‘Corelli, when did you write this?’

‘Oh, over the course of the last year. Didn’t you say I was unlikely to hear from you again? It’s been, what, nine minutes?’

‘So is it based on Rappaport? Me?’

‘Well, I wanted a story about a mogul and a media company. So I did some research on moguls and media companies. Book publishers, TV studios, streaming companies. So not you, or him, or CrossMedia. It’s an amalgam of people and places and pieces of news and things I’ve seen.’

‘How do I know that?’

‘I’ve been writing for a year. Rappaport died a few days ago. What do you think? That I foresaw all of this?’

‘So is it a murder story?’

‘You have to read the manuscript to find out.’

‘Crime is not my beat these days, and I don’t do un-agented manuscripts, but I will pass it on to one of our editors who does this stuff. I read the first two paragraphs. Not bad, but needing work.’

‘Well, OK, I suppose.’

‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Corelli. Your manuscript is going to be read, just not by me.’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘I need to find out how Rappaport died. Can you help me?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t know. There is no evidence of anything. There’s not even an open docket. He just died.’

‘And the mogul in your book?’

‘Read it.’

‘No. One of my staff will read it.’

‘He was murdered.’

‘By whom?’

‘Someone who knows him really well. But it’s more complicated than that.’

‘Jesus, Corelli.’

Plot. Joelle had become allergic to a finely wrought plot. Over her years of editing, she had come to appreciate that excellent and symmetrically machined plots were antithetical to the soul of story. She loved stories. She hated plots—they were a cheap conceit, pieces laid out higgledy-piggledy across the pages and then slotted and fitted and fastened over three hundred pages, like a piece of Ikea furniture. That was not the way the world worked. The world was messy and incomplete and ambiguous and only loosely directed. And the best stories were similarly so, even as they captured a microcosm of truth. Not everything resolves, nor should it. Her mother dropped dead when she needed her most, when her teenage self was grasping for handrails, when she was sinking without ballast, when the certainty of her pre-teen years were suddenly shattered by menstruation and bullying and drugs and unreliable friends and loud boys and a world that suddenly loomed so large that she could not see its edges. At sixteen, she hated her mother. Called her a fucking bitch to her face. Who responded with a pale and tight-lipped retreat to the other side of the house. But she knew, and her mother knew, that this was the game. You hate your mother because she loves you so hard, because she wants only the best for you, because her life is emptied by your teenage pain, and she can do no other than to try to hold you. What you do not do, Ma, is die. You don’t get up and die. You keep trying, even when your daughter calls you a fucking bitch. You left me without a plot, you left me adrift, and I have still not found my shore.

So plot was at the bottom of her list. And meta-anything gave her hives. When one thing means something else and is disguised as motive that is actually narrative but actually blah-blah. And here she was, right in the middle of meta-plot. A real death. A real detective. A made-up story about a murder. Maybe. Art imitating life, deceit camouflaged as truth, hints and coincidences masquerading as causality.

She skimmed the first part of the manuscript. It was impossible to read now—there were potential familiarities at every corner. The description of Sarah Solms’s office—well, maybe, in a generic sort of way. The parking lot of the building—yes, close. The famous scriptwriter described as a cliché—an ascetic, multi-divorced, wrecked mess of a man facing his declining audience and talent. No, CrossMedia had no one like that, except between the pages of some of its books.

So what else would be in this manuscript? She assumed it would be the vanilla ingredients of the crime novel—characters who will work assiduously to unravel the crime, forage its roots, uncover its incognitos, lay bare motive and reason and method, so that punishments can be calculated, conferred, earnestly executed and duly recorded, leaving victims to nibble half-heartedly at the bitter fruits of justice and revenge, and the great balance between right and wrong maintained or right-sized or whatever?

No, proximity to what actually happened to Buddy would be, at best, the guess of a detective’s imagination and literary ambitions. And its proximity to how life really works, no—a long miss, if he was lucky.

Joelle felt the air go out of her. She stared again at the first page of the manuscript. She stared at the employee exit letter on her desk, personally penned by Buddy in an embarrassed conciliatory tone. She stared at the pile of manuscripts awaiting her now distracted attentions. She stared at her cloying inbox. She stared at the open Word document caught mid-edit on some wounded work. She stared out the window at the yellow-blue Los Angeles sky framing the hills of Hollywood.

Then she stared at the screen on her phone and the Tinder logo coyly aflame.