Joe smiled kindly. “Don’t you get it? He made that up so I’d be on his side. It didn’t happen, Zoe. Not before today. And even if she had — well. I don’t like stalkers.”
“Me neither,” Zoe said. And meant it. Tom had made a pass at her shortly after that meeting in the market, and evidently didn’t take rejection well, hence the spate of late-night calls she and Joe had suffered awhile back. But Joe had been right about one thing; there were ways, with technological trickery, that someone clever could find out who’d been making phone calls, no matter that they thought they’d shielded their number. Trashing Tom Parker’s place had been her reasonable response. It hadn’t occurred to her he’d think Tessa had done it, but the more she listened to Joe, the more she was sure he’d thought no such thing. He’d known it was Zoe. Using Joe — steering him to where he’d do to Tessa what Zoe had done to Tom — was the typical stalker’s revenge: manipulative, distant, pleased with itself. His hard luck Joe had seen through him. Not that she was about to share any of this. “How’d you get into his place anyway?”
His second break-in. Harder when you don’t have a key.
“Bob Poland helped,” he said. For a fee. “Policemen know the strangest things. Like getting through locks.”
Zoe nodded. Getting through locks was a skill she’d been tutored in by a local tearaway. “And what did you do?” she asked, curious. “Once you were in?”
There’d been a moment when he’d almost turned and left, overcome by the enormity of it: of breaking in, of wreaking havoc. But then he’d seen Tom’s office. I like things ordered, Joe, he’d said. And there, to prove it, stood his filing cabinets, with their reams of carefully alphabetised records that Joe had carefully, randomly, reordered. Tom would be hours straightening that lot out. Hours. Maybe days.
“It’s better you don’t know,” he told her.
He was sure that’s what Marlowe would have said.
©2008 by Mick Herron
The Good Father
by William Link
In partnership with Richard Levinson, William Link was the creator and producer of some of the most popular shows on TV, including Columbo, Mannix, Ellery Queen, and Murder, She Wrote. For their joint work on such series Levinson and Link received a special Edgar Award and the Ellery Queen Award from MWA, and were three-time winners of the Edgar for Best TV Feature or Mini-series Teleplay.
It would seem Jay Jordan had made the fatal mistake of turning fifty.
A successful television writer since his twenties, Jay was known to postpone a European vacation if his producer needed an additional rewrite on a Hill Street Blues. It was one of the reasons, albeit a minor one, why his marriage went into receivership. And on that one his wife Lynne was, unfortunately, the receiver.
But no sooner he had blown out the candles on his birthday cake than it seemed he’d simultaneously blown out the wires on his phone. He would ask his agent about the lack of current assignments on a Monday and the man (one of his oldest friends) would wish him a happy weekend as they hung up. When his picture was taken down off the wall at the Palm, one of Hollywood’s premier steak houses, he knew immediately that the industry was reciting him his Last (W)Rites. All the new work was going to the army of young writers who seemed to love their computers more than their wives or girlfriends.
It was not that Jay was skirting the poverty line. He still owned his ranch house in Sherman Oaks, his once obese stock portfolio, membership at the health and tennis clubs, but his insatiable urge to write was like poison ivy— Ahhh, it was great scratching it even if it drew a little masochistic blood in the process. Goddammit, he had come up the hard way, poor kid from the Bronx, no money to go to college, just this starved monkey on his back, hungering to write, to get his words up there on the screen. Actually, down there on the screen since he was a TV scribe. But now...
He was sitting in his living room at eleven in the morning, unshaven, still in his bathrobe, when his ex called. As usual, she wanted at his wallet. There was always a justifiable reason: Jeffrey (their son) wanted to go to Baja with his friends for a weekend, the roof was leaking again, Jeffrey’s dental bills. Legally, he didn’t have to pay any of this but she always managed to make him a last-drop-of-blood donor. Even blindfolded, hands tied behind her back, she could unerringly find his guilt button. All this expressed in her usual harridan’s voice.
“You never see Jeffrey, you never even saw him in his school’s The Mikado, and he was the Mikado!”
“Gimme a break, I paid for his damn costume.”
“But you never saw him in it.”
She had him there: He saw his son maybe six, seven times a year. He just couldn’t relate to the kid, he was too Californian: too blond, too tanned, too arrogant even at five and even worse as a teenager. He called Jay “Jay.” Where was his respect, treating his father like one of his pot-smoking buddies? Jay had compounded the situation by getting him into a private school filled with the opportunistic offspring of the town’s actors, agents, entertainment lawyers. You could catch them in homeroom every morning reading the trades, looking forward to their lattes at lunch.
It was only after he had gotten Lynne off the phone with his usual promise of forthcoming lucre that the idea hit him. It came unheralded like most of his best story ideas, a gift-wrapped missive from the subconscious. But it had its downside: It meant a talk with the blood recipient. A very serious, probably hard-sell session which would finally give the kid, not being too Freudian about it, an upper cajone in their relationship. Could he deal with that? You betcha!
He always dreaded going back to the house he lost to Lynne in the marriage settlement: a faux-Tudor on Hillcrest in Beverly Hills. He even avoided driving by it if possible. But this was business!
In his ex’s now over-decorated living room (God, some of the furnishings actually looked Iranian!), he confronted Jeffrey, who sat sprawled on a sofa, scruffy in soiled T-shirt and cargo pants, drinking a soda. He was regarding Jay with a contemplative smirk like a used-car salesman evaluating his newest victim.
Before Jay could begin, Jeffrey said, “Jay, I’ve been thinking. You know, my name, Jeffrey Jordan — it’s a little over-the-top alliterative. Wouldn’t you say? It gets embarrassing.”
Jay wanted to throw up. But this was business. “You might have a point there,” he managed to concede. But he loved the fact that his son had used the word “alliterative.” Maybe they read more than the trades at that showbiz school.
“I want to change it,” Jeffrey said emphatically.
“That can be done,” Jay agreed. “We can do that legally, no problem. Let me know.”
“Great. You know what I’d like to change it to?”
Jay shrugged. “What?”
“Hunter. Hunter Jordan. Cool, don’t you think?”
“Very cool. Now — ah — I’d like to discuss something else.”
Jeffrey, future Hunter, rolled over on the sofa. He popped himself up, almost into Jay’s face. “Lay it on, Jay.”
Jay explained the situation in television, the young demographic the industry thirsted for, the dangers that faced Jeffrey and Lynne since the industry had pressed his delete button. Think of it — the lack of tuition money, the perks like Baja, etc. No new car next year. The newly christened Hunter without a Hummer!
If his son was disturbed by Jay’s dissertation, his face remained unperturbed. He took a hearty swig of his Big Red, said, “So what’s the climax of the plot? You’re the writer.”
“An impersonation. You.”
Jeffrey, ex-Mikado, straightened up on the sofa. “Me?”
“You go in, pitch the story to the producer. You get the assignment and I write the script. They’ll never know the old fart did the writing.”