"I warned you," Clay snarled. "Send her off to the fucking shrinks and what happens? We get cheap psychology about her readers and a book no one will buy. The woman can't write, for Christ sake. If she loses her adolescent fantasy about true love she loses her audience."
" Maybe Dr. Reindorf will betray her as badly as Gerardo and Kenny, and that surgeon, her first husband, who gave us A Clean Wound."
"We can't take that chance," Clay said. "You've got to do something."
"I'm sixty," Amy said. "I can take early retirement. You're the one who's worried about it. You do something. Get the publicity department to plant a story in the National Enquirer that Roxanne is getting therapy from a child molester."
She meant it as a joke but Clay thought it was worth an effort. His publicity staff turned him down.
"We can't plant stories about our own writers. Publishing is a community of gossips. Someone will know, they'll leak it to someone else who hates you, and the next thing you know Roxanne will be at Putnam and you'll be eating wiener-water soup."
Clay began to lose sleep. Final Analysis, done in silver with a suggestive couch on the cover, came well out of the gate, but word of mouth began killing it before the second printing was ready. It jumped onto the Times list in third place but stayed there only a week before plummeting to ninth. After five short weeks Final Analysis dropped off the list into the black hole of overstock and remainders.
The faxes from Brussels were hot enough to scorch the veneer from Clay Rossiter's desktop, while Roxanne's agent, Lila Trumbull, called daily to blame Clay for not marketing the book properly.
"But you can't market long, dull dreams and their interpretation," Clay howled to his secretary. "As I told Amy."
Clay fired Amy, to relieve his feelings, then had to rehire her the next morning: Roxanne had an editor clause in her contract. She could leave Gaudy if Amy did.
"Only, if she's going to keep turning out cheap psychology it won't matter. Pretty soon even Harlequin won't touch her. And, by the way, we won't be able to afford you. How long has she been seeing this damned shrink?"
"About nine months. And the last time she was in New York she only stayed overnight so as not to miss a session. So it doesn't seem to be following the course of her usual infatuations."
"He's not in New York? Where is he?"
" Santa Fe. This isn't the only town with psychiatrists in it, Clay."
"Yeah, they're like rats: wherever you find a human population, there they'll be, eating the garbage," Clay grumbled. "Maybe he can fall off a mesa."
When Amy left he stared at the clock. It was eleven in New York. Nine A.M. in New Mexico. He got up abruptly and took his coat from behind the door.
"I have the flu," he told his secretary. "If some moron calls from Brussels tell him I'm running a high fever and can't talk."
"You look healthy to me," she said.
"It's the hectic flush of fever."
He was out of the office before she could chide him further. He flagged a cab, then changed his mind. The cops were forever questioning cabdrivers. He took the long, slow subway ride to Queens.
On the flight to Albuquerque he wondered what he should do about renting a car. He'd paid cash for his ticket so that he could use an assumed name, but he'd need a driver's license and credit card to rent a car. When the man next to him got up to use the bathroom Clay went through his breastpocket. They didn't look anything alike, but no one ever inspected those photos. And fortunately the man's home was in New Mexico. He wouldn't miss his license until after Clay mailed it back to him, with cash for the price of the rental, of course.
It turned out to be easy. Pathetically easy. He called Dr. Reindorf and told him the truth, that he was Roxanne's publisher, that they were all worried about her, and could he have a word in confidence. Someplace quiet, remote, where they wouldn't run the risk of Roxanne seeing Clay and feeling spied upon. Reindorf suggested a mesa with a view of Santa Fe below it when he'd finished seeing patients for the day.
Clay made the red-eye back to New York with an hour to spare. The next morning Amy stuck her head around his door. She started to ask him something, but decided he really did have the flu, his eyes were so puffy. It wasn't until later in the day that Roxanne called her, distraught at Reindorfs death.
"She somehow ended up going to the morgue to look at the body, don't ask me why," Amy told Clay's secretary, since Clay had gone home sick again. "It had been run over by a car several times before being thrown from the mesa. The cops hauled her ex-gardener in for questioning but they don't seem to have any suspects."
"The news should revive Clay," his secretary said.
Ancilla's hands fluttered at her sides like captive birds. "You don't understand, Karl. Papa is dead. His work-I never valued it properly, but I must try to carry it on."
"But, darling girl, it's too heavy a burden for you. It's just not a suitable job for a woman."
"Ah, if you knew what I felt, when I saw him-had to identify his body after the jackals had been at it-no burden could be too big for me now."
Karl felt pride stir within him. He had loved Ancilla when she had been a beautiful, willful girl, the toast of Vienna. But now, prepared to assume a woman's role in life-to shoulder a load most men would turn from-the spoiled child lines dropped from her cherry tips, giving her the mouth of a woman, firm, ripe, desirable.
"I love it," Clay said. "I'm ecstatic. And you're calling it Life's Work? You got her to change it from An Unsuitable Job for a Woman? Good going. It's been only seventeen weeks since that shrink died and she's already cured. We ought to be able to print a million, a million two, easy. I'll fax Brussels. We'll go out to celebrate."
"I'd rather celebrate right here." Amy shut his office door. "We have a chance to sign a really brilliant new writer. Her name is Lisa Ferguson and she's written an extraordinary novel about life in western Kansas during the sixties. She's going to be the next Eudora Welty."
"No, Amy. Hispanic experience is good. African is possible. But rural Kansas is of no interest to anyone these days except you. I'm certainly not going to pitch it to Brussels."
Amy leaned over the desk. "Clay, Lila Trumbull called me seventeen weeks ago. The day after you went home sick with the flu."
"She's always calling. How can you know what day it was?"
"Because that was when Roxanne's shrink's body was found." Amy smiled and spoke softly, as if to Roxanne herself. "Lila thought she saw you in the Albuquerque airport the day before. She was stopping to see Roxanne on her way back to New York from L.A. and was sure you were renting a car when she was picking up her bags. She'd called to you, but you were in such a hurry you didn't hear her."
Clay shifted in his chair. When he spoke his voice came out in a croak.
"I-she-she should have asked at the rental counter. They could've told her no one rented a car in my name that day. Anyway, I couldn't have been there. I was home with the flu."
"That's what I told her, Clay. You were home sick-she must have been mistaken. And that's what I'll tell anyone else who asks… I'll call Lisa Ferguson's agent and tell her thirty, okay?"