Steven Womack: By Blood Written

“Good idea.”

“Would you excuse us, boss?”

“Sure,” Joan said, holding up her empty glass. “If you need anything, just call me. I’ll be at the bar.”

Taylor leaned in close to Brett as the two strode arm-in-arm across the room toward the kitchen.

“You’ll have to excuse her,” Taylor said soothingly. “You don’t get to be head of one of the top half-dozen literary agencies in the city by being a shrinking violet.”

“Shrinking violet’s one thing,” Brett said as they stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Dragon lady’s quite another …”

“Yes, she’s abrasive and in-your-face and loud and vul-gar,” Taylor said. “And she also fights like a pit bull for her clients and everyone who works for her.”

Brett held up a hand, palm-out, toward Taylor. “Hold on, girlfriend. You’re preaching to the choir. Remember? I’ve been up against her.”

“Then you understand why her clients are desperately loyal to her, and so are her employees.”

“Yourself included, I guess,” Brett commented.

Taylor smiled. “Yes. And now that we’re away from the crowds and the music, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with Michael’s tour.”

Brett sighed and leaned against the refrigerator. There was barely room for both women in the cramped kitchen at the same time.

“Well, it’s kind of weird, really,” Brett said slowly. “I can’t quite figure it out, and I’m not sure it’s anything serious.”

Brett paused, crossed her arms, and lifted an eyebrow.

“You’ve seen how women react to him?”

Taylor pursed her lips, thinking of the situation she’d just encountered upstairs. “Yes,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“I mean, the guy’s really good-looking!” Brett said. “Am I right or am I right?”

Taylor nodded. “You’re right, Brett. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“And he’s funny and he’s warm and he’s sexy and he’s personable and he’s smart and-” Brett hesitated for a moment.

“ God! Why can’t I find a man like that!”

Taylor laughed softly. “Don’t forget, he’s very close to rich and famous as well.”

“Yes!” Brett exclaimed, her arms flapping out to her sides in an exaggerated gesture. “That, too! I want to say the guy’s a hunk, but that word doesn’t quite fit, does it?”

Taylor thought for a moment. “No, it really doesn’t and I’m not sure why.”

“Half the time I want to jump his bones and the other half of the time I want to take him home and make him dinner,”

Brett said. “Forget that he’s one of my authors.”

“Don’t forget that,” Taylor warned. “Never forget that.

Don’t even think of it.”

“I can’t help but think of it!” Brett placed her hands on her hips and slouched even harder against the refrigerator door. “Besides, I’m only half serious. I’m a lot of things, my friend, but deluded isn’t one of them. I haven’t got a chance with him …”

“Brett,” Taylor said, feeling like she was interrupting a reverie that really wasn’t much of her business. “What are you trying to tell me? Out there, you sounded like there was some kind of problem.”

“I can’t figure it out,” Brett said. “Given what an attractive, charming, sexy man he is-”

“Yes?” Taylor asked after a moment.

“How come Carol Gee hates him so much?”

Audrey Carlisle was the first to spot Michael Schiftmann as he carefully made his way down the spiral staircase from the second floor of Taylor’s loft. The black wrought iron bent and squeaked as he descended, but the din of party chatter and music covered what would otherwise have been an annoy-ing sound. Audrey, a short, severe woman in her late fifties who’d been the

Times

main reviewer of crime fiction for more than two decades, had managed to solidify a comfortable and safe niche for herself. The more academic and literary critics stayed away from popular fiction, especially mysteries and crime novels, while the less accomplished reviewers of pop culture novels had been beaten into submission.

Crime fiction was Audrey Carlisle’s turf, and she guarded it zealously. She’d made careers and she’d torpedoed them.

Writers respected her and feared her, the savvy ones anyway.

But in all her years of dealing with writers and authors-the distinction between the two being very real, she thought, authors considering themselves officers while writers were enlisted personnel who worked for a living-she had never encountered anyone like Michael Schiftmann.

He was what she considered a workmanlike writer. Audrey had briefly reviewed his first two novels and found them perfectly competent but less than outstanding. She worked in a couple of paragraphs about his first book in a column that reviewed a dozen other first novels as a favor to an editor. Schiftmann’s first book had been published as a mass-market paperback, had spent its customary six weeks on the shelves, and then faded quietly into obscurity.

A year later, Audrey found in the basket of review copies that inundated her office every day Michael Schiftmann’s second book. It, too, had been designed, published, and marketed in a completely forgettable fashion and, once again, got a cursory two-paragraph mention in Audrey’s regular column. When a third book landed on her desk eight months after the second, it wound up in a canvas bag jammed full of other review copies and bound galleys and shipped off to the VA hospital in Queens.

That was the last Audrey Carlisle heard of Michael Schiftmann for several years. She vaguely remembered seeing more paperbacks come across her desk, but in the avalanche of paper that gushed in and out of her office on an annual basis-enough to stretch from Manhattan to Tokyo every year-she couldn’t be completely sure.

Audrey continued to eye Michael as he took the last step off the spiral staircase and was immediately sandwiched between two young women in tight sheath dresses, martini glasses in hand. The pouty-lipped brunette to his right leaned in close as she talked to him, wrapping a curl of hair around her left index finger as she spoke in what Audrey knew was classic body-language come-on. Audrey felt her brow tighten as she watched the two young women fawn over Michael, who seemed to be politely enduring the attention. The short blond in the red vinyl said something apparently considered funny. Michael laughed, and the lines of his jaw shifted under his skin. His teeth were white and straight; Audrey wondered if he’d had them bleached.

She felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she couldn’t figure out which was more alluring; the brunette with the sexy, thick lips or the warmth radiating from Michael Schiftmann as he stood next to her pretending-Audrey hoped-to listen.

Audrey felt her face redden and turned away, heading toward the bar with her empty glass. It was always this way for her at parties. Never successfully forcing herself to be comfortable, she often found herself standing alone with an empty glass in hand. No one ever offered to fill it for her. No man ever chatted her up. The small talk others made with her varied, depending on the place the other person occupied on the publishing feeding chain. Writers clawing their way up the ladder were either sycophantic, deferential, and fawning, or they were too intimidated to talk to her at all.

The established authors whose careers were already made condescended to her, patronized her, now that she was no longer essential to their success.

In either case, Audrey realized, none of them really knew her or gave a damn about her. As her turn at the bar came, Audrey decided to have one more Scotch and soda, then call it a night. Parties always brought her down. At least, she thought, that dreadful music had stopped momentarily.