Lawrence Sanders - McNally's caper

I was in bed with J. Mark Hamilton, my brother-in-law. We had spent the night together because my sister, Laura, was in Park Central, recovering from plastic surgery. She’d had her tits elevated.

So there we were in the morning, J. Mark and me, his unshaven jowls scraping at me. ‘ Bon appetit ,’ I murmured, and then the phone rang.

It was Sol Faber, my literary agent.

‘Morning, doll,’ he said brightly. ‘We got a meet with the man at tennish. Remember?’

That’s the way Sol talks.

‘I remember,’ I said. As a matter of fact, I had forgotten. I have that frailty: I lose the remembrance of unpleasant coming events.

Sol told me to meet him in the lobby of Binder Publications a few minutes before ten. Then we hung up. My brother-in-law raised his bald head to stare at me.

‘Who was that?’ he demanded.

‘Your wife,’ 1 said. ‘She asked me to remind you to pick up the drycleaning.’

His face went white before he realized I was ribbing him. J. Mark is not the fastest wit in the world. He does, though, possess certain skills, even if I don’t allow him between my sheets solely because of them. It’s a form of hostility directed against my sister. Laura is the pretty blond, petite one. I am constructed more along the lines of a Marine drill instructor, and I have a profile that belongs on postage stamps.

In all modesty, I am not a gorgon, but I am large. Five-ten, to be exact. J. Hamilton was my sister’s height: five-four. Like most tall women I inspire dreams of conquest in short males. Simply, I suppose, because we’re there.

1 am extraordinarily slender, but hardly fragile. My breasts are not as large as Laura’s, lifted or descended, but I have strength in my shoulders, arms, back, and legs. I work at it: jogging, yoga, swimming, sex. My health is indecently good.

I wear my hair quite short. It is a rather indeterminate shade of dark brown. My eyes are brown too.

1 am twenty-eight years old, and was born in Lima, Peru, where my father was serving as consul. Laura, who is three years younger, was born in Paris. Of course. She would be.

My father died when I was twenty-two, in a manner so ridiculous that I blush to mention it. A golf cart he was riding tipped over and fell on him, breaking his back. Near the sixth green. My mother waited a decent interval (five weeks) before remarrying. Juan, my stepfather, is two years older than I, very Spanish, and can’t decide whether to be Picasso, Manolete, or Cervantes. He and my mother live on the Costa del Sol in a seafront condominium. My mother’s name is Matilda. She is called Matty, and we-exchange Christmas cards.

I visited them only once, and fled after Juan made his interest clear. He is quite short.

I have never been married. I don’t live a celibate life, but neither do I sleep around. I like men better than women.

I think that concludes the vital statistics. Oh, one more thing: I have very long feet. I offer this only as proof of my intention of making this narrative as honest as possible.

I still feel I did nothing wrong. The New York Police Department and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, of course, feel differently.

WHO AM I?

My name is Chuck Thorndike. My name is Mike Cantrell. My name is Buck Williams. My name is Pat Slaughter. And, God help us, my name is Brick Wall.

All pseudonyms, of course. My real name is Jannie Shean. But I am the author of hard-boiled mystery-suspense thrillers, and Aldo Binder, ‘the man’ at Binder Publications, is conviced that since men are the big buyers of this genre, the author’s name should also be male. And not only male, but ruggedly, toughly, two-fistedly masculine.

‘Like Mickey Spillane,’ he told me.

‘Like Raymond Chandler?’ I said. ‘Like Dashiell Hammett?’

But I was so anxious to sell my first novel that I agreed to be Chuck Thorndike. Then, when I got in the swing of things and began turning out four pot-boilers a year, along came Mike, Buck, Pat, and Brick.

I make no claim to creating literature, but I do strive for intelligent entertainment. My books are tightly plotted, with the required dollops of sex and violence, and they have found a faithful readership. I have had two movie sales, and last year I grossed almost a hundred thousand dollars. As Brick Wall might say, ‘That ain’t potato pancakes, sweetheart.’

I’m lucky and I know it. For every novelist able to support himself on his earnings, there are a hundred who must earn bread teaching Creative Writing in New Hampshire girls’ schools, writing ad copy on Madison Avenue, or slicing pastrami in an Orchard Street deli. Probably I made it because I found a formula I enjoyed writing and a lot of people enjoyed reading. Not that it’s a formula original with me. It’s called the Big Caper, and involves looting a bank vault, a kidnapping, hijacking an airliner, a raid on an armored truck — something large enough to require a gang of four to a dozen bad guys.

The first third of a Big Caper thriller is spent gathering the personnel: delineating their strengths, weaknesses, and their relationships to each other; and planning the caper. The second third of the novel describes the actual commission of the crime. In the final third, the whole thing falls apart through bad luck, clever police work, or from the personality defects, failure of brain or nerve, and antagonisms of the gang members. They are not the master criminals they fancied themselves. Justice triumphs.

How many Big Caper novels have you read? A dozen? A hundred? I hope some of them were mine. Or, rather, Chuck’s, Mike’s, Buck’s, Pat’s, or Brick’s.

Together, we turned out books like link sausage, until, about six months ago, it all began to come apart like … well, like a Big Caper. The final sales on Mike Cantrell’s latest, Mayhem on Mother’s Day, were down, way down. And the bookstores were returning unsold stacks of Pat Slaughter’s Massacre on Division Street.

Worse, I had recently turned in Chuck Thorndike’s new opus, Murder for Breakfast, and after three weeks of chilling silence from my publishers, Aldo Binder’s secretary called Sol Faber to set up an appointment with the great man himself. I fancied I heard, faintly, the sounds of a guillotine. Creak of pulley. Rasp of rope. Whistle of blade’s descent. Chonk!

The offices of Binder Publications were in a seedy building overlooking Times Square. On a clear day you could see the massage parlors on Eighth Avenue. Our meeting was held in the Editorial Conference Room, which had all the ambience of a Central Park Comfort Station.

Besides me, the cast of characters included:

Sol Faber, my agent. Sol tried so hard with his California leisure suits and blow-dried hair. He was thin, jerky, with horn-rimmed glasses, a pinkie ring, and a habit of snapping his fingers to call a waiter.

Aldo Binder, my publisher. Aldo was the only man I knew who wore double-breasted vests. He was a big, lumpy man with gloomy eyes, much given to brooding silences. He smoked black cigars. It was said he got his start publishing porno. He was shrewd and knowledgeable. Had the same secretary for thirty-three years. There were stories about that too, with references to the spavined leather couch in his office.

Simon Lefferts, my editor. Lefferts was a shithead and a snotnose. He was supposed to have a PhD in American Literature, and he treated every manuscript that came across his desk like the first draft of Farewell to Arms.

So there we were, four nutcakes, sitting around an old oak table that must have been bought from a defunct fraternity house. The top was carved with names, class numerals, Greek letters, and one ‘Fuck you.’ Simon Lefferts had the manuscript of Chuck Thorndike’s Murder for Breakfast in front of him, along with three pages of single-spaced notes. I figured I was in for a two-hour personal pogrom.