them.”
“I don’t get it,” said Judith.
Dade shrugged his wide shoulders. “I’m interested
in ideas. Your mother sounds as if she’s had a colorful
life.” His casual demeanor evaporated, replaced by
weariness. “Besides, I could use some good ideas
about now. I feel tapped out.”
Judith was mystified. “You mean—you’d buy ideas
from her?”
“Not exactly,” he replied, eyeing the door as if he
were anxious to make his getaway. “It gets real complicated.”
Judith let the matter drop. She was more interested
in
“Was it so complicated with the book that
was based on? I mean, that was a very old book, wasn’t
it? Copyright may have expired.”
“It had,” Dade said without much interest. “I think.
Anyway, whoever wrote it had been dead for years.”
“How did Bruno come by the book? That is,” she
went on, not wanting to admit she’d been snooping in
the guest rooms, “I used to be a librarian, and I’ve
never heard of it. I’m assuming it was fairly obscure.”
“It was at that,” Dade drawled with a gleam in his
eye. “I heard that one of Bruno’s ancestors had written
it. In a nutshell, sophomoric and dull. Carp was the author’s name, as I recollect.”
“C. Douglas Carp,” Judith said as the name on the
title page sprang into her mind’s eye. “Was it his
grandfather or an uncle?”
Dade shrugged again. “I don’t really know. There
was a family tie, though. It was more textbook than
novel, almost impossible to use as the basis for a script.
Too much fact and not enough fiction. And too damned
much territory to cover. I struggled for almost a year to
get just the outline done.”
“I gather you had your differences with Chips Madigan over the script,” Judith said, trying to sound
matter-of-fact.
“Chips!” Dade growled, making a slashing motion
with one hand. “That punk. He and Bruno screwed up
my script every which way. They—Bruno speaking for
both of them—insisted I hadn’t kept to the spirit of the
book. Bull. There was no spirit. It was just a bunch of
events strung together by a weak narrative. For all I
know, old Carp may have paid to get it published. It
was garbage, all nine hundred pages of it.” He paused
to pull out a pocket watch from inside his vest. “Hey,
