wet heap. His shirt was plastered to his chest and the buckles of his wide suspenders gleamed wetly against it. He looked around at the women in the room.
That was when Tricia got her first good look at his face, and he at hers. They recognized each other in the same instant.
She dropped the towel she was holding, strode up to him in her underwear.
He said, “I can—”
Tricia cocked her arm back and swung. The punch connected on the point of his chin, his feet went slip-slip- slip on the slick floor, and he fell backwards into the tub.
“You’re Carter Blandon! Your family owns a hotel! The city can be dangerous for a girl like me! Tell me more, why don’t you?”
“Keep her away from me,” the dripping man said, having climbed out of the tub a second time. He was keeping Tricia at arm’s length, but she was pacing him, stepping forward each time he backed away.
“Where did your glasses go? Or were they all part of the act? Like that fancy accent you put on?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “I’ve never worn glasses in my life.” Tricia swung at him again and he ducked it. “Will somebody help me, please?”
“No way,” Erin said. “We want to see how this one plays out.
“Where’s my money?” Tricia yelled.
“Gone,” the man said. “It’s gone. I spent it. All right? I spent it, every penny. To get my books out of hock before they went into a furnace. You would’ve done the same, I promise.”
“You
“Oh, we know,” Erin said. “We’ve heard them often enough.”
“Listen to me, will you? Come on. Please. Let me explain.” He sneezed. “I’m going to catch pneumonia. At least let me get into some dry clothes, okay?” He dropped his hands. “You might want to get into some yourself.”
Tricia looked down at herself and remembered suddenly what she was wearing—or, more precisely, what she wasn’t. Then her hand leaped to her head, where her hair was still slowly bleaching away. “Oh, no! Erin, we’ve got to wash this out—right?” She shot a glance at Blandon, or whatever his name really was. “Don’t you dare set one foot out of this bathroom, do you understand me?”
“Be reasonable—what am I supposed to change into here? I’ve got another suit in my office. It’s right across the hall. Erin can come with me, make sure I don’t go anywhere. You come over when you’re ready, I’ll answer any questions you have. Okay?”
Tricia weighed her options. It didn’t take long.
“Erin?”
“Sure, honey,” the redhead said. “Go ahead and wash. I’ll watch him for you.”
“Which office?” Tricia said.
“Number 315,” the man said. “Hard Case Crime.”
Number 315 was a smaller office than Madame Helga’s, just a single room with a single window and not too much light coming through it. Lettered on the glass it said HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS, and sure enough, the place was filled with books, shelves of them, stacks of them, and a handful spread out across the top of the wooden desk Blandon was sitting behind. Erin stood next to him, in her black dress once more, leaning one arm on his shoulder. He was in his shirtsleeves, with brown suspenders and a brown tie dotted with tiny red
“Have a seat,” he said.
“That’s all right,” Tricia said, “I’ll stand.” Her own hair was not completely dry yet either and the new dress she’d unpacked had creases showing from the long train trip. She felt like a rube, a country girl facing down the slickest of city slickers, and it made her reluctant to give any quarter, any at all.
“I’m sorry about the money,” Blandon said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t like doing it. But I was desperate. If we don’t have books to sell, we don’t have a business, and my printer was threatening to destroy the lot if I didn’t pay him at least a portion of what I owed.”
“So you stole from me.”
“Stole? You handed me your money, I didn’t steal it. As I recall, you were standing on a New York City sidewalk, talking loudly about how much money you’d saved up. Lady, if I’m starving and you put a roast beef sandwich in front of me, I’m going to eat it and damn the consequences.”
“So I’m a roast beef sandwich.”
“In this metaphor, yes.”
“And what do you think the police would call what you did?”
“They’d call it fraud and throw me behind bars for it. But that’s just because they don’t understand the realities of the modern business world. A small company like ours...thirty-five dollars can be the difference between life and death.”
“What do you think it is to me?”
“An investment,” he said. “And a smart investment, too. Think of it as buying a piece of New York’s next great publishing company. Dell, Fawcett, Pocket Books... these are million-dollar operations. And why? Because of these.” He lifted a couple of the skinny paperbacks from his desk, let them drop again. They looked like drugstore crime novels, the covers colorful and lurid and peppered with ladies in negligees and men with guns. Each book had an image of a yellow ribbon in the top left corner and one more on the spine. “Just twenty-five cents apiece, just five little nickels—but men have built castles on that foundation of nickels. They’ve built empires. And what have they got that I don’t?”
“Ethics?” Erin said.
“Don’t you believe it,” Blandon said. “They’ve got no more ethics than a cat. They bite and claw and fight for every penny and if it takes a thumb in the eye or a knee in the groin to do it, that’s what they deal out. It’s every man for himself, winner take all. But for the winner who does take all, the one who comes out on top of the heap...” He fell silent, a dreamy look on his face. “And that’s going to be me. That’s going to be Hard Case Crime. We’re going to come out on top.”
“Even if you have to fight dirty to get there,” Tricia said.
“That’s right, sister. Even if. You see this book?” He picked out one of the books on his desk, held it out to her. The cover showed a nearly bare-breasted blonde dressed as Blind Justice, an old-fashioned scale in one hand and a bloody sword in the other. She was peeking out from under her blindfold at a couple of frightened-looking men. The title was
“This was our first book, came out four months ago. That fellow who came after me in the bathroom? This is what he’s all hot under the collar about. Just because he wrote a book ten years ago with a similar title about a guy named Mike Hammer. Am I imitating it? Damn right I am. His book sold millions of copies. Ours? So far we’ve shipped twelve thousand. Doesn’t hurt Spillane at all. Guy hasn’t written a book in six years, he’s probably still raking it in. I guarantee our little book doesn’t even make a dent in his income. But what it does do is get us started. At twenty-five cents apiece, twelve thousand copies are worth three thousand dollars, and half of that comes to us.”
“So why did you need my thirty-five bucks?”
He shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “A copy shipped isn’t a copy sold. And even when they do sell, the stores take their sweet time paying. And the printer gets his cut off the top. Then there’s the warehouse and the trucking and the binding and the paper...”
“I’m sure,” Tricia said, “and the author and the artist, too, but—”
Blandon blew a raspberry. “That’s peanuts. Trucks and paper and printing—that’s where the real money goes.”
“Listen, Mr. Blandon,” Tricia said, and then stopped. “Hold on, what’s your real name? It’s not Blandon, I’ll bet.”
He shook his head. “It’s Borden. Like the milk. Charley Borden.”
