Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
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You Can Choose Your Future.’ Dr. Seuss.
Yeah, that should do it; it is really clever if you think about it.
Thron goes back to Google. Again he types in ‘Best American Publishing Companies’ as he has many times over the last few months. Such grand names, sounding of culture and money and quiet whiskeys in oak-paneled boardrooms. Then he types in ‘Best American Editors’. Names and lists and awards and intelligent and competent faces staring out from the screen. Then he opens Google Maps and checks drive times from here to there.
Chapter 7
Joelle tried to remain as anonymous as possible at the edge of the mourners at Mount Sinai cemetery on the Hollywood edge of the San Fernando Valley, spread ostentatiously on the lee side of the mountains whose frontage bravely bore the Hollywood sign. She hoped that her floppy black hat and oversized glasses would hide both her identity and any unscheduled tears she might shed. She was also a little uncomfortable that she would make some blasphemous faux pas at this Jewish funeral, whose rituals and processes were a little opaque to her Protestant heritage. She wasn’t sure what to say to the family, and whether she might say something that would cause their old and bad-tempered God to smite her. She had been to only one Jewish funeral before, and was taken aback by a number of things, not least of which were the foreign-tongued incantations at the graveside as the simple pine box was lowered, spoken by a scraggly-bearded man with the air of ancient and inviolable authority, and the mumbled replies of the mourners. In any event, she knew that her valiant attempts at disguise were a waste of time. There were scores of writers and industry types there who knew her personally, or knew of her, or envied her, or loved her, or hated her. Joelle Jesson was larger than life in her small world, and there was no circumference of sunglasses that would hide her.
Then there were grieving family members—a deeply distressed mother, tiny and birdlike, a veil covering her face, through which the glisten of tears was clearly visible. And his father, equally small, but dumpy, draped with a look of bewildered perplexity. She expected that his grief was crouching out of site, preparing to pounce. How these two little people manufactured such a large son was testament to the strange alchemy of genes—how proud they must have been of his size, physical and commercial and intellectual. And then there was a weeping giant against whom the little mother slumped. Buddy. Almost Buddy, a little older. His hair a little curlier, a hint of gray at the temple. The same recipe of towering and vulnerable. And sexy. She banished the thought as soon as it formed. She vaguely remembered from a Google search that he had a brother. A doctor? No. A software guy? No. An artist! That’s right. Some minor reputation with reviews buried in the middle pages of lightly perused culture magazines. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She banished the thought again.
There was a sudden pause in the prayers and the rabbi turned to the mourners, of which there were several hundred.
‘The eulogizing of somebody like Buddy Rappaport is particularly difficult. This is not only because I have known the Rappaport family for decades, and not because I gave him lessons for his bar mitzvah. It is not because the mark he has left on the world is large and lasting, nor that he overcame learning disabilities to end up graduating summa cum laude at Stanford. Nor the fact that he honored and loved his parents, Moe and Ida, and his big brother Duke.’
Buddy and Duke? Good god, it was a wonder they survived childhood at all.
‘And it is certainly not because of a long string of achievements in business or the charities he supported. It is because he had so much left to do. He was an uncompleted project, but we will never know what that project was going to be, other than the certainty that it would have been big, important, and would make the world a better place. He was to be, in more ways than one, a giant of a man. But other destinies have intruded.’
This was the problem with eulogies, she thought, whether delivered by rabbis or priests or atheists. They were a long chain of rubbery platitudes stretching to incredulity.
She could have offered a truer one. She would have said—Buddy Rappaport was smart and literate and witty and a bit overweight and too ambitious and had lost sight of what was important but also very sexy in the way that only the imperfect and the mysteriously inscrutable can be. I had little in common with him, but I still would have had an affair with him, had he tried. Then I am sure I could have sorted out the rough edges.
The service concluded with the turning of spadefuls of earth onto the pale and sad-looking coffin, small and lost even as it contained Buddy’s bulk. Then mourners turned and began the long trudge back to their cars. She felt a tug at her elbow. A similarly floppy-hatted and large-sunglassed woman smiled slightly. Magdalena Mili, the wide-faced, flat-nosed PR chief, whose eye for exposure opportunities for their talent pool was as unsubtle as it was successful. She had managed to cajole unwilling brands into co-sponsored billboards, acerbic and skeptical reviewers into positive NYT reviews, Nobel prize winners into breathless shouts, famous ex-actors into softball podcasts, and the great and the good into reluctant photo ops with many an undeserving hot new author. She was shameless. She was invaluable. And, not withstanding her squat and wide Slavic ancestry, she was attractive, in a sort of don’t-fuck-with-me kind of way.
‘Such a tragedy.’
‘Yes.’ Joelle kind of got stuck there. Then she noticed Magdalena’s trembling lower lip. Had she been fucking him? Yes! It was written all over her pallid skin and colorless eyes and boxer’s nose. Fuck her. Fuck him.
Joelle scuttled off, unwilling to enter into a sisterhood of grief with Magdalena. As she got to the parking lot she spotted Polina, Buddy’s lanky assistant, howling tearfully into a palm tree whose trunk seemed to shrink back from the spectacle. Not her too? For god’s sake, she thought. She had dodged a bullet, of that she was now sure.
She was now approaching her car, eyes down, not wishing to view the undignified lamentations of Buddy’s women. There was a man leaning casually against her hood. Of medium height and tensored forearms and friendly smile and seen-it-all eyes and awful clothes.
‘Ms. Jesson?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I have a word?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Detective Corelli. LAPD.’ A practiced hand retrieved a badge.
‘I’m not sure. Am I in trouble? To which you will no doubt answer—should you be?’
‘No. You’re not. Unless of course you are. I’m a voracious reader.’
‘Um, OK.’ What was going on here? Buddy was dead. The ancient rites of Jews burying the body within 24 hours dissuading any thoughts of an specialist autopsy beyond the coroner’s basic report, and lack of obvious evidence of foul play smoothing the way. And he wants to tell me how much he reads? She waited for him to state his business.
‘Will you read my manuscript?’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘It is very good, really.’
Joelle and Corelli sat in a dilapidated restaurant on East Cahuenga, which appeared exhausted by the disappointment of being located in the San Fernando Valley, within grasping distance of the lights of Hollywood, but destined to remain valley-bound.
‘So, a novel, huh?’
‘Yes.’
‘About a crime?’
‘Naturally.’
‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you why you should give up on it now, before your literary ambitions are crushed on the rocks of rude reality, if you will answer a question about a death.’
‘You’re not even going to look at it?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Detective Corelli. You have—in some people’s minds, including