She smiled a telling smile, one that told me who gave Arizona the banking information.
I said, “So, you’re bankrupting the man?”
She smiled. “He has to pay. He has to spend every fucking dime he’s made on my labor of love. Every dime. He was on the phone transferring money as soon as they asked for it.”
She laughed, ran her fingers through her hair in a beautiful, erotic motion.
I asked, “He paid already?”
“He wants that book. Doesn’t want to lose his fame. Doesn’t want that kind of scandal.”
“So, it’s over?”
“God, no. It’s only beginning.”
“What happens now?”
“I have twenty copies of Manumit. Twenty copies of Dawning. I mail them to twenty different places. First class. No return address. Marcus’s bloody publishing company. His bloody editor, his publicist, they are all on that list. New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Essence. Washington Post. Many others. All get a note from ‘Ms. Avid Reader’ who is ’outraged by this farce.‘ And the note lists the other places that have been notified.”
“Then what? You destroy him? You become famous.”
“That’s not the goal. But maybe. Who knows? Oprah. Regis and Kelly. Trisha.”
“And you publish the book you’re holding out... what?”
“Under my own name. As it should be.” She took another sip of her drink. “My child will have my name, not that of some surrogate writer. ”
“You wrote all of his books?”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“It’s the Jack. Bad habit of his. Jack likes to be clear on things.”
“No. Just the one that made him famous.” She moved her hair from her eyes. “He wrote the horrible ones. The ones that have the large fonts on all the signs, the ones no one cares for.”
“He’ll figure this shit out. You know that, right? Soon as you publish the book.”
“Marcus never saw the real book. I refused to let him see the work until it was complete. That way he couldn’t e-mail it to his publisher or agent or whoever. So they couldn’t claim my child as being his. He didn’t get his hands on the computer until I made it here.”
“If you’re so unhappy, and it’s not about the money, why don’t you just leave? You could’ve sent those books out at any time.”
“I did leave. Left a long time ago.”
I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but my eyes went back to that BREAKING NEWS.
Sade closed her eyes and started singing, “Bashero mi mo fe e. ” Dots and accent marks of joy filling up the room. Her drunken happiness told me why she had stuck around. She wanted to be on the front row so she could watch Freeman fall like Saddam’s statue.
She stood up, stumbled on the pretty stilts she was wearing.
She shook her head, disappointed. “I can manage on my own.”
“Sade—”
“One last thing.”
“What?”
So much tension was in her forehead, in her blue eyes. “You know what writing does?”
“Have no idea.”
“It says I was here. I existed. I was important. I made a difference.” Her eyes were wide, words seeping out on a long, woeful moan. “I don’t exist. I’m not important. I’m not making a difference.”
She took out her passkey.
I asked, “You gonna be okay?”
She answered with a pained smile. “Twelve-letter word. Commensalism. I’d attached myself to a shark and didn’t know how to let go. I’m free. I’m free, Driver.”
I watched her make her way to the elevator. She got on. Then she was gone.
My attention went back to the bar. The news conference started. I held my JD tight and asked the bartender to turn up the volume. I imagined everyone down at Back Biters was glued to the same thing, Pedro leaning over that bar, shaking his head.
A family representative was at the podium. He said that Wolf had received the horrific news while he was visiting his children in Las Vegas. Lisa had planned on going to Las Vegas with her husband, but changed her plans at the last minute citing a family emergency. The representative said that Mr. Wolf was devastated to get this tragic news, as could be expected, but with the love of his family and the community, he’d pull through this crisis. The entire family was shocked that something like that could happen to someone so wonderful, a woman whose family was a pillar of Compton’s and Los Angeles’s African-American community.