and nodded.
“Yeah, that’s it. Being that he’s dead and you were there, I thought you might want to know.”
I looked at him for another moment.
“Okay, man,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you around.”
I straightened up and closed the door, then bent down to look at Warren through the window and gave a wave. He snapped off a military-style salute and drove away.
46
In my room I connected my computer to the phone line and dialed into the Rocky’s computer. I had thirty-six E-mail messages waiting for me. I hadn’t checked in two days. Most of the in-house messages were congratulatory, although they weren’t explicitly worded as such because the senders probably hesitated to do so, wondering if it was proper to congratulate me for killing the Poet. There were two from Van Jackson asking me where I was and to call and three from Greg Glenn asking the same. The Rocky operator had also dumped my phone messages into my E-mail basket and there were several from reporters across the country and from Hollywood production companies. My mother and Riley had also called. There was no doubt I was in demand. I saved all the messages in case I wanted to call back and signed off.
Greg Glenn’s direct line rang through to the operator. She said Greg was in a story meeting and she had standing orders not to ring into the conference room. I left my name and number and hung up.
After waiting fifteen minutes for Greg to return my call and trying not to think about what Warren had told me at the end of our ride, I got impatient and left the room. I started walking down the strip and eventually stopped at Book Soup, a bookstore I had noticed earlier during the ride with Warren. I went to the mystery section and found a book I had once read which I knew was dedicated to the author’s agent. My theory was that this was at least the sign of a good agent. With the name in hand, I next went to the research section and looked up the agent in a book listing literary agencies, their addresses and phone numbers. I committed the phone number to memory, left the store and walked back to the hotel.
The red light on the phone was flashing when I got back to my room and I knew it was probably Greg, but I decided to call the agent first. It was five o’clock in New York and I didn’t know what hours he kept. He answered after two rings. I introduced myself and quickly went into my pitch.
“I wanted to see if I could talk to you about representing me in regard to a, uh, I guess it would be called a true crime book. Do you do true crime?”
“Yes,” he said. “But rather than discuss this on the phone I would really prefer that you send me a query letter telling me about yourself and the project. Then I can respond.”
“I would but I don’t think there is time. I’ve got publishers and movie people calling me and I have to make some decisions quickly.”
That set the hook. I knew it would.
“Why are they calling you? What’s it about?”
“Have you read or seen anything on TV about this killer out in L.A., the Poet?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m the one who, uh, shot him. I’m a writer—a reporter. My brother—”
“You’re the one?”
“I‘m the one.”
Though he was interrupted often by other calls, we talked for twenty minutes about the possible book project and the interest I’d already gotten from the movie production people. He said he worked with an agent in Los Angeles who could handle the interest from that industry. In the meantime, he wanted to know how quickly I could send him a two-page proposal. I told him I’d get it to him within the hour and he gave me the number of his computer’s fax modem. He said that if the story was as good as he had seen on TV, he thought that he could have the book sold by the end of the week. I told him the story was better.
“One last thing,” he said. “How did you get my name?”
“It was in A Morning for Flamingos.”
The red light on the phone continued to wink at me but I ignored it after hanging up and went to work on my laptop writing the proposal, trying to consolidate the last two weeks into two pages. It was a difficult