Foul Matter by Martha Grimes

Kidd.” Bobby had his feet on his desk and was leaning back, sans coat, holding a dust jacket up to the light splashing in through his window. Central Park glittered in the light. “This jacket sucks, Clive.” He tossed it across the desk. “As long as Ned Isaly delivers a manuscript, we can’t touch him. I mean, it would be pretty foolish to pretend it was unacceptable. That’s even without the complication of Kidd’s walking out if we did it. So what else did Zito say?”
    Clive made no move to pick up the cover mock-up, appalled that Bobby could take this whole business so calmly. “That’s all. Just that these two always work together.”
     
    Sally sensed, if she didn’t actually hear, someone moving toward the door. She zipped the typist’s chair over to the Xerox machine and punched it on. She had nothing to copy but a page from a book lying there, but it made no difference as her back was to the door and she was on the other side of the room. She slapped the open book down and pushed the button.
    “Where’s Melissa?”
    It was Clive. She removed the book and turned to face him, trying to look really dumb, her mouth slack, eyes wide. “Oh. Melissa had to leave for a while. It was a kind of emergency about her wedding.”
    Clive wasn’t interested in the wedding; he was looking at her for a long moment, obviously trying to assess what, if anything, she’d heard. He wouldn’t have worried about Melissa; she was too self-absorbed to let any talk intrude that hadn’t to do with her wedding. But Sally, that was cause for concern. Sally was known to be smart, quick, and intuitive.
    Sally turned back to the machine as if she couldn’t care less what they got up to in there.
    “What’re you doing out here?”
    Over her shoulder she said, “Copying some pages. Why? Did you want something?” Still wide eyed, she was all candor.
    “What? No. Yes. Make some coffee, will you?”
    She nodded. She could tell he had determined she was harmless and had heard nothing.
    The door would not stay shut, that’s what it was. Even after Clive had made a point of pulling it to, it was clear (to her, not to him) that the catch was worn or dislodged.
    She wheeled to the coffeemaker and dumped several spoonsful of Blue Mountain into the grinder (God, but this man was spoiled!), which she then transferred to the cone holder of Bobby’s spaceshuttlelike-looking coffeemaker (designed, she noted, by Porsche); she added water, turned it on, then wheeled back to the desk. The desk was as close to the door as it was possible to get, short of putting her ear up to it, and she daren’t get that close.
    At first, Clive’s voice was considerably lower, and he’d stopped pacing, so that she heard nothing but a mumble. But it wasn’t long before the voice returned to normal levels and he had resumed his movements again. She would make sure her hands were on the computer keyboard if one of them suddenly appeared again.
    Ned. They were still talking about Ned and Ned’s contract. Why? This meeting seemed to be taking place for that sole purpose . . .
     
    Clive was out of his chair and pacing again.
    “So who are they?” Bobby wasn’t about to let him get back on the subject of Ned-if-Ned-publishes.
    “Candy and Karl,” said Clive. “Those are the names he gave me.”
    “Two. We don’t want two. That’s just one more person to know about the, ah, project.”
    Clive took a weird delight in being able to tell Bobby for once he had no choice. No Bobby choice—this included no rewriting of the Constitution, no reimagining the universe, no reinventing the world. The World as Bobby Mackenzie Sees It. Fuck you, Bobby. “Whether you want two or not, you’ve got two . . .”
     
    “ Whether you want to or not, you’ve got to . . . ” Sally couldn’t understand why Clive seemed to be telling Bobby what to do. “Got to” what ?
     
     
    Clive moved closer to Bobby’s big desk. “They work together.” Jesus, were they