The Max

Three

Hell hath no fury like a mystery writer… dropped.

Paula Segal was nervous, not a feeling she liked having. She laughed to herself, thinking, Feeling Nervous, she might use that for a title. Or Twisted Feelings? Or maybe Hard Feelings – someone else had probably already used that but fuck him, you couldn’t copyright a title. Then she sighed and said out loud, “Bad joke.” Like she was ever going to have a shot at titling another book.

She was meeting her agent for lunch, not dinner. You knew when they moved you from dinner to lunch, you were semi-fucked, only one unearned-out advance away from a fast latte in Starbucks. Just ask that poor Irish bastard who’d been hot for all of ten minutes. Jesus, he’d had more agents than lattes and look at him now. He couldn’t even make a panel at the U.K. Festivals.

She checked her rankings on Amazon – nothing better than 500,000. And worse, she’d gotten yet another shitty review from Booklist.

The thing was, she knew she was good. She had three good mysteries under her belt, one nomination for the Barry – she’d lost to Tess Gerritsen, but that was no biggie, everyone lost to Tess – and Laura Lippman had promised her a blurb. Even Val McDermid had smiled at her that time in Toronto.

But she’d been termed “midlist” when she’d started out and more recently had slipped to “cult.” Cult equaled nada, sorry, hon. She just didn’t get it. She thought only those creepy noir guys got demoted to cult. She’d never even written a short story for Akashic.

She seriously didn’t understand why her books hadn’t done better. She wrote what she thought was a nice blend of cozy and medium-boiled. Nothing too dark or too scary. Her heroine, McKenna Ford, was a lovely combination of sensitivity and street smarts.

But not according to Kirkus, which called her last book, “Tired, unoriginal and pointless. Read Megan Abbott for the real deal.”

Jesus, she hated Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin. Not only did the guys love them but they got rave reviews. Don’t get her started on female mystery writers, except for Laura of course. Hey, that blurb might still happen.

Her agent ran her rapidly through lunch, then said, with no gentle breaking in, “You’re screwed.”

Lunch that.

He added, “SMP’s dropping you.” Then asked, “You ever try true crime?”

What? She was an artist. She couldn’t slum and write non-fiction. She was going to just say, fuck it, it wasn’t for her. If she couldn’t write mystery fiction she’d rather go back to the telemarketing cubicle.

But then her agent told her about the Max Fisher story and something sparked. She thought, Hello? This could be a goldmine; it was like the book was already written. She couldn’t believe Sebastian Junger hadn’t beaten her to it. Could The… A.X. be her ticket all the way to the top? Or, well, at least back to the middle.

As usual, she got ahead of herself. She imagined winning next year’s Edgar Award for best true crime book, with her old editor sitting in the audience watching, thinking about the one that got away. Maybe Laura herself would present the award. Though they’d only spoken that one time, at the bar at the Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, and let’s face it, Paula had been so nervous she barely spoke. She just did a lot of smiling, nodding, and blushing. Still, she felt like Laura actually liked her, that they’d, dare she even think it, made a connection that went way beyond mystery writing. The encounter had ignited something in Paula, gotten her off the fence, so to speak. She’d experimented in college – who hadn’t? – and a bit after college, too, and yeah, once or twice in recent years, but basically she’d thought of herself as straight. But that smile Laura gave her had pushed her over the edge. Hell, over the cliff. Yep, Paula was playing for the other team now. She was on the lookout for a pretty, intelligent, mature, successful lover and Laura Lippman fit the bill. She imagined them living in Baltimore, their Edgars side by side on the mantel, traveling the festival circuit in Europe together…

Okay, okay, it was time to focus, buckle down, get this damn book written.

She attended the trial of The… A.X. She sat in the back, taking lots of notes. This Max Fisher, he was some character all right. She’d never seen anyone so caught up in his own delusion. He was on trial for major drug charges, and it was like he was gleefully oblivious to it all. Even when the judge sentenced him, Fisher didn’t seem to get the gravity of the situation. As he was led out of the courtroom, he chanted, “Attica, Attica, Attica…”

Paula knew she’d have to dig deep, really make readers understand the psychology of Fisher, but deep wasn’t her strong suit. Her writing was surfacey, superficial. She often told friends that this was purposeful, that she could write with more depth any time she wanted, that she consciously tried to “dumb it down for the masses.” As if the masses had ever seen one of her books. She had a better chance of bedding Laura Lippman than of getting a book into Wal-Mart.

But a superficial take just wouldn’t work for a guy like Fisher, and neither would her usual cozy-to-medium-boiled style. This guy made In Cold Blood seem like chick lit. The things the man had done, the unsavory people he’d been involved with, especially that woman he’d been engaged to, Angela Petrakos – she sounded like she could be the subject of her own true crime book. Paula was already thinking, sequel? But telling the Fisher story properly would require some serious hardboiled, noir writing. She didn’t know if she had the chops to pull it off.

But the telemarketing cubicle loomed large and made her refocus. She Googled like a banshee and by the time she was done she was thinking, Edgar? Just the beginning. Why not a National Book Award? Or, hell, maybe even a Quill…

She had to sit back and try to take it all in. The Fisher story had it all. There were, get this, Irish hit men who even had, whisper, IRA connections. There was also some odd stuff about Down Syndrome and gold pins that she didn’t quite get but hey, if there was a handicapped theme, hello Oprah, right? What would she wear on the show? Would Oprah cry when Paula talked about her long personal journey from unknown cult writer to literary goddess? Yeah, probably.

She snapped herself back into focus, thinking, And, wait, there was even more handicapped stuff, some guy in a wheelchair who photographed women in, let’s say, compromising positions. Hello Playboy serialization. And there was also

A hero cop: Hello Hollywood. At worst, a TV series.

Boyz in the hood: Hello Spike Lee.

Southern crackers: Hello National Enquirer.

And above it all, loomed The… A.X. There was no doubt that was the book’s title: The Max. She’d thought about Hot Blood, Tough City, toyed with Songs of Innocence. But, nope, it had to be The Max.

She was so excited. She went and made herself a dry martini; no one, she knew it, no one, made them drier. It was good, just the right amount of martini, and gave her the boost of confidence she needed as she wrote the following to Mr. Max Fisher, c/o Attica State Penitentiary: Dear Mr. Fisher, I am a mystery writer of high standing in my genre, a friend of Laura Lippman, Tess Gerritsen, etc. I have been commissioned by a very high profile publisher to write a true crime book and I truly feel you are the subject most deserving of my time. I believe you have been the most appalling victim of our Justice System and I would like to set the record straight and I must confess, as a woman, I find you hugely appealing. I enclose a photo. Yours sincerely Paula Segal (MWA, IACW, ITW, PWA)

She had the perfect photo for this schmuck – her, bursting out of a bikini, nearly topless. And her favorite part about the photo, she looked demure. Demure was a word you got to use when you were a writer of her caliber. Recalling the photos of Petrakos from the trial, she knew this asshole loved big busts, and was he ever getting the max with this shot. Her previous lover, an Annie Lebowitz wannabe, had taken it. The girl was a lousy lay but she sure could take good photo.

Delighted with her herself, she practically skipped down to the post office and sent the letter. Attica, just the thought of it made her shudder.