"Death and the Lit Chick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malliet G M)

VII

Lord Easterbrook sat at his desk, staring at a spreadsheet on his monitor, scrolling back and forth with his computer mouse to read the numbers in the outer columns. He accidentally struck the wrong key and the whole thing disappeared. He let out a bellow that set the eighteenth-century glass rattling in the windowpanes.

His youthful assistant, well-used to these technical emergencies, came rushing in-a pretty girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in black and white. A no-nonsense type whose crisp demeanor nicely kept Easterbrook's querulousness at bay. She'd become adept at coping whenever he threw his toys out of the pram. Now she deftly tapped at Easterbrook's keyboard until the vanished document reappeared.

"Haven't I told you then?" she said. "Stay away from that delete key and you'll be fine."

"I was never near the blasted delete key. Print the infernal thing out for me, will you? On good old-fashioned paper. Oh, and tell my wife I'll be late."

"Yes, sir." And the young woman went to do as she was told. Her great-gran was the same way: She'd never quite resigned herself to any invention introduced since the telephone, and even that she thought was full of "rays," whatever that meant.

Left alone five minutes later, Lord Easterbrook perused the rescued document, now safely consigned to paper. On the mend, he thought, on the mend. Like Scholastic before J. K. Rowling came along, his was a tiny press, its prestige and respectability owing more to longevity than anything like profitability. Who, after all, would expect to turn anything like a real profit on a house specializing in crime novels?

Rumor had long had it in the City that Easterbrook simply kept Deadly Dagger Press on as a rich man's hobby. Like those fools knew anything, he thought. But then, Kimberlee Kalder had come along, rising from the submission pile like-well, like Venus rising from the sea. That his assistant, not he, had recognized the potential at once was something he often conveniently forgot. Thanks to Kimberlee, silly name and all, Dagger was, to continue the metaphor, afloat.

Not that Easterbrook had ever actually read Kimberlee's book. The balance sheets were the only required reading on his night table.

But what the deuce was taking the girl so long with the next manuscript? he wondered now. It's not as if she were writing Pride and Prejudice, for God's sake. The last time they'd spoken on the phone she'd been decidedly cagey about that. "Wasn't quite ready," she'd said. "A bit more of a rewrite on the end, I think," she'd said.

It was balderdash, of course. She was out shopping for a new agent, and a new publisher, if the rumors from the publishing trenches were true. Which was why he'd had the sudden inspiration for this pre-conference gathering, and the little award to keep her happy. A chance to talk with her in person.

The personal touch, yes, that's what was needed.

He looked at the figures, mostly black now instead of red.

Leave Dagger, would she, and break her contract? Well, we'd just see about that.

If the personal touch didn't work, there were always other means.