Death Before Facebook

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    Skip entered a room full of chintz and light, not especially an original look, but it went with the house, and it worked.
    “Sit down. Would you like that tea?”
    “No, thanks. I’ve just come from lunch. Why on earth did Pearce think I’d call on you?”
    “To check up on him, I guess. He’s a little on the self-important side.”
    “Well, he’s sort of right. But I mostly came because Alison Gaillard said I shouldn’t miss you.”
    “Alison! How on earth do you know her?”
    “She and I were sorority sisters at Newcomb.”
    “Oh, you’re the Kappa cop. You’re famous.” She paused, letting pennies drop. “Now I get it. You must be Elizabeth Langdon’s kid.”
    Skip grinned.
    “I know her from… let’s see, the Opera Association, I think, and maybe the NOCCA board. I don’t even remember what-all. We’re sort of in the same business.”
    “Professional volunteers.”
    She laughed. “We say ‘community activists.’ ”
    It was the sort of thing Skip had gotten used to. She got ready for twenty minutes of “who-do-you-know,” and when that was over, she asked about Pearce. “He must be a nice man, if you still keep up a friendship.”
    “He’s a perfectly terrible man. We don’t have a friendship at all—he just calls me to borrow money and read his manuscripts. The former calls are a great deal more frequent than the latter.”
    Skip laughed.
    “And thank God. I could tell you about his writing, but you mentioned you just had lunch.”
    “Gory?”
    Her face grew serious. “Just depressing. He has talent, he just can’t seem to get on with anything.”
    “Must be pretty slow stuff.”
    “In a sense. Do you know how long the average screenplay is?”
    “A couple of hundred pages, I guess.”
    “About a hundred and twenty. Think about it. If you wrote one page a day, you could do a whole one in about four months.”
    “Providing you’d already plotted it, I guess.”
    “Well, say you took six months doing that. And then you took a month or two for research. You could do it in a year. Then maybe you’d want to rewrite—give it another six months, say a year to be generous. That’s two years, which is a tremendous flyer to take if you’re not getting paid for it. Just to take off two years—wouldn’t you say?”
    Skip nodded, not sure where this was going.
    “Well, Pearce has been working for seventeen years. That’s almost twenty years on a hundred and twenty pages—on a project nobody wants and nobody’ll ever want. And if they did, they couldn’t get it because it wouldn’t be finished. And if it were finished, it would be a different story from the one they bought. Because he keeps changing it.” She sighed. “Every week he’s got a different great idea.”
    “No wonder he has to borrow money.”
    “Oh, the man is pathetic. A bitter, bitter old man.”
    “Old? But I thought he was about your age.” Around fifty, she thought.
    “Old, old, old before his time. He’s a person who never fulfilled his own potential—he could have been a writer. Or a lawyer, for God’s sake, or a bailbondsman. Something. But he isn’t anything. He’s accomplished nothing. But he wants to be recognized anyway—that’s what the problem is. He tells everyone he’s a writer, and he does write, so as far as he’s concerned he is, and he just can’t understand why he doesn’t get fame and adulation. Which is what he wants. I don’t even think he cares that he doesn’t have any money—he just wants his talent recognized.”
    She paused for breath. “So every now and then he does some piddling story like the one he’s working on now, about this young man’s murder. And he posts on the TOWN, of course. I guess that’s a form of writing. For all I know, people love him there.” She grinned evilly. “That would be so much easier if you’d never met him. You could imagine he was a dashing, witty sophisticate instead of a broken-down old boozehound.”
    “He’s an alcoholic then.”
    “Oh, didn’t I mention that? It’s the main thing, I guess.”
    “I could see that.”
    “It’s why I dumped him.” She wrinkled her nose again. “Well, that and the fact that I couldn’t stand the man after I found out who he really was. You know how people can pretend to be something they’re not?”
    Skip nodded.
    “Men, I mean—when they’re trying to get your attention.”
    “What did he pretend to be?”
    “Oh, someone nice. Caring, as they say nowadays.