Looking for Rachel Wallace Read Free

sake order another drink. You look so uncomfortable, I’m afraid you’ll discorporate.”
    He smiled and signaled the waiter.
    “Do you have any other statements to make?” she said to me.
    “Maybe one more,” I said. “I hire on to guard your body, that’s what I’ll do. I will work at it. Part of working at it will include telling you things you can do and things you can’t do. I know my way around this kind of work a lot better than you do. Keep that in mind before you tell me to stick it. I’ll stay out of your way when I can, but I can’t always.”
    She put her hand out across the table, and I took it. “We’ll try it, Spenser,” she said. “Maybe it won’t work, but it could. We’ll try.”

3
    “Okay,” I said, “tell me about the death threats.”
    “I’ve always gotten hate mail. But recently I have gotten some phonecalls.”
    “How recently?”
    “As soon as the bound galleys went out.”
    “What are bound galleys? And who do they go out to?”
    Ticknor spoke. “Once a manuscript is set in type, a few copies are run off to be proofread by both author and copy editor. These are called galley proofs.”
    “I know that part,” I said. “What about the bound ones going out?”
    “Galleys normally come in long sheets, three pages or so to the sheet. For reviewers and people from whom we might wish to get a favorable quote for promotional purposes, we cut the galleys and bind them in cheap cardboard covers and send them out.” Ticknor seemed more at ease now, with the third martini half inside him. I was still fighting off the peanuts.
    “You have a list of people to whom you send these?”
    Ticknor nodded. “I can get it to you tomorrow.”
    “Okay. Now, after the galleys went out, came the phone-calls. Tell me about them.”
    She was eating her martini olive. Her teeth were small and even and looked well cared-for. “A man’s voice,” she said. “He called me a dyke, ‘a fucking dyke,’ as I recall. And told me if that book was published, I’d be dead the day it hit the streets.”
    “Books don’t hit the streets,” I said. “Newspapers do. The idiot can’t get his cliches straight.”
    “There has been a call like that every day for the last week.”
    “Always say the same thing?”
    “Not word for word, but approximately. The substance is always that I’ll die if the book is published.”
    “Same voice all the time?”
    “No.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    Ticknor said, “Why?”
    “Makes it seem less like a single cuckoo getting his rocks off on the phone,” I said. “I assume you’ve rejected the idea of withdrawing the book.”
    Rachel Wallace said, “Absolutely.”
    Ticknor said, “We suggested that. We said we’d not hold her to the contract.”
    “You also mentioned returning the advance,” Rachel Wallace said.
    “We run a business, Rachel.”
    “So do I,” she said. “My business is with women’s rights and with gay liberation and with writing.” She looked at me. “I cannot let them frighten me. I cannot let them stifle me. Do you understand that?”
    I said yes.
    “That’s your job,” she said. “To see that I’m allowed to speak.”
    “What is there in the new book,” I said, “that would cause people to kill you?”
    “It began as a book about sexual prejudice. Discrimination in the job market against women, gay people, and specifically gay women. But it has expanded. Sexual prejudice goes hand in hand with other forms of corruption. Violation of the equal employment laws is often accompanied by violation of other laws. Bribery, kickbacks, racket tie-ins. I have named names as I found them. A lot of people will be hurt by my book. All of them deserve it.”
    “Corporations,” Ticknor said, “local government agencies, politicians, city hall, the Roman Catholic Church. She has taken on a lot of the local power structure.”
    “Is it all Greater Boston?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I use it as a microcosm. Rather than trying to