Gideon Read Online Free Page A

whether to hire you or fuck you.”
    Carl had to admit, she got his attention.
    Everything about Maggie Peterson was calculated to get attention. The severe blue-black pageboy hairdo that had been cropped sharply at the chin, with what looked to be a hatchet. The wide sash of bright red lipstick. The matching skintight black leather jacket and trousers. This was a highly charged woman, most likely forty, a lean, tightly coiled whippet who exuded energy and sexual challenge. This was a very sexy predator. A meat eater. And right now she was eyeballing him up and down as if he were a T-bone steak, medium rare.
    Carl glanced around just to make absolutely, positively sure that he was the person Maggie had said those words to. He was. So he cleared his throat and took his shot. “If I have a choice,” he said, smiling, “I need the job more.”
    Maggie didn’t smile back. He got the feeling that smiling was not usually on her agenda.
    “I read those murder mysteries you ghosted for Kathie Lee,” she said, gazing up at him. “I liked them. I liked them a lot.”
    That would be Kathie Lee Gifford. Not his proudest creative moment. But a job was a job.
    “Betty got that for me,” he said, and modestly shrugged his broad shoulders at Maggie, feeling the twinge in the left one that was always there. A Penn power forward who was now playing over in Greece had given that to him under the boards his senior year. Carl had started at point guard for Cornell for three years, a smart, determined floor leader, a good passer, an accurate shooter. He was the complete basketball package. He had it all—everything except the height, the vertical leap, and the foot speed. He was an inch and three-eights over six feet tall and his weight hadn’t changed, it was still 185. Although fifteen of those pounds kept wanting to drift south. He had to work out regularly to prevent that.
    “Betty sent me your novel, you know.”
    “No, I didn’t know.” He couldn’t help it; his pulse was definitely quickening.
    “It was the most dazzling prose I’ve read in two, possibly three years. Parts of it were even brilliant.”
    There it was, the b word. The word every writer hungered to hear. And it wasn’t just anybody saying it to Carl. It was Maggie Peterson, who could actually do something about it.
    “We need to talk,” she was saying now.
    Carl stood there a moment, grinning. He looked no more than eighteen when he grinned. He looked, Amanda once told him with a disgusted look in her eye, like an overgrown Campbell’s Soup kid, with his shiny blue eyes and apple cheeks and unruly dirty blond hair that was forever tumbling down into his eyes. He was so wholesome and innocent-looking that bartenders still asked him for his ID.
    “Well, sure,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
    Maggie glanced abruptly at her watch. “Meet me at three o’clock.”
    “Your office?”
    “I have a lunch date on the East Side. It’ll be easier to meet at my apartment. Four twenty-five East Sixty-third. We can be alone there. Have a nice little talk in my garden.”
    “It’s pouring rain outside.”
    “I’ll see you at three, Mr. Granville.”
    “It’s Carl.”
    “I thought people called you Granny.”
    “Some do,” he allowed. Although precious few, and it had to be his idea, not theirs, and …”
    And how the hell did she know that?
    “I do my homework,” she said, as if reading his mind. Her eyes were already elsewhere, flicking around the crowded room, restlessly searching. When they came to rest, she was looking down at the waxen body in the casket. “This really is the end of an era, isn’t it?” The realization seemed to please her. She turned her gaze back to him. “Don’t disappoint me, Carl. I can’t stand to be disappointed.”
    And with that she vanished back into the crowd of mourners.
    * * *
    It was Amanda Mays who offered Carl the ride home in the rain.
    Her same old dented, rusted-out wreckage of a Subaru station wagon was