A Literary Agency From Hell
By Charles Shea LeMone
In her usual efficient manner, Kim Lange stepped off the elevator on the eleventh-floor and marched down the newly carpeted hallway to the office of McCall’s Literary Agency and let herself inside. Fifteen minutes later, she sipped her first cup of black coffee and glanced at the ticking hands on the big wall clock. She knew within a few minutes a deluge of phone calls from disgruntled clients would begin jamming the phone lines. With an exasperated sigh, she comforted herself with the fact that this would be her final day on the job, a fact that only she knew.
As she absently stared out the window onto Wilshire Boulevard at the snarled Los Angeles traffic--a few blocks west of La Cienega Boulevard--she reflected on the journey that brought her to this crossroad in life. Alfred (Freddy) McCall left the well-known agency she’d worked for as a receptionist to start his own company. In the weeks leading up to his departure, he begged her to come work for him. He promised her double the pay and more responsibilities, referring to her as the dynamo he needed to make his business flourish.
The flattering words had their desired affect on 5’1”, 97 pound Kim, who, despite her diminutive body, possessed the driving force of a cyclone in the making. The way her bright green eyes gazed at the world from beneath her straight black bangs--trimmed just above her eyebrows--expressed a determined fierceness that Freddy claimed to have recognized the moment she was hired.
“I’m taking six of their best writers with me,” he’d explained across the candle lit table of a trendy Rodeo Drive restaurant. “Both of us have worked too hard for these selfish assholes for too many years. Believe me, the only way we’ll get the proper compensation we deserve is to strike out on our own. I’ve had ten years of their broken promises. And you, what has it been, five years now? Think about it, Kim, at last you’ll be an agent too.”
He then systematically laid out what he called the facts of life for her: a long list of editors who had left their former employees to amass a fortune working for themselves.
The ringing phone snapped Kim from her reverie while blankly staring at the traffic below. She crossed the reception area and passed six cubicles that were now empty. The other staff members, all five of them, were long gone. Now it was only Kim and Freddy--whenever his lower back was not bothering him too much to come into the office. Lately, though, that was seldom. Inside his plush office, she pushed a button to field the first call of the day on the speakerphone. She dealt with problems best when she paced in a tight circle.
“McCall’s Agency. Kimberly speaking. How may I help you?”
“I need to speak to Mr. McCall,” a woman demanded. “The same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that!”
Kim recognized the voice as that of a woman from Maine who had paid five-thousand-dollars four months ago to have her romance novel polished by an editor—of the agency’s choosing--before submitting it to publishing houses.
“He’s still out, Jenna,” Kim responded calmly. “But he has promised to give you a ring first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, yeah!” The woman’s temper flared. “Are you promising me that because tomorrow is Friday, and you’ll have the whole weekend to avoid dealing with me?”
“As I told you yesterday, Mr. McCall is still in traction and in too much pain to deal with anything else at the moment. But I have checked with the editor assigned to your novel. And you should be very pleased to know he’s assured me that it’s coming along just fine. He even said he’s positive that it’s going to be a major blockbuster.”
“Okay.” The woman sounded somewhat appeased. “I’ll trust your word again… one more time. But I better be able to speak to him tomorrow. If not, I’ll be on a flight out there and in your office Monday morning.”
Before the lunch hour, Kim fielded three-dozen more calls, each of an urgent nature. The last came from the landlord, inquiring about three month’s rent due. All the while she wondered how she’d managed to maintain her sanity and keep the angry clients and creditors at bay for so long with so many lies. It had been almost a year since Freddy convinced her the only way out of the financial mess he’d found himself in was to run scams on all the out-of-town writers who submitted their work.
His dream of having a successful agency began coming unglued shortly after he opened the office. Only two of the writers from the other agency kept their promises to let him represent them. Consequently, to maintain his overhead he was forced to borrow money from friends and family. When that proved insufficient, he got a second mortgage on his Los Felix home. That’s when his wife left him and filed for divorce.
In time, Kim became his sympathetic companion and then his lover too. For despite the twenty-year difference in their ages, and the fact that fifty-year-old Freddy was not physically appealing to her, she believed against all odds he’d find a way to right the ship. Also, being his rudder and anchor in turbulent waters fulfilled a need within Kim—who was raised in an Iowa home for orphans. Besides, she discovered that he was a dedicated and passionate lover who brought out an insatiable side of her in bed she never knew existed. Then there was his natural gift of gab that had always attracted her. And under his tutelage, she’d become an even more convincing liar than Freddy.
While taking a lunch break at a nearby delicatessen, she recalled the night when she became a partner in Freddy’s scheme. They were at the same restaurant where he’d talked her into leaving the other company. This time, however, there was nothing confident or suave about his approach; he was far too desperate to fool her or even try. That morning the last editor manning one of the cubicles had quit.
“From now on we accept at least half the manuscripts we receive, and pour it on the writers about how great their books are. Then we charge them a fee for signing with us and let them believe we plan to send fifteen copies or more off to the top houses. Of course, we’ll do none of the above and charge them for the copies and postage, too.”
Kim sat dumbfounded, as Freddy went on, “I’ve been doing it for the last two weeks. You’d be surprised how easy it is. I just play on their egos and never read more than the first two or three pages and the last two or three. But watch how the checks start rolling in, Kim. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
“You can’t go on fooling them forever,” Kim protested. “They’ll have to wise up to your bullshit at some point.”
That’s when he explained his bailout plan. “You and me, baby. About a year from now, we’ll be off to some remote tropical island with new identities.” Before she could interrupt, he continued, “I mean what choice do I have? If I stick around here too much longer, I’ll be toast. The couple of writers we have making the real bucks for us just don’t cut the mustard. You should know, you keep the books and pay all the bills that are piling up.”
He looked so pitiful that she could not restrain from reaching across the table and taking one of his hands into both of hers.
“There’s got to be a better way than that, Freddy,” she said soothingly.
“If that’s true,” he muttered with downcast eyes, “you tell me what it is because I sure can’t see any other way out of this hell of a mess.”
The next morning she dutifully began following his instructions by opening a back load of unsolicited manuscripts, perusing the first two or three pages to determine whether or not the authors possessed a modicum of talent. Within a few weeks she’d signed thirty-five of them. And the numbers grew as she milked each one of them for every cent she could, one-hundred-dollars for signing as clients, gradually adding additional costs for doing business. It was her idea to charge for editing work that was never commissioned, which brought in thousands of extra dollars each week. Her biggest catch, an anthologist, netted ten-thousand-dollars all told. But as far as she was concerned, every contracted dollar and bill left unpaid counted toward her unencumbered future with Freddy.
For the first few months, she allowed herself to feel guilty about the scams she was running. Over time, though, she kept reminding herself that no one had ever done anything to help her get ahead. Nabbing the job at the other agency had seemed like a blessing; and she’d gone on at nights to earn a bachelor’s degree in English. But with the economy in a nosedive, where would she find a job--if Freddy went down and she found herself unemployed—working at a McDonald’s?
Moreover, she began to scorn the people she was so easily deceiving for being so dumb. If they had any talent, and common sense knowledge about the book business, they could easily forgo the need of representation by learning to write good query letters and book proposals to send directly to publishing houses. It was as though they wanted her to take their money so they could go on believing they had the rare talent it takes to break into a business where so many failed.
Then, the same day she discovered the proverbial needle in a haystack among all the lousy manuscripts—a true gem of a writer--she also learned something about Freddy that changed everything. Driving home to her small apartment one rainy night, while stopped at a streetlight, she saw him coming out of a restaurant when he was supposedly in New York. Right away, she recognized the tall, blonde woman on his arm, the one he was shielding from the rain with a newspaper.
It was the agency’s best-selling author, Sabrina Crosse. Smiling the way she was, she appeared even more attractive than she did in the photograph on the back cover of all her mystery novels. Laughing like infatuated teenagers without a care in the world, a mere few feet away, they jogged right in front of her car as they crossed the street. And all of this came only hours after Freddy had complained he had to get off the phone with her and rest his bad back. It was like one of those sappy plots Sabrina was famous for writing.
“You filthy lying bastard!” she kept saying to herself as she followed his car back to the turnoff for Sabrina’s estate in Brentwood.
Three months later, she had to congratulate herself for being a better con artist than Freddy could ever hope to be. Never once did she give him reason to suspect that she had changed allegiances and was thinking of no one but herself while loathing him with a monumental contempt just below the surface of all her actions. By the time he discovered anything was wrong, he’d be penniless and she’d be long gone, sunning on the beach in front of a four-star hotel.
However, a close call had come two days ago. On a rare day he’d made it into the office, on his way out for one of his long lunch meetings that never amounted to anything worthwhile, he’d run into the mailman. Bringing the stack of letters to her, he flipped through the first six missives and stopped before laying the stack on her desk. There, under the utilities bill, was the letter she’d been anxiously awaiting for several days. Inside was a check for two-million-dollars from Newborn Publishers. The one manuscript in a million had paid off in record time—all without Freddy having a clue.
Now, at three o’clock on her last day in the office, she’d transfer all of the money they’d swindled plus the two-million into the offshore account she’d set up for herself. Then with her brand-new passport, and a new identity, it was off to the Tahiti as a first stop--and a life of leisure. Meanwhile, she had Freddy believing she could single-handily stall things for another week. A very fitting end, she felt, to her relationship with him. As he was fond of reminding her about story plots: poetic justice should always determine the outcome of every climax and set the tone for all resolutions.
Kim laughed, thinking back to when Freddy had estimated their scams would net four to six million dollars--if they also failed to pay the agency’s best writers the quartiles they’d earned. She knew then that was wishful thinking. However, as things had turned out with her newly discovered writing genius, she was expecting their corporate account figures to be close to that four million mark when she checked the account later in the day. The two-million-dollars had been listed as pending the previous day.
On impulse, though, she ignored an incoming call and went online to the banking account. She was shocked to see the amount had not changed and the big check was no longer listed as pending. Fifteen minutes on hold to her contact at Newborn Publishing, in New York, had her sweating even though the air-conditioner was on high. And each new blinking line that went unanswered seemed to bode bad tidings. Finally, her contact greeted her.
“What’s going on back there, Mike?” She wasted no time on pleasantries. “That check was supposed to clear by today.”
“Oh, didn’t you hear there’s a snag in the procedures?”
“What snag?”
“Your most talented newly discovered writer gave us a call a few days ago. Seems he was suspicious about your agency. Says a year ago he submitted the same manuscript in a different name and got a rejection notice. This time around, you gave him reason to believe he was in with us. But he never heard from you again.”
“He’s got to be mistaken. I’m sure Alfred’s been in touch with him.”
“Well, there are more complications, Kim. You see, we faxed the guy a copy of the contract and he claims it’s not his signature on any of the pages.”
“I… I… ah[W1]…” Kim stuttered and flopped down in a chair, her elbow knocking a lamp off the desk. “I… I better call Alfred right now and get to the bottom of all this.”
She hung up before Mike could say more. With feverish fingers, she transferred the balance of the company account into the offshore one. Then she dug into her purse with a trembling hand, tuning out the ringing phone lines and their six blinking lights. The way things were going, she was surprised to find her plane ticket and her passport were still in the zipped pouch where she’d left them.
When she looked up, there was a dark, bulky figure blocking the doorway of the office. As he stepped closer she saw a gun in his right hand, pointed at her.
“Who… are you?” she gasped the words with a thick tongue.
“I’m the man you tried to cheat out of two million dollars.”
“But… you would have gotten paid, anyway,” she whimpered. “So why… why… kill me?”
“Because I’m the man who put such a believable story together about a serial killer who enjoys killing figures of authority and getting away with it.”
Kim saw the spark from the gun but never heard the sound it made or the numerous phone lines--which kept on ringing long after the intruder was gone.
Author’s Note: This is a fictional tale and no way represents any real-life agencies. For most of them are reputable companies. However, there is truth in the fact that many successful writers have learned the art of preparing query letters and book proposal to obtain agent representation or direct deals with publishing houses. Below is a link to a Website where informative books on these subjects can be found.
http://www.writersweekly.com/books/3332.html
