Page 100 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

There was an hour or so left before I had to return to the Lesley
place, so I figured it might be a good idea to check in at the office.
Jean Poole gave the expected dirty look when I strolled in and
flippantly asked for my messages. I went to my desk and poked
around at the PC I was trying to soup up, but my heart wasn’t in it.
The tedium was relieved by a call from my boss. Time to check in.
“It’s going well,” I claimed, upon being queried in front of
Mallard’s desk. “My organizational scheme is in the second phase of
implementation, and—”
“Cut the crap,” said the publisher, in what I found it easy to
interpret as a spirit of good-natured camaraderie. “When do you
think you’ll be finished?”
“Oh, well, given my present rate of progress, and applying a best-
case scenario to phase three, we can extrapolate to an estimated
completion time of, maybe, later this afternoon.”
“Best case? What does that depend on?”
“Basically, on Mrs. Lesley showing up on time and letting me in.
Once there, I can whiz through the rest of those piles like a streak of
lightning.”
Mallard merely frowned. He was being quite mellow: was I taking
liberties? You bet. I knew now that the manuscript was worth a lot to
various interested parties. My reward for plucking this needle out of
the haystack would be commensurate, of that I had no doubt.
“Did you look into his computer?”
“First thing off the starting blocks, boss. Not a thing.”
“Too bad. That’s why I sent you on this mission.”
So that was it! I could feel the air hissing out of my hyper-inflated
ego. All my other virtues, talents and experience were for naught.
Hoping the text would simply be sitting on Lesley’s hard disk like a
ripe plum, he had sent his hacker to pluck it. The rest of the search
was pure grunt work any semi-literate creature with opposable
thumbs could do.
“I see. Well, at any rate, I won’t fail you, sir.” All I had left was my
pathetic canine loyalty. “All those other people want me to give
them—or sell them—the manuscript, but it belongs to Mallard
Books and that is where I will bring it.”
“What!” he barked. “What other people?”

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