Page 74 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

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Mallard Books wasn't the first place I worked after leaving
school, but it was going to be the first one on my résumé. I mean, it
was a real business, a publishing house specializing in those do-it-
yourself and how-to books most people wind up buying sooner or
later to save money on plumbers or gardeners or lawyers. In fact, I
hadn’t been there a week before I started playing around with a
sample résumé on my private word-processing files: ‘Lance
O’Bleakley, Technical Writer and Editor’ was the heading, in very
bold letters. Of course, this was back in ‘86, and desk-top publishing
was still in its infancy, so I couldn’t make it very fancy. But I will say
that Fletcher Mallard, considering his age, had an excellent
understanding of the potential of the personal computer.
My computer skills were certainly not a huge factor in getting me
hired—you had to have some ability to edit the English language to
work there and survive. It wasn’t a large outfit, really not much more
than a suite of offices in the old Krass Building downtown, but
Mallard had two other people doing the same thing I was, trying to
whip into shape some ill-produced but brilliantly conceived
manuscript submitted by an unknown author. The boss, having been
in the business since the earth was cooling, knew what would sell and
what wouldn’t, and his was the biggest publishing house of self-help
manuals in the city. I had struggled through my first assignment (you
may have seen Grow your own Shampoo in the remainder bins at your
local bookstore) in more time than had been budgeted, and I was a
little worried that I wasn’t cutting the mustard.
But I had configured Mallard’s newest PC for him, and even
fiddled with some turbo cards to get him more than his money’s
worth on a 286-clone. I could see that my cybernetic expertise
impressed him, and nobody else there had a clue about hardware or
software. I was sitting at my desk one morning congratulating myself
for having wasted endless hours as a hacker instead of studying
something useful when Evan Adams, one of the other editors, snuck
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