"He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico, and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words."
"Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous mood right now."
Gallison smiled slightly. "He said he just wasn't capable of it. Too sensitive, too imaginative, too afraid of life in the buff to take it by the horns that way. I'm still quoting him. He said he was never cut out to be a fugitive. Anything connected with the police terrifies him. If a Government agent should call on him about some trivial, completely innocent matter he'd have a heart attack. He just can't take that sort of thing. He has made a full confession. He says he killed her because she pulled an outrageous gyp on him."
"Yes, I know," Fenton said. "It's what he claims in these letters. He claims he wrote a series of articles for her about juvenile delinquency, and I guess you saw the major, six-million-dollar movie that was based on his material. The Clark Gable-Monroe sort of thing. And now it's on TV, a two-year contract for a weekly series and I think the sponsor is General Motors, but I'm not sure. In case you don't know, all of that is about as big-time as you can get. It would make practically any writer feel entitled to walk down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in TV and stop for a moment to shake the paw of the MGM lion. The lions in front of the library would look that way to him."
"He says he didn't get a cent out of it," Gallison said. "Not one single penny."
"That's hard to believe," Fenton said. "It seems he sold the Eaton-Lathrup Publications all rights to the material. I haven't looked too deeply into the technicalities involved in such transactions but I'm pretty sure that 'all rights' means exactly what it says. If a magazine buys material on that basis it is entitled to all of the profits accruing from subsequent re-sales, to TV, the movies or whatever."
"Willard practically admits that," Gallison said. "In fact—"
"Wait a minute," Fenton said, a little impatiently. "Let me finish. It's my understanding that not many of the really big magazine groups buy all rights. There's usually a contract involved, with a stipulation in it concerning the rights. And even when they do buy all rights they're seldom one hundred percent legalistic about it. They'll often lean backwards to see that the author gets a break, gets at least a slice of the pie if the work passes into the so-called big-time. I don't know how Lathrup felt about that or just what her policy was, of course. But if he claims he's been gyped out of money he's entitled to in a strictly legal sense, I don't believe he has a legal leg to stand on. Not if he sold the group all rights, with no reservations whatever."
"That's just it," Gallison said. "That's where he claims she took advantage of him. He says that, like plenty of other writers, he's no businessman. You'd laugh to hear the way he's been going on about that, if he wasn't a self-confessed murderer. Nothing a murderer says or does is ever funny. But the way he put it would have gone over big on a TV comic program. He claims he has no more business sense than a two-year-old; would sign any contract that was pushed under his nose without looking at even the large print, let alone the fine. He claims he's—well, the term he used was 'a commercial imbecile.' He takes a sort of pride in it. And he thought she understood that some writers were like that—some of the biggest names, in fact, in the writing business.
"They can't even bring themselves to glance twice at a contract. It's not important to them, they're way off in the clouds somewhere, figuring what their characters are going to say and do in the next chapter."