Synopsis Ben Hawthorne, self-exiled to an absent friend's crumbling Greenwich Village apartment, attempts to write down the events of his last month in Los Angeles. He is desperate to under- stand why he pushed Mark Victor off the balustrade of his Wilshire Corridor penthouse terrace. What, in God's name, possessed an easy-going, ethical WASP to murder his oldest friend, who happened to be a Jew?
While Ben's claim that Mark accidentally fell -they were both drunk -is readily accepted by the police and public, he knows otherwise.
Ben and Mark met at college. During the ensuing thirty years, they stayed in touch, but had gone dramatically different ways. They were each other's oldest, not best, friend. That is, until the past year, 1992, when Mark chose to enter Ben's world.
By now, Mark had become one of the country's foremost financier/entrepreneurs, with a Time Magazine cover to his credit for effecting the major mergers of the Eighties. Ben, by now, was considered a "world class" motion picture director, with hit films and an Oscar nomination attesting to his success.
Four years prior to killing Mark, however, Ben suffered two shattering setbacks: His agent of two decades, who had shielded him from most of the harsh truths of the business, died from a stroke. Only weeks later, an IRS agent informed Ben that his business manager, also of twenty years, was a compulsive gambler who had disappeared, leaving his clientele bereft of all assets, including pension investments. Suddenly, at forty-eight, Ben had to cope alone in a hostile environment, with no production prospects and his several million, gone.
Does Mark know any of this when he offers to finance The Cry of Sirens, from a controversial script Ben owns? What part does Martha, Mark's assistant and Ben's eventual wife, play in the final encounter on the penthouse roof-garden? How do ego, guilt and envy bear on the impulse of one American high-achiever to destroy another?
During his intense odyssey to uncover his motivation to murder, Ben must re-live relationships with friends, lovers, relatives and adversaries. Well-known figures, ranging from John Huston and Robert Redford to political activist Allard Lowenstein and journalist George Plimpton, play an integral part in the self-investigation.
Ben's career has been devoted to mastering the distinctions between reality and illusion. Once he separates fiction from fact in his personal life, he finally understands why he killed Mark Victor. Was it a justifiable homicide? Certainly not, by society's standards. Should he be punished? The reader must judge...
