I knew, I guess, what I was to her. I’d given her a break once. I’d let her cut in on a story of mine and it helped get her a job on the paper. I’d played her rabbi sometimes since then, given her advice, stood up for her in the constant management firefights. I knew she needed someone like that. I knew her old man had been a D.A. out in Chicago, one of those crime-busting types, and that he’d died when she was twelve years old. I knew she needed someone sometimes to help her figure the angles, and to give her the high sign when she came through.
But she’d confused one kind of need with another. I knew that too. And I knew it would be no good in the end if I confused her any more.
So I sat at the counter in my diner near the terminal. I drank my coffee. I smoked my cigarette. I stared into the fierce and fading face in the mirror across from me. The sadness, the old sadness and the new, was chiseled into it now. I did not think that that would ever change.
I shook my head at my own reflection.
“Jesus,” I said, “what the hell happened to you?”
I paid my tab and headed out. It was time to meet with Abingdon.
21
The congressman’s campaign headquarters were within walking distance. That was too bad: It wasn’t a good day for walking. The heat seemed to have thickened overnight. The air itself seemed gray, the color of the rain that would not come. I moved down Lexington Avenue through a flow of sweating faces, of damp foreheads and mouths opened to pull in what breath there was. By the time I reached Thirty-ninth, my jacket was off again, my tie was loosened again, my shirt and shoulders sagged. I was glad to reach the place in the middle of the block.
It was a long storefront. Bunting hung from the sill. Banners in the window. Stars and stripes on the banners. ABINGDON FOR SENATE HEADQUARTERS one banner said. I passed through the glass door and came gratefully into the air-conditioning.
There was a second of murmuring after I walked in: the usual office noise. Then it stopped. From every desk in the room, gazes turned toward me. I stopped at the first desk. A woman in a soft pink dress sat behind it. She was young and bright-eyed, but her glossy lips were set in a frown just for me.
I stood before her, slipping my jacket back on. “Tell him I’m here,” I said.
She tilted her head just slightly. “He said to send you back.”
Back I went. Down the corridor formed by the gunmetal desks—and the gunmetal stares—on either side of me. An aluminum box had been erected against the rear wall. I rapped on the door of the box, waited for a call, and pushed inside.
The candidate was seated at his desk. Not a gunmetal desk but a wooden one. Better for the photogs, more quaint. His wife was there, standing beside him, bent forward, leaning on the desk over the sheets of paper fanned out in front of them. They were both framed against the maps pinned up behind them. They both had their eyes raised to me.
“Have a seat, John,” Abingdon said. He gestured at the green chair in front of the desk. He did not crack a smile.
I sat down. He sat back and pinned me with his piercing blue eyes.
“Still hot out there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “In here?”
He inclined his square, jutting chin slightly. “Hot enough.” He came forward, clasped his hands on the desktop. “So. What can I do for you?”
I glanced up at Mrs. Abingdon, her sharp angles hovering above me.
“Anything you have to say to my husband, you can also say to me,” she said. The clipped New England tones pattered at me like hail.
I raised my eyebrows at Abingdon. His expression did not change. “All right,” I said. “Then here it is. I saw those pictures, Abingdon. You can keep saying they don’t exist for a while, but I saw them, I know they do. I guess I thought I’d come by here and give you a chance to make the disclosure yourself. It’s a stinking story, and it’s all going to come out eventually. If you want to salvage something from it, you’re going to have to beat me to the punch.”
Abingdon let that lie there a while. Then, very slowly, he said: “In other words, you want me to do your job for you.” He opened his hand to me. I kept my mouth shut. “The word is that you’re in quite a lot of trouble over this story. It would just suit you, wouldn’t it, if I broke down and told all exclusively for the Star.”
I almost laughed. The congressman was a pro all right. “Well,” I said. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
“No doubt,” said Abingdon. “But why should I play along?”
“Well, you haven’t exactly made a friend of me so far,” I said. “You’ve called me a fool in public and practically a liar, too. Even if my bosses weren’t on my tail, I’d have no reason to hold back on this one. I’m going to find those pictures eventually. You must know that or you wouldn’t have agreed to this interview.”
The congressman brought his hands up from the desk, the palms pressed together as if in prayer. He rested his chin on the fingertips. “Off the record,” he said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“What would it take to make a friend of you again?”
Now I let him wait while I mulled it over. “You wouldn’t be trying to buy me off, would you?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. “Hell, man, what’s the good of that?” I said. “I’m only one wolf in the pack.”
“Still,” he said, quiet as before. “What would it take?”
He watched me, propped on his fingers. The Mrs., leaning over me, stared until I thought she would burn holes in the side of my head.
“The truth,” I said finally. “It would take the truth.”
“Ach!” The guttural sound came from Mrs. Abingdon. She pushed away from the desk in exasperation. “The truth! You’re a newspaperman. What do you know about the truth?”
I glanced at her. “Mrs. Abingdon, I realize this is hard for you.…”
“Oh? Do you?”
It was arctic, but I pushed on. “You’ve got to understand that it’s not personal. I’m just …”
“Trying to do your job?”
“Well … yeah.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “And you think I’m being emotional about a … a personal matter between myself and my husband.”
“It would be understandable,” I said.
She charged back at me, leaned over me. “No,” she said into my face. “No, Mr. Wells, it wouldn’t. I have worked—worked with my husband on every campaign he’s ever run, and on every project. There’ve been no decisions I wasn’t privy to, no loss I didn’t suffer, no gain I didn’t enjoy. Paul and I are more than a mere marriage. We’re a team. We work together. No matter what personal issues there may be between us.”
I cleared my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
Mrs. Abingdon warmed to her subject. “Let me tell you something,” she continued. “Let me tell you something about the truth, my simplistic friend. The truth is that my husband is going to the Senate. He belongs in the Senate. He’s the sort of man they need there. He’s strong and he’s a leader and he has a vision of what this country can be and what it can do. And who’s his opponent?” Her bony hand moved through the air on a wave of contempt. “Maldonado.” She spat the name. “A two-bit criminal with a four-bit criminal behind him. That’s the truth, Mr. Wells. And if you succeed in pursuing this story, in destroying my husband for the sake of some cheap, filthy stories started by some dime-store blackmailers, then you will have been instrumental in giving the people of New York State a representative who will be less at home making laws than he would be making bathtub gin and …”
Abingdon made a movement. A slight movement with one hand. His wife fell silent instantly.
“Mrs. Abingdon has strong opinions on who should be the senator from New York State,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said. I looked up into her ferocious gaze. “And I’ll be honest with you, ma’am. I don’t really give a damn who your husband sleeps with.”
“Oh!” she said, furious. “You dirty little …”
The c
ongressman gestured her silent again.
“I mean it,” I said. “I had a chance for an exclusive on these pictures, remember? I’m the guy who turned them down.”
Abingdon still spoke slowly, quietly with the open vowels of Boston. “Then why are you so—so hell-bent on getting your hands on them now?”
“Because way back then it was adultery,” I said. “Now it’s murder.”
“Murder!” Mrs. Abingdon crossed her arms, turned her back on me. She walked across the room to a coffee maker set against the wall. I heard her heels clip-clop on the linoleum. She poured herself some coffee, angrily shook in some powdered creamer.
“Yeah.” I stood up. I addressed her back. “It’s a slightly different commandment, Mrs. Abingdon.”
She whipped around. The steaming white coffee sloshed over the rim of her paper cup. I saw it drip on her hand. She did not flinch. “I didn’t know Mayforth Kendrick,” she said. “And from what I’ve read in the papers, I’m quite glad I didn’t have the privilege. I find it hard to imagine why the death of a man like that should have anything to do with keeping a man like my husband from having a hand in the affairs of his country.”
I looked from her to the man sitting behind the desk. He remained imperturbable as his wife burned and fumed. There was even humor in those blue eyes, and a trace of irony on his lips. It seemed to me just then that he would probably have made a good senator. I faced his wife again.
“Yeah, I can see where you’d find it hard to imagine,” I said. I walked to the door. But I turned there. The two of them were staring after me. Mrs. Abingdon’s eyes glittered with the force of the stare. “I’m going to get this story,” I told them.
The two turned their stares on each other.
“And I’m going to get it soon.”
For a breath—then another—the husband and wife searched each other’s eyes. Finally, Abingdon looked up at me.
“Thanks for stopping by,” he said.
22
On the sidewalk again I lit a cigarette. It tasted sour in the heat. I tossed it away.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets. I started up the street toward the terminal. Pushing through the sparse crowds, against the thick heat. Staring at the sidewalk, watching it shimmer and steam.
What the hell, I thought. So Abingdon wouldn’t talk. I still had nothing to worry about. I was all set up, in fact. I had the name of the girl in the pictures. I had every news outlet in town beat on that. And to go with it, I had an eyewitness piece on Maldonado’s campaign tactics that would have Bush singing in the shower for days. I had nothing to worry about at all.
Except smearing Georgia Stuart. Once I wrote those stories, she’d be in the thick of it for certain. The little Ohio girl would find out what it was like to be convicted in the press without a chance to testify. To become the punch line of dirty jokes, and the moral of cautionary tales. She’d see herself lampooned in satires, and smirked at by comedians on TV. She’d go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning hearing her name drowned in men’s barroom laughter, seeing her image reflected in women’s condemning eyes.
But that was not my problem. I had enough to worry about. Bush and Dellacroce, Cambridge and Marino. Mobsters and editors: the worst elements of society on my tail. Just like Lansing said: I couldn’t go soft because some bimbo’d been slapped around a little. Because she’d ruined one of my better shirts by crying in my arms. If Georgia wanted to tell her side of the story in time for the bulldog edition, she knew how to reach me. I couldn’t hold up the great march of American journalism just because she needed time to collect her thoughts after being kidnapped and tortured and before being stripped naked in every living room in the country.
I needed a hot angle. I needed to confirm the existence of those pictures. And if the cops couldn’t find them, if Abingdon wouldn’t talk, if Georgia herself couldn’t face the music, where the hell else was I supposed to go?
I stopped. I looked up at the broad facade of the Terminal hanging there in the damp atmosphere. I looked up at the stone Mercury on its summit as, unconcerned with the temperature, he spread his arms to the multitude below. I was jostled from behind.
“Move, wouldja,” someone muttered.
I took a deep breath, started walking again. I felt like I was working on one of those sliding square puzzles. I used to do them all the time when I was a kid. You started with a picture of Donald Duck or something—a picture drawn over several squares held together in a frame. Then you slid the squares around from place to place until the picture was all scrambled. Then you tried to put it together again, holding the frame in your two hands and sliding the squares with your thumbs. Even when two pieces clicked together it didn’t always help, because you might have to move one to get another around it. Even as one section of the puzzle became clearer, another became more of a mess.
Now, as I sweated and huffed my way back to Forty-second Street, two squares clicked together in my head and I decided to ignore the rest of the picture for a while. Suddenly I had an answer to a question that had bothered me since the night before. If it led to a new angle for tomorrow’s editions, that would be enough.
I tried walking faster up the avenue to get to my car, but the heat was just too much for me. I pushed it as far as I could go, and was practically gasping as I reached the intersection.
I stopped at a phone booth. I called information to get the address I wanted. I moved around the terminal to Vanderbilt and crawled into the Artful Dodge.
It was a Friday in August: There was almost no traffic at all. The Dart and I rolled easily down into Chelsea. A block of Twenty-first Street, near Ninth. It was a block the gentry hadn’t invaded yet, though they had the place surrounded. In the midst of the fancy new eateries and antique stores and preserved brownstones, this was still a stretch where the bricks of the buildings were yellow with grime, where the corner bodega still kept some cockroaches around for the cat to kill. I parked in a tow-away zone, hoping my press plates would keep me safe.
The place I wanted was a flat-faced, four-story rectangle of brick. The iron banister flanking the stoop was rusted orange. One end of it had pulled free of the concrete. When I put my hand on it, it vibrated and swayed to the side. I went up gingerly. I pushed through a glass door into the vestibule. I scanned the list of names above the doorbells. I pressed the button under the name Susan Scott.
She was the waitress from Cole’s restaurant on Theater Row. She was the one who’d given me Georgia’s address.
Her muffled voice came out of the door speaker in a burst of static. I shouted my name back at her. I had to wait almost half a minute before the inner door unlocked. I pushed inside.
She lived on the third floor. The flights were long. The hall was hot. I reached her door and leaned against the jamb, panting. I knocked. I had to wait a full minute this time before I heard her footstep come near.
Susan Scott pulled the door back and stood aside. I stepped into a room the size of a corridor. The sofa against one wall and the two chairs against the wall opposite were so close together that her guests must have sat knee to knee. There was a bookshelf on the third wall and a kitchenette in the fourth. There was an entrance to the bedroom squeezed in between the rest.
Susan shut the door. She turned and leaned back against her hands as they clutched the knob.
She was wearing a bathrobe. The hem of a nightgown trailed out from underneath. The getup didn’t do much for her figure, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup either. But she was still stunning with her rich black hair touseled and wild, and her rich lips pursed in a smile at me.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said. Her whiskey voice was sharp, sardonic.
I nodded. I was still trying to catch my breath. “I remembered you worked nights,” I said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“No, no, I was just …” She made a half gesture toward the living room. Then she stopped it, let her hand fall. “You look beat. Can I get you some water or som
ething?”
“Yeah, please.”
She walked past me. I caught the light scent of toilet water trailing behind her. She glanced up at me shrewdly. I watched her go by.
She stood at the sink with her back to me. She reached up to a cupboard for a glass. I stopped watching her. I turned and let my eye pass over the living room again. I saw a coffee mug set down on the wooden floor next to the sofa. I shifted a little. I saw another mug by the leg of one of the chairs.
Susan was running the water now. Waiting for it to cool. I moved to the bedroom entrance. I snuck a look inside.
The place was in shadow, the lights out, the shades drawn. But I could make out a frame bed with the sheet rumpled at the center of it. The room was so small that the bed took up most of it. There was a thin writing table against one wall, and a wooden chair pressed in to it tight. I saw the outline of a closet door that did not look like it could open without hitting the bed. There was also, beginning in one corner, a brief hallway with a bathroom at the end of it.
Susan turned from the sink quickly. I looked at her.
“Nice place,” I said.
She stepped back to me. Handed me the water. “Small,” she said. I drank. “Now, is there something you want … or is this how reporters ask for dates?” I came gasping out of the water. “You’re a little old for me, you know.” She took the glass from me, held it.
“I really came to ask you a question.”
“You couldn’t phone?”
“It’s not the sort of question you ask on the phone.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Is Wally Shakespeare hiding under your bed?”
My hand shot out and caught the glass before it could hit the floor. I gave it back to her.
She had gone pale, but she still managed a wry twist to that rich mouth. She still managed to snort a little before she turned her back on me again and returned, stiffly now, to the kitchen counter.
“He does that, you know, our Wally,” I said. “It’s a favorite of his and he strikes me as the kind of guy who sticks with something if it works for him.”
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