My lips parted. I was surprised. I had been mentally counting up my savings to see how long I could last on unemployment. I had not expected a reprieve. For a second or two, all I could do was stand there staring at Bush. I had no idea what was going on in the guy’s mind. I wasn’t going to ask.
I tipped a finger at the man. I bowed my head to the rest of them. First Sandler, then Hodgekiss, then Cambridge. Cambridge was still trying to look smug, but I noticed a faint tinge of green had crept in under his flush:
I left him there. I walked out of the room. I shut the door behind me. I leaned against the wall, listening to the hammer of my heart.
8
I walked back into the city room. I tried not to look pale. I wasn’t very good at it. As I walked through the maze of white partitions, every eye in every cubicle I passed turned up to look at me. Some of those eyes held pity in them. Some held bitter joy. I walked by all of them until I reached my desk. I sat down. I lit a cigarette. I stared at the rubbish piled up in front of me. I wished I had a door to close.
“How bad?” It was McKay. He leaned against the edge of the entrance. His baby face was puckered with concern.
I kept staring at the garbage heap of crumbled papers and ashes and pencils without points. It looked good to me. I had been with the Star eleven years. I liked it here. More than I wanted to admit.
I took a deep breath. “Bad,” I said.
McKay got hoarse suddenly. “You out?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
“That’s good anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
I kept staring, kept shaking my head. “I’m not sure.” I scratched the side of my head. “I don’t even know how it happened. Or why.”
“Well, I’m glad to have you around anyway. Can I have my five dollars back?”
“Yeah sure.” I took out a wallet and wrenched out a fiver. I gave it to him.
“Thanks,” he said. He stuffed it in his pocket. He gave me a jaunty wave. He started back to his desk.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What five dollars?”
“Oh by the way,” McKay called. “Lansing said to wish you luck whatever happens.”
“Where is she, anyway?” I called back. “Don’t I even rate a condolence call?”
“She waited as long as she could. She just headed out to Abingdon’s press conference.”
I shot out of my chair. “Is she gone?”
McKay shrugged. “She just left.”
I took off. I wove past the cubicle partitions to the glass doors. I had five days to get this story, and Abingdon’s press conference was a good place to start.
I pushed out into the elevator lobby.
“Christ,” I said. I had forgotten about the heat. It coiled around my skin like a snake.
I got in the elevator and rode down, hoping to catch Lansing outside.
I caught her all right. As I came out the front door, I saw her sitting in her red sports car. It was parked at the curb. I hurried toward it along the sidewalk, fighting against the thickness of the heat. When I came up to the passenger window, I saw that Lansing was just sitting behind the wheel. Just sitting there, staring. There was a tear rolling down her fine high cheek. I was so startled that for a second I couldn’t even retreat. But she didn’t see me, she didn’t turn around.
She reached forward suddenly, almost angrily. She grabbed hold of the key in the ignition. She wrenched it to one side. The little sports car coughed, then roared, then screeched as she kept holding the key down and the starter scraped.
I backed up a few steps. “Hey, Lansing, wait,” I called to her.
She glanced around quickly. When she saw it was me, she swiped at her cheek with one hand. By the time I leaned down at the window, she could pass.
“Can I bum a lift?” I asked.
She nodded. “Get in.”
I slid in next to her. We took off. We rode down through the narrow lane of Vanderbilt to Forty-second Street. We curled around to Park and headed downtown. The finely shaped apartment buildings rose up on either side of us. The avenue’s center islands were pink with begonias.
Lansing didn’t talk for the first few minutes. I tried not to look at her too closely. I fiddled with the air-conditioning vents for a while. After that, I just peered out the window.
Finally, she said: “So? Should I drop you at the unemployment office?”
“Ha ha.”
“You survived then?” Her voice was a little thick, but that was all.
“For now, anyway,” I said.
There was a pause. She said: “I’m glad.”
The way she said it, I had to turn to her. She glanced over at me and smiled.
She looked fine now. She looked better than fine. She looked fresh again and beautiful, the way she looked sometimes when she first came into the city room in the morning. You’d be sitting at your desk staring into your coffee and you’d see her and feel better about it all. Sometimes I would think about that look when I was away from her. Sometimes when I was sitting in a bar watching a Mets game. Or when I was sitting home alone watching the glow of the neon lights from the theater across the street. I would think about it, and then I would stop thinking about it. Lansing was twenty years younger than I was. She was pretty and smart, and I was old and ugly. The last thing she needed was to have me sitting at home thinking about how she looked in the morning.
We hit Thirty-sixth, turned left. Headed down a hill lined with brownstones. In front of us, the street broadened as it was joined by other streets and avenues. Then all of them funneled down into the Midtown Tunnel. We went down with them. We raced into the long tube of red taillights and yellow tiles.
We drove without speaking. I smoked and thought. I thought about Bush. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted to prove. He had a rep as the kind of guy who would crush you for nothing. Why had he let me slap at him like that and get away?
It made me nervous. I tried to figure it. The yellow tiles of the tunnel rushed by me in a blur.
Then Lansing cleared her throat and said: “So uh … Abingdon … I never covered him before. Anything I should know?”
I shrugged. “Wear a scarf if you date him.”
“What?”
“No. You know. Nothing much. The usual Kennedy type.”
She gave a little laugh. “Sometimes I think Kennedy wasn’t killed. I think he was shattered into little pieces and each piece grew into a whole new candidate.”
“That’s Abingdon, all right. From Massachusetts and everything. Somerville. Except he wasn’t rich. He had one of those mothers, you know, who work their fingers to the bone to make it happen for their sons. She was a secretary, I think, and took in sewing or something. That’s the official line, anyway. Sent him to Princeton, too.”
Lansing whistled.
“Yeah,” I said. “Then Harvard Law on a scholarship and after that, it was JFK all the way. Activist law. Fought off some big highway project that would have displaced a bunch of poor folk. Pictures of him on TV with his jacket off and his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. All that …” I gestured to the gray peak high on my forehead. “And hair, too. And the wife always standing next to him smiling.”
“What’s her name?”
“Jane. Skinny, high cheekbones. New Englander. Real fierce and moral. A Katharine Hepburn type. They got into politics in the seventies. They’d left Massachusetts by that time. Too overcrowded with pols. They came to New York, worked on a few campaigns, then went on to the state assembly for a term. Then Congress. And he’s done pretty well, too. Liberal. A lot of housing protection stuff, antidiscrimination. He’s been fine.”
“Ah,” she said. “But has he been good?”
From the end of the tunnel, the gray light of Queens rushed toward us. It grew brighter. We broke out into it. We coasted to a stop at a tollbooth. Lansing tossed about forty dollars in change into t
he electric basket. She hit the pedal and we rolled off down the Long Island Expressway.
“Has he?” she repeated.
“Been good? Apparently, he’s been very, very good.”
“Ha ha.”
“Too good for his own good. That’s his reputation anyway.”
The world opened up around us. The hot gray sky flagged above low brick buildings. The sky and the buildings stretched out to the horizon.
Lansing kept her eyes on the road, but she was listening carefully.
“I never covered the man,” I went on. “But you know my buddy McMahon up in Albany? He covered him for the Times-Union. The word is, yeah, Abingdon’s a loverboy. He’s handsome and he’s headed for the top and it’s easy for him and he uses it. Frequently. With anything that happens to be wearing a skirt. McMahon says he and a couple of other capitol boys got drunk one night and made a pool on it. They took turns tagging after the guy for a week to see how many senators’ wives and secretaries and local weather girls he could hit. Whoever got the number within ten took the pot.”
“I get the picture,” said Lansing. “And what about our fierce and moral Katharine Hepburn type?”
“Well, there are two versions of that, and I guess either of them could be true. One story has it that she was never much for that sort of thing. She is kind of dried up and, I don’t know, ferociously noble, if you get what I mean. So she had her two kids, one boy and one girl, and gave the good congressman his freedom.”
“Why does she stay?”
“Ambition, or maybe because she can accomplish the things that matter to her more easily being a congressman’s wife.”
Lansing chewed it over a few seconds. “This sounds suspiciously like the male version,” she said. “What’s the real one?”
I laughed. “Okay. The other story is that his screwing around broke her proud, stern and moral heart. When she found out about it, she left him. She went away for a few weeks—supposedly on vacation but, in fact, to carry on a tortured conversation with her God and soul. How’s this one?”
“Better.”
“I thought you’d like it. Anyway, after said tortured conversation with the aforementioned Cod and soul, she decided her noble goals and/or political ambitions could best be served by returning to her work, husband and children. But the cost has been that dried-up, ferocious nobility of hers.”
“Because she really loved him once.”
“So the story goes.”
She was quiet a while. She ran her fingers back through her hair. Her hair ran out behind her, silken and blond. The motion cleared her cheek, the cheek where her tear had been. I studied the smoothness of the skin there, its faint flush.
This time, she did glance over. She saw me looking. The flush deepened.
“Stop looking at me that way, Wells,” she said, smiling.
“That’s my line, isn’t it?”
She stopped smiling. “Yeah.” She turned back to the road. The highway was uncrowded and we cruised on quickly. Trees grew out of the stone, grass grew up around the houses. We were in the suburbs at the borough’s edge.
I leaned toward her. “Listen …” I began.
“So is Abingdon aiming at the White House?” she asked me.
I hesitated. I leaned back in my seat. I lit a fresh cigarette. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he was.”
“Why was? You think this’ll stop him?”
I shrugged. “Hard to know.”
“I guess a lot depends on whether they find Kendrick’s pictures.”
I reached into my jacket pocket. I felt the piece of paper in there: the copy of Wally Shakespeare’s photograph of Georgia Stuart.
“Yeah,” I said. “And on who finds them first.”
9
Paul Abingdon’s house sat on a hill. The house was imitation Tudor. The hill was real grass, sweetly green. There were maples on the hill. They were tall and majestic. They were full with summer leaves. The leaves hung limp in the wet heat.
The hill rolled gracefully down to the suburban street below. The street went curling off through a quiet neighborhood of lawns and manses. Every inch of the curb, as far as the eye could see, was lined with cars. A lot of battered station wagons from the TV and radio stations. One white sound truck for a possible live spot on the noon news.
The house itself was besieged by reporters. They’d gathered on the gentle slope in a semicircle. The arc was about fifteen journalists long and three deep. It began in the pachysandra under the living room window. It curled around and ended in the holly bush outside the den. Its center was the single step before the front door where Abingdon was going to appear. The reporters’ cameras, microphones and attention were all directed toward that empty step.
Lansing and I found a place to put the car about two blocks away from the house. We had to walk back up the hill. I had to push on my knees to convince them to take it. My jacket was off by that time. My tie was undone. My shirt was gray with sweat. Lansing pranced ahead of me. She moved on those long legs like a deer. Every so often, she had to stop and wait for me to catch up. Then she had to wait for me to wheeze for a few seconds before I could go on.
Finally, we came over the rise. We approached the reporters on the lawn.
“There he is,” someone said.
I raised my dripping face to the front door. I expected to see Abingdon appear. Instead, I saw the semicircle of reporters spin about. In a single motion, the mob came down the hill toward me. Lansing was pushed back. The reporters closed in. A few shoved mikes under my nose. A few more pointed cameras into my face.
“John,” shouted someone. “John, can you confirm for us the story about the photographs?”
I followed the voice. It was a kid I didn’t know. One of the TV girls. Where the hell did she get off calling me John?
“Do you know the identity of the woman?” someone else shouted.
I looked for him, but before I could find him, someone else pressed close with a microphone.
“Why did you refuse to report the existence of the pictures before Kendrick’s death?”
“Do you feel you’ve been scooped on your own story?”
“What was your relationship with Kendrick?”
“Don’t the people have the right to know about their candidates, Mr. Wells?”
I waited. The questions started to run out of steam. They stopped. I smiled. I grinned. I laughed.
I reached into my pants pocket. The nearest reporter to me was Molly Caldwell from CNC-TV. She was a striking woman. Small and thin with a cap of black hair. She pushed her microphone toward me. I brought a quarter and a dime up and handed it to her. Surprised, she took it.
“Buy the Star tomorrow and read all about it,” I said.
There was a collective groan. It was followed by angry shouts.
“You’re a reporter—”
“The people have a right to know—”
“You have an ethical responsibility—”
Nothing is as ethical as a reporter who hasn’t gotten what he wants.
“That’s S-T-A-R,” I told them when the shouting died down. “Our slogan is: We tell you everything you need to know.”
They were about to start in on me again. But just then, there was a noise from the house behind them. The mob swiveled away from me to regroup around the front step. My hands in my pockets, I strolled over and stood behind them. Lansing came up beside me.
“That ought to keep Bush happy for a while,” she whispered.
“What a man will do to keep his job,” I said.
The oaken door above the step had opened. Now the screen door beyond it pushed out. Two big men came through. They wore dark suits. They wore sunglasses. Their hair was clipped short. It was so black it seemed blue, like in the comics. They posted themselves on either side of the step and crossed their arms on their expansive chests. Abingdon’s bodyguards.
Next came the candidate and his wife. He opened the door for her. A perfect gentleman. Mrs. Ab
ingdon came gingerly out onto the step. She was wearing a modest brown skirt that ended at her calves and a high-collared blouse that ended at her throat. She was very long and very skinny. Her face was all angles: sharp nose, sharp chin. Her hair, black with elegant flecks of gray, was done up in a tight bun high at the back of her head. She stood erect, her hands folded before her. She smiled, a little tightly. She posed without moving as the cameras snapped and whirred.
Her husband joined her. He came out the door and squeezed her upper arm in greeting, as if they’d just met. She turned her head and smiled at him, turned back to us. He smiled at her, turned back to us and smiled. It was all very nicely done.
The cameras kept snapping and whirring. A few reporters shouted questions. Paul Abingdon waited, turning this way and that to give all the photographers a good angle of him. All the angles were pretty good. He was a handsome man. Tall with broad shoulders and a trim waist. His hair was light brown, sculpted to his head. His face was chiseled, bronze and strong. He had piercing blue eyes, and a jutting jaw. He was thirty-six or so, but when he smiled, he looked much younger, almost like a boy.
He was wearing a polo shirt and slacks, and, as I stood there bathed in sweat, I wondered how he managed to look so crisp. The heat did not seem to affect him at all.
He held up his hand. The scattered questions ceased. “I’ll be brief,” he said in his broad Boston twang. “I know it’s hot. But if you think it’s hot for you …”
The reporters got it after a moment and laughed. Mrs. Abingdon laughed, bending forward with it a bit.
The congressman grinned. “Actually, what I have to say is very simple. This morning, a sordid story was reported about me in some of the media. The story said that a low-level criminal had been murdered, and that he had been in possession of photographs of me with a woman.” He swept over us with his piercing blue eyes. His musical drawl continued. “My comment to you on that is this: the story isn’t true. Those pictures do not exist. It is not possible for them to exist. And that’s all there is to say.”