“I'm sorry, that's not true. The lawyer told me. Phillip Constantine.”
“That fuck?” Rosoff laughed, an unpleasant bark. “That may be the one good thing comes out of all this, if that piece-of-shit lawyer goes down.”
“Constantine told me,” said Laura, careful not to react to Rosoff's language, certain he expected her to, “because he said it would all come out anyway. So: it's true, right?”
Rosoff picked up a thin gold pen from his desk and tossed it down immediately. “Shit. Yeah, okay, it's true.”
“Where did the rumor come from?”
“No idea.”
“Come on. The cop who knew the most about these people? Didn't you wonder?”
“Sure I wondered. But I don't know.”
“Did Eddie Spano plant it?”
“Not likely. Keegan wouldn't've trusted anything he got from any butthole buddy of Spano's.”
“So where did he get it?”
“Why don't you ask that lawyer fuck?”
“He says he doesn't know.”
“You asked him?”
“How the hell else would I know what he said?” Laura snapped.
“You believe him?”
Laura thought she heard a note of uncertainty in Rosoff's growl. This was probably not a man who got snapped at very much.
“A defense attorney? As if.” She could hear Reporter-Laura cheering her on. “But whatever he does know, he's too slippery to tell me.” Laura let contempt for the slippery leak into her voice. She looked Rosoff straight in the eye, to say: As opposed to my admiration for the blunt and straightforward, for any man brave enough to let the chips fall where they may.
Rosoff met Laura's stare, then cocked his head, as though he'd learn something if he saw her from a new angle. She didn't move. The window behind him was filled with black water and black sky, the lights of boats and stars and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. One of the cargo ships Laura had been watching from Angelo Zannoni's terrace was slipping into the distance, going to a new job in a new place. Laura wondered if it had finished the work it had come here to do, or if that job had been disrupted, ruined by the attacks, the collapse, the new world.
“Fuck,” Rosoff said. “You're gonna skewer this guy McCaffery no matter what, right?”
“I'm looking for the truth,” Laura declared. She rolled on before he could snarl out his thoughts on truth. “I think McCaffery had something to do with Jack Molloy's death and he's been paying off Mark Keegan's family ever since. I think the money's not his, and that means someone else was also involved, probably Spano. I think the investigation into all this is what led to the death of a reporter on my paper.”
“That guy who jumped off the bridge? That was suicide.”
“It was murder.”
Rosoff peered at her again and didn't speak. Hey, come on, Laura thought, you can't run out the clock like that, it's not fair.
Fair? Laura felt an icy wash slip over her skin as she heard Harry's voice, mocking and amused. After everything that's happened, Stone, you're still complaining when things aren't
Rosoff snapped his head around to look in the direction Laura was looking, toward the window. Water lay flat and moonlight sparkled, boats drifted, the bridge stood. He spun back. “What's the matter with you? You look like you saw a ghost.”
A plane, Laura realized he meant. A jet banking low. Or an explosion in the harbor, a new billowing black cloud.
“Just thinking,” she managed. “Just remembering something.”
Under his breath Rosoff muttered, “Shit.”
“About McCaffery?” Laura prompted, trying to behave like the hard-edged reporter she'd been a few seconds ago, though her face was hot and her heart was pounding. Harry, she thought, for pity's sake, I'm working! Leave me alone! No! No, wait, no, don't!
“Harry Randall,” Rosoff said. “What makes you think the guy didn't jump?”
However much of Rosoff's time Laura had left, it wasn't enough to explain that. She settled on “I knew him.”
Rosoff's right hand scratched at something on the thumbnail of the left one. “Any other time,” he said, and he seemed to be talking as much to himself as to Laura, “I'd be happy to help. To see one of those showboat Fire Department pretty boys get what's coming to him, it wouldn't bother me in the least. Now . . .” He kept his eyes on his huge hands.
“Now,” he went on, “maybe this is bigger than him. What happened back then doesn't matter. What happened to that reporter doesn't matter. People look at these guys, they went running into that hellhole, didn't come out, people need them to be better than the rest of us. Even if this one beat his wife, that one cheated on his taxes. They're dead now. Anything bad McCaffery did, he's not gonna do it again. He's not a guy now, he's a legend. What's wrong with that?”
“Because someone killed Harry,” Laura said. “Because the truth matters. Even now.”
