Bookman's wake

I gave her a long, wary look. “This must be a slow news day. I didn’t think major metropolitan dailies bothered with simple extradition hearings.”

“Nothing about this case is simple, and everything about it interests me. May I sit down?”

She did, without waiting for the invitation. The steno pad was still clutched tight in her left hand.

“Listen,” I said. “Before you draw that Bic out of the holster, I don’t want to be interviewed, I’ve got nothing to say.”

“May I just ask a couple of questions?”

“You can ask anything you want, but I’m not going to let you put me in print saying something dumb. The fact is, I don’t know anything about this case that could possibly be worth your time. And I learned a long time ago that when you don’t know anything, the last guy, or gal, you want to see is a reporter.”

“You’ve been burned.”

“Basted, baked, and broiled. There was a time when Blackened Janeway was the main lunch course at the Denver Press Club.”

She smiled, with just the right touch of regret. She was good, I thought, and that made her dangerous. She made you want to apologize for not being her sacrificial lamb.

“I’m not a hard-ass,” I said by way of apology. “I like the press. Most of the reporters I know are fine people, great drinking buddies. I even read newspapers once in a while. But I’ve lived long enough to know how your game works.”

“How does it work?”

“If you quote me accurately, your obligation ends right there, even if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. My viewpoint gets run through your filter system and I wind up holding the bag.”

She flashed a bitter little smile and I took a second, deeper look at her. She was one of those not-quite-rare but uncommon women, a brown-eyed blonde, like the wonderful Irene in Galsworthy’s sadly neglected Forsyte Saga . Her hair was the color of wheat in September. Her face was pleasantly round without being cherubic: her mouth was full. She was in her thirties, about Rita’s age, not beautiful but striking, a face carved by a craftsman who had his own ideas of what beauty was.

Belatedly I recognized her name. “You wrote the book: the Grayson biography.”

“I wrote the book,” she confessed.

“I should be asking you the questions. You probably know more than I do.”

“That may be. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“I keep telling you, I don’t know anything. I’m just a friend of the court, delivering a prisoner back to the bar.”

“Right,” she said with a tweak of sarcastic skepticism. She opened her purse and dropped the steno pad inside it. “Off the record.”

“Everything I’ve got to say I said on the record in open court.”

“You didn’t say why you’re really here and what you’re doing.”

“It’s irrelevant. I’m irrelevant, that’s what you need to understand.”

“Who is Slater?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“There’s someone else involved in this. Slater’s not just working for a Taos bonding company.”

I shrugged and looked at a crack in the ceiling.

“I made some calls after the hearing. You left deep footprints in Denver.”

“That’s what they said about King Kong. On him it was a compliment. As a gorilla he was hard to beat.”

I waited but she missed her cue.

“You were supposed to say, ‘That gives you a goal to shoot for.’ If we’re going to play Wits, the new Parker Brothers game, you’ve got to be sharp.”

She gave me a look of interested amusement.

“We’ll put it down to midafternoon sag,” I said.

“You are a handful, aren’t you? My sources in Denver didn’t exaggerate much.”

“So who are these people and what are they saying about me?”

“Who they are isn’t important. They told me what anybody could get with a few phone calls and a friend or two where it counts.”

“Read it back to me. Let’s see how good you are.”

“You were with DPD almost fifteen years. Exemplary record, actually outstanding until that caper a while back. You have a fine-tuned but romantic sense of justice. It should always work, the good guys should always win. Then