She came in about ten minutes later. She was wearing a red raincoat and hood. She was brisk, getting me quickly past the formalities with the guard. He looked at me suspiciously as I disappeared with her into the building. We went past a receptionist’s booth, empty now, then through a door to the right and up a set of stairs. We came out on the second floor, in a corridor that led past a string of offices. There was a bookcase filled with review copies, overflow from the book editor, with a sign to the effect that the staff could buy them (the money to go to charity) at $3 a copy. In a quick flyby, I saw some hot young authors—David Brin, Dan Simmons, Sharyn McCrumb—whose newest books, with author photos and publicity pap laid in, could already command cover price plus 50 percent in a catalog. That’s the trouble with review books; they tend to be wasted on book editors. I wanted to clear out the case, buy them all.
She was standing about thirty feet away, waiting. I joined her at the edge of the newsroom, a huge chamber quiet in the off-hours. It gave the impression that news happened on its timetable, at its command.
She hung up her raincoat, then led me into a narrow place defined on both sides by tall filing cabinets. It was crowded with desks, maybe a dozen of them packed into a space the size of a medium-sized living room. It was like walking into a canyon: it was part of the newsroom yet it wasn’t, because an editor couldn’t see in there without getting up and making the grand effort. I didn’t have to be a reporter to know what a coveted spot it was…out of sight, out of mind. Her desk was far back in the corner, as secluded as you could get without moving up in management, getting yourself glassed in and becoming a different breed of cat.
She sat and motioned me to a chair. She looked different somehow from the image I had retained from our one meeting in the courthouse cafeteria. She looked harder and tougher, more of the world. Then she smiled, like the child looking up at Frankenstein’s monster, and I felt good again.
“Nice racket you’ve got,” I said. “You people must get some great poker games going back here.”
“We call it the Dead Zone. They’ll have to kill me to get this desk.”
“Are they trying?”
“So they say.”
She didn’t push me. If I wanted to small-talk and break the ice, she could do that. She was looking straight in my eyes.
“You look miserable…tired, wet, and hungry.”
I nodded. “Your city has not treated me well.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and managed to look it. “You’ve come in the rainy season.”
“Oh. How long does that last?”
“Almost all year.”
She offered coffee but I had had enough. We looked at each other across her desk.
“I came here from Miami,” she said. “My first month was a killer. It rained twenty-eight out of thirty days. I was a basket case. I was ready to go anywhere. If the newspaper in Grand Island, Nebraska, had offered me a job covering the grasshopper beat, I’d‘ve been on the next bus out of here. Then it cleared up and I learned what a sensational place this is.”
“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“There’re two secrets to living here. You’ve got to dress for weather and you can’t let it get you down.”
“That’s two for two I missed.”
“Now the only thing that bothers me is the traffic. This town has got to be the worst bottleneck in the United States. It’s great as long as you don’t need to drive, or if you do need to drive, you don’t need to park.”
“It sounds better by the minute.”
“I guess I’m here for the long haul. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. What’s Denver like?”
“I had forgotten what rain looks like till I came here.”
“Sun city, huh?”
“Somebody once said that Denver has more sun and sons of bitches than any other city in the country.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll stay with the rain. I bought a boat last year, I’m a pretty fair sailor now. Sometimes I just take off on Friday and drift up the coast. I put in at some warm-looking marina and spend the weekend exploring. If I’ve got a difficult piece to write, I do it there, out on deck if the weather’s nice.”
“Is that where you wrote your book?”
“Would have, if I’d had it then. Have you read it?”
“Not yet, but it’s high on my list. I just picked up a copy.”
“Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you read.”
I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard a reporter say. She shrugged and said, “It’s a good book, I’m not apologizing for it; if I had it to do over again, I’m sure it’d come out mostly the same. A little better, maybe. That’s the curse of being a writer, you never want to look back at what you did last year because the trip’s too painful. You see stuff you should’ve done better, but now it’s set in stone.”
