one side of her forehead and pinned on the other, like a bobbysoxer. Michael was disappointed. He’d been expecting Katharine Hepburn.
“Are you Claire?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Michael Daley. My brother Rick and Amy Ryan-”
“Of course.”
“She and Rick…”
She smiled. “I know who you are, Michael. Amy talked about you. I saw you at the funeral, from a distance.”
“You have a minute to talk?”
She glanced up at the clock: two-fifteen. “A minute, not much more. I’m on a deadline. The evening edition.”
“I just have a few questions about Amy.”
“Fifty-five seconds.”
“Okay. You worked with Amy on the Strangler story?”
“Yes.”
“You shared a byline. Did that mean you worked together on all those stories?”
“For the most part. We did our own reporting. We wrote together.”
“Why did you stop tracking the story?”
“We didn’t. The story stopped moving. DeSalvo confessed, and the investigation stopped. The story now is the trial. When the trial starts, we’ll cover it-I’ll cover it.”
“What about the murders themselves?”
“Our reporting was mostly about the police work. Amy and I weren’t investigating the murders; we were investigating the investigation.”
“So you never checked into other suspects? Arthur Nast? Kurt Lindstrom? Never contacted either of them? Never interviewed them?”
“No. We weren’t crazy. Well, Amy might have been crazy. I wasn’t.”
“So Nast or Lindstrom never threatened her, never had a grudge?”
“As far as I know, she never spoke to them.”
“Was she having trouble with anyone else? Threats?”
“No.”
“Did she ever talk about Brendan Conroy?”
“Brendan Conroy? In what way?”
“As someone she was investigating?”
“No. Brendan Conroy was someone she used as a source.”
“On the Strangler stories?”
“On all sorts of stories.”
“What about my father’s murder? Did she ever talk about it?”
“Not with me.”
“She never talked about how Conroy’s partner got killed?”
“It was a big case; Amy may have talked about it. But I don’t remember anything specific.” She laid her left hand on Michael’s arm. “I’m sorry about your father, of course.”
Michael noted the wedding band on her finger.
“So what was Amy working on, then?”
“As far as I know, she was preoccupied with two stories: the Strangler and the rats in the West End.”
“Rats in the West End? That’s not a crime story.”
“Two-legged rats.”
“Ah. What about them?”
“I don’t know. But I can guess. There’s a lot of money to be made on that project. That’s the kind of cheese those rats like. Money. You want to figure out what the story was? Find the cheese.”
“How?”
She pointed at the graffiti on her typewriter. “Know what this means? Amy wrote that. It was her little joke. Goyakod. It means: Get Off Your Ass, Knock On Doors. That’s what we do here. That’s all there is to it. Go to the West End and start knocking on doors.”
“But there aren’t any doors in the West End anymore.”
“See? This job isn’t as easy as it looks. Your minute’s up.” She sat down, sandwiched a piece of carbon paper between two sheets, and rolled them into the typewriter platen. “Go. If you find anything, let me know. Now go. Good luck.”
Michael did go, but he paused to watch her from the doorway. Across the room, she sat with her shoulders erect, touch-typing quickly, eyes on her notes. She was the only woman in the room, and easily the best typist. The men tended to tamp the keys with their two index fingers. They held pencils clenched in their teeth or wedged behind an ear and forgotten there. They glanced up nervously at the clock on the wall.
Then and there Michael fell for Claire a little, despite the wedding ring, or because of it. He had always been prone to these little swoons. He could not help it. He found women irresistibly affecting, and there was an onanistic promiscuity in the way he developed and abandoned crushes. But they came less often now. Love is a sort of hope, and Michael was not feeling much of that lately.
43
Seated in a Barcelona chair that forced him into a reclining position just a foot or so off the floor, Joe eyed the receptionist behind the desk, this blond broad with a swirl of hair like whipped cream whom Joe would have liked to bend over the desk right then and there. He tried to haul himself up out of the chair, but it would not let him go. The seat cushions were tipped backward, and the chair was so low he could not get his legs underneath him. The effect was like tossing a sandbag onto Joe’s lap. He could not get up.
The receptionist smiled agreeably.
Rather than struggle like an overturned beetle, Joe decided to wait until she looked away. He occupied himself by imagining her naked. He considered the cost of liberating her from her clothes, the time, the money, the risk that this chick would be the one that finally snapped Kat’s patience. The receptionist was probably worth all that, depending on her ass, which Joe still had not seen and which could change the whole calculation. Probably it was a big, majestic thing, like an enormous cleaved peach, which was Joe’s type. But what if her ass turned out to be one of those no-ass asses that left the back of a skirt to droop, or an overripe ass that slumped like rotten fruit? So much depended on the ass.
The receptionist busied herself with papers on her desk. The phone in front of her was a sleek white plastic thing that resembled a sleeping cat, and Joe admired it. It looked expensive. It rang and she answered it briskly, “Sonnenshein Development, Mr. Sonnenshein’s office, this is Ingrid.”
How would it feel to lay that phone against his own ear? It must be light, lighter than the prewar models at the station made of heavy black Bakelite, their cords wrapped in gutta-percha. And of course it would still carry the intimate warmth of Ingrid’s ear.
In order to fuck her and do it the right way, he would have to take her out, and that would cost money, which he did not have. Then there was the time it would take sitting in a restaurant or a bar, time he did not have because he had to work details and work off the money he owed. Also, he never saw his kid anymore. He would have to make that up to Little Joe as well, after everything else. The whole thing did not make sense. But there she was, and with an addict’s logic he rationalized, If I was hungry, I’d eat, so…
“You ever sit in these things?” Joe said.
“No.”
“This has gotta be the most uncomfortable chair on earth. You should try it.”
“Why would I want to sit in the most uncomfortable chair on earth?”
