The doorknob being turned-
The door being pushed inward-
The smell of the day's heat and a man's sweat-
And there, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight blasting behind him and turning him into little more than a silhouette, stood Richard Dobyns.
He barely hesitated.
He started to turn.
It was obvious he was going to run.
'No!' she shouted, her voice almost hysterical in the ancient shadowy room.
She had waited all these years for proof. And now her proof was running away from her.
She lunged for Dobyns, grabbing him by the sleeve.
'I want to help you. You've got to believe me,' she said.
He was in the doorway, out of breath now, fear lurid in his eyes.
'Close the door, Richard, and I'll help you.' She took the tone of a person trying to reassure a child or a skittish animal.
'You're not the police?'
'No.'
He stared out the doorway with a real longing. Freedom lay that way. In this room was only a mysterious woman who claimed to want to help him but whom he deeply distrusted. She could see all this in his gaze.
'I know what happened at Hastings House,' she said.
He put a shaky hand to his mouth. He licked dry lips.
'And I know about the thing in your stomach, too,' she said.
'My God,' he said. 'Who are you?'
And then he quietly closed the door behind him and came back into the apartment.
The old black manual Royal was O'Sullivan's pride. It made him feel like a real journalist.
Would Edward R. Murrow have used a wimpy word processor?
Hell no.
O'Sullivan saw the word processor as just one more symbol of journalism's decline.
In journalism school now (or TV school as the kids these days called it) the professors spent as much time on 'presentation', (i.e., how to put on makeup and hair spray) as they did on writing news stories.
And it showed in the kind of writing you saw on local TV. Badly structured pieces that didn't answer half the questions they raised, sometimes including-incredibly enough-the basics of the story itself.
But the makeup looked good.
And the King Kong hair spray was working hard.
So to hell with journalism.
O'Sullivan was thinking all these uncharitable thoughts because Dashing David Starrett had just handed in another totally incomprehensible tale about alleged corruption in city hall.
Not until halfway into the story did Starrett's copy tell you which city council members were allegedly involved. Not until three fourths of the way in did the copy tell you what the specific charges were. And three times in a page and a half of copy Starrett seriously violated not only the letter but the spirit of the English language.
Unfortunately for O'Sullivan, who usually ended up rewriting Dashing David's stuff, the kid was the darling of the news consultants. He booked well in focus groups because-as one grandmotherly woman supposedly told the consultant-he 'has dreamy eyes.'
Though he was not yet quite twenty-five, Dashing David would most likely get a network job within the next few years.
He had the 'presentation' part down and there was always an O'Sullivan type somewhere to do the rewriting for him.
O'Sullivan wondered if Edward R. Murrow had had dreamy eyes.
Somehow O'Sullivan couldn't imagine that.
He took a break at a quarter to five.
The news would be on the air in another hour and fifteen minutes so he stood in his doorway watching the craziness.
Reporters literally tripped over each other as they stumbled toward deadlines rewriting, reediting, repolishing. There was, predictably, a flare up of egos and tempers in front of one of the small editing rooms. With nine reporters and only three rooms, the video machines needed to complete a story were at a premium. A few times punches had even been exchanged.
As he stood there, feeling properly paternal about this whole resplendent process of TV journalism, O'Sullivan started wondering about Chris again.
Had she been joking about a 'murder' tip?
Where the hell was she now?
He went back to his desk and dialled her home number.
Eight rings and no answer.
He started wondering again about the tip she claimed to have got.
If the story was true, it might just save her job as a reporter. How could even the craven consultants deny her usefulness to the staff when she unearthed the exclusive tales of butchery and slaughter so desired by the public?
He went back to his doorway and looked at his staff of kamikaze reporters.
He had to admit that even though they all used word processors, a few of them actually had the makings of good journalists. A few of them had got into the job not because of the glamour, but because they understood- corny as it sounded-the vital role journalism played in a democracy.
Holland was like that. A serious reporter.
Maybe that was why he liked her so much (and a hell of a lot more than he'd ever let on to her, being of the generation of men who believed that women could guess your true feelings through intuition or some goddamned thing like that).
So where the hell was Holland anyway?
For the first time he had the thought that maybe if the murder call was the real thing, Holland might be in a little trouble.
And that didn't make O'Sullivan feel good at all.
Even if he didn't tell her how much he cared about her (after a few brewskis, he sometimes even admitted to himself that he might even
Sometimes he worried about her a lot.
6
Every mental hospital had somebody like Gus living within its walls. He'd been at Hastings House so long- some said ever since Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president-that he didn't even have a last name anymore. He was just Gus.
At this point in his life, he was round, fish belly white, balding, and just as strange as he'd been the day his mother had first brought him here after Gus had complained too many times about the small green Martian man who kept trying to poison him. Every time the staff recommended that Gus be granted a few days at home, he would invariably do something that would make them rescind the order. One time it was sneaking into old Mrs. Grummond's room and taking a dump under her pillow because she hadn't wanted to watch Superman in the TV room. Another time it was dressing up in Katie Dowd's slinkiest nightgown and strolling into the games room, lipstick like a rash on his mouth, and a red paper rose stuck behind his ear. Perhaps his most memorable moment at Hastings came one September day when the state inspectors arrived to check out rumours of abuse they'd heard about Hastings. Just as they reached the third floor, they heard horrifying screams coming from the opposite end of
