Of course, he didn’t like setting a precedent, letting a reporter pull out of anything, but her news judgment was usually good and she’d never done this before.
“Sure,” he said, “if that’s the way you see it. You’ll have to come up with something else and fast.”
The sudden wave of relief made her feel faint and guilty. “I wouldn’t drop it unless I really thought it was worthless,” she rushed to assure him. “I just don’t think it will work.”
He nodded.
“I feel bad about this,” she said.
“God,” she told Frank Kowalski, “they scared me in a way. All that stuff was such garbage. It was awful.”
He chuckled.
“No, no, I’m serious. It made me sick. And, about half of the guys there were either cops or reporters.”
She knew the bearded man with the pipe was and thought the man in the work shirt probably was as well.
She shuddered. “And I thought they were bringing me something to eat. Do you believe that? I thought all those cans and boxes of food were for a snack.”
Frank Kowalski laughed.
“What does Brown want you to do?” he asked her.
“Something happy,” she said. “A happy series. What the hell is happy?”
19
“I would have been scared to death,” Debbie told her.
“I was when they put that blindfold on, but after that it was all right,” Ellen said. “It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that time I was on the manhunt.”
“What manhunt?”
“It happened before you got here. Three kids helped their father and some other guy break out of prison. They went on a rampage, killing babies, everything. And guess who was following them.”
“You?”
“Of course.” Ellen laughed. “Now, that was frightening.”
They sat at the edge of the pool, their legs dangling in the water.
“I’m out there in a van with that fool Rappaport, right in the middle of the Tonto National Forest, two hundred thousand acres or something. We were there all night. There were these two state cops in their car who were about sixteen years old and jumpy as hell. We couldn’t even get out to go to the bathroom because they got scared when they heard the door open. I sat up all night and Rappaport slept. He was sure his wife was going to get pissed that he was up there with me.”
She kicked at the water. It was October and the water was warm.
“You know what I figured out that night?” she said.
“What?”
“That I didn’t want to die that way, out in some forest for some nothing story. Still, we did the story and it won an award. The funny thing is they weren’t even there that night. They were someplace else killing somebody.”
She hadn’t talked to someone like this in a long time, not since Dale in Albuquerque. They used to share their station stories over Tecates with lime at Al Monte’s bar.
“My father once told me what he was afraid of,” she told Debbie. “Here is this guy who fought hand-to-hand combat in Europe in World War II and he had this wild fear.”
“What was it?”
“It was about New York. That’s where he worked after the divorce.”
“What did he do?”
“His company handled international insurance, like Lloyds, you know? Insurance for things like revolutions, wars. He would go to these countries, meet the top guys and figure out what could go wrong and when. His company would insure companies and their people who were going to do business there.”
“I didn’t know people did that.” Debbie said.
“He loved it and when we were young we used to travel with him all over the world.”
“You have brothers and sisters?”
“Two brothers, one younger and one older. We spent holidays and summers in Hong Kong, Madrid, London.”
“I’ve never even been to New York,” Debbie sighed.
“My father liked New York but he couldn’t understand how the blacks put up with it. He thought that one day they were going to get mad enough to come out of Harlem and seal up the whole city.”
They looked at each other.
“You know,” Ellen continued, “it’s an island and he said if they got mad enough and organized they could cut off the bridges and seal off the tunnels and let everybody fry in the city.” She laughed.
“I think he wanted them to do it. He said he didn’t understand how they could stand it, living there in Harlem and watching the trains taking all these fat cat businessmen in their Brooks Brothers suits back to Connecticut.” She leaned back, stretched her neck.
“All the commuter trains to Connecticut go through Harlem. These guys, and I’ve seen this, are sitting there in this air-conditioned train, reading their newspapers, and playing these ridiculous card games that have been going on for years. They are going past the tenements where the people are hanging out of the windows, T-shirts, housedresses, hot as hell. They’re watching the trains go by. My father wondered why they didn’t kill all those bastards on the train. And,” she laughed again, “he was one of them.”
“Is that what he was afraid of, that the blacks would do that?” Debbie asked.
“No, he wasn’t afraid of that. He was afraid he would have a heart attack or something and fall down on the street and people would step over him, thinking he was some old drunk. That’s the way they are in New York. That’s what scared him, but it didn’t happen. He died four years ago of cancer. Real fast. Nobody stepped over him except the doctors.” She kicked the water.
“My mother died when I was five,” Debbie said, putting the same strength in her voice she heard in Ellen’s.
“I hardly remember her at all. Some man hit her car. He was drunk.
