“Wonderful!” Her voice changed sharply. “The poor crazy old woman— We’re vultures, that’s what we are—”
“Don’t be melodramatically moral, Molly. It’s our job. There have to be . . . well, vultures; and that’s us. Now let me talk to Whalen, and I’ll—”
“Boss?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Boss, I’ve been a good girl Friday, haven’t I? I keep all the job orders straight and I never make a mistake about who’s just been to the city and who’s got relatives staying with them and whose strawberry jam won the prize at the Fair—”
“Sure, sure. But look, Molly—”
“And when you had that hangover last Thursday and I fed you tomato juice all morning and beer all afternoon and we got the paper out OK, you said you’d do anything for me, didn’t you?”
“Sure. But—”
“All right. Then you stay here and let me cover this murder.”
“That’s absurd. It’s my job to—”
“If you know how much I want to turn out some copy that isn’t about visiting and strawberry jam— And besides, this’ll be all tied up with the Hitchcocks. Maybe even Laura’ll be there. And when you’re . . . well, involved a little with people, how can you be a good reporter? Me, I don’t give a damn about Hitchcocks. But with you, maybe you’d be in a spot where you’d have to be either a lousy reporter or a lousy friend.”
MacVeagh grinned. “As usual, Friday, you make sense. Go on. Get out there and bring me back the best story the Sentinel ever printed. Go ahead. Git.”
“Gee, boss—” Molly groped for words, but all she found was another and even more heartfelt “Gee—’’Then she was gone.
MacVeagh smiled to himself. Swell person, Molly. He’d be lost without her. Grand wife for some man, if he liked them a little on the plump side. If, for instance, he had never seen the superb slim body of Laura Hitchcock—
But thoughts of Laura now would only get in the way. He’d have to see her tomorrow. Offer his condolences on the death of her aunt. Perhaps in comforting her distress—
Though it would be difficult, and even unconvincing, to display too much grief at Agnes Rogers’ death. She had been Grover’s great eccentric, a figure of fun, liked well enough, in a disrespectful way, but hardly loved. A wealthy widow—she held an interest in the Hitchcock plant second only to H. A.’s own—she had let her fortune take care of itself—and of her—while she indulged in a frantic crackpot quest for the Ultimate Religious Truth. At least once a year she would proclaim that she had found it, and her house would be filled with the long-robed disciples of the Church of the Eleven Apostles—which claimed that the election by lot of Matthias had been fraudulent and invalidated the apostolic succession of all other churches; or the sharp-eyed, businesslike emissaries of Christoid Thought—which seemed to preach the Gospel according to St. Dale.
It was hard to take Agnes Rogers’ death too seriously. But that ultimate seriousness transfigures, at least for the moment, the most ludicrous of individuals.
Whalen was reading when John MacVeagh entered his cubbyhole off the printing room. One of those books that no one, not even Father Byrne, had ever recognized the letters of. It made MacVeagh realize again how little he knew of this last survival of the race of tramp printers, who came out of nowhere to do good work and vanish back into nowhere.
Brownies, he thought. With whiskey in their saucers instead of milk.
Not that Whalen looked like any brownie. He was taller than MacVeagh himself, and thinner than Phil Rogers. The funniest thing about him was that when you called up a memory image of him, you saw him with a beard. He didn’t have any, but there was something about the thin long nose, the bright deepset eyes— Anyway, you saw a beard.
You could almost see it now, in the half-light outside the circle that shone on the unknown alphabet. He looked up as MacVeagh came in and said, “John. Good. I wanted to see you.”
MacVeagh had never had a printer before who called him by his formal first name. A few had ventured on “Johnny,” Luke Sellers among them, but never “John.” And still, whatever came from Whalen sounded right.
“We’ve got work to do, Whalen. Were going to bring out an extra tomorrow. This town’s gone and busted loose with the best story in years, and it’s up to us to—”
“I’m sorry, John,” Whalen said gravely. His voice was the deepest MacVeagh had ever heard in ordinary speech. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Leaving—” MacVeagh was almost speechless. Granted that tramp printers were unpredictable; still after an announcement such as he’d just made—
“I must, John. No man is master of his own movements. I must go, and tonight. That is why I wished to see you. I want to know your wish.”
“My wish? But look, Whalen: We’ve got work to do. We’ve got to—”
“I must go.” It was said so simply and sincerely that it stood as absolute fact, as irrevocable as it was incomprehensible. “You’ve been a good employer, John. Good employers have a wish when I go. I’ll give you time to think about it; never make wishes hastily.”
“But I— Look, Whalen. I’ve never seen you drink, but I’ve never known a printer that didn’t. You’re babbling. Sleep it off, and in the morning we’ll talk about leaving.”
“You never did get my name straight, John,” Whalen went on. “It was understandable in all that confusion the day you hired me after Luke Sellers had retired. But Whalen is only my first name. I’m really Whalen Smith. And it isn’t quite Whalen—”
“What difference does that make?”
“You still don’t understand? You don’t see how some of us had to take up other trades with the times? When horses went and you
