“Poster boy for Tennessee crackers kicking and screaming he’s going down for a crime he didn’t commit. Tulia, Texas upside down. Gets my funny bone is all.”
“Is there anything tending to exculpate?”
“Nothing I’ve heard about. They got motive and opportunity. They got the murder weapon. Hard case to beat, Isobel.”
“Hard case to beat.” The phrase echoed after the call. Macmillan said something like that when she tried to sell her story. He told her it was a hard case to make.
As soon as Macmillan figured out that he was in the clear, that Mel Gold would catch whatever came down, and probably take more than his share, Macmillan’s other side would surface. He’d be dancing soon enough.
As she expected, Jennings’s arrest played big. This was no routine murder. This was a counter story; a harpoon in the side of a helium whale. Her own paper ran an article casting doubt on Isobel’s earlier work, without mentioning her name. But that would not take long. She expected a mea culpa on the editorial page. That would be the fat lady’s song. Once-eager new pals were already steering clear. Her private office became a no-go zone from the minute Macmillan and Gold walked out. Next day, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times suggested that the New York Times had once again been suckered by a youngster with an imagination.
The New York Post ran a full-page headline: “Times Tainted.” This time the photo of Isobel showed her ducking paparazzi. “Fuck you,” she said, throwing a copy of that paper in her wastebasket. Other papers across the country ran stories stating as fact that Harlan Jennings’s capture disproved the three-by-one theory. Many suggested that Isobel Gitlin invented the connection, developed it like a piece of fiction, sold it to her editors (and what kind of editors were they?), and thereby hoodwinked the national press, the cable stations, the networks, and, yes, the American people.
The talking heads asked each other when would they learn? They berated themselves as too damned trusting. They wondered what would become of us all if things like this continued to sap America’s faith in its media. And who, after all, was this Isobel Gitlin? No friend of theirs, to be sure. None of them knew her.
Isobel still had her salary and her office, and Mel Gold was there to do what he could. Nevertheless, she saw herself near the end of a very short branch. That was when Walter Sherman called.
“Miss Gitlin,” he said. “We have not met, but I know that you’re right. I’d like to talk it over.”
“What do you mean you know I’m right? Right about what?”
“Hopman, MacNeal, and Ochs. I know things that you don’t. I know things that you should know. Where would you like to meet?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Walter Sherman. Meet me in the restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel. Six o’clock. I’ll be sitting at a table next to the window facing Central Park West. I’ll be wearing a camel-hair blazer. You’ll be relieved when you see me. I’m old enough to be your father, and harmless as a pup. I know what you look like. I’ll see you come in. I’ll be dining and I hope you’ll join me… if you have any appetite nowadays.”
“Mr. Sherman,” she said. “I will have a gun in my purse. If you are f-fucking around I will shoot off your b-b- balls.”
The tables by the window are actually in the bar. The first entrance from the lobby brings you there. A single line of tables sits against the plate glass, inches from the street. The bar’s a step up. In between the tables and stools, a row of planters is filled with large, leafy triffids that keep the rooms apart. Walter watched Isobel walk past him outside, wearing a green summer dress and yellow sweater, chin on her chest, stepping quickly, hands clutching a green, beaded purse. He stood up, smiled, and waved as she moved inside.
“It’s a pleasure. I’m Walter. May I call you Isobel? Please have a seat. And please leave the gun in your purse.”
She shook his outstretched hand, sat, and felt an awkward silence roll in. He liked awkward silences. They sometimes offered a window into the subject’s state of mind. The quality of the smile, or frown, the posture, the steadiness of the gaze-there were things you could often tell from signs like that.
Walter Sherman’s own manner had nothing much to offer. He seemed relaxed but purposeful, self-assured but diffident. What he said next suggested telepathy:
“See? Old enough to be your dad.”
“I’m older than I look,” she said. “You could be younger.”
Now his pale-blue eyes showed her something nice: he was at least a little impressed. “Drink?” he said, flicking a finger. A smiling waiter leapt forward. She ordered a vodka martini. He asked for a Diet Coke.
“Is that quite fair?” she asked him.
Walter said, “I’ll have wine with dinner. We can talk about sports until then.”
Isobel could hold five martinis long before she left London.
“You know about me. Everyone does. It’s ugly.” She was stammering only moderately, and felt unexpectedly at ease. Now she saw a curious light in Walter’s bright blue eyes. She tried a telepathic turn of her own:
“I spoke English and very good French at home. As a child I spoke Hindustani every day, and Bauan as well. I still can. My parents tried to keep my speech white, European. I rebelled against that, which could have produced my stammer. They say I pronounce my English like a little black village girl. That may help to explain the inflection you hear. I cultivate it because I like it. Do you?”
The surprise in his smile seemed to confirm that she had, in fact, read his mind. Then came the martini. She felt its first effect before the alcohol hit her blood. Coffee worked the same way. She got her first rush from the smell. She became aware that this was becoming a “jolly bash,” as her suave, determined father might have said. And a jolly bash was not what she had in mind.
“Now let’s hear about you,” she said matter-of-factly. “What do you do besides advertise your antiquity?”
“I find missing people,” he said.
No question: he’d said the same thing hundreds of times before. He could certainly have lied; anything else would have sounded more likely. She got the sense that he liked going straight to the point. Did he really find that practical? When did circumstances permit that kind of candor? How would it work for a catcher of people? Or was it a nifty affectation?
“Why do you do it?” Isobel asked, all pretty eyes and ears.
“People pay me to do it.”
“Why don’t they call the police?”
“Most do, but some are embarrassed, and some are afraid of ridicule, the risk of humiliation. Sometimes they need a private way to find whoever’s lost.”
“First you said ‘missing.’ Then you said ‘lost.’ Which is it?”
“Sometimes there’s no difference. Some people want to be missing. They are not lost. Once in a while they don’t know where they are. Then they are lost.”
“What do you call yourself, professionally? What’s the name for it?”
“I usually don’t, and I don’t know,” Walter smiled again. She noticed the skin crinkling around his eyes and mouth. She thought him mid- to late-forties, but she thought he looked sixty because of the tan-what it had done to his face. Her father and mother avoided the sun, out of European vanity. She was afraid of sunburn. This one, like many Americans, seemed to pursue melanoma.
She said, “I never imagined anyone actually did what you say you do. I imagined it was all in the movies.”
“Well,” said Walter, “just goes to show.”
“Your… what do you call them, clients? I assume they’re celebrities, public figures? People who don’t want the world to know that their daughter-I’ll bet it’s always the daughter-ran away with a Hell’s Angel gang, or a circus, or wherever they go. And, that’s where you come in.”
He seemed a little less charmed. Her flippancy was doing its job. She expected to get a look at him now. “That’s where I come in,” he said, just a little shortly.
“I feel like calling you Robert Mitchum. Except he’d be somewhat older, if he were alive.”
He didn’t like impertinence. Probably took it for disrespect. He was sipping his Diet Coke silently. Sullenly? No. Not quite that.
“What makes you good at doing it?”
He said, “I really don’t know. I just am. I know where to look. I know what to ask. The right things come to
