82 Desire

having an affair, which might or might not be anyone else’s business. This was a blatant conflict of interest. Not to write the piece seemed hugely irresponsible. Yet writing it was invasion of privacy. She couldn’t see doing it to Bebe.
    But she took LaBarre’s picture and recorded the time.
    She didn’t have them together, but that didn’t matter—she had enough material to make an editor believe her, and that was all she needed.
    She headed back to the office, still feeling queasy, thoughts racing. And by the time she was on the escalator, cooler heads had prevailed. She wasn’t going to write the damn story.
    What would she write, anyway— OFFICIAL AND DEVELOPER IN LOVE NEST ? Hardly.
    She had a piece of something, that was all. And she was glad she’d taken the pictures—they were something concrete, to show if she had to, to prove she had some tiny piece of a greater jigsaw puzzle. Bebe and LaBarre might not be a story by themselves, but the affair was a good reason to keep digging. What if, for instance, Russell turned up dead? The fact that Bebe was having an affair called into question everything she’d said about his disappearance. She could have killed him in an argument, say, disposed of the body at leisure, and made up the story about the airport.
    In a sort of daze, she dropped off the film in the photo department and then checked the library for clips on Bebe. Browsing through quickly, she could see that at least once Bebe had voted for one of LaBarre’s projects. Since he had several, Jane wondered if it was a pattern.
    She was still scrolling through clips, trying to get a handle on what was happening, when someone touched her shoulder.
    “Janie.” It was her editor, David Bacardi, her former lover and big, bad mistake.
    “I hate it when you call me Janie.” She turned to look at him as she said it, and she almost gasped, remembering. He was tall, with a good chest and good shoulders. He had dark hair graying at the temples and curling on his forehead—for which she was a sucker—and wore fashionable round, metal-framed glasses, white oxford-cloth shirts, striped ties. He moved sinuously, like someone who played a lot of squash.
    He was absurdly good-looking. Not merely handsome, but darkly handsome—handsome in an intellectual way; handsome in a preppy, take-home-to-Mom kind of way. Sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t fallen for him before she did, yet if she thought back, she could remember that, too. He was also handsome in a pat sort of way; a God’s-gift sort of way. She’d been contemptuous of him before he decided to make it a point to seduce her.
    But since he was also funny, charming, and bright, who could resist, really?
    Anyone with a good sense of self-preservation, she thought now.
    Walter had hated him. That should have been warning enough.
    But it hadn’t been, and now she was stuck with her own self-contempt for having fallen for his transparent ploys—having fallen, in a real sense, victim to him. She was stuck with that, and he was her boss, a position that held a bit of the victim in it in the best of circumstances.
    She really did hate it when he called her “Janie.”
    He said, “How’s the Fortier thing going?”
    “Interesting developments. Can we talk about it in your office?” She didn’t want the whole place knowing about Bebe’s sex life.
    “Hey, Jane, here’s your prints.” Ozzie Otis, the photographer she’d sweet-talked into doing them, dropped a crisp pile on her desk.
    David picked them up. “What’s this? You’re a photographer now?”
    “Ozzie was just doing me a favor.”
    He looked closer. “Are these what I think they are?”
    “Come on. Into your office.”
    As she told the story, she could see David’s eyes begin to glitter. He leaned closer and closer, and finally he blurted, “This is a hell of a story, Janie.”
    It was absolutely the highest compliment he’d ever paid her.
    She leaned back, hoping he’d notice her pointedly drawing away from him, and spoke as frostily as she dared. “Exactly what do you think the story is?”
    “Are you kidding? Here’s a powerful politico literally in bed with a guy who wants to destroy half the views in the city and make parking some kind of California nightmare. Needless to say, an extremely controversial figure who needs every vote he can get. Have you checked her voting record?”
    “That’s what I was just doing.”
    “And?”
    “Last time she voted in his