82 Desire

who’d get them for her. She called him and went back to studying the second list. Everything was so huge, so cosmic… except for one thing. One glaring thing, now that she thought of it: “Baroness’s connection.”
    How hard could it be to figure that out? The tipster obviously wanted her to—he’d brought the poet to her attention.
    Well, Langdon wasn’t going to tell her, and neither was The Baroness—Jane knew that because she’d asked her already. However, the poet was unabashedly courting publicity—maybe they could deal, Jane and The Baroness. Wait a minute! Maybe The Baroness herself had asked her there, through the tipster. Maybe the five items on the first list weren’t related at all. Say the tipster was hatching some plot or other that involved the Fortier family, and in the course of it decided to take advantage of the fact that he now had a trained reporter in his kennel.
    Sure enough, The Baroness had an unscrupulous-looking boyfriend—or, at least, assistant. Wait another minute—she’d introduced him as her “partner in crime.” Jane felt the exhilaration of an adrenaline rush. “Lamar” something; she could find out by calling the restaurant where the reading was held. His art—such as it was—was for sale there.
    She dialed Reggie and Chaz. “Hi, this is Irene Adler. I was in the other night for a poetry reading…”
    A male, slightly accented voice answered her: “Oh, yes. The Baroness de Pontalba. Very good, yes?”
    “Excellent, I thought. A really enjoyable evening. I liked the paintings, too, by the man who helped her—her boyfriend, I guess.” She made the sentence faintly interrogative.
    “Oh, yes. Mr. Lamar Foret. Her boyfriend.”
    “Is the show still up?”
    “No, I’m so sorry. It was only for that one night. We felt so bad he didn’t sell anything.”
    “Hey, it’s not over till it’s over. I’m calling because I can’t get one of them out of my head. I was going to ask the price.”
    “Ohhhh. Ohh.” He seemed to be mulling things over.
    Finally he came to the perfect solution: “I could give you Mr. Foret’s phone number.”
    “Oh, could you? Fabulous.”
    She got it and dialed. A machine answered: “This is the robot of Lamar Foret. Leave a number or he’ll send me to kill you.”
    Damn! It wasn’t the tipster’s voice. She was about to hang up when someone answered: “Why is a famous Times-Picayune reporter calling a simple graduate student?”
    She was glad they weren’t face-to-face—she was sure she must look utterly taken aback and stupid. But she said smoothly, “Ah. Caller ID Deluxe—number and name.”
    “You must be an investigative reporter.”
    She couldn’t think what to ask him except her original question. “I was wondering if you were the person who invited me to the reading the other night.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I got a tip about it.”
    “What, a hot poetry-reading tip? Yeah, it’s Talba’s cheap way to get a publicist—you get a guy to call up all the reporters and tell ’em she’s Page One material.”
    His voice was nasty with sarcasm. Even over the phone, Jane disliked him. She needed to get off in a hurry. “Well, just thought I’d check it out.”
    “You want a tip? I’ll give you a tip.”
    “Oh, yeah? About what? “
    “About that story you’re working on.”
    “What story?”
    “You know what story. How much will you pay me for it?”
    “Sorry. We don’t pay for information.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Despite universal journalistic policy, Jane privately considered paying for information unethical only in cases where the seller could feed you lies that could end up in the paper. Paying for tips, she felt, was merely bad—and very expensive—policy.
    She said, “What the hell. Twenty dollars.”
    He hung up.
    Her head hurt.
    A hangover , she thought, is like a cold. You have to feed it. In fact, you have to feed it gross stuff.
    She was on her way out to the kitchen to fix a peanut butter sandwich when Lamar called back. “Fifty,” he said.
    She’d already forgotten the conversation. “Fifty what?”
    “Hey, reporter. Wake up. I’ve got something you need to know.”
    “I told you, we don’t pay for information.”
    “Then you told me you do.”
    “Well, I had a weak moment. I can’t do it.”
    “It concerns Mr. Russell Fortier’s place of employment.”
    “United Oil. What about it?”
    “Ms. Sandra Wallis, aka The Baroness de Pontalba, has a day