Hard News

you can do right now.”
    “The competition isn’t going to find out.”
    Sutton was sighing and shaking her head the same way Rune’s algebra teacher had when she’d flunked for the second time. “It’s not the competition I’m worried about. I’m worried that you’re wrong. That he really is guilty. If we lose a story to another network, well, that happens; it’s part of the game. But if there’re rumors flying around about a segment we’re doing and it turns out to be wrong it’s my ass on the line.
Comprende
, honey?”
    Rune nodded and quickly lost the staring contest.
    Sutton broke the tension with a question. She sounded amused as she asked, “I’m curious about one thing. “Do you know who Randy Boggs was convicted of killing?”
    “I read his name but I don’t exactly remember. But what I’ll do—”
    Sutton cut her off. “His name was Lance Hopper. Does that mean anything to you?”
    “Not really.”
    “It ought to. He was head of Network News here. He was our boss. Now you see why you’re playing with fire?”

    chapter 4    
     
    LEE MAISEL WAS A LARGE, BALDING, BEARDED MAN IN HIS fifties. He wore brown slacks and a tweed jacket over a tie-less button-down dress shirt and a worn burgundy-and-beige argyle sweater. He smoked a meerschaum pipe, yellowed from smoke and age. The pipe was one of a dozen scattered over his desk. He didn’t look like a man who made, as executive producer of one of the country’s most popular TV newsmagazines, over one million dollars a year.
    “I mean, how was I supposed to know who Lance Hopper was?” Rune asked.
    “How indeed?”
    Maisel and Rune sat in his large office in the Network’s portion of the old armory building. Unlike Piper Sutton’s office in the parent’s high-rise, Maisel’s was only thirty feet in the air and overlooked a bowling alley. Rune liked it that he was down here with his troops. Maisel even looked like a general. She could picture him in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, sending tanks after Nazis in North Africa.
    Rune sat next to a large Mr. Coffee machine. She looked at it uncertainly—as if the pot contained the nuclear sludge that the coffee resembled. He said, “Turkish.” He poured a cup for himself and raised an eyebrow. She shook her head.
    “Piper really rides on hyper, doesn’t she?” Rune asked. Then it occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t be talking about Sutton this way, at least not to him.
    Maisel didn’t say anything, though. He asked, “You don’t grasp the significance? About Hopper?”
    “All I know is Piper said he was head of the Network. Our boss.”
    Maisel turned and dug through a stack of glossy magazines on his credenza. He found one and handed it to her. It wasn’t a magazine, though, but an annual report of the Network’s parent company. Maisel leaned forward and opened it to a page near the center, then rested a thick, yellow fingertip on one picture. “That’s Lance Hopper.”
    Rune read,
Lawrence W. Hopper, executive vice president
. She was looking at a tall, jowly businessman in a dark suit and white shirt. He wore a red bow tie. He was in his fifties. Handsome in a businessman sort of way. Rock-hard eyes.
    “You understand what you’ve done?” Maisel said.
    “No, not exactly.”
    Maisel’s tongue touched the corner of his mouth. He toyed with one of his pipes, replaced it. “Boggs was convicted of killing a man I knew and worked with. A man Piper knew and worked with. Lance could be a son of a bitch but he was one hell of a journalist and he turned the Network around. He was in the Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Mike Wallace pantheon of broadcast journalism gods. He was that good. Everybody respected Lance Hopper. When Boggs was convicted of killing him you should’ve heard the applause in the newsroom. Now here
you
come and say Boggs isn’t guilty. That’s going to cause problems around here. Loyalty problems. And it could get you and everybody involved in the project in a lot of trouble.”
    Maisel continued. “Look, I interviewed Boggs myself. He’s a drifter. He’s never had a decent job in his life. Everybody agrees with the jury that he did it. If you’re right and he’s innocent you’re going to be pretty unpopular around here. And you aren’t going to win any awards from the judge and prosecutor either. And if you’re wrong you’ll still be pretty unpopular but not around here because you won’t be
working
here anymore. See