Hard News

footage. That’s all.”
    “So you think there’s a chance it’ll just go away?”
    Sutton avoided his eyes. “She’s young. I’m keeping a close eye on her. I’m hoping she gets tired of the whole thing.”
    Semple had the power to make this story go away forever, leaving behind fewer traces than a couple of pixels on a TV monitor. He glanced at Sutton and said, “Keep me informed on what she finds.”
    “Okay.”
    “I mean daily.” Semple looked out the window for moment. “I dined at a wonderful restaurant. It was off St. Germain.”
    “Really?”
    “I wish you’d been there with me.”
    “It sounds nice.”
    “Michelin was wrong. I have to write and urge them to give it another star.” And he uncapped a fountain pen and wrote a note on his calendar reminding himself to do just that.

    chapter 13    
     
    RUNE WAS SLEEPWALKING. AT LEAST, THAT’S WHAT IT felt like.
    She’d been sitting at her desk, in the same curvature-of-the-spine pose, for seven hours, looking over tapes. The close air of the studio was filled with the buzz of a dozen yellow jackets, which she’d thought was the video monitor in front of her until she’d shut it off and realized that the buzzing had continued; the sound was originating from somewhere inside her head.
    Enough is enough.
    She stood up and stretched; a series of pops from her joints momentarily replaced the buzzing. She left Bradford in charge of logging in the recent tapes she’d shot and headed outside. Rune walked through the complicated maze of corridors and into the spring evening. She removed the chrome chain necklace of her ID from around her neck and slipped it in her leopard-skin bag.
    Outside a harried woman employee of the Network stood on the sidewalk. Her husband—a young professional—walked up to her with their two young children in tow. It had apparently been his turn to pick up the kids tonight.
    The mother gave them perfunctory hugs and then started making weekend plans with her husband. Their daughter, a redhead about Courtney’s age, tugged on her mother’s Norma Kamali skirt. “Mommy …”
    “Just a
minute,”
the woman said sternly. “I’m speaking to your father.” The little girl looked sullenly off.
    Rune gave the kid a smile but she didn’t respond. The family walked off.
    Man, I’m beat, she thought.
    But as she walked south she felt the cool, electric-scented city night air waking her up and she saw from the clock on the MONY tower that it was early, only eight P.M. Early? Rune remembered when quitting time had been five. She continued down Broadway, past the pastel carnival of Lincoln Center—pausing, listening for music but not hearing any. Then she continued south, deciding to walk home, a couple miles, to get the blood back in her legs. Thinking of what she needed to do for the story. Getting her hands on the police report of the Hopper case was the number-one item.
    Then she’d have to talk to all the witnesses. Get Megler on tape. Maybe interview the judge. Find some jurors. She wondered if there was an old priest who knew Boggs. A Spencer Tracy sort of guy.
Ah, well, now, sure I’d be knowing the boy Randy and I’ll tell you, he helped out in soup kitchens and took care of his mother and left half his allowance in the collection plate every Sunday when he was an altar boy
….
    A lot to do.
    She walked through Hell’s Kitchen. Her head swiveled as she went down Ninth Avenue. Disappointed. The developers were doing a number on the area. Boxy high-rises and slick restaurants and co-ops. What she liked best about the neighborhood was that it had been the home of the Gophers, one of the toughest of the nineteenth-century gangs in New York. Rune had been reading about old gangs lately. Before she got waylaid by the Boggs story she’d been planning a documentary on them. The featured thugs were going to be the Gophers and their sister gang, the Battle Row Ladies’ Social and Athletic Club (also known as the Lady Gophers). Not a single producer had been very interested in the subject. The Mafia and Colombians and Jamaicans with machine guns were still the current superstars of crime and there wasn’t much demand for stories about people like One-Lung Curran and Sadie the Goat and Stumpy Malarky.
    Her feet were aching by the time she got to her neighborhood. She stopped outside the houseboat, looked at the dark windows for a moment. Behind her another family walked past, a mother and father and their