Hard News

really have any leads. Nothing solid.”
    “But you still think he’s innocent?”
    “Yeah, I guess I do. The story’d still get done. Piper said she’d assign someone local to finish it.”
    “Did she?”
    “Yeah, she promised me.”
    Maisel nodded.
    After a moment Rune said, “She doesn’t want me to do this story, does she?”
    “She’s afraid.”
    “Afraid? Piper Sutton?”
    “It’s not as funny as it seems. Her job is her whole life. She’s had three disastrous marriages. There’s nothing else she can do professionally; nothing she wants to do. If this story goes south she and I, and Dan Semple to some extent, will take the flak. You know how fickle audiences are. Dan and I are worried about news. Piper is too but she’s an anchor—she’s also got public image to sweat.”
    “I can’t imagine her being afraid of anything. I mean, I’m terrified of her.”
    “She’s not going to have you rubbed out if you tell her you’re going to stay and do the story.”
    “But she’s my boss….”
    Maisel laughed. “You’re too young to know that bosses, like wives, aren’t necessarily matched to us in heaven.”
    “Okay, but she
is
Piper Sutton.”
    “That’s a different issue and I don’t envy you having to call her up and tell her that you’re declining her offer. But, so what? You’re an adult.”
    Sort of, Rune thought. She said, “I don’t know what to do, Lee. What’s your totally, totally honest opinion about my story?”
    Maisel was considering. A gold clock began pinging off the hours to ten P.M. When it hit eight he said, “I’m not going to do you any favors by being delicate. The Boggs story? You take it way too personally. And that’s unprofessional. I get the impression that you’re on some kind of holy quest. You—”
    “But he’s innocent, and nobody else—”
    “Rune,” he said harshly. “You asked my opinion. Let me finish.”
    “Sorry.”
    “You’re not looking at the whole picture. You’ve got to understand that journalism has a responsibility to be totally unbiased. You’re not. With Boggs you’re one of the most goddamn biased reporters I’ve ever worked with.”
    “True,” she said.
    “That makes for a noble person maybe but it’s not journalism.”
    “That’s sort of what Piper told me too.”
    “There’s government corruption and incompetence everywhere, there’re human rights violations in South America, Africa and China, there’s homelessness, there’s child abuse in day-care centers…. There are so many important issues that media has to choose from and so few minutes to talk about them. What you’ve done is pick a very small story. It’s not a bad story; it’s just an insignificant one.”
    She looked off, scanning Maisel’s wall absently. She wondered if she’d find an omen—an old map of England, maybe. She didn’t.
    A minute passed.
    He said, “It’s got to be your decision. I think the best advice I can give you is, sleep on it.”
    “You mean, stay up all night tossing and turning and stewing about it.”
    “That might work too.”
    THE TWENTIETH PRECINCT, ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE , was considered a plum by a lot of cops.
    The Hispanic gangs had been squeezed north, the Black Panthers were nothing more than a bit of nostalgia, and no-man’s-land—Central Park—had its very own precinct to take care of the muggings and drug dealers. What you had in the Twentieth mostly were domestic disputes, shopliftings, an occasional rape. The piles of auto glass, like tiny green-blue ice cubes, marked what was maybe the most common crime: stealing Blaupunkts or Panasonics from dashboards. Two yuppies who’d scrunched BMW fenders might get into a shoving match in front of Zabar’s. An insider trader might commit suicide occasionally. But things didn’t get much worse than that.
    There was a lot of traffic in and out of the low, 1960s decor brick-and-glass precinct station. Community relations was a priority here and more people came through the doors of the Twentieth to attend meetings or just hang out with the cops than to report muggings.
    So the desk sergeant—a beefy, moustachioed blond cop—didn’t think twice about her, this young, miniskirted mother, about twenty, who had a cute-as-a-button three-or four-year-old in tow on this warm afternoon. She walked right up to him and said she had a complaint about the quality of police protection in the neighborhood.
    The cop didn’t really care, of course. He liked