True-Life Adventure

better than you are. It wasn’t the fact that you quit, shithead; it was the way you did it.”
    How I did it was, I sent him one of my favorite records— “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck. I thought he’d be amused.
    “Joey, I apologize. I thought you liked country music.”
    “Are you coming back to work or not?”
    “How about temporary?”
    “Okay. Nolte’s going on six months’ leave.”
    “I had in mind about two weeks.”
    “Mcdonald, give me a break. What good’s that going to do me?”
    “I meant two weeks’ special assignment. I’ve got a fantastic story, Joey, my boy. I mean, fantastic. You know Jack Birnbaum, the P. I. that got poisoned?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, have you noticed that Lindsay Hearne is mysteriously on leave from ‘Bay Currents’? What if I told you those two things are connected?”
    “You would have my full and complete attention.”
    “Lindsay’s married to Jacob Koehler, first of all.”
    “The gene-splicer.”
    “Right. Here’s how it shakes down: Lindsay met Jacob on an interview ten years or so ago when she was a humble newspaper reporter. They got married and their union was blessed with issue. But they made like atoms when little Terry was five. At first they had joint custody, but then Jacob remarried and Lindsay relinquished her half of Terry, the better to pursue greatness, I guess.”
    “Get to the point, Mcdonald.”
    “Well, Lindsay had Terry every other weekend, and thereon hangs our tale.”
    “She snatched her.”
    “Right you are. About three weeks ago. And Jacob hired Jack Birnbaum to find the kid.”
    “Hang on a minute. The station must know where she is.”
    “Uh-uh. She phoned in sick the Monday after Terry disappeared, but apparently not from home— could have been from anywhere. And then she resigned formally in a letter which her producer received the following Wednesday, posted Saturday from San Francisco.”
    “So if she’s quit, why are they saying she’s on leave?”
    “They want her back. She has a contract and they don’t want to let her out of it without a fight. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, Birnbaum was killed because of this case.”
    “How do you know?”
    I ran it down for him, about the files and all. He was suitably impressed. “So what are you going to do if I put you on the payroll? Solve it?”
    “Right, chief.”
    He sighed. “Be careful, Paul.”
    He hung up before I could ask to be switched to the library. So I called back and broke the news that I was back, however briefly. Then I named a few names and pretty soon a female voice was reading to me. It was very soothing.
    The voice read me a story written about Lindsay Hearne four or five years back, when she won the Peabody Award, which, I gather, is something like a Pulitzer in the broadcasting field. Lindsay won it for exposing a massive cover-up involving a breeder reactor at a government lab in the East Bay Hills— a machine that was masquerading as some sort of helpful friend to mankind, but which could be used to whip up a little plutonium any time a bomb was needed. She got that story when she’d been in San Francisco about six months.
    Before she came here with Koehler, she’d been, as I told Joey, a humble newspaper reporter. She’d worked first in Louisiana and then in Michigan. She hadn’t won a Pulitzer, but that was about the only journalistic honor she hadn’t bagged before she went into TV, which was an excellent move on her part.
    She was a great reporter. I said it and I meant it. Great. One of the best I ever saw. And she was also a fine figger of a woman. TV was unquestionably her medium.
    After the soothing voice got done with Lindsay, I asked it to move on to Jacob. It said Jacob had worked at Stanford with Paul Berg, the first guy to get the Nobel for genetic engineering, which, in case you don’t know, is a simple little process by which you can recombine DNA, the stuff that genes are made of, and invent new organisms. You probably think only God can make a tree, and you’re right; scientists just splice viruses and bacteria together to make new bugs. But gene-splicing is thought to have quite a future.
    Anyway, Berg did it first and he was Jacob’s mentor. Then Jacob improved on Berg’s method and won his own Nobel.
    Other whiz kids in the field, Herbert Boyer and Ronald Cape, left their respective universities and founded genetic engineering companies, Genentech and Cetus. But Koehler and