True-Life Adventure

“I couldn’t miss it, could I?”
    “Well?” Journalists are like two-year-old children. They have to be patted on the head and told “good boy” every time they go to the bathroom. I was looking for a pat. She wasn’t giving it:
    “Well what?”
    “What do you think?”
    She shrugged. “It was okay.”
    She got up and left for work.
    The average person might have spent five minutes or so staring into space and dwelling on his hurt feelings, but I have excellent powers of concentration. I simply turned to the comics section, read Doonesbury , Gordo , and Fred Bassett. My attention probably wouldn’t have strayed throughout a reading of the whole paper, but we’ll never know. A ringing telephone interrupted this John Wayne- like project.
    It was Susanna Flores: “Paul? We’ve got an I.D. on the mystery woman.”
    So caught up was I in “Letters to the Editor” that I temporarily forgot what mystery woman we were talking about. “Umph?” I said. “Umph. Yes. The woman Lindsay met at the Hunan.”
    “It was Marilyn Markham. The cameraman saw her picture this morning. Good piece, by the way.”
    “Oh. Thanks.” Good heavens. The hoped-for pat on the head. “He’s sure it was Markham?”
    “Quite sure.”
    “Good. How are you, by the way? Any more threatening calls?”
    “No, thank God. Everything seems fine.”
    I rang off, phoned Marilyn at Kogene, and asked her how she liked the story. I couldn’t resist the opportunity for another pat. But it wasn’t forthcoming.
    “It was… fine,” she said, in the brave, reluctant tone you might use if your hostess asked how you’d liked your brains and capers.
    All right, then. If she was going to be brutal, so was I. “Did you tell the cops,” I said, “that you saw Lindsay the night before she disappeared?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I think they’d be interested,” I said.
    “What is this? Some kind of blackmail attempt?”
    “Dr. Markham, please.” I can be very haughty when I don’t get my pats. “I think we both want the same thing. Maybe we can work together.”
    “What do you want?”
    “To find Lindsay Hearne, of course. Don’t you?”
    She sucked in her breath. “Yes. Of course.”
    “I’d like to talk to you about your meeting with her. I don’t know how to say this exactly, but I think we should talk alone. I mean—” I meant outside Jacob’s presence, but I didn’t have to say so. She interrupted me, sounding resigned.
    “I suppose we should. Can you come here at seven P.M.? I’ll say I’m working late and send Jacob home to make dinner.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    I didn’t have much to do all day. I figured to go into the office and see if I could collect a few more pats, but other than that I was a bit at loose ends. So I sat around the kitchen awhile and had some more coffee and made myself a bagel. I was feeling kind of tense and I didn’t know quite why.
    Sardis called around eleven. “I’m sorry I was a bitch this morning.”
    “You weren’t a bitch. A couple of months at charm school’d probably fix you right up.”
    Silence.
    “Sardis? Hey, Sardis? Little joke. Honest.”
    More silence.
    “Listen, you weren’t a bitch, really. It’s nice of you to call.”
    “I thought your story was good.” Her voice sounded all teary.
    “You did? Hey, forget charm school. Listen, want to run for president? I’ll vote for you, and I think my mother will and I have this friend named Debbie Hofer who might…”
    “Coming home for dinner? We could have cold pork roast.”
    “Could we make it late?” I told her about my date with the mystery woman and we agreed to have dinner afterward.
    Things were okay between us again. Or so I imagined. I may have mentioned that I make it a point not to think about things I don’t want to think about.
    I went out, photocopied Terry Koehler’s hospital file, bought a manila envelope for the original, and mailed it back to Moffitt Hospital. I wanted to be rid of the thing before I went into the office because I had a feeling there was going to be a police beat story about a certain burglary that Joey was going to ask me some questions about. I was going to have to compound all my other sins by lying to my city editor.
    I went in and got that out of the way (“Who, me, Boss? Oh, come on. How could you even think…”), wrote a few fan letters to my favorite detective novelists, did a few pages of my own book, and generally passed a pleasant day. I