27
That was the worst of the heat, I remember. The rain pretty much broke the back of it. August ended mild, and there was a chill in the air of September. After Labor Day, the temperature did not touch eighty again.
By then, of course, the election was in full swing. Abingdon wasn’t a candidate anymore. He’d stepped down and been replaced on the ticket by a state assemblyman named George Kelly. George was nothing special, but no one could find anything wrong with him either. At the end of October, he was running ahead in the polls by several lengths.
It seemed pretty clear he was going to beat Christian Maldonado, at any rate. Old Mr. M.’s campaign faltered grievously after my series linking him to Marino and Dellacroce hit the stands. In October, too, Alphonse Marino himself turned up in the trunk of an ’84 Cadillac. His hands and feet had been tied together and his head had been blown apart. Many political observers took this to mean that Maldonado had lost his base of support. The candidate never did concede defeat but that didn’t seem to matter much to anyone but him.
All that, though, was at election time, when an old reporter’s fancy turns to thoughts of selling insurance for a living. All that came later, in the fall.
It was Georgia Stuart’s death that night that seemed to end the summer for me, and the long dearth of news that marked the summer. Her death did a lot of things for me, in fact. It got me off the hook. Saved my career, my reputation, probably my life. When she died, I got a story that would put the Star on top of the Abingdon scandal for good. I didn’t have to worry that she would try to discredit me by lying—or even telling the truth—about our hour together. And, her murder led the cops to search through Wally Shakespeare’s luggage, a search that turned up the well-thumbed pictures of Georgia and Abingdon to prove my word was good. Finally, with Georgia dead, with the full story told, Dellacroce had no real reason to send his goons after me anymore. He was unlikely to chance hitting a reporter just to save face.
So all in all, I did pretty well on Georgia’s murder. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it is. You can’t get involved with a dirty little story without getting dirty yourself. Hell, maybe you wouldn’t get involved at all, if you didn’t have some of the dirt on you to begin with.
All things considered, then, maybe I should have been grateful to Wally Shakespeare for killing his girl. Maybe it was thankless of me to call the police on him. But I did. As soon as he moved off into the rain that night, I left Georgia’s side. I shouldered through the storm to the pay phone on the corner. I called the cops first. Then I called the paper. I got Harriet Coleman, an assistant city editor.
“Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite,” I said.
“Who is this?”
“Wells.”
“Stop kidding around, Wells, we’re on deadline. Jesus.”
“Well, hold page one.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“I mean it. You know the girl in the Abingdon photos?”
“The imaginary girl in the imaginary photos?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s got an imaginary bullet hole in her imaginary head, I know who the imaginary killer is, and if you don’t give me a rewrite man, you’re going to have an imaginary job.”
She laughed. “I can’t believe this. You’re serious. You really want me to remake page one and get you rewrite.”
“I even called you sweetheart.”
“God, this is great. Wait till I tell my husband. Hold on. I’ll pass you on to McKay.”
So I told my story to McKay and he wrote it for me. It wasn’t everything, not yet. But it was more than anyone else would have for hours to come. Later, with Gottlieb’s help, I pieced together the rest of it. How Georgia had come to New York and adopted the stage name of April Thomas. How she quickly grew weary of the cold, cruel world of the New York theater. She was probably more than ready for a change of pace when Allen Simon from the Abingdon campaign came into her life. Georgia must have realized pretty fast that he had two things she could use: connections, and an apartment. The apartment turned out to be by far the more useful of the two. A move to a more elegant location could only help her in her career, and it would help her avoid Wally, too, who had phoned her from California by then. But after she hooked into Abingdon himself, the move seemed positively inspired. Delilah, Kendrick’s girlfriend, told me that Georgia offered her old apartment to Kendrick as a base of operations for his new business enterprise. In return, all he had to do was take a couple of photographs and peddle them to the press. No money down and instant celebrity for Georgia Stuart, who’d decided, by that time, that her old name would do just fine. When Kendrick got killed, Marino got the story from Delilah and told her to keep her mouth shut. She did.
So Kendrick moved into Georgia’s apartment—and that’s when Wally showed up. He came looking for his girl and found Kendrick instead. Kendrick laughed at him, told him that Georgia didn’t want to see him. When that didn’t take, Kendrick, still laughing, showed him the pictures. Kendrick was laughing still when Wally pulled out his dad’s old crow shooter and, with many a biblical remonstrance, blew out the little pimp’s brains.
That last part of it was in Wally’s confession. The cops got it out of him the very night he killed the girl he loved. After they came and got Georgia’s body and talked to me, they put out a call for him. Rounded him up in Times Square not an hour later. He was standing in the rain underneath the news zipper on the Number One tower. He was preaching to the storm, waving his gun in the air, shouting fire and brimstone over the lightning and thunder. Above him, a belt of electric letters carried word of the day’s events around and around.
We got the arrest into the final edition. The Daily News ran a brief on it, too, but they did not have the link to Abingdon. After that, I stuck with it just to make sure nothing supped by me. I hung out with the police until midnight or so and then came back to the office to write up my notes.
Around seven the next morning, I was awakened by a gentle prodding at my shoulder. I opened my eyes to find my cheek resting against the cold, hard top plate of my Olympia. I raised my head and blinked up into the face of Lansing.
“I figured I’d find you here,” she said softly. She smiled.
She’d brought me coffee and a bagel. She rolled a chair up to my cubicle door and watched me eat. Behind her, the city room’s maze of white partitions stood silent. I saw a janitor pushing a vacuum against the far wall.
“You still talking to me?” Lansing asked me.
“Yeah, hell, more or less,” I said around a mouthful. “Why are you here so early anyway?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
I nodded. I sipped my coffee. I ate my bagel.
“Thinking,” she said.
I nodded. I sipped. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I said.
She looked down at the tips of her shoes. She shook her head. I watched her hair whip back and forth.
“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “why Bush let me get away with this. After I insulted him and all. Why’d he give me a chance to get this story? Why didn’t he just fire me?”
She looked up at me from under lowered brows. Her mouth turned upward at the corners. The story of my meeting with the people upstairs was all over the city room by now. “Is that really what you’ve been thinking about?”
“Yeah, off and on. Among other things. You know.” I sipped. I ate.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve heard,” said Lansing.
“Okay.”
“I’ve heard our friend Cambridge has had it. I’ve heard he’s through at the Star.”
“Come on,” I said. “Wishful thinking.”
“Maybe,” said Lansing. “But Bush must have had something in mind when he gave you a chance like that. I figure he’s been listening to Cambridge beef about you long enough, he decided it was time to see for himself who was right. When Cambridge made this play to get rid of you, Bush decided to set the two of you off against each other. If you didn’t come through, you wou
ld have been out. The way it is, I think Cambridge better start looking for another paper to relate to.”
I shook my head. “Office politics. It’s all too complicated for me.”
She made a face. “I’ll bet.”
I polished off the bagel. I lit a cigarette. Lansing watched me with her blue, blue eyes. I watched her back. I sipped my coffee. I smoked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve been giving you such a hard—”
“What’s it like out?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Is it still raining?”
“Oh. No. No, blue skies all over. Brand new day. But listen—”
“Hot, though?”
She shook her head. “Around eighty. Not humid. Very nice.”
I nodded. I smoked. I drained the coffee.
“I’m not gonna marry him,” said Lansing.
“Who?”
“Wells!”
I laughed. “Okay.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t love him,” she said. “So I’m not going to marry him and that’s it. My mother is just going to have to live with it.”
I smoked. “Okay,” I said.
“I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know I decided that.”
“Okay.”
“But, I mean, it’s my decision. It’s what I want. No one else is to blame.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But I may be a pain for a while. I may be cantankerous.”
“Lansing,” I said, “you’re always cantankerous.”
She reared back in her chair. “I am not. When am I cantankerous?”
“All the time. You’re always a pain, too.”
“Well, what do you think you are, my friend?”
“Tired,” I said. “I’m tired. I need another cup of coffee.” I stood up. “Wanna come? We’ll go over to the terminal, watch the rush.”
“Okay.” She stood in front of me. She looked up at me. All at once, her expression grew soft. Her eyes opened up on a depth of sorrow. Her lips were pursed and her body seemed to lean toward me in a silent appeal.
“Stop looking at me like that, Lansing,” I whispered.
Then I put my hand against her cheek. For a long time, we stood there silently.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by Andrew Klavan
cover design by Jason Gabbert
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The Rain Page 19