She was going insane. That was the problem. She had been sitting in the office since seven, and not one single practical thing was done. The network wasn’t going to run itself. The contracts weren’t going to get signed. The talk show hosts and disc jockeys weren’t going to get monitored—and you had to monitor them. The network ran mostly conservatives, so there wasn’t usually a problem with the FCC on obscenity, but there was always the danger that one of these guys would commit slander on the air or challenge a sitting United States general to a duel at high noon. That would be funny, except that a guy named Charlie Little had done it once, and the general in question had shown up at the studio loaded for bear. Frank was probably right. The general probably wouldn’t have done anything. It would have ruined his career. Still.
In the end, Marla always did come back to liking herself as she was. There was a lot of satisfaction in it. She wasn’t a Genius, so she didn’t have to prove her depth and originality at every moment. She wasn’t a Creative, so she didn’t have to show her disdain for society by wearing silly clothes and swearing a lot. She wasn’t a Titan of the Industry, so she didn’t have to win every battle she fought and only be seen in cars that cost more than most people made in the course of two years. She wasn’t beautiful, so she didn’t have to rush around to plastic surgeons to stem the tide of time with Botox and lifts. She had nothing to prove, and that made it far easier to do her work, do it well, and stay employed.
Even in high school, when everybody had been working so hard to be cool and popular, she had known better than to try to be either. If you just went your way, if you just did what you were supposed to do when you were supposed to do it—well, then, everything would be all right. You would get where you were going. You would have what you wanted. You would be who you wanted to be in the end.
The problem was, she didn’t remember what she had been doing on the night of January 27. The chances were good that she had been here, talking to Frank about something, but she didn’t actually know if she had, or what they’d been talking about. And the police would ask. She knew they would. They would look into her life, too, and although they would find nothing there, nothing she had to be ashamed of, nothing that could be construed as damaging—well, they might not find anything like that, but they were bound to search the building. They were bound to check into the fires she had put out over the years. They were bound to do a lot of things. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed it ought to be to display your innocence in a murder investigation.
She got up, went over to her filing cabinet, and then remembered she needed her key. The computer was supposed to usher in the new paperless office and make furniture like the filing cabinet completely obsolete, but Marla didn’t know any large office anywhere without a few of these cabinets. She wondered what other people kept in them. She kept files, but then the cabinets had been built to hold files.
She got the key out of her purse and the top drawer of the cabinet opened up. She took out the entire stack of folders inside. They were ordinary manila folders, legal sized, color-coded with stick-on tabs. One of them held the documentation in a hit-and-run case in Palm Harbor, Florida. Fortunately, the kid who’d been hit hadn’t died, and hadn’t been permanently injured. He’d just been thrown from his bike and stuck in the hospital for six weeks in traction, because he broke both his legs and his collarbone in the fall. One of them held the documentation in a shoplifting case in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That one had been a little stickier. There were photographs of three gold cigarette lighters, two Rolex diamond watches, and a woman’s turquoise and onyx necklace making their way into pockets and out the door. Marla couldn’t remember how many times she had told her people only to shop in the very best stores. If they were overtaken by a fit of kleptomania in a place like that, well, the store would be used to it, and used to covering it up. One of them held the documentation in a stalking case in Enid, Oklahoma. That had been the easiest of them all, because it had just been a question of transferring the idiot out of Oklahoma to somewhere he wouldn’t have access to the girl, which meant Portland, Maine. There hadn’t been another girl, for which Marla was grateful. She was less grateful that the girl in Enid, Oklahoma, had been fifteen years old, and that the disc jockey in question had been arrested for the third and definitive time when he’d gotten himself completely tanked on Stolichnaya, stripped to the skin, and stationed himself in her backyard beneath her bedroom window. When the police picked him up, he’d been baying at the moon, or something.