“Depends on how much it was.”
“Shit.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“About the meeting. You must have known about it since yesterday.” Maybe you’d known about it longer, I started to say, and that’s why you didn’t so much as call me over the weekend! Restraining myself, I stared tensely at him.
He was studying his wineglass again. After a pause, he replied, “I didn’t see any point in telling you. All it would have done was worry you, and it was my impression the meeting was pro forma—”
“Pro forma?” I looked incredulously at him. “Amburgey’s gagged me and spent half the afternoon tearing apart my office and that’s pro forma?”
“I feel sure some of what he did was sparked by your disclosure of the computer violation, Kay. And I didn’t know about that yesterday. Hell, you didn’t even know about that yesterday.”
“I see,” I said coldly. “No one knew about it until I told them.”
Silence.
“What are you implying?”
“It just seemed an incredible coincidence we discovered the violation just hours before he called me to his office. I had the peculiar thought that maybe he knew . . .”
“Maybe he did.”
“That certainly reassures me.”
“It’s moot anyway,” he easily went on. “So what if Amburgey knew about the violation by the time you came to his office this afternoon? Maybe somebody talked—your computer analyst, for example. And the rumor drifted up to the twenty-fourth floor.” He shrugged. “It just gave him one more worry, right? You didn’t trip yourself up, if that’s the case, because you were smart enough to tell the truth.”
“I always tell the truth.”
“Not always,” he remarked slyly. “You routinely lie about us—by omission—”
“So maybe he knew,” I cut him off. “I just want to hear you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.” He looked intensely at me. “I swear. If I’d heard anything about it, I would have forewarned you, Kay. I would have run to the nearest phone booth—”
“And charged out as Superman.”
“Hell,” he muttered, “now you’re making fun of me.”
He was in his boyish wounded manifestation. Bill had a lot of roles and he played all of them extraordinarily well. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe he was so smitten with me. Was that a role as well?
I think he had a starring role in the fantasies of half the city’s women, and his campaign manager was shrewd enough to take advantage of it. Photographs of Bill had been plastered over restaurant and store-fronts, and nailed to telephone poles on virtually every city block. Who could resist that face? He was stunningly handsome, his hair streaked straw-blond, his complexion perpetually sunburned from the many hours he spent each week at his tennis club. It was hard not to stare openly at him.
“I’m not making fun of you,” I said wearily. “Really, Bill. And let’s not fight.”
“Fine by me.”
“I’m just sick. I don’t have any idea what to do.”
Apparently he’d already thought about this, and he said, “It would be helpful if you could figure out who’s been getting into your data.” A pause. “Or better, if you could prove it.”
“Prove it?” I looked warily at him. “Are you suggesting you have a suspect?”
“Not based on any fact.”
“Who?” I lit a cigarette.
His attention drifted across the kitchen. “Abby Turnbull is top on my list.”
“I thought you were going to tell me something I couldn’t have figured out on my own.”
“I’m dead serious, Kay.”
“So she’s an ambitious reporter,” I said irritably. “Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of hearing about her. She’s not as powerful as everyone makes her out to be.”
Bill set his wineglass on the table with a sharp click. “The hell she isn’t,” he retorted, staring at me. “The woman’s a goddam snake. I know she’s an ambitious reporter and all that shit. But she’s worse than anybody imagines. She’s vicious and manipulative and extremely dangerous. The bitch would stoop to anything.”
His vehemence startled me into silence. It was un-characteristic of him to use such vitriolic terms in describing anyone. Especially someone I assumed he scarcely knew.
“Remember that story she did on me a month or so back?”
Not long ago the Times finally got around to the obligatory profile of the city’s new Commonwealth’s attorney. The story was a rather lengthy spread that ran in the Sunday paper, and I didn’t remember in detail what Abby Turnbull had written except that the piece struck me as unusually colorless considering its author.