Harry basked in her good fellowship, and they smiled at one another in honest pleasure. He might have an undimmable belief in his winning ways with the fair sex — as he himself would no doubt have phrased it — but he and Sara had gotten all that nonsense out of the way at the very beginning of her time with the Galaxy, and now the sight of him merely brought back those old days of heady irresponsibility, when sneaking a microphone into a television star’s bathroom was the height of journalistic achievement. She could look herself in the mirror these days, an honest and worthwhile human being, a decent citizen, a true investigative reporter for a serious and respectable magazine; but she had to admit, those old days had been fun. The sight of Harry Razza brought it all back.
As did Harry’s next remark: “A terrible place, this, Sara. You must have done something astonishingly wrong in your new employment to be exiled out to these pastures.”
“Come on, Harry,” she said, “we’re both here for Ray Jones, and you know it.”
“Some sort of minstrel, I understand,” Harry said, waving away Ray Jones with a dismissive hand. “Became a bit too enthusiastic in the hayloft; the bint din’t survive.” Casually, he added, “She’s a cousin of Princess Di, you know.”
Sara laughed out loud and accepted her key from the extremely nice lady, who was at this moment sprouting extra ears all over her clean forehead and concrete-permed hair. “Harry, you guys are still the same,” Sara said, picking up her bag. “I’ll see you.”
“Not one place to drink in this hamlet,” Harry informed her. “That’s how horrid it is. We’ve set up a little hospitality suite, you know, just for our friends, over at the Palace. You go out here,” he said, pointing at the door, “turn left, go just one mile through this horror, and you’ll find a cottage inaccurately called the Palace. We’re in Two-two-two. Easy to remember, yes?”
“Very easy,” Sara agreed.
Harry stepped closer, lowering his voice, looking serious and concerned. “I’ll tell you how bad this place is,” he murmured. “They have an Australian restaurant. Could you believe it? With oysters.”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
“Look about you, Sara,” Harry advised. “Do you see an ocean?”
“You may be right,” Sara said. “See you later, Harry.”
“Don’t forget. Two-two-two.”
“I’ll remember,” Sara assured him, then went up to her standard-issue motel room, neat and inert. Having unpacked, she phoned Jack Ingersoll, her editor back in New York, to say, “While checking in, I ran into Harry Razza.”
“Oh, good old Harry,” Jack’s voice said in her ear. Jack, too, had worked for the Galaxy at one time, where he’d been both Sara’s and Harry’s editor. “Did he try to get you drunk?”
“Apparently that’s difficult in this town. No major hotel with a bar, no airport with a bar, nothing central and useful. So the Galaxy’s set up a hospitality suite at one of the other motels. The Down Under Trio’s out rounding up the nation’s press.”
“Go over there,” Jack said.
Surprised, Sara said, “What? Why? You know what they’re up to; it’s the same stuff they used to do for you.”
Which was to eliminate the competition. Given a story like the upcoming Ray Jones trial, the Galaxy would undoubtedly flood the area with anywhere from fifty to a hundred reporters and photographers and sneak thieves, and the task of the Down Under Trio was to distract, befuddle, and snooker the rest of the press, thus hobbling the world of journalism with booze and disinformation like the Princess Di gambit, while keeping all actual scoops and sidebars and juicy tidbits in the story for themselves; that is, for their team at the Galaxy. Sara might once have been a coworker of Harry Razza’s, but today she was a rival, so why would Jack want her to fly into the Galaxy’s web?
“Because,” Jack explained, “they need stuff for this week’s paper, and you don’t. You are there to study the whole scene, to do a think piece and a summing-up after it’s all over. And what’s going to be a big part of that scene, all along the way? The Weekly Galaxy.”
“Ah,” Sara said, following the idea. One concept that Jack had retained from his days on the Galaxy was that the story is never really the story. The story is just the doorway that lets you get inside and find and cover the real story, the story you want to cover. So Jack had just nosed out one possible story, which was not, in fact, the upcoming murder trial of country singer Ray Jones but was — surprise, surprise — the Weekly Galaxy. In the past. Trend had tried and failed to do a Weekly Galaxy exposé; maybe this was the time.
This could be fun, Sara thought, and said, “Two-two-two.”
“Right you are,” Jack said, misunderstanding.
5
After a late lunch with some state legislators over in Branson, Warren Thurbridge drove back to the defense team’s offices in Forsyth, the county seat, and when he walked in, Jim Chancellor was standing there, a lot of computer printout in his hands. He had good news, and he had bad news. “We’ve got our first jury lists. We can go over them now,” he said. “The phone company’s at work in your office, so maybe we should use the conference room.”
“Phone company?” Warren didn’t like that; everything was supposed to be done and ready to go. “What for?”
“Beats me,” Jim said. He was a local attorney, under forty, amiable, chunky, with a good sport’s thick black mustache. “They just said there was a little glitch.”
Warren, frowning massively, strode to his office, stood in the doorway, and there they were, a man and woman, both in plaid shirts and jeans and work boots, both wearing white hard hats with the word CONTEL on the side, both lumbered with big heavy tool belts jangling and dangling with equipment. They had Warren’s desk shoved out of the way and were doing something to the spaghetti of phone wires at the baseboard along the back wall. While the man went on working with a small screwdriver, the woman, apparently sensing the weight of Warren’s glare on her back, turned, smiled brightly, and said, “Just a couple more minutes.”
Jim stood behind Warren, outside the room. “We can use the conference room, Warren,” he said. He was new at saying “Warren,” and it came out a trifle lumpy.
But Warren pointed to the papers in Jim’s hands and said, “That stuff’s our secret. We’ll wait.”
“You’re the boss,” Jim said.
That’s right. Warren Thurbridge was not Ray Jones’s criminal lawyer. He was much more than that; he was the chief attorney of Ray Jones’s defense team. As such, he was a cross between a battlefield commander and a movie producer, and he looked the part: distinguished, handsome, confident, heavyset, a very well preserved sixty-one, with silvery hair and piercing eyes and a booming laugh that could as readily turn into a roar of rage or a silken snakelike hiss of contempt.
What Warren Thurbridge was good at was deploying large forces to powerful effect. He wouldn’t be a damn bit of use one-on-one, walking into court as a lone counselor arguing the case of one small defendant. But that didn’t matter; no one would ever think to offer him such a job. Nor would he accept it. What he would accept, and happily, was the Ray Jones kind of case. Lots of publicity, lots of money, and maybe even a shot at getting the son of a bitch off. Perfect.