She hung up her raincoat, then led me into a narrow place defined on both sides by tall filing cabinets. It was crowded with desks, maybe a dozen of them packed into a space the size of a medium-sized living room. It was like walking into a canyon: it was part of the newsroom yet it wasn’t, because an editor couldn’t see in there without getting up and making the grand effort. I didn’t have to be a reporter to know what a coveted spot it was…out of sight, out of mind. Her desk was far back in the corner, as secluded as you could get without moving up in management, getting yourself glassed in and becoming a different breed of cat.
She sat and motioned me to a chair. She looked different somehow from the image I had retained from our one meeting in the courthouse cafeteria. She looked harder and tougher, more of the world. Then she smiled, like the child looking up at Frankenstein’s monster, and I felt good again.
“Nice racket you’ve got,” I said. “You people must get some great poker games going back here.”
“We call it the Dead Zone. They’ll have to kill me to get this desk.”
“Are they trying?”
“So they say.”
She didn’t push me. If I wanted to small-talk and break the ice, she could do that. She was looking straight in my eyes.
“You look miserable…tired, wet, and hungry.”
I nodded. “Your city has not treated me well.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and managed to look it. “You’ve come in the rainy season.”
“Oh. How long does that last?”
“Almost all year.”
She offered coffee but I had had enough. We looked at each other across her desk.
“I came here from Miami,” she said. “My first month was a killer. It rained twenty-eight out of thirty days. I was a basket case. I was ready to go anywhere. If the newspaper in Grand Island, Nebraska, had offered me a job covering the grasshopper beat, I’d‘ve been on the next bus out of here. Then it cleared up and I learned what a sensational place this is.”
“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“There’re two secrets to living here. You’ve got to dress for weather and you can’t let it get you down.”
“That’s two for two I missed.”
“Now the only thing that bothers me is the traffic. This town has got to be the worst bottleneck in the United States. It’s great as long as you don’t need to drive, or if you do need to drive, you don’t need to park.”
“It sounds better by the minute.”
“I guess I’m here for the long haul. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. What’s Denver like?”
“I had forgotten what rain looks like till I came here.”
“Sun city, huh?”
“Somebody once said that Denver has more sun and sons of bitches than any other city in the country.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll stay with the rain. I bought a boat last year, I’m a pretty fair sailor now. Sometimes I just take off on Friday and drift up the coast. I put in at some warm-looking marina and spend the weekend exploring. If I’ve got a difficult piece to write, I do it there, out on deck if the weather’s nice.”
“Is that where you wrote your book?”
“Would have, if I’d had it then. Have you read it?”
“Not yet, but it’s high on my list. I just picked up a copy.”
“Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you read.”
I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard a reporter say. She shrugged and said, “It’s a good book, I’m not apologizing for it; if I had it to do over again, I’m sure it’d come out mostly the same. A little better, maybe. That’s the curse of being a writer, you never want to look back at what you did last year because the trip’s too painful. You see stuff you should’ve done better, but now it’s set in stone.”
“What would you change?”
“A thousand little things…and of course I’d write a new ending.”
“Of course?”
“The ending leaves the impression that the Graysons died in an accident. Just some tragic twist of fate.”
“Which is…?”
“Not true.”
“They were murdered, you said.”
“Read the book, then talk to me again. Just keep in mind that the last chapter wasn’t what I would’ve done, then or now.”
“If you didn’t do it, who did?”
“It was sanitized by an editor in New York. The problem was, I had produced this monster-sized book and it was ending with more questions than it answered. They didn’t like that, they felt it would not be satisfying for a reader to go through seven hundred and fifty pages and come out with the kind of questions I was asking. Especially when the experts seemed to agree that it was an accident and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t. The book really didn’t need to end with any unanswered questions at all. They died. That was the end of it.”
“But not for you.”
“I still keep my finger in it. As you can see.”
“You must have something in mind.”
She smiled into the sudden pause that stretched between us. “I’ve been doing some fiction lately. I’m finding a voice, as the literati say. I’ve had three or four pieces in the literary reviews and I’m working on a novel. Maybe that’s how I’ll finally get rid of the Graysons. I read somewhere that fiction’s the only way you can really tell the truth. I never even understood that when I was learning the ropes, but I sure believe it now.”
She gave me a look that said, Hey, I’m not pushing you, but why the hell are we here ?
I said, “I’ve got a deal for you.”
“I already own the Space Needle, I bought it last year. I never could resist a deal.” She got up and came around the desk, patting me on the shoulder. “Let’s go get some breakfast. I don’t think I want to hear this on an empty stomach.”
21
It was a lick and a promise, all I had time for. My reading on her would have to be the abridged version, once over lightly. This is your life, Trish Aandahl, a tour of the high spots. From that I’d decide: move on alone or bring her to the party.
Conventions and courtesies, five minutes. She had grown up in Ohio, her parents simple people who lived for the moment. Life was what it was: you worked at it every day and got up the next day and did it again. Her father had worked for wages in Cincinnati; her mom found jobs in restaurants, dime stores, car washes, wherever there was women’s work that demanded no special skills. They had produced a child unlike either of them, a daughter who didn’t believe in women’s work and grew up thinking she could do most anything. At least the parents had had the wisdom to indulge her differences.
She beat the clock with a minute to spare. She knew I was fishing, but she had tapped into my growing sense of urgency and was willing to give me some rope.
Personal color, three minutes. Trish was her real name, listed that way on her birth certificate. Her mother had named her after a best friend and had never known that the name was a diminutive of Patricia.
She was alone in the world. Her parents were dead and there were no other children. If there was a man in her life, it wasn’t readily apparent. She wore no rings, but that doesn’t mean as much as it once did.
She was amused now, wondering how far I’d go into this Dick-and-Jane style personal Baedeker. I wondered about her gripes and dislikes and gave her one minute for that.
She didn’t need it. Phonies, stuffed shirts, chiselers, and liars. Her code was much like mine, her hate list virtually identical.