Finally – it was close to threea.m. – he began to think about the French girl, the one with the straight teeth. With the thought of her, and a little bit of effort on his part (elbow grease was the way he thought of it), Jack Nestor finally began to relax.
It was enough of a date to keep Bradford Simpson happy and not enough of one to worry Rune.
They were at an outdoor table at a Mexican restaurant near the West Side Highway, the table filled with red cans of Tecate beer and chips and salsa – and a ton of material about Lance Hopper and Randy Boggs.
Hehad wanted to ask her out again, as it happened, but Rune was content to keep the evening mostly professional.
Bradford scooted his chair closer to hers and Rune endured a little knee contact while they read through the Hopper files. "Where's Courtney?" Brad asked.
"Let's not go there," Rune said.
"Sure. She's okay?"
Yes, no. Probably not.
"She's fine."
"She's really cute."
Let's notgo there, she thought and turned back to the files on Lance Hopper that Bradford had found in the archives.
As they read she began to form a clearer picture of the late head of Network News.
Hopper was a difficult man – demanding that everyone at the Network work as hard as he did and not let their personal lives interfere with the job. He was also greedy and jealous and petty and wildly ambitious and several times, when his contract was up, virtually extorted the parent company for stock options that increased his worth by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet he was also a man with a heart. For instance, spending as much time with the interns as he did, as Bradford had mentioned. He advocated educational programming for youngsters on the Network, even though shows like that produced far less revenue than after-school cartoons and adventure shows.
Hopper regularly appeared in Washington before the FCC and congressional committees, testifying about the importance of unfettered media. He was often vilified by conservative, family-oriented groups, who thought there should be more censorship in the media.
Hopper also took responsibility for the worst black eye in the history of the Network. Three years ago – just before his death – the Network had run an award-winning story as part of the coverage of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. The story was an exclusive about a village outside of Beirut that appeared to be liberal-minded and pro-Western but was in fact a stronghold for fundamentalist militants.
But when a U.N. force made a sweep of the village to look for suspected terrorists they were so prepared to meet resistance that the operation turned into a blood-bath after a solitary sniper fired one shot near the convoy. A chain reaction of shooting followed. There were twenty-eight deaths, all by friendly fire, including some soldiers. The sniper was a ten-year-old boy shooting at rocks. The militants, it seemed, had left a week before. Some blamed the U.N. for relying on a news story for its intelligence but most people thought it was the Network's fault for doing the story in the first place or for not at least following up and reporting that the terrorists were no longer there.
Hopper took responsibility for the incident and personally went to Beirut to attend the funerals of the slain villagers.
Bradford and Rune continued to pore over the files, and though a portrait of Hopper as a complex, ambitious and ruthless man appeared, no evident motive for his death emerged.
From there they turned to the transcripts of interviews Rune had made over the past week as she'd
traveled around the East Coast and the South talking to people who knew Randy Boggs.
Yeah, Randy Boggs worked for me for close to two years. He come in and was looking for a job. Good boy. Dependable. He wasn't no killer. He pushed a broom with the best of them. I'm sure it was the sixties. We had the Negro problem then. Course, we still have the Negro problem. 'Bout that, I'd like to say a few words, seeing how you have a camera-
Next…
Randy Boggs? Yeah, I knew the Boggs family. Boys I don't remember. Father was a mean motherfucker. Man, the-
Next…
Randy? Yeah. We had this lobster business. But -you got the camera rolling? Okay, let me tell you this story. The wife and I were one time over to Portland and we were driving in the Chevy – we always buy American cars, even if they 're a pile of you know what. So we were driving along and there were these three lights in the sky, and we knew they weren't planes because they were so bright. Then one of them-
Next…
Rune yawned violently.
"You okay?" Bradford asked.
"Moreorless." She opened another file.
Her life had become an endless circle of long hours by herself, of flying on airplanes and staying in hotels that somebody else paid for, of tense meetings at the Network, of interviews that sometimes careened out of control and sometimes worked, of a lonely houseboat, of a chaotic editing room. (One morning she woke up to find that she'd fallen asleep with the Betacam next to her – which wasn't so scary as the fact that she'd slept with her arm around it all night.) She gave up late-night clubs, she gave up West Village writers' bars. Even gave up seeing Sam Healy much. Piper Sutton would occasionally swoop by Rune's cubicle for a status report, like an eagle grabbing a squirming trout in its talons.
As she and Bradford pored over all this material now, amid the raucous laughter and boasting and flirting of dozens of young lawyers and businesspeople drunk on tequila and the thrill of life in Manhattan, Rune felt both more and more incensed that such a vital and important man as Lance Hopper had been killed and more and more certain that Randy Boggs hadn't done it.
12
Come on, Sam. Please?" She'd tried charm, and now she was trying pleading.
But Sam Healy was a detective who disposed of bombs for a living; it was tough to talk someone like that into anything he didn't want to do.
They were sitting on the back deck of the boathouse, drinking beers and eating microwave popcorn.
"I just want to look at it. One little file."
"I can't get access to the files in the Twentieth Precinct. I'm Bomb Squad. Why would they even talk to me?"
Rune had spent a lot of time trying to decide if she was in love with this man. She thought she was in a way. But today wasn't like the old days -whenever they were – when you were either in love or you weren't. Love was a lot more complicated now. There were degrees, there werephases of love.
It kicked in and out like a compressor in an air conditioner. She and Healy could talk easily. And laugh. She liked the way he looked like a man in a Marlboro ad. She liked the way his eyes were completely calm and deeper than any man's eyes she'd ever seen. But what she missed was that gut-twist, that weight-losing obsession with the object of your desire that was Rune's favorite kind of love even though it was totally rare.
Also, Healy was married.
Which, oddly, didn't bother Rune that much. At least he was separated and had no problem being bluntly honest about the times he saw Cheryl. Rune looked at his marriage like an air bag in a car – a safety feature. Maybe when she got older, if they were still together, she'd force him to make a decision. But for now his marriage was his business. All she wanted was honesty and a boyfriend who kept you guessing. And no boyfriend kept you guessing like one on the New York City Bomb Squad.
Rune said, "They got the wrong man."
"I know your theory about Boggs."
"I don't need to prowl around the evidence room. I just want to read one file."