Deadline Man

“Shoot.”

“Troy Hardesty.”

She looks relieved. “He’s as clean as they come in a dirty industry. Was. What a horrible thing.”

“I was there. We had just had a meeting. I was down on the street.”

She says my name in a way that makes me miss her. I ask her if she knew anything about him.

“Only what I read, mostly. He was a man who seemed to have everything to live for: pretty wife, private airplane, the big house over on Mercer Island. I went to a party there once with Chad.” Her husband. “This was about a year ago.”

“Those cozy regulators.”

“Stop it. He wasn’t under investigation, and Chad was doing some IT work for one of Troy’s friends. Anyway, no expense was spared. I could get a real taste for beluga caviar…”

“So nothing wrong with his hedge fund…”

“That I knew of,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound cold, but the suicide of a big investor isn’t exactly a surprise nowadays. But was he a Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford? If he was, it sure hasn’t come to our attention.”

“Was he faithful to his wife?”

“The columnist digs for dirt. How would I know that?”

“No taste for young girls?”

She laughs loudly. Wendy has a great laugh. “We don’t have a morals division at the SEC.”

“So why would the FBI be investigating him?”

She eyes me warily, as if she’s afraid I am going to drag her into some bureaucratic swamp. She holds up her hands. “I just can’t tell you. I mean, I don’t know.”

I let it go. Something ties Hardesty to Megan Nyberg. I let the conversation drift and she’s telling me about their ski trips to Whistler last year, about fixing up their house in Magnolia. It all sounds very domestic and predictable and I am happy for her. When the drinks are drained, I pay the bill and ask her about eleven-eleven. She shrugs and smiles, says, “I’m pretty out of it when it comes to pop culture,” and we st

ep out into the night.

It’s starting to rain a very fine mist and the street is turned dark black.

“I can’t believe October is almost over,” she says.

“Do you know what a national security letter looks like?”

She hesitates, bites her lip. Finally, “You know I can’t even go there.”

“But you know what one looks like. Just hypothetically.”

“Just hypothetically.”

I stand there letting the mist gather on my forehead. She raises the hood of her coat.

“Just hypothetically,” she says, “it would have a Justice Department letterhead. It would have some officialese up there, like, ‘In reply, refer to file number’ blah, blah.”

“How would it be worded?”

“Very legalese. ‘Under the authority of Executive Order…’ ‘In accordance with…,’ that kind of thing.”

So far, it sounds very much like the piece of paper I saw on my table the other morning. “And it would be signed?”

“Of course.”