Sort of, Rune thought. She said, "I don't know what to do, Lee. What's your totally, totally honest opinion about my story?"
Maisel was considering. A gold clock began pinging off the hours to ten P.M. When it hit eight he said, "I'm not going to do you any favors by being delicate. The Boggs story? You take it way too personally. And that's unprofessional. I get the impression that you're on some kind of holy quest. You--"
"But he's innocent, and nobody else--"
"Rune," he said harshly. "You asked my opinion. Let me finish."
"Sorry."
&nbs
p; "You're not looking at the whole picture. You've got to understand that journalism has a responsibility to be totally unbiased. You're not. With Boggs you're one of the most goddamn biased reporters I've ever worked with."
"True," she said.
"That makes for a noble person maybe but it's not journalism."
"That's sort of what Piper told me too."
"There's government corruption and incompetence everywhere, there're human rights violations in South America, Africa and China, there's homelessness, there's child abuse in day-care centers.... There are so many important issues that media has to choose from and so few minutes to talk about them. What you've done is pick a very small story. It's not a bad story; it's just an insignificant one."
She looked off, scanning Maisel's wall absently. She wondered if she'd find an omen--an old map of England, maybe. She didn't.
A minute passed.
He said, "It's got to be your decision. I think the best advice I can give you is, sleep on it."
"You mean, stay up all night tossing and turning and stewing about it."
"That might work too."
THE TWENTIETH PRECINCT, ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE, was considered a plum by a lot of cops.
The Hispanic gangs had been squeezed north, the Black Panthers were nothing more than a bit of nostalgia, and no-man's-land--Central Park--had its very own precinct to take care of the muggings and drug dealers. What you had in the Twentieth mostly were domestic disputes, shopliftings, an occasional rape. The piles of auto glass, like tiny green-blue ice cubes, marked what was maybe the most common crime: stealing Blaupunkts or Panasonics from dashboards. Two yuppies who'd scrunched BMW fenders might get into a shoving match in front of Zabar's. An insider trader might commit suicide occasionally. But things didn't get much worse than that.
There was a lot of traffic in and out of the low, 1960s decor brick-and-glass precinct station. Community relations was a priority here and more people came through the doors of the Twentieth to attend meetings or just hang out with the cops than to report muggings.
So the desk sergeant--a beefy, moustachioed blond cop--didn't think twice about her, this young, miniskirted mother, about twenty, who had a cute-as-a-button three-or four-year-old in tow on this warm afternoon. She walked right up to him and said she had a complaint about the quality of police protection in the neighborhood.
The cop didn't really care, of course. He liked concerned citizens about as much as he liked his hemorrhoids and he almost felt sorry for the petty street dealers and hangers-out and drunks who got pushed around by these wild-eyed, lecturing, upstanding, taxpaying citizens--the women being the worst. But he'd studied community relations at the Police Academy and so now, though he couldn't bring himself to smile pleasantly at this short woman, he nodded as if he were interested in what she had to say.
"You guys aren't doing a good job patrolling. My little girl and I were out on the street, just taking a walk--"
"Yes, miss. Did someone hassle you?"
She gave him a glare for the interruption. "We were taking a walk and do you know what we found on the street?"
"Nade," the little girl said.
The cop infinitely preferred to talk to the little girl. He may have hated intense, short, concerned citizens but he loved kids. He leaned forward, grinning like a department-store Santa the first day on the job. "Honey, is that your name?"
"Nade."
"Uh-huh, that's a pretty name." Oh, she was so goddamn cute, he couldn't believe it. The way she was digging in her own little patent-leather purse, trying to look grown up. He didn't like the lime-green miniskirt she was wearing and he was thinking maybe the sunglasses around the girl's neck, on that yellow strap, might be dangerous. Her mother oughtn't to be dressing her in that crap. Little girls should be wearing that frilly stuff like his wife bought for their nieces.
The good-citizen mother said, "Show him what we found, baby."
The cop talked the singsongy language that adults think children respond to. "My brother's little girl has a purse like that. What do you have in there, honey? Your dolly?"