The restaurant is chilly and Emma is rubbing her hands to warm up. I switch to her side of the booth and put an arm around her, a courtly deed that improves my mood more than hers. She does perk up when I tell her about that phone call to Charles Chickle—like me, she wants to believe it was really Janet. Neither of us mentions the blood on the carpet. Neither of us touches our wine, either.
In a flat voice she says, “You might be right. Maybe I’m not cut out for newspaper work.”
“This kind of stuff doesn’t happen every day.” Still talking about Jimmy’s sister.
“What if she’s dead, Jack?”
“Then… I don’t know. We chase it down. We get the damn story.”
I’m not fooling Emma one bit. She knows I’m rattled.
“Besides the widow, you have any idea where all this might lead? Why people are dying and disappearing?”
“Give me some time,” I say.
“A rock singer who hasn’t been heard from in years, an out-of-work piano player—”
It sounds as if she’s losing her nerve. I tell her we can’t give up now. Especially now.
Emma says, “I just don’t want anything awful to happen to you. I’m sorry but that’s the truth.”
She locks on with the jade-green eyes. I hear myself saying, “I wonder who’d write my obituary.”
“Write it yourself, smart-ass. We’ll keep it in the can.”
“All right, but I’ll need a good quote from you. Being my boss and all.”
“Fine,” says Emma. ” ‘Jack Tagger was a deeply disturbed individual—’ ”
“—’but a gifted and much-admired reporter. All of us in the newsroom will miss him terribly—’ ”
“—’for about five minutes—’ ” Emma re-interjects.
” ‘Especially Emma Cole, since she never got to sleep with him and heard he was absolutely spectacular… ‘ ”
“Agghh!” She slaps my arm and pokes me with an elbow and now we’re sort of wrestling in the lunch booth, laughing and holding each other loosely. It’s nice, bordering on comfortable. Who besides Evan would have imagined—me and my bold plans! The most casual of flirtations and, instead of trying to save Emma, I’m now trying to seduce her. Or hoping to be seduced. In any case, questions of character could be raised.
Emma is saying she phoned her father and told him about the Jimmy Stoma story and Janet’s disappearance. He told her to be careful, told her to stay in the newsroom and leave the hairy stuff to the reporters. She says she got mildly annoyed, and I tell her not to take it the wrong way. If I were her dad, I’d have given the same advice.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Emma says.
“All right. Now don’t get upset, but lately I’ve been having lascivious thoughts about you. And I mean ‘lascivious’ in the healthiest and most wholesome sense.”
“In other words, you want to have sex,” she says. “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. Let’s try another subject.”
“Fair enough. How about this: I no longer have a frozen lizard in my refrigerator.”
“Oh?”
“Ever since the night of my burglary. I used it to clobber the guy.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Oh yes. This was one jumbo lizard, too. I’m hoping it messed him up real good.”
Emma says, “What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned handgun?”
“Hell, anybody can defend themselves with one of those.”
Upon returning to the newsroom I find a message on my desk from Griffin, who doesn’t believe in e-mail. The coffee-stained note is scrawled in pencil, entirely in capital letters:
COPS DIDN’T GO TO THRUSH HOUSE AFTER 911 BECAUSE SHE’D CALLED THE DAY BEFORE + TOLD THEM NOT TO. SAID IT WAS DRUNK BOYFRIEND WHO TORE UP THE PLACE + IT WAS OVER + SHE DIDN’T WANT TO PRESS CHGS. IF U NEED MORE, LET ME KNOW. G.
When I show the note to Emma, she exclaims: “So she is alive!”
I’m not so optimistic. Janet never spoke of having a boyfriend. She mentioned her ex-husband and her pervo Web-crawlers but no particular guy in her life.
“Maybe she’s all right,” I tell Emma, “or maybe these phone calls are being made by someone pretending to be her.”