“Right. Glamorous African-American lesbian, a twofer.”
“Exactly.” Bolton smiled as if we were buddies. “You can even bring in the old guy you live with.”
“Old is hot, as well? Thank you, but I have an active real detective practice.”
“A hundred thousand an episode,” Bolton said, “with a guarantee of a minimum of six episodes, even if the series never airs. We’d start with Lydia Zamir—follow you as you try to trace her. And, you know, people love being on camera—if we put out a call saying that anyone who’s seen Zamir gets a cameo on the show, we’d get the public involved in the investigation.”
“Wow,” I said. “As Lieutenant Kojak used to say, a hundred—no, six hundred thousand—is sure a lot of balloons. And having a whole lot of strangers underfoot while I tried to track down a lead—that makes it irresistible. And yet, I will persist in resisting.” I permitted myself a small tight smile, self-congratulation at my witty riposte.
Murray kept his eyes on the floor, but Bolton said, “One-twenty an episode.”
“Don’t you have a legal team that handles these kinds of negotiations?”
“I’m on the Global executive committee,” Bolton said. “We have fluid lines of command. Believe me, the board, including Oscar Taney, is behind this project.”
I didn’t need Siri to tell me that Taney was the majority owner and chair of Global Enterprises.
“We want to find Lydia Zamir,” Bolton said. “We owe her a good outcome to her story after our TV crew frightened her into running off—even though it was totally unintentional and certainly within the bounds of modern journalism.”
“Always good to check the liability box,” I agreed gravely. “Have modern journalism’s bounds expanded to include chasing people into the path of danger?”
This time Bolton did frown, but he decided to overlook the comment. “You find her, we get her medical care, it’s win-win—especially for you, since you walk away with close to three quarters of a million.”
He pulled some papers out of his breast pocket and laid them on the glass tabletop in front of him. “The details are in here. In fact, we’ll make it one-twenty-five.”
He took out an elegant little fountain pen, found the relevant page, and wrote in the new amount. When he put the pen back inside his jacket, I longed to see it leak all over the tan linen weave.
I looked at my watch. “Gentlemen, you were so beguiling I let you have nine minutes. Now I have real-life clients, who don’t want their business on cable for the world to watch. Fino al prossimo.”
Bolton got to his feet. “Offer’s good for twenty-four hours, Warshawski—you’d be smart to take it.”
I walked him down to the outer door, basically wanting to be sure he actually left the building. Murray stayed behind. When I got back to my office, he was standing at my desk, playing with a letter opener that a knife-making client had created for me.
“Explain to me what in Conan Doyle’s name was going on just now. No way does Global think they want me in a docudrama. There wasn’t even the pretense of a screen test, for one thing, and for another, that’s not how people at Bolton’s level operate. He’d send a flunky down, and it wouldn’t be for this kind of money. Either the company is so desperate to get hold of Lydia that they’ll go through this ridiculous charade, or they’re dangling all these balloons in front of me to keep my attention from something that they don’t want me to see. Am I working on a project that touches Global’s interests?”
Murray shifted uncomfortably. The letter opener started to fall and he grabbed at it, slicing his fingers.
“Go bleed over that ludicrous contract while I get a wet cloth,” I said. “Real blood on the paper will make it seem like an authentic docudrama.”
While Murray tended to his cuts, I scrolled through my list of open projects. I didn’t think any of them connected to Global’s interests, but Global has a thousand tentacles—any of them could be attached to one of my clients without my knowing.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “What made you be a party to this repellent idea?”
“Bolton pitched it differently when he called me this morning.” Murray kept his attention on his fingers, drying them one at a time before taping over the cuts. “He said everyone at Global knows how much I want to get back to significant journalism—and you know that’s true. He said there’s a lot of talk around town about work we did together—they even teach the Humboldt Chemical investigation at Medill.”
Medill, Northwestern’s journalism school, wrestles with a few other universities for top national billing.
I sat on the corner of my desk. “You get a royalty for the case study?”
“No.” He flushed but kept fiddling with the Band-Aids, not looking up. “Just saying, you and I have a reputation. Bolton said if we both wore a wire while we hunted for Zamir it would be a ratings bonanza and would open the door to other reporting assignments.”
“And you bought it? How could you be so totally naive? Wearing a wire while talking to witnesses? Protecting the source—that’s what you do when you’re digging deep. And there’s no deep digging here, anyway. Just titillation. Did Bolton know you’d asked me to find Zamir?”
“No. He’s been pounding on me from the moment Zamir disappeared from Provident, although at first it seemed to be coming down the pipe to me through the Star’s editorial team. When you showed up on different news feeds because of the Fouchard kid being connected to Prinz, they thought they could work out a deal with you—of course they know we have a history.”
I digested that. “Murray, turn on your J-dar. Guy is flattering you and trying to buy me off. There’s something he doesn’t want us to know, or maybe he wants to be there doing damage control if we find it out. I can’t believe Zamir is important to them.”
He finally looked up. “Yeah, but I don’t know what it could be. I read everything I could find on Zamir after they started bird-dogging me. It’s a big story, but big like an opera—not big like a cover-up. Global is mad about gun control, I mean mad against it, and the Zamir story starts with that mass murder in Kansas. But that was four years ago. It’s been superseded by Parkland and El Paso and way too many others.”
“Elisa Palurdo is living with death threats from mass slaughter deniers,” I said, “but even that will only be news if one of the freaks actually kills her. As for Zamir, she’s afraid, or she wouldn’t have fled the hospital, but I can’t believe she’s afraid of a living, breathing threat, or she wouldn’t have been living openly on the streets before your story ran.”
“Tell me the truth, Warshawski. Did you find Lydia Zamir? Do you know where she is?”
I smiled sardonically. “You know what Mencken said—the smallest atom of truth comes from the agony of someone who dug it up. You don’t throw it about like loose change.”
21
Combing Through Trash
Time was when I would have trusted Murray with the information about Lydia’s hideout. Not now. He might imagine he was being loyal to me, to the story, to the source, but his first allegiance would be to the person he thought could advance his career.