Ninety-One

“YOU CAN’T RUN THESE pictures on the front page of the paper,” I said to Megan Callahan in her office at the Tribune. “Or on our home page.”

We had been going at each other, her door closed, since she’d called and asked me to come over, telling me there was a situation we needed to address immediately. I said that didn’t sound good. She said it wasn’t even close to being good and that she’d explain when I got there.

The situation involved a series of photographs of Ben Cantor and me at Harris’ steak house. One had me leaning down to kiss him on the lips. Another had the two of us leaning across the table, my hand covering his. There were similar pictures from the night we’d eaten at Fogata, where Cantor had said the paparazzi wouldn’t find us.

So somebody has been following me all along.

“If we don’t run them,” Megan said, “you can explain to the next managing editor of the Tribune why we didn’t run pictures that everybody except Stars and Stripes is going to have within the next hour or so.”

I heard a ping from her phone. She was on the other side of her desk. She hit some keys on her huge laptop screen, then swiveled it so I could see the home page of Wolf.com.

“Annnnnnnd,” she said, “we’re off.”

They’d gone with the one of me kissing Cantor when I’d arrived that night, headlined:

UNDERCOVER(S) COP

Plus the secondary headline:

Suspect Behavior from Wolves Owner

with Cop “Investigating” Her

I slumped back into my chair.

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“Are you sleeping with him?” Megan said.

“None of your goddamn business. But no.”

“Jenny,” Megan said, “there’s no way for you to spin this. Or for us to ignore this. What the whole world is about to see is you and the detective investigating two murders in your family gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.”

“Would it matter to you if I told you how badly that particular dinner date ended?”

“Not even a little bit.”

Her phone pinged again. She nodded.

“Okay. TMZ is running with it.”

“You make it sound as if that’s the paper of record.”

“With stuff like this, it pretty much is.”

“We aren’t obligated to run with the crowd on this,” I said.

“There is no we right now,” Megan said. “There’s just the paper. And so you know? We are going to run with the crowd on this, fast as we can. When you gave me this job you told me to edit the paper my way. So let me do that now. If you’d like to give me a quote, we can throw it into the news story. If not, we need to get this up now.”

I leaned forward and looked at the photographs she’d spread out on her desk. My eyes had originally passed right over the one of Ben and me standing on his front porch the night he’d invited me in.

I pointed to that one now.

“I didn’t even go inside that night. But that doesn’t matter, either, does it?”

“You’ve been in the crosshairs for weeks,” Megan said. “You ought to know the rules of engagement by now.”

I leaned back in my chair, feeling very tired at the moment. Tired of just about everybody and everything.

“Is it even worth asking where these pictures came from?”

“Sure,” Megan said. “It was Bert Patricia.”

“Private detective to the stars? I don’t even know why he calls himself private. He’s in the papers almost as much as I am.” I held up a hand. “Wait—didn’t Bert Patricia go to jail?”

“On the phone hacking thing,” Megan said. “Somehow he beat the rap.”

“So he doesn’t care that people know he’s the one who’s been following me?”

“One of the people following you,” she said. “Are you kidding? He wants people to know it was him, even if he can’t come right out and say that himself. It puts him right where he wants to be: in the middle of a big story.”

“My brother Jack must have hired him. When Jack wasn’t having one of his reporters following me from time to time.”

“Nope,” Megan said. “If he had, the only place where you’d be able to see these pictures would be at Wolf.com.”

“So if he didn’t, who do you think did?”

“I was getting to that,” Megan said. “I don’t think. I know who did.”

“I thought private detectives didn’t reveal who their clients are.”

“The ethical ones usually don’t,” Megan said. “But Bert couldn’t resist telling one of our reporters, who’s been covering him for years. On background, of course.”

“So who did hire him?”

“The commissioner of the National Football League,” Megan Callahan said.