New York

A month after Christopher Hopman’s murder, Isobel Gitlin found herself preparing an obit for Billy MacNeal, the baby billionaire. Also shot to death. Also by high-powered rifle, from a distance. Also taken in silence, the crime absent any trace of perpetrator identity, possible motive, or useful physical clues. Absent, in any case, evidence the police admitted to having. Hopman on a golf course, MacNeal on a diving board. The two of them tied together by a billion dollars.

Isobel snatched the glasses from her nose as though they threatened her view of the truth. What magnitude of coincidence could possibly account for a thing like this? She shook her head and replaced the specs. At seven thirty that morning, Isobel began reviewing the histories of companies comprising First and Second Houston Holding from their inceptions. Now, midway through her third container of coffee, she noticed that Second Houston, which, she remembered, had been sold to Hopman’s Alliance Inc., was also parent to the villainous Knowland & Sons. Isobel felt the kind of thrill she imagined her hairy ancestors experiencing with the mind-shaking revelation that the sharp stone embedded in their heels might do the same to a rabbit’s belly. The caffeine did not calm her down.

She told her editor that she had discovered a link between the killings of MacNeal and Hopman, and therefore a possible story. He told her she was suffering from the heat. She outlined the facts she had, but he only heard her out; he did not listen. “Jesus!” he thought, as Isobel talked, “doesn’t she know this is the fucking obituary page.” Then he shook his head and said, “Very hard case to make off what you’ve got. Really. Not worth pushing further.” He wanted nothing more to do with it, or her, for that matter. When he considered Isobel Gitlin, which was hardly ever, Ed Macmillan had only contempt for what he figured was her free ride. He had worked to get where he was. Macmillan was New Irish, very much in favor at the Times. He was not the red-nosed, hard-drinking Fordham product native to New York newsrooms in nostalgic yesteryears. He was in his early forties, Cornell, health-club fit, a white wine drinker. No spots on his one- hundred-dollar tie. He did, however, affect a manner that he believed echoed an earlier, ballsier day. He imagined himself a menacing Lou Grant. Isobel knew him to be a complete asshole.

“Look,” he said to her, “if it’s news, we have news people working it. If it’s an obit, it’s you. That’s what you do. You write obituaries. So go do one.” She pushed back, starting her pitch all over again until Macmillan interrupted her.

“Dog days of summer,” he told Isobel, with a cold, dry chuckle. Then he sought to end the matter by saying, “The heat’s getting to you. We don’t sell the New York Times at the supermarket checkout. Why don’t you try a weekend at the beach?”

Isobel watched Ed’s little smirk spread and become a chaste, hence pointless, leer. His undistinguished, knob-nosed face turned into a caricature of adolescent self-regard.

“Do you know where the term comes from?” Isobel said. “‘Dog days of summer’? Do you know what that means?” She stuttered severely on “do” and “dog.”

He shrugged, condescension rising with sweet cologne. “Sweetie, even the dogs can’t take the summer heat. They walk around with their tongues hanging out, huffing and puffing and beat to hell. It makes their little doggy minds go whacko. Watch out it doesn’t happen to you.”

“No,” replied Isobel. “It’s from the da-da-Dog Star. It’s how the Indians knew it was the height of summer. The da-Dog Star is the brightest object in the night sky in August.”

She paused, attempting to follow that up with her most ferocious, cobra-snaky stare.

He rolled his eyes and waved her away.

Isobel Gitlin’s byline topped Billy MacNeal’s obituary, but nowhere in it was she permitted to mention Hopman’s name.