Claire Downey’s desk at the Observer was in a corner of the newsroom, where the racket of clacking wire-service teletypes joined the general clamor of the room-the arrhythmic whack- [pause] -whack-whack of typewriters, the men in rumpled white shirts speaking in raised voices like a ship’s crew shouting into the wind. At the center of Claire’s desk was a big Royal typewriter. The logo on it had been written over with a marker: “Royal” had been altered to “GoyaKOD.” Surrounding the typewriter were papers, a wire basket, folded newspapers, a Kent cigarette carton converted into a pencil tray, an ominous-looking spike to impale papers. All these things seemed to have collected at random, as if blown onto the desk by a swirling breeze.
Michael hovered near the desk until a woman approached. She wore a plain gray skirt with a white blouse. Her face was broad and square, pretty in a girlish, quick-smiling way. It was framed by brown hair, which she parted on one side of her forehead and pinned on the other, like a bobbysoxer. Michael was disappointed. He’d been expecting Katharine Hepburn.
“Are you Claire?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Michael Daley. My brother Rick and Amy Ryan-”
“Of course.”
“She and Rick…”
She smiled. “I know who you are, Michael. Amy talked about you. I saw you at the funeral, from a distance.”
“You have a minute to talk?”
She glanced up at the clock: two-fifteen. “A minute, not much more. I’m on a deadline. The evening edition.”
“I just have a few questions about Amy.”
“Fifty-five seconds.”
“Okay. You worked with Amy on the Strangler story?”
“Yes.”
“You shared a byline. Did that mean you worked together on all those stories?”
“For the most part. We did our own reporting. We wrote together.”
“Why did you stop tracking the story?”
“We didn’t. The story stopped moving. DeSalvo confessed, and the investigation stopped. The story now is the trial. When the trial starts, we’ll cover it-I’ll cover it.”
“What about the murders themselves?”
“Our reporting was mostly about the police work. Amy and I weren’t investigating the murders; we were investigating the investigation.”
“So you never checked into other suspects? Arthur Nast? Kurt Lindstrom? Never contacted either of them? Never interviewed them?”
“No. We weren’t crazy. Well, Amy might have been crazy. I wasn’t.”
“So Nast or Lindstrom never threatened her, never had a grudge?”
“As far as I know, she never spoke to them.”
“Was she having trouble with anyone else? Threats?”
“No.”
“Did she ever talk about Brendan Conroy?”
“Brendan Conroy? In what way?”
“As someone she was investigating?”
“No. Brendan Conroy was someone she used as a source.”
“On the Strangler stories?”
“On all sorts of stories.”
“What about my father’s murder? Did she ever talk about it?”
“Not with me.”
“She never talked about how Conroy’s partner got killed?”
“It was a big case; Amy may have talked about it. But I don’t remember anything specific.” She laid her left hand on Michael’s arm. “I’m sorry about your father, of course.”
Michael noted the wedding band on her finger.
“So what was Amy working on, then?”
“As far as I know, she was preoccupied with two stories: the Strangler and the rats in the West End.”
“Rats in the West End? That’s not a crime story.”
“Two-legged rats.”
“Ah. What about them?”
“I don’t know. But I can guess. There’s a lot of money to be made on that project. That’s the kind of cheese those rats like. Money. You want to figure out what the story was? Find the cheese.”
“How?”
She pointed at the graffiti on her typewriter. “Know what this means? Amy wrote that. It was her little joke. Goyakod. It means: Get Off Your Ass, Knock On Doors. That’s what we do here. That’s all there is to it. Go to the West End and start knocking on doors.”
“But there aren’t any doors in the West End anymore.”
“See? This job isn’t as easy as it looks. Your minute’s up.” She sat down, sandwiched a piece of carbon paper between two sheets, and rolled them into the typewriter platen. “Go. If you find anything, let me know. Now go. Good luck.”
Michael did go, but he paused to watch her from the doorway. Across the room, she sat with her shoulders erect, touch-typing quickly, eyes on her notes. She was the only woman in the room, and easily the best typist. The men tended to tamp the keys with their two index fingers. They held pencils clenched in their teeth or wedged behind an ear and forgotten there. They glanced up nervously at the clock on the wall.
Then and there Michael fell for Claire a little, despite the wedding ring, or because of it. He had always been prone to these little swoons. He could not help it. He found women irresistibly affecting, and there was an onanistic promiscuity in the way he developed and abandoned crushes. But they came less often now. Love is a sort of hope, and Michael was not feeling much of that lately.