The man is a stellar talent, a wordsmith, a genius. Right now, he appears to be drooling on his desk.
Elsie makes her way over and hovers at his shoulder, clears her throat. Heston does not move. She clears her throat again, more loudly. He slowly rolls over, peering up at her from under an elbow.
“What does he want?” he groans.
In her peripheral vision, Elsie notices Patricia Fowler watching them. She can’t imagine Patricia ever turning up to theTimesreeking of bourbon. In fact, she can’t imagine many other reporters getting away with what Heston gets away with. She looks down at him and smiles politely. The veins in his eyes have burst, his hands are covered in scratches and she’s pretty sure his shirt is stained with burger relish.
“Paul didn’t…Mr. Hunter didn’t send me.” She straightens her shoulders. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?” Heston flops back onto his forehead, then pushes himself up with his hands, shaking his head quickly and widening his eyes to sober up.
Elsie steels herself.
“I wondered if you’d heard anything about a Jane Doe—someone the LAPD might be referring to as Blondie, someone who might have some links to the Kings.”
“To the what?” He straightens, and frowns at her. “Why are you asking about the Kings? You’re a…secretary.”
“Personal assistant.”
She was a secretary once, when she first started at theSignal. She was fantastic at that job, a meticulous Clacker. She never let any errors slip through, as if her brain were a tightly strung net cast over the words, scooping up anything found wanting. She’d present her pages to the editors at regular intervals, her eyes shining, chest full. She’d long for them to appraise her work, to grade it as if writing a report card, to tell her she was at the top of the class. It was a need for constantvalidation that she’d had ever since she was a child growing up in England, her father far away, on the muddy beaches of France, for the bulk of her life, until he returned with a parasite, a malevolent rage inside that changed things forever.
“Get out of here,” Heston orders. “Less questions.”
“Fewer,” Elsie tries to interject.
“More…typing, or whatever it is you do.” He waves his hand, then returns his head to the desk.
Elsie turns away, forces a stage laugh; she doesn’t want him to see that his words have scorched her. She makes her way back to her typewriter, then takes a seat, rearranging a stack of notepaper to keep her hands busy. Her eyes prickle with the threat of tears, which makes her even more frustrated. Why will they not treat her like one of their own? Yes, she’s “just” a personal assistant, not a reporter, but she has proven herself to be good at her job. If only they would let her write, if only she could show them that she can do it…
She was primed for this job. After it all happened—after she discovered the extent of what Albert had been doing, just how many there were—she became ravenous for facts. When the trial and the sentence and the media frenzy had passed, any facts would do. She read encyclopedias, road atlases, phone books. She needed to know things—anything at all. That was when the puzzles started, too, when she found a taste for crosswords, for Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column inScientific American—an insatiable desire to solve, to put things in order, to trust her own brain again. After she learned of Albert’s crimes, the grimy details of the world refracted into sharp focus. She saw the film of grime on everything—the peeling paint on otherwise beautiful buildings, the rats on the subway tracks, the discarded gum on the undersides of railings. She saw that muddy finish on people, too, could see their bad parts with only a glance.
In the office, she surveys the books on her desk, stories of men gonerotten, of the ways in which humans can so easily harm one another. Those who kill are often lionized in the press; Elsie knows that now. Revered, in a way, for their charisma, for the alien wit with which they can outsmart their victims. As if their brutal transgressions propel them to a different plane than the one the rest of society is on. But Albert was not really that smart. Albert was boring; he was awkward. Albert could never have been described as “magnetic.” Eczema bloomed around his eyebrows and on his elbows, which were cracked and red. The back of his head was beginning to lose its hair, revealing a shining, freckled expanse of skin, like a monk’s tonsure. There had been nothing dangerous about him, and everything dangerous about him at the same time. But it was easier for the police to cast him simply as otherworldly, wily, “different from us,” because only that could explain why it took them so long to catch him.
“Hey.” Someone is calling out to her in a hushed voice. “Hey, assistant girl.”
She turns, and when she realizes it’s Patricia, her cheeks betray her.
“Why are you asking about the Jane Doe?” she questions when Elsie hurries over. Patricia has a low voice for a woman, a drawl more than anything else; it stirs something strange in Elsie’s stomach.
“I’m sorry,” Elsie stammers. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
Patricia leans back and smiles. A suede jacket is slung over her chair. Elsie could never get away with a suede jacket.
“You looking for a story or something?” Patricia asks, the side of her mouth quirked.
Elsie falters, gives a fractured, unconvincing laugh. “I’m just a secretary. I mean, a personal assistant.”
Patricia laughs drily. “If I’d accepted beingjust a secretary, I would have made my father very happy. And let me tell you, no one wants to do that less than me.”
Is it a trap? What if Hunter is listening in?
“I can’t help you unless you tell me why you’re asking.” There’s something confrontational, schoolboyish about Patricia.
Elsie looks quickly around her again. Robert Heston, out of earshot, has a line of coffee cups arranged in front of him and he is downing them in quick succession.
“I heard there was something unusual about the body,” Elsie ventures, trying to hold Patricia’s gaze even though she feels entirely out of her depth.
“Okay.” Patricia considers this, smiles again. “Well, firstly, the Jane Doe’s not a Jane Doe anymore.”
