Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [93]
“Impossible now. I’m really busy.”
“I’ll come to Washington. What’s a good day for you? Tomorrow? The next day?”
“Ah, I’ll have to get back to you.”
“Fine, but don’t let too much time pass. I’ve already discussed this with our editorial and marketing people. We’re serious.”
He took her number and left the building, stopping in at a florist on his way to the Press Club to arrange for flowers to be sent to Georgia. He’d paid and was leaving the shop when he had another thought. “I’d like to have flowers sent to my daughter, too,” he told the clerk. “At the TV station where she works. They go to Roberta Wilcox.”
“Roberta Wilcox?” the clerk said. “I watch her all the time. I knew the name was familiar. And you’re the one who’s been writing about the serial killer.”
“That’s me,” he said.
“You’ve got me scared to death,” she said. “I keep the door locked most of the day.”
“I noticed I had to knock,” he said.
“You can’t be too careful,” she said, “not with a fiend loose on our streets.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, signing the credit card slip and wishing her a pleasant day.
He was greeted when he entered the Press Club by a number of the guys, all of whom had something to say about his involvement with the serial killer. The attention was not unwelcome, and he found himself eagerly answering their questions, parrying their jibes, and enjoying the drink to which he was treated. Some well-wishers wanted to continue their conversation over lunch, and they settled at a large, round table where the drinks kept coming, and the conversation became more rambunctious.
“So, Joe,” someone asked, “how many calls have you gotten from the coast this morning?”
“The coast?”
“Hollywood, pal. They make a movie about almost anything these days.”
“Who’ll play Joe?” another asked, which set off a flurry of suggestions from around the table, many of which generated loud laughter. “Tom Cruise? Nah, he’s too young.”
“I was thinking of Robert Redford,” Joe offered.
“Come on, he’s older than you are, Joey.”
“I know. How about Julia Roberts?”
“Julia Roberts! She’s a—woman.”
“So what? They do whatever they want out in Hollywood. Hell, they might make you black in the film, turn it into a story from the ’hood.”
“I might write a book about it,” Wilcox interrupted, “depending, of course, on how the whole thing turns out.”
“We knew you when,” someone said.
“Yeah. I got a call this morning from a New York book publisher.”
“Get an agent” was suggested.
“The hell with an agent,” someone else counseled. “Do the deal yourself.”
If he didn’t have a story to write for tomorrow’s edition, Wilcox would have been content to stay there for the rest of the day, maybe even get drunk the way he had a few times earlier in his career when surrounded by other journalists. Those were happy, carefree times, long before a sense of his own mortality increasingly entered his consciousness. He felt a measure of that youthful abandon while enjoying lunch that day with his friends, but knew it was just a fleeting reincarnation.
“I really have to go,” he said after finishing lunch. He reached for his wallet, but someone clamped a hand on his arm. “Hey, Joe Wilcox, your money’s no good today. Just remember us when they’re casting extras for the newsroom scenes.”
“I will, I will,” Wilcox said, getting up from the table and shaking hands. “Thanks for the lunch and drinks,” he said. “You’re the best.”
The final comment he heard as he walked away was from the only woman in the group: “Lock that daughter of yours up, Joe, until the nut is put away.”
Her words dampened the exuberance he was feeling, and stayed with him as he rode the elevator down to the lobby and headed back to the Tribune Building. The danger to Roberta.
By the time he got there, however, his mind was focused on what he had to write, and he hunkered down in his cubicle, the words filling his computer screen as though coming from some automatic compartment inside his brain. On many days, it was a struggle