Hard News Page 7

  Boggs looked at the guard and said, "Could you leave us?"

  The man answered, "No."

  Rune said to the guard, "I don't mind."

  "No."

  "Sure," Boggs said, as cheerful as if he'd been picked for first baseman in a softball game. He sat down and said, "What for d'you want to see me, miss?"

  As she told him about receiving his letter and about the story she grew agitated. It wasn't the surroundings; it was Boggs himself. The intensity of his calmness. Which didn't really make sense but she thought about it and decided that was what she sensed: He was so peaceful that she felt her own pulse rising, her breath coming quickly-- as if her body were behaving this natural way because his couldn't.

  Still, she ignored her own feelings and got to work. Rune had interviewed people before. She'd put the camera in front of them, washed them in the hot light from Redhead lamps and then asked them a hundred questions. She'd gotten tongue-tied some and maybe asked the wrong questions but her talent was in getting people to open up.

  Boggs, though, took a lot of work. Even though he'd written the letter to the station he was uneasy around reporters. "Don't think I'm not grateful." He spoke in a soft voice; a slight southern accent licked at his words. "But I'm ... Well, I don't mean this personal, directed at you, miss, but you're the people convicted me."

  "How?"

  "Well, miss, you know the expression 'media circus'? I'd never heard that before but when I read about my trial afterwards I found out what they mean. I wasn't the only person who felt that way. Somebody who got interviewed in Time said that's what my trial was. I wrote a letter to Mr. Megler and to the judge saying that I thought it was a media circus. Neither of them wrote back."

  "What was a circus about it?"

  He smiled and looked off, as if he was arranging his thoughts. "The way I see it, there was so many of you reporters all over the place, writing things about me, that the jury got it into their head that I was guilty."

  "But don't they ..." There was a word she was looking for. "You know, don't they keep the jury in hotel rooms, away from papers and TV?"

  "Sequester," Boggs said. "You think that works? I was on Live at Five the day I was arrested and probably every other day up till the trial. You think there was one person in the area that didn't know about me? I doubt it very much."

  Rune had told him she worked for Current Events but there was no visible reaction; either he didn't watch the program or he didn't know that it was on the Network, the employer of the man he'd supposedly killed. Or maybe he just wasn't impressed. He glanced at the Betacam sitting on the table beside Rune. "Had a film crew in the other day. Were shooting some kind of cop movie. Everybody was real excited about it. They used some of the boys as extras. I didn't get picked. They wanted people looked like convicts. I looked more like a clerk, I guess. Or ... What would you say I look like?"

  "A man who got wrongly convicted."

  Boggs smiled an interstate cloverleaf into his face. "You got some good lines. I like that. Yeah, that's a role I've been acting for a long time. Nobody's bought it yet."

  "I want to get you released."

  "Well, miss, seems like we've got a lot in common." He was definitely warming up to her.

  "I talked to Fred Megler--"

  Boggs nodded and his face showed disappointment but not anger or contempt. "If I had money to hire me a real lawyer, like those inside traders and, you know, those coke kingfishers you see on TV, I think things might've been different. Fred isn't a bad man. I just don't believe his heart was in my case. I reckon I'd say he should've listened to some of my advice. I've had a little experience with the law. Which I'm not proud of but the fact remains I've seen the inside of a courtroom several occasions. He should've listened to me."

  Rune said, "He told me your story. But I knew you were innocent when I saw you."

  "When would that've been?"

  "On film. An interview."

  The smile was now wistful. He kept evading her eyes, which bothered her. She believed this was shyness, not guile, but she didn't want shifty eyes on tape.

  Boggs was saying, "I appreciate your opinion, miss, but if that's all you have to go on I'm still feeling like a six-ounce bluegill on a twenty-pound line."

  "Look at me and tell me. Did you do it or not?"

  His eyes were no longer evasive; they locked onto hers and answered as clearly as his words, "I did not kill Lance Hopper."

  "That's enough for me."

  And Boggs wasn't smiling when he said, "Trouble is, it don't seem to be enough for the people of the state of New York."

  TWO HOURS LATER RANDY BOGGS GOT TO: "THAT'S WHEN I decided to hitch to New York. And that was the biggest mistake of my life."

  "You were tired of Maine?"

  "The lobster business didn't work out like I'd hoped. My partner--see, I'm not much for figures--he kept the books and all this cash coming in didn't no way equal the cash going out. I suspicioned he kept the numbers pretty obscured and when he sold the business he told me he was letting it go to a couple creditors but I think he got paid good money. Anyways, I had me maybe two, three hundred bucks was all and two new pair of jeans, some shirts. I figured I'd be leaving that part of the country before another winter come. Snow belongs in movies and in paper cones with syrup on it. So I begun thumbing south. Rides were scarce's hens' teeth but finally I got me some rides and ended up in Purchase, New York. If that isn't a name I don't know what is." He grinned. "Purchase ... It was raining and I had my thumb out so long it was looking like a bleached prune. Nobody stopped, except this one fellow. He pulled over in a--we call them--a Chinese tenement car. Big old Chevy twelve or so years old--you know, could ride a family of ten. He said, 'Hop in,' and I did. Biggest mistake of my life, miss. I'll tell you that."

  "Jimmy."

  "Right. But then I told him my name was Dave. I just had a feeling this wasn't a person I wanted to open up with a real lot."

  "What happened after you got in?"

  "We drove south toward the city, making small talk. 'Bout women mostly, the way men do. Telling how you get put down by women all the time and how you don't understand them but what you're really doing is bragging that you've had a ton of 'em. That sort of thing."

  "Where was Jimmy going? Further south?"

  "He said he was only going so far as New York City but I was thankful I was getting a ride at all. I figured I could buy a Greyhound ticket to get me on my way to Atlanta. In fact I was thinking just that very thing when he looks over at me in the car and says, 'Hey son, how'd you like to earn yourself a hundred bucks.' And I said, 'I'd like that pretty well, particularly if it's legal but even if not I'd still like it pretty well.'

  "He said it wasn't real illegal. Just picking up something and dropping it off. I told him right away, 'I've got a problem if that'd be drugs you were talking about.' He said it was credit cards and since I've done a little with them myself in the past I said that wasn't so bad but could he maybe consider two hundred. He said he'd more than consider it and said if I drove he'd make it two hundred fifty And I agreed was what I did. We drive to this place somewhere. I didn't know New York but at the trial I found out it was on the Upper West Side. We stopped and he got out and I scooted over behind the wheel. Jimmy, or whatever his name was, walked into this courtyard."

  Rune asked, "What did he look like?"

  "Well, I wasn't too sure. I oughta be wearing glasses but I'd lost them overboard in Maine and couldn't afford to get new ones. He was a big fellow, though. He sat big, the way a bear would sit. A moustache, I remember. It was all in profile, the look I got."

  "White?"

  "Yes'm."

  "Describe his clothing."

  "He wore blue jeans with cuffs turned up, engineer boots--"

  "What are those?"

  "Short buckled boots, you know. Black. And a Navy watch coat."

  "Weren't you a little nervous about this credit card thing?"

  Boggs paused for a minute
. "I'll tell you, miss. There've been times in my life--not a lot, but a few-- when two hundred fifty dollars hasn't been a lot of money. But back then it was. Just like it would be now and when somebody is going to give you a lot of money you'd be surprised what stops becoming funny or suspicious. Anyway, I sat for about ten minutes in the car. I had me a cigarette or two. I was real hungry and was looking around for a Burger King. That's what I really wanted, one of those Whoppers. There I am, feeling hungry, and I hear this shot. I've fired me enough pistols in my life to know a gunshot. They don't boom like in the movies. There's this crack--"

  "I know gunshots," Rune said.

  "Yeah, you shoot?"

  "Been shot at, matter of fact," she told him. This wasn't ego. It was to let him know more about her, make him trust her more.

  Boggs glanced at her, decided she wasn't kidding, and nodded slowly. He continued. "I walk carefully into the courtyard. There's a man lying on the ground. I thought it was Jimmy. I run up to him and see it's not Jimmy and I lean down and say, 'Mister, you okay?' And of course he isn't. I see he's dead. I stand up fast and I just panic and run."

  Boggs smiled with a shallow twist of his lips. "And what happens? The story of my life. I run into a police car cruising by outside. I mean, I really run right into it, bang. I fall over and they pick me up and collar me and that's it."

  "What about Jimmy?"

  "I glanced around and seen the car but Jimmy wasn't inside. He was gone."

  "Did you see any gun?"

  "No, ma'am. I heard they found it in the bushes. There wasn't any of my prints on it but I was wearing gloves. The DA made a big deal out of it that I was wearing gloves in April. But I got me small hands ..." He held one up. "I don't have a lot of meat on me. It was real cold."

  "You think Jimmy shot Mr. Hopper?"

  "I pondered that a lot but I don't see why he would have. He didn't have any gun that I saw and if it was just a credit card scam Mr. Hopper wouldn't've been in on that, credit cards're small potatoes. I think Jimmy had the cards on him and just panicked when he heard the shot. Then he just took off."

  "But you told the cops about Jimmy?"

  "Well, not the credit card part. It didn't seem that was too smart. So I kept mum on that. But, sure, I told them about Jimmy. Not one of them--to a man--believed me."

  Not even your own lawyer, Rune thought. "Assuming Jimmy didn't shoot Hopper, you think he might've seen the killer?"

  "Could've."

  "There isn't a lot to go on, what you've told me."

  "I understand that." He sighed. "I was just biding my time, waiting for parole. But there're people here I got on the bad side of somehow. I'm really worried they're going to move on me again."

  "Move on you?"

  "Kill me, you know. They tried once. I don't know why. But that's life here in prison. Don't need to be a reason."

  Rune asked, "How bad do you want to get out?"

  Boggs glanced at the camera. Rune stood up and looked through the viewfinder to frame him better. What she saw troubled her because she wasn't looking at animal eyes, or criminal's eyes, which would have been scary but expected; she saw gentleness and pain and--even harder to bear--a portion of him that was still a lonely, frightened young boy. He said, "I'll answer that by telling you what it's like in here. It's like your heart is tied 'round and 'round with clothesline. It's like every day is waking up the morning after a funeral. It's like you welcome fear because when you're afraid you can't think about being free. It's a sadness so bad you want to howl when you see a plane flying by going to a place you can imagine but can't ever get to, no matter how close it might be."

  Randy Boggs stopped and cleared his throat. "Do what you can for me, miss. Please."

  chapter 10

  RUNE GAVE MOTHERHOOD HER BEST SHOT.

  She really did.

  Courtney was probably three-fourths toilet-trained. The remaining quarter was tough to cope with but Rune managed as best she could.

  She bought healthy food for the girl.

  She bathed her twice a day.

  She also leapt right in to improve the little girl's wardrobe.

  Claire, who had super-crucial taste in her own fashion, had bought the poor kid mostly sweats, blouses with bears or Disney cartoon characters on them and corduroy jeans (corduroy! In New York!). Rune took her straight down to SoHo, to a kids' store where Rune knew one of the salesclerks. She dropped some bucks on real clothes: A black Naugahyde miniskirt and a couple of black T-shirts. Yellow and lime-green tights. A wad of lacy tooling for her hair. Jewelry was risky--you never knew what kids would swallow--but Rune found an outrageous studded belt and black cowboy boots (which were slightly too big but she figured there was only one way the girl's feet were going to grow and why not buy something that would last more than a month). The finishing touch was a plastic leopard-skin jacket.

  Rune paid the two hundred twenty-seven dollars but decided the results were worth it. She said, "All right, dude, you're looking crazy good."

  "Crazy," Courtney said.

  But it wasn't long before problems developed.

  They'd left the store, bought some ice cream and gone window-shopping. Then Rune wondered if you could take three-year-olds dancing. There was a super late-night club just opening up down on Hudson in the old building where the famous Area had been years before, a totally historical place. She hadn't seen too many children there. None, in fact. But she wondered if you could sneak one in early, say, just after work, about six or seven. It seemed a shame to have a kid who looked like a miniature Madonna and not expose her to some real New York life.

  "You want to go dancing?"

  "I want to go to the zoo!" the girl said fiercely.

  "Well, the zoo's closed now, honey. We can go in a day or so."

  "I wanta see the animals."

  "In a day or two."

  "No!" Courtney started to scream and ran into Comme de Garcon, where she threw the ice cream into a rack of eight-hundred-dollar suits.

  The day-care center didn't work out either.

  Rune did the math and figured out that if she dropped Courtney off at eight and picked her up at seven--the hours Piper Sutton insisted that her crew work, at a minimum--and then got a night sitter twice a week, she would have one hundred and eight dollars a month left out of her paycheck.

  So the little girl spent half the week at day care, half at the Network.

  And when Piper Sutton called Rune one night at what was, for the rest of the world, quitting time and demanded an update on the Boggs story ("Now, Rune. Now now now!), Rune had to park the little girl with Bradford Simpson, who took up the task sportingly even though she could tell by the furtive phone call he made that he was breaking a date to help her out. It was clear that she'd soon run out of friends if she tried to conscript last-minute baby-sitters very often.

  But what finally did it was the honey.

  Rune had spent all Thursday taking footage of the exteriors of the building where Lance Hopper had been killed and of the crime scene itself. She'd picked up Courtney just before the day-care center closed and had to spring for a cab to get fifty pounds of equipment and thirty pounds of child back to the houseboat.

  Rune plopped her in front of the old Motorola console TV, queued up The Wizard of Oz and took a shower.

  Courtney, who didn't like the black-and-white Kansas portion of the film, wandered off to find something to play with. What she located was a jar of clover honey, sitting on the galley table. She climbed up on a chair and pulled it down carefully then sat on the floor and opened it.

  Courtney loved honey. Not so much because of the taste but because of the great way it poured so slowly down the stairs. Which was a lot of fun but what was even better was the way she could use it to paste together Rune's videotape cassettes. She made a wall out of them, and pretended it was the Wicked Witch's castle.

  Then the water in the shower shut off and it occurred to Courtney that playing with the honey might be one of th
ose things she shouldn't be doing. So she hid the rest of the evidence, pouring it into the Ikegami video camera case.

  Courtney closed the door, then slipped the empty jar under the coffee table. At that point Dorothy arrived in full-color Oz and the little girl settled down to watch the film.

  Rune surprised herself by actually screaming when she saw the camera. She was trying to shout that the camera had cost fifty thousand dollars but the words weren't even getting out of her mouth. Courtney looked down at the camera, bleeding honey, and started to cry.

  Rune then dropped to her knees and surveyed the ruined tapes. She cradled the camera like a hurt pet. "Oh, God, oh, no ..."

  "Oh-oh," Courtney said.

  "I can't take it," Rune gasped.

  ONLY TWO PHONE CALLS.

  She was surprised to find that when it came to children, you could cut through city bureaucracy pretty fast. The administrator she was speaking to told her that a protective diagnostic caseworker could be on her way in a half hour. Rune said not to bother, she'd come to their offices tomorrow. The woman gave Rune the address.

  The next morning she packed up the girl's few possessions and they walked to the subway. After transferring three times they got off at the Bleecker Street stop and climbed to the sidewalk.

  "Where're we going?" Courtney asked.

  "To see some nice people."

  "Oh. Where? At the zoo?"

  "I'm sure they'll take you to the zoo."

  "Good."

  The building looked like one of those massive, grimy factories in ten shades of gray--a set from a 1930s movie about a tough, slick-haired industrialist who learns that life with floozy blondes and martinis can be pretty unsatisfying.

  But when Rune considered it again she decided that the building on LaGuardia Place looked more like a prison. She almost turned around. But then she free-associated: prison, Randy Boggs.... And she realized that she had a responsibility to do her story and save him. And that having Courtney in her life was going to make that impossible. She shifted the girl's fingers, still slightly sticky from the honey, into her left hand and led her toward the squat, dark building.

  Rune glanced at the granite slab above the front door to the building, which would have been a good place to carve the words, Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter.