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“There is noweright now,” Megan said. “There’s just the paper. And so you know? Wearegoing to run with the crowd on this, fast as we can. When you gave me this job you told me to edit the paper my way. So let me do that now. If you’d like to give me a quote, we can throw it into the news story. If not, we need to get this up now.”
I leaned forward and looked at the photographs she’d spread out on her desk. My eyes had originally passed right over the one of Ben and me standing on his front porch the night he’d invited me in.
I pointed to that one now.
“I didn’t even go inside that night. But that doesn’t matter, either, does it?”
“You’ve been in the crosshairs for weeks,” Megan said. “You ought to know the rules of engagement by now.”
I leaned back in my chair, feeling very tired at the moment. Tired of just about everybody and everything.
“Is it even worth asking where these pictures came from?”
“Sure,” Megan said. “It was Bert Patricia.”
“Private detective to the stars? I don’t even know why he calls himself private. He’s in the papers almost as much as I am.” I held up a hand. “Wait—didn’t Bert Patricia go to jail?”
“On the phone hacking thing,” Megan said. “Somehow he beat the rap.”
“So he doesn’t care that people know he’s the one who’s been following me?”
“One of the people following you,” she said. “Are you kidding? Hewantspeople to know it was him, even if he can’t come right out and say that himself. It puts him right where he wants to be: in the middle of a big story.”
“My brother Jack must have hired him. When Jack wasn’t having one of his reporters following me from time to time.”
“Nope,” Megan said. “If he had, the only place where you’d be able to see these pictures would be at Wolf.com.”
“So if he didn’t, who do you think did?”
“I was getting to that,” Megan said. “I don’t think. I know who did.”
“I thought private detectives didn’t reveal who their clients are.”
“The ethical ones usually don’t,” Megan said. “But Bert couldn’t resist telling one of our reporters, who’s been covering him for years. On background, of course.”
“So whodidhire him?”
“The commissioner of the National Football League,” Megan Callahan said.
Ninety-Two
WHEN I CALLED JOEL ABRAMS,he denied ever having heard of Bert Patricia and tried to act offended that I would accuse him of stooping to such a thing.
“Our league is better than that,” Abrams said.
“Really? Since when?”
“And this isn’t about my behavior, anyway,” Abrams said. “It’s about yours.”
“I just hope you’re as intrepid the next time one of your other owners gets caught with his pants down.”
“I’m not the one having an inappropriate relationship.”
“Neither am I,” I said, and hung up on him.
I had chosen not to give a quote to my own paper or anybody else about what the whole world was calling an affair, even if both Ben Cantor and I knew it wasn’t an affair, never had been, and neverwouldbe, the way things were going.
What I did instead was leave town.
