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She nodded at the empty guest chair and I sat.
“Is there a problem, Jackie?”
Helen knew goddamned well there was a problem. She’d had her assistant deliver the cover to my office and I had refused to sign off on it.
“Actually, there is. Perhaps we can work out a solution together.”
She didn’t want me to take this conciliatory approach. What she wanted was for me to flat-out accuse her of not understanding the audience that the cover was meant to reach so that she could go screaming to Leigh that I was “too sensitive” about racial issues. We’d been down this road many times and I had no intention of falling into that trap today.
“What do you think the cover needs?” she inquired through gritted teeth.
“Well,” I answered pleasantly, “perhaps you could tone down this screaming red, put some faces on the characters instead of blanking them out . . . better yet, you could hire real people to pose for it.”
“Anything else?” she snapped.
“Yes. Do you think it is appropriate that both the man and woman are doing a jitterbug with their butts arched high in the air? I mean, the book is about a teacher and the handsome pediatrician who has come into her life. They aren’t dancers.”
Helen leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. “Why must you and I go through this with just about every cover that is created for your books?”
This was my cue to say something that she could twist around to make me sound like an unreasonable militant.
I stood up and gazed at her w
ith a sympathetic expression on my face. “Why, Helen, I didn’t realize you felt that way. Let’s go to lunch real soon and I’ll be happy to listen to all your concerns and ideas. All right?”
She just stared at me—all angry eyes and red cheeks set above the Thin Pink Line—and said nothing.
I slammed her door on my way out.
16
REPRIEVE
There was a flurry of excitement in the hallways when Keith arrived. People stared, waved, smiled, and more than a few women preened in his direction. I led him into Leigh’s office.
Craig greeted me like a long-lost friend. He seemed to have aged in the last two weeks. He stood up like a gentleman, shook Keith’s hand, gave me a chest-crushing hug, and kissed me on the cheek when I entered Leigh’s office, but he didn’t smile. His eyebrows were furrowed in concentration and there were worry lines that I didn’t remember seeing before across his forehead. His eyes were those of a sad child. I murmured my condolences into his ear, gave him a comforting pat on the back, and sat down in the second guest chair, which meant that we were all facing Leigh, and I had to twist slightly whenever I wanted to address Craig directly.
“Craig, I tried to reach you several times during that awful first week, but you were either out or not taking calls.”
He gave me a tired smile. “Thanks, Jackie. I’m really happy to see you.”
“How is Dora?”
He leaned back and sighed. “Ahh, Pixie. She is absolutely destroyed . . . just destroyed . . . I’m looking for a good child psychiatrist to help her through all this. It would help a lot if the police could find this dirtbag and we could all get some kind of closure.”
Leigh was watching us closely. Like all the editors, I reported directly to Leigh, and she had reported to Annabelle. She was wondering how I got so close to the chief and her husband.
I understood how she felt. If Asha and Leigh started hanging out, I would feel annoyed and disrespected also. But it wasn’t my fault and it was time she knew the truth.
“Craig, I didn’t tell Leigh about the Mabley book because Annabelle asked me not to, but Leigh is my supervisor and all this secrecy is beginning to cause problems between us.”
He seemed befuddled. “Problems?”
Leigh placed her hands flat on the desk. “If Jackie has a good reason for that dash across your lobby on the morning of Annabelle’s death, then we need to hear it. Otherwise, it will be impossible for her to work here with a terrible cloud of suspicion hanging over her head.”
Keith interrupted. “Ms. Blue cannot be fired. She has not even been charged, let alone convicted of any crime.”
Leigh turned red.
