just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.
“Hey, there, big shot! Who’s the man?” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”
Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.
Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”
No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.
“Yeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”
Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”
Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”
Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.
“You bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”
Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse—realized that one of the old guys reading in the back of the store looked vaguely familiar.
He narrowed his eyes. Who was it? Thin, stooped, with shaggy white hair. Even from the back, the man was obviously not a local. His clothes were too ill fitting and tweedy for D.C.
Finally, the light went on. It had been almost three years since Tyler had seen him, but this had to be Dilday Merle.
He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Professor.”
Bennie’s store was small enough that Tyler didn’t even have to raise his voice. Which meant, of course, that Merle must have been able to hear every word Tyler had said since he walked into the newsstand. Tyler wondered why the old man had kept silent so long. The last time they’d met, when Merle had been trying to talk Tyler out of printing his story on the Heyday Eight, he hadn’t exactly been shy.
Merle turned around with a smile, and Tyler saw that the professor was holding the current copy of the New Yorker.
“Hello, Tyler. I’ve just been reading your latest article.” Merle glanced down. “Still chasing the bad guys, I see. Your style hasn’t changed much.”
A small chuckle came from Bennie’s side of the counter. “Perhaps not,” Tyler said neutrally, watching as Merle walked toward him. “But then, the bad guys don’t change much, either.”
Merle gazed at him through his thick glasses, which made his eyes seem large and owlish, as if they didn’t miss much. “And you’re still not losing sleep over it,” he said. He glanced at Bennie. “Or so I hear.”
Bennie laughed outright at that. “If you’re looking for a bleeding heart, man, you better look somewhere else. Mr. Tyler here, he traded his heart in ten years ago. Got himself a bigger brain instead.”
Tyler shot Bennie a hard look. Surely he knew better than to bring up that ancient history. What happened ten years ago was none of Dilday Merle’s business. It wasn’t any of Bennie’s business, either, but unfortunately Tyler had been young at the time, and emotional. He’d talked too much.
But Merle obviously wasn’t interested in Tyler’s past. He stopped, set down the magazine and held out his hand. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Because I don’t need a heart this time. I need a brain.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tyler shook Merle’s hand, noting with surprise how firm the grip was. “Why is that?”
Merle looked at Bennie, and seemed relieved that the vendor was fully absorbed with another customer.
“Because I’m being blackmailed. And I want you to catch the bastard who’s doing it.”
Twenty minutes later, when they were settled at Tyler’s favorite café, and the waiter had taken their order and departed, Tyler knocked back some scalding black coffee and turned to the man beside him.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over. Slowly. From the beginning. Because I’m having a little trouble believing I heard you right.”
“You did.” Dilday Merle had ordered bottled water, and he was carefully decanting it into the empty glass the waiter had provided. “I’m being blackmailed.”
This time, Tyler was better able to control his shock. But still…it was insane. Seventy-something-year-old Dilday Merle, with his old-fashioned etiquette and his bow ties, and his owl eyes?
This stuffy, ivory-tower academic was being blackmailed?
Though it was the lunch hour, and dozens of people thronged the quaint little café, the anonymity of the crowd provided its own privacy.
“What the hell could anyone blackmail you about?”
“Hell is the perfect word for it.” Merle’s voice carried some heat. He might be close to eighty, but there wasn’t anything frail about him. “Some bastard has been calling me up, ordering me to pay him a thousand dollars every two weeks or else he’ll tell the board of regents that I was mixed up with the Heyday Eight.”
Tyler, who had just lifted his coffee cup, froze in place. He felt the steam moisten his lips, but he was too distracted to drink.
Dilday Merle and the Heyday Eight?
He didn’t want to fall into stale clichés about old people, but come on. His mind tried to picture Greta Swinburne or Pammy Russe straddling this elegant, elderly man, snapping their little black whips across his bony backside.
No way.
“For God’s sake, son, get that look off your face.” Merle tightened his mouth. His high forehead wrinkled in an intense scowl. “It isn’t true.”
As if the projector of his life had started rolling again, Tyler blinked back to reality. He sipped at his coffee, trying to look unfazed.
“Of course it’s not true,” he said. “Greta gave me the complete list of their customers when I broke the story. You definitely weren’t on that list. I would have noticed.”
“And plastered my
