Reborn

3

Bitch! Gerry Becker thought as he followed Jim upstairs. Stevens's wife must think her shit don't stink! Where'd she get off with the high-and-mighty act? Nothing but a hick broad from a hick Long Island town whose husband suddenly got lucky. Big fucking deal! Gerry held it all in. He had to stay on Jim Stevens's good side until he got what he wanted for this story. Yeah, a feature on James Stevens, sudden heir to Dr. Roderick Hanley's fortune, including exclusive interviews with the famous scientist's unacknowledged son—that alone might be enough to ride the wires.

But Gerry had a feeling there might be more than just another rags-to-riches story here.

"All right," Stevens said as they reentered the upstairs library. "Let's pick up where we left off."

"Sure," Gerry said. Right.

Where they'd left off was nowhere. Stevens was looking for Mommy and Gerry was helping him. Not out of any deep feeling for Stevens but because it would add tremendous human-interest value to the feature.

But what Gerry was really looking for was juice. Hanley, for all his fame in the scientific community as an innovator with a commercial bent, had been pretty much of an enigma, always shunning interviews. A lifelong bachelor, always in the company of that M.D., Edward Derr. Gerry had a suspicion that maybe the guy was queer. Sure he fathered Stevens—after seeing those two pictures a moment ago, no one could doubt that—but maybe that had been just a momentary aberration. Or maybe he liked to swing both ways. Gerry's nose for news told him that there was some pretty weird shit hiding in Roderick Hanley's private life. All he needed was to find a couple of juicy bits and his feature would be hot stuff indeed.

And a hot feature on the wires would get him off a hick rag like the Monroe Express and back into the journalistic mainstream. Maybe the Daily News. Maybe even the Times!

Gerry had been in the mainstream once. Younger guys like Stevens—younger only by a few years but that was like a generation away these days—seemed satisfied to diddle around on a local rag and write the Great American Novel on the side. Not for Gerry. News was the only writing that mattered. He'd been on his way up at the Trib, living in a fourth-floor walk-up, but slowly inching ahead, doing what he wanted. Then the Trib had folded, just like the World Telegraph & Sun. Black days, those. Only the News, the Post, and the Times were left, and they were up to their eyeballs in guys more experienced than Gerry. For a while he had tried The Light, hoping for a shot at the top spot after its editor mysteriously disappeared, but it went to someone else. A weekly didn't prove to be his style, so he had hooked up with a small-time daily and waited for his chance.

His chance was now.

He slammed a notebook back into its slot. So much for that shelf. Nothing but notes and jottings and equations and abstracts of scientific articles pasted onto the pages. No love letters or dirty pictures—not a drop of juice.

Time to go to the next shelf. Boring as hell, but something was going to turn up, and Gerry intended to be here when it did.

He went to pull a volume from the next section of bookshelves but couldn't seem to budge it. When he took a closer look, he saw why. Suddenly excited, he squeezed his fingers in above the books, grabbed hold of the tops of their spines, and pulled.

The whole row of books pulled free in one piece.

Only they weren't books, just a facade of old spines glued to a board. He heard Stevens at his side.

"What've you got here, Gerry?"

At the rear of the shelf a dull gray metal surface reflected the light from the window.

"Looks like a safe to me, Jim. A big one."

But where was the combination?