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  “Yes, Mrs. Sanchez,” I said, guessing. The PR man, typically, had refused to give me a last name. But how many Amalias could there be at Huntington Hospital?

  The woman glared at her clipboard, then peered suspiciously over the rims of her tortoiseshell bifocals as the electronic door behind me swooshed open. Three graying men with ruddy faces glided in together.

  “Suffolk County Homicide,” one of them said.

  “Homicide,” agreed the other two.

  “Here to interrogate Mrs. Sanchez!” the first detective announced.

  Why hadn't any of the cops Mulvaney called told him that the hospital had a murder suspect?

  “I'm Amalia's friend,” I chirped, even though Leisure Suit had some new dumb rule that we couldn't lie.

  The first detective examined me. “Then you speak Spanish, right?”

  “Like a native,” I lied again as he motioned me to follow.

  It had been a tough night for Amalia Sanchez, and she was in no position to be choosy about her friends. The cops, speaking English v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, told her to tell me everything she wanted them to know.

  Reporter heaven. It does happen more than once in a lifetime, even on Long Island.

  Amalia grasped my hand in her dark, bony one, as if we'd known each other all our lives, and I thanked Midwood High School for whatever Spanish it might have forced down my throat.

  As she spoke, her eyebrows moved with her. They were thick and curly, not tweezed into an expression of surprise, like so many women's.

  “Ask her when she threw her boyfriend out the window,” ordered the first detective. “Before or after she set the fire?”

  “Mi perrito muerto,” she wailed quietly.

  “Ay,” I said, thinking Oy. These guys had no idea they were investigating the alleged homicide of a puppy. I thought of Mulvaney, who claimed nobody was smarter than a cop.

  “Come se llama el perro?” I asked her. If you wrote about pets, you needed to get their names.

  “Dani,” she said, wiping her face with a shredded tissue. “Danielito, mi Daniel. Daniel Ortega Saavedra, el perrito.”

  This, I thought to myself, could be a better story than I'd imagined.

  “Mi perrito precioso. El mejor perrito del mundo.”

  The lead detective turned to his boys. “Ain't Danny the name arson gave us?”

  “He's a dog,” I explained, trying to sound matter-of-fact. It is always best to let cops in on their own mistakes gently.

  “Broads always make excuses,” the lead detective said.

  I shook my head. “As in bow-wow.”

  The detectives' red faces turned white.

  “Daniel was a dog?” the lead detective asked.

  “A little one,” I said.

  I arrived back in the Gloomroom and spotted Mulvaney on the phone miserably asking questions about automobile alarms. He saw me, too, and clicked his tongue in mock scolding. He'd probably heard from Homicide by now. Around us the Non-Naked Men typed furiously, their white shirts unbuttoned, their headphones askew.

  Fifteen minutes to deadline.

  “Fischkin, whattaya got?” A photograph of a red Mazda leaned against Leisure Suit's computer.

  “I love it!” he shrieked as I filled him in.

  Leisure Suit and dog stories were made for one another.

  “I absolutely love it.” He rose from his chair and climbed on top of the City Desk Without a City.

  Mulvaney, who could giggle like a little boy, was doing just that.

  “Stop the presses!' Leisure Suit shouted, stamping his foot perilously close to his computer terminal. Mulvaney's giggles escalated to hysteria.

  The only people who actually could stop the presses—the pressmen—were miles away in Garden City, studying the intricacies of publishing with newfangled computers regularly imperiled by excitable editors.

  Shaking with delight, Leisure Suit climbed down and told me to write my own budget note.

  RONKONKOMA BUREAU

  Radical Arson

  Liberate Me, the only Alternative Bookstore in Huntington, burned to the ground last night in what police say was a suspicious fire. As flames spread, the bookstore owner roused his second-floor tenant by throwing used Communist Manifestos at her window. She tossed her dog, Daniel Ortega, out the window into the landlord's arms, then jumped herself. Tenant in guarded condition at Huntington Hospital. Landlord and dog missing. All believed to be Nicaraguan revolutionaries, immigration status unknown but probably not good.

  At my desk I read the notes I'd scrawled from memory in the hospital parking lot and wrote the real story.

  I popped my head up to see Mulvaney standing over me. “Good dog story. Did you call your mother for a quote?”

  He had a pencil behind his ear. All he needed was a black visor and he could play himself in The Front Page. “My friends at Homicide, though,” he added, “are not amused by your deception.”

  Two minutes to deadline and he was bothering me.

  In the end I'd had to tell the detectives I was a Newsday reporter.

  But they'd given me the quote I needed and told me I had wonderful foreign language skills for someone assigned to Huntington. My little lie, they assured me, didn't concern them nearly as much as the guys in Arson, who'd left the crime scene convinced it was a human, not a dog, tossed from the apartment window. These guys made me look like Gabriel García Márquez.

  “Oh, bullshit, Mulvaney,” I said. “They thought it was very funny.”

  I swiveled my chair and started typing.

  Mulvaney put his hand on the keyboard. “They found the dog. It wandered back home and the cops took it in for questioning.” Leisure Suit stood and surveyed the City Desk Without a City, as if he might climb it again.

  Mulvaney was wearing a clean shirt. “You don't even have to give me a piece of the byline.” Leisure Suit clapped twice, pulled a leg high.

  I made this update “the kicker”—the last sentence—and looked around to see if the Only Female Assistant Editor in Ronkonkoma was in. If she was, she'd make me put the dog's current whereabouts in the lead. That would make the top clunky and ruin the flow of the entire story. But suspense, I suspected, was no longer an attribute the only female assistant editor admired.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “the cops tell you anything else about the dog?”

  “Yeah, they said it yaps.”

  The police added that the dog barked merrily, in anticipation, perhaps, of a reunion with its owner.

  I pressed “Send” and waited for questions.

  Story sent, I nodded at Mulvaney, who was back on the phone. “You don't want a byline? What do you want?”

  He hung up and smiled blue. “The usual.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Northern Ireland.”

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “for me you hung up on an entire country?”

  “Isn't a country,” he replied. “Or, it shouldn't be.”

  We drove down to Long Beach and stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy beach towels. Mulvaney claimed he had some in his bungalow, but we'd never find them in the rubble that was supposed to be a floor. It had been warm for a May night but the ocean was freezing, particularly if you weren't wearing anything.

  “Did the bookstore owner ever show?” I asked as we dried off.

  “Hard to tell. He used a few names.”

  “A bookstore owner with aliases?”

  “Remember the kind of bookstore. And now the broad's gone missing, too.”

  “Amalia!”

  “Yep, your best friend. Walked right out of the hospital. Didn't even collect her puppy.”

  I pulled the towel off him. “Cops call after I sent the story?”

  He nodded and went for my towel. “I don't think they're really Nicaraguans,” he said as I ran out from under the streetlight on the boardwalk.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, pulling my jeans on, “something better than a fire is going on here.” I thought of her face. “She
had eyebrows like a woman who did not have time for nonsense.”

  “You could adopt the mutt.”

  I kissed him. “Do we really need another dog story?”

  Even now, I remember falling in love. Even now, I remember falling in love with Mulvaney and thinking it wouldn't be necessary for him to sing to me.

  Perhaps, when it comes to this book, I am being inflexible. Mulvaney is still smart, still handsome, still employed, and still interesting, even in bed, although I do not want to write about that.

  But he's not asking me to. He says he can be standing up for most of this.

  I'm a writer. This is something I can do for my husband.

  CHAPTER 14

  Teamwork, Part Two

  “Fischkin,” Leisure Suit said, shaking his head, “I just don't see a story.”

  The editor's right hand tapped out gibberish on his keyboard. The left linked a chain of paper clips around a sterling silver frame in which he'd put the image of his beloved Mazda. If only Leisure Suit's mind worked as well as his fingers.

  “They're raising money in the name of Oliver Cromwell,” I repeated.

  He nodded. “Yes, it's a mildly interesting gimmick. Historically accurate, too. Did you know that Huntington was settled by people from Cromwell's hometown, Huntingdon with a ‘d'?”

  He stopped typing but continued linking his paper clips. “Now that I think of it, wasn't Cromwell the founder of the British Royal Navy? Get it? Navy—yacht club.”

  “He massacred people right and left!”

  “War is hell,” Leisure Suit agreed.

  A Non-Naked Man stood and stretched. His shirt stuck to his potbelly. The May heat wave hadn't broken.

  “Would you say the same thing about Hitler?” I asked, making a mental note to join the union, now that I had passed the Gloomroom probationary period. “Would you say that he did what he did because war is hell?” Another Non-Naked Man pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his perspiring face.

  “I need a weather story,” Leisure Suit said. He liked those almost as much as he liked dog stories.

  There was a sweaty commotion at the entrance to the Gloomroom: Mulvaney returning from Manhattan. Somehow he'd convinced Leisure Suit that the only way to find out about Long Island car theft was to go into the city. I'd asked him to check while he was there for anything new on the alleged Long Island Nicaraguans.

  “Mulvaney,” Leisure Suit yelled out, “you got any heat-related crime?”

  Mulvaney stomped over to the City Desk Without a City and slammed his notebook so that it barely missed Leisure Suit's hand. “I don't do weather,” he said.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “you should at least do storms.”

  Leisure Suit raised his eyebrows. “I hadn't realized you knew Mulvaney so well.”

  Mulvaney smiled lightning blue at me. “Rain, I understand,” he went on. “My ancestors came from rain. They came from a small wet town in the west of Ireland.”

  Leisure Suit was back on the keyboard. “Where was that?” he asked, staring at his terminal.

  “They called it Mulvenna.”

  I moaned.

  “Doesn't exist anymore.” Mulvaney looked at me and winked. “Cossacks burned it down.”

  I shook my head, but he was too delighted with himself to stop. “My relatives had to flee to America on a boat without chocolate.”

  Leisure Suit looked up from the computer, slid open his desk drawer with a jagged back-and-forth motion, and grabbed another box of paper clips. “They had Cossacks in Ireland?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I offered. “They rode in with Oliver Cromwell.”

  The new box of paper clips spilled out onto the floor. My brown eyes locked into Mulvaney blue. We knew we couldn't laugh, or even smile.

  “You didn't know that Oliver Cromwell hired Cossacks?” Mulvaney paused and looked hard at the editor. “Oliver Cromwell and fifty-two Cossacks rode into Mulvenna, Ireland, on a cold, wet morning in 1649 and set the town on fire. His soldiers killed on sight. Within hours, half the town was dead.”

  The editor bent to pick up his paper clips, but he didn't take his eyes off Mulvaney.

  Well, I thought, just because stuff like that happened in my mother's Felshtin didn't mean it never happened in Mulvaney's Mulvenna, or even someplace more factual.

  “They herded all the women into a boat,” Mulvaney said. “A boat without chocolate. They were sold as slaves in the West Indies. To the Brits!”

  Leisure Suit sat still.

  “Irish slaves, of course, were worth more because they were white.”

  “A lot of white women belong to the Huntington Yacht Club,” I said.

  “Sir Oliver Cromwell Day,” Mulvaney agreed. “The Ancient Order of Hibernians is livid—and you know that Irish temper.” He put an arm around me, in conspiratorial mode, but he spoke loudly. “Got that from a Daily News photographer. Buddy o' mine.”

  Our editor, I knew, couldn't stand it when a city paper beat him on a Long Island story. This was my chance but I had to act quickly.

  “Guess I better write it,” I said.

  Leisure Suit looked exhausted. “Make it short,” he said.

  After deadline we invited everyone at Newsday to drink with us at the Ground Round. Getting people to drink to excess and spill their guts was at the top of the list of non-sex things Mulvaney and I did best together. Everyone from Ronkonkoma—except Leisure Suit, who didn't drink but should have—squeezed into the bar. It was so crowded the fake Tiffany lamps shook. When we thought the place could hold no more, the Men Who Did Write Naked Came the Stranger arrived from Garden City to regale us with stories about their days as undercover pornographers.

  “Those were better times,” they all agreed in unison. “Before newspapers had computers.”

  Just before midnight, the Only Female Assistant Editor in Ronkonkoma appeared. She threw back a few shots of bourbon and—to the delight of most of us but especially Claire—described what it had been like to work in Chicago and sleep with Mike Royko's best friend.

  “He wasn't as good a reporter as Mulvaney,” she said. She told Mulvaney that he was the best police reporter in Suffolk County. I was afraid he'd hit her.

  “The only police reporter,” he said sadly. “Not enough news for two.”

  After Mulvaney pours wine for me, he starts to cook. He makes delicious meals, but after he “cleans up,” there is a mess. He says this is because he is “a complicated human being.” When we still worked in Ronkonkoma, Mulvaney would open cans and call it “cooking dinner for you.” I fell for that, too, but it was also a trick, a failed attempt to convince me that he himself was as simple as Chicken Noodle.

  CHAPTER 15

  Do Lyrics Count?

  Mulvaney stomped over to the City Desk Without a City minutes before deadline and plunked down fuzzy black-and-white NYPD photographs of an upside-down luxury automobile. “Guaranteed stolen late this morning from Long Island,” he announced. “Southern State to Belt, flipped over during a cop chase in Brooklyn.”

  Leisure Suit clutched the pictures in his long, lanky fingers.

  “Lucky thief,” Mulvaney said. “He strolled into the cops' arms. Won't need to be wheeled through his perp walk.”

  The editor held up the photos to the Gloomroom's fluorescent lights, then lowered them, perilously close to the picture of his own Mazda. He tinkered with the cloth buckle of his leisure suit.

  “Good wreck shot,” he said, putting the pictures aside a bit nervously. “Where'd they steal it from?”

  Throughout the Gloomroom, we all swiveled our chairs to watch.

  “He took it from a newspaper parking lot in Ronkonkoma,” Mulvaney said.

  A few reporters stood to get a better view.

  Leisure Suit's eyes went wide. He peeled a single staple off a long row, pushed the photos aside, squinted at them sideways.

  “Ronkonkoma?” he asked.

  Mulvaney nodded solemnly.

  Leisure
Suit picked the photos up again, and when he slammed them down his whole body jerked like a new corpse. From his open desk drawer, he grabbed three boxes of staples and flung them in the general direction of Mulvaney, sending slivers of metal hailing down, making visibility poor. The editor ran into the thick of that storm, hugged himself tight, and let out a small, incomprehensible yelp.

  “Mulvaney!” he yelped more coherently. “Mulvaney, you fucking bastard! You had my car stolen!”

  Mulvaney smiled his widest blue. “Nah. Must have been that new car-theft ring.”

  To Mulvaney's complete and utter amazement, this stunt did not further endear him to Leisure Suit. It was, to be blunt, a major setback for his career.

  Suddenly he was reined in, banned from Manhattan, ordered to Babylon instead. His stories ran in the back of the paper and he spent nights at the Ground Round complaining that Leisure Suit couldn't take a joke; that the car had only needed a few “minor” repairs.

  “You'd better lay low or you'll have to leave the country,” I said.

  But with fewer stories to report, Mulvaney was sweeter, and life with him was slower. If I worked late, he went to my cottage and warmed up a can of Campbell's soup. One night he insisted that we go out alone, to a place we knew in Huntington that served good mussels.

  His eyes softened and I panicked. He was, as I had always believed, as I should have remembered, a typically deranged Irishman. Mulvaney was going to ask me to marry him! And the romance had been going so well. . . .

  Fall had started early. We hung our jackets in a small cloakroom packed with other customers' coats. Months earlier Mulvaney had discovered an old jukebox in that room and the owners had moved it out front. After we got our table he put two quarters in and Rosemary Clooney crooned: Of sunburns at the shore / nights in Singapore / you might have been a headache / but you never were a bore.

  When the mussels arrived, Mulvaney took one, threw the shell back in his bowl.

  “There are still people in Ireland who won't eat these,” he said.

  I nodded. Months had passed since my Oliver Cromwell story had run upfront, prompting Huntington Hospital to change the name, and the theme, of its fund-raiser. Even longer since Physty the whale had finally made it back to sea.