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his name perched above it. Some of the young turks had joked about it in the halls after work, and some of their words had reached his ears. This is a prizewinner? Holy Christ, what a sham. The newsroom hardass, a young defector from the Daily News named Grainger, had taken to calling him Hiram’s Folly. But he still had his admirers. One kid named Jerry Wayne still thought he was God warmed over.
    And he had to admit it: he really hadn’t set the world on fire in his first few months. He had had a few good things, but nothing that anyone else couldn’t have done. The Radio City piece had been a waste of time; he simply didn’t have the stomach for it. Diana Yoder was a gem, a lovely creature who wanted nothing more than to dance and be left alone. Walker could dig that. But an ugly confrontation with Kanin had followed.
    “The girl doesn’t want to do it, Joe. She can’t understand why you keep persecuting her. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t understand that either. You keep sending people after her and she keeps telling you no.”
    “Shit,” Kanin said. “For this I send my top reporter. Tell me something I don’t know yet.”
    Walker sat in the chair facing Kanin and ran his fingers through his hair. “Look,” he said. “We’ve been going around and around on this piece. I keep trying to sidestep it and you keep getting in my way. So let’s get our cards right on the table, okay? You will never get that story in your newspaper if you wait around for me to do it.”
    “Like I said, tell me something I don’t know.”
    “It’s not my meat.”
    “So where does that leave us? I want that story.”
    “Then send somebody else. Go yourself if it’s all that important.”
    “Very funny, Walker.”
    “I wasn’t trying to be.”
    “There are ways of getting this story,” Kanin said. “Ways other than talking to the girl herself. But I never thought I’d have to tell you that. I mean, you’re the famous Dalton Walker, investigative reporter…”
    “Oh, can the shit. This isn’t some goddamn labor union, it’s a sensitive, moving piece, or should be. It’s worth absolutely nothing without the girl’s cooperation. You can send any jack-off out on the streets to get the facts, but it takes somebody who gives a damn to write it. And I wouldn’t touch it the way you want it done.”
    “We’ll see about that.” Kanin slammed his desk drawer, pushed back his chair and stalked away to Hiram Byrnes’ office.
    Later that afternoon, Byrnes called Walker in for a chat. Briefly Walker ran through the facts of the dispute with Kanin. “Don’t worry,” Byrnes said. “I’ll get him off the Yoder girl’s back. But what about you? You got anything going yet?”
    “A few things. Mostly renewing old ties.” He shrugged. “Sometimes these things take a while.”
    “Don’t worry about it. I told you when you came here, you don’t have any deadlines on this paper.”
    It sounded ideal. For a while he pretended it was, ignoring the talk floating around the office, ignoring Kanin’s deadly glare, which could freeze water across a crowded room. The hell with them. He worked into things at his own pace. Tidbits on the circus fire, all filed into a fattening folder in his cabinet. Lunch with Al Donovan, who had gotten slightly heavier and a little whiter of hair in the years since Walker had last seen him. Donovan took him to a classy joint in Brooklyn, but Walker paid the tab, knowing that the FBI never paid for lunches. Later he turned in an expense account, which Kanin scowled at for a long time before signing. The hell with them. Let the Tribune buy Donovan’s lunch.
    Often, at night, he sat alone in the newsroom and thought about the little girl, and a tent burning, and a lady with a soft voice who wasn’t there.
    But now, after all these weeks, he had it. He had something anyway. He stood at the edge of the tiny grave and watched the coffin being lowered, and he had a yarn that would tear their