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you talk to?” he asked.
    She picked her purse up from the floor. Her hand came out with a business card. County seal. Assistant District Attorney. Timothy Beal.
    “And then they brought some other men in. They said I was a liar.”
    She began to cry in earnest now. Corso waited as she found a twisted Kleenex in her coat pocket and applied it to her dripping nose. With the other hand, she fumbled in her purse and produced a yellowed and much-fingered piece of newsprint. “I showed them your article about how Mr. Himes was innocent. And you know what?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “They said you were a liar too. That you got fired for printing lies. And that was why you were working here instead of wherever you used to work.”
    Corso kept his mouth shut.
    “Did you?” she insisted.
    “Did I what? Get fired for fabricating a story? Yes, I did.”
    “Not that,” she whined. “Did you lie?”
    “Not on purpose,” he said.
    “You made a mistake?”
    He grudgingly nodded. “In some way I still don’t understand, I must have gotten sloppy. Overconfident, maybe…something like that.”
    Corso recalled Cynthia’s face, watching it melt like a cake in the rain as he told her the real story of what he thought had happened. And then the silence and the look of pity as she asked, “You don’t really think anyone is going to believe that, do you?” After that she began to rave about how if he’d just admit to making a mistake, maybe he could salvage what was left of his career. About how telling the story he’d just told her would accomplish nothing except to get him branded as not only a liar but as a paranoid schizophrenic as well. Corso had never told the story again. Not to Ben Gardner, his editor at the New York Times who fired him, and not to Mrs. V. here at the Seattle Sun when she hired him. So why, he wondered, did he feel compelled to tell Leanne Samples?
    “Leanne,” he said, “what happened to me back in New York is a very complicated story.” He looked into her eyes. They were nearly black. “I say that not because I think you’ll have any trouble understanding it. I say it because I don’t understand the details of it myself. All I know for sure is that it happened.”
    She sat up straight, as if she were at school. Said she understood.
    “I was writing a series about a very rich and powerful man.” Corso paused. Took a deep breath. “He invited me to his office one day. Real polite and everything. Had a catered lunch there for us.” Corso gathered himself. “After lunch—over coffee—he told me to stop. No more writing about him, he said.” Corso snapped his fingers. “Just like that. ‘Stop,’ he told me. He said he’d squash me like a bug if I didn’t.” Corso ground his thumb on the table for emphasis.
    Leanne cringed. “But you didn’t stop, did you?” she said hopefully.
    “No,” Corso said. “I didn’t. I kept picking at it.”
    She looked at her own thumb. “And he—”
    “Like a bug.” Corso sighed. “People got fired,” he said. “Some of them held me responsible for ruining their lives.”
    “How?” she asked.
    Yeah…that was the double jeopardy question, wasn’t it? How could such a thing have happened? To a raw rookie, maybe. But to a seasoned investigative reporter? He wakes up one day and a whole raft of otherwise respectable people are suddenly conspiring against him. Spare us. We wanna hear that crap, we’ll watch The X-Files .
    “Money and pride,” Corso said after a moment. “He had enough money to be truly dangerous, and I had enough pride to be truly stupid.”
    “Mama says money won’t buy happiness,” Leanne said.
    “What’s your mama have to say about pride?” he asked.
    “Mama always says that ‘pride goeth before a fall.’”
    “I’m living proof your mama is right,” Corso said.
    “I knew you wouldn’t lie on purpose.”
    “Thanks,” Corso said with a chuckle. “You’re now executive vice president of the Frank