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worked with. Lance could be a son of a bitch but he was one hell of a journalist and he turned the Network around. He was in the Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Mike Wallace pantheon of broadcast journalism gods. He was that good. Everybody respected Lance Hopper. When Boggs was convicted of killing him you should’ve heard the applause in the newsroom. Now here
you
come and say Boggs isn’t guilty. That’s going to cause problems around here. Loyalty problems. And it could get you and everybody involved in the project in a lot of trouble.”
    Maisel continued. “Look, I interviewed Boggs myself. He’s a drifter. He’s never had a decent job in his life. Everybody agrees with the jury that he did it. If you’re right and he’s innocent you’re going to be pretty unpopular around here. And you aren’t going to win any awards from the judge and prosecutor either. And if you’re wrong you’ll still be pretty unpopular but not around here because you won’t be
working
here anymore. See the significance?”
    “But what difference does popularity make? If he’s innocent he’s innocent.”
    “Are you as naive as you seem to be?”
    “Peter Pan’s
my favorite play.”
    Maisel smiled. “Maybe it
is
better to have balls than brains.” Rune smelled sweet-sour whisky on his breath. Yes, Maisel certainly fit the mold of an old-time journalist.
    “Why don’t you find a
nice
criminal who’s been wrongly imprisoned and get him out of jail. Why do you have to crusade for an asshole?”
    Rune said, “Innocent assholes shouldn’t be in jail any more than innocent saints.”
    Which earned an outright laugh. Rune could tell he didn’t want to smile but he did. He looked at her for a minute. “Piper called me and said there was a, well, an eager young thing from the local station who—”
    Rune asked, “Is that how she described me? Eager?”
    Maisel dug into his pipe with a silver tool that looked like a large flattened nail. “Not exactly. But let’s let it go at that. And when she told me that, I thought, Oh, boy, another one. Eager, obnoxious, ambitious. But she won’t have grit.”
    “I have grit.”
    Maisel said, “I think you may. And I have to tell you—even though I think he’s guilty the Boggs case went a little too smoothly. Too fast.”
    “Did the media hang him out to dry before the trial?” Rune asked.
    Maisel leaned back. “The media hangs
all
defendants out to dry before the trial. That’s a constant. No, I’m just speaking of the cops and the court system…. I think this may be—
may
be—a story worth telling. If you do it right.”
    “I can do it. I really can.”
    “Piper said you’re a cameraman. You have any other experience?”
    “I did a documentary. It was on PBS.”
    “Public Broadcasting?” he asked derisively. “Well,
Current Events
is a hell of a lot different from PBS. It costs over a half-million dollars a week to produce. We don’t get grants; we survive because of advertising revenue geared to our Nielsen and Arbitron. We
earn
our way. Last week we had ten-point-seven rating points. You know what a point represents?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Each point means that nine hundred and twenty-one thousand homes are watching us.”
    “Awesome,” Rune said, losing the math, but thinking that a lot of people were going to see her program.
    “We’re fighting against some of the biggest-drawing shows in the history of television. This season we’re up against
Next Door Neighbors
and
Border Patrol.”
    Rune nodded, looking impressed, even though she’d only seen one episode of
Neighbors
—the season’s big hit sitcom—and thought it was the stupidest thing on TV, full of wisecracking and mugging for the camera and idiotic one-liners.
Border Patrol
had great visuals and a super sound track, though all that ever happened was that the cute young agent and the older, wiser agent argued about departmental procedures, then saved each other’s ass on alternate weeks