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parties, and he would go to fiveor six a night. He worshiped the rich and powerful. “We’re having a wonderful time” was a bon mot for Babe when it came from blue-blooded lips. His excessive enthusiasm could be quite funny. Babe once wrote this gushy lead to a Veiled Prophet story: “There are balls and there are balls, but there are no balls like the Veiled Prophet’s balls.”
    Babe had another valuable function besides his entertainment value. He was a company spy. He was uncanny at sensing power shifts at the paper, and he immediately became the rising stars’ new best friend, feeding them choice tidbits of gossip and shameless servings of flattery. The
Gazette
had gone through some dreadful upheavals recently, but Babe had managed to sniff which way the winds blew and stay on top. God knows what tale he’d take back to the new
Gazette
managing editor. I saw him sizing up my leather outfit. He’d probably report that I was into bondage. I tried to head him off, without actually seeming to give him a reason why I was hanging around an alley in leather.
    “Nice tux, Babe,” I said. “Armani?”
    “Yes,” he said. “That idiot on the copy desk asked me why it was so baggy. He didn’t understand drape.”
    “Probably thinks drape is something you hang in a window. I can tell you’ve been somewhere important.”
    He preened. “What a night,” he said. “The art museum had an opening for the Monet show, and the publisher flew in for it. Then the symphony gala. And the charity cigar dinner at the Progress Club.”
    “I’ve been to a charity ball, too,” I said brightly.“The Leather and Lace Ball. Are you covering it, too?”
    He screwed up his face like I’d just offered him a cod liver oil cocktail. “No,” he said. “Those aren’t my sort of people. The
Gazette
beeped me because they heard the commotion on the scanner. The night city editor deduced that a prominent person had met with an accident and asked me to check it out. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
    He seemed to feel I’d crashed his news event. The
Gazettes
promise of “24 Hours of News You Can Use” got a little thin in the wee hours. Our ads showed a bustling newsroom, but those pictures were taken during the hyperbusy late afternoon. Between about 1:00 and 6:00 A.M . the tight-fisted
Gazette
didn’t even have a skeleton staff. It had a single bone. Maybe that’s bonehead. The paper used one editor to cover the entire city, usually an exile who worked the graveyard shift because he or she had screwed up big time. The night city editor’s miserable—and impossible—task was to monitor the scanner for major police and fire calls and watch the news wires. If something big happened, the night city editor would call the staff at home and try to make us feel guilty enough to come into work. Most of us monitored our answering machines and wouldn’t pick up, no matter how much the editor groveled. Some staffers saved these pathetic phone pleas and cruelly played them for the newsroom.
    But this night city editor seemed destined to see daylight soon. He’d figured out that a night owl like Babe would prowl until almost dawn, and if he used the magic words “prominent person” he could getBabe to cover the story without putting in for overtime.
    “Who is the deceased?” Babe asked. For one instant, his eyes grew brighter and I swear he licked his lips.
    “It’s Sydney Vander Venter,” I said.
    “That bitch.” He spat. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The way she treated her poor husband. She called me up after I mentioned her upcoming divorce and whined that Hudson had left her for another woman. She wanted me to print that! I told her that she drove him to it. I heard she was a dyke.”
    “I’m sure the word you heard was bike,” I said. “Sydney was dating a biker, as in Harley, and they were both definitely straight.”
    Babe was behind the times. He called everyone he didn’t like gay and thought that was