The Henderson Equation by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

the freshly inked pages in the process.
    "Confirmed?" Charlie asked gently. Nick pushed
the mangled paper toward the reporter.
    "Confirmed," he nodded. "It just compounds
the felony. It makes us all a part of it, accomplices."
    "I suppose you're right there. But you'd better harden
yourself, old buddy. You'll bleed to death early in this game if you let your
sense of justice get in the way of your good sense."
    "Never," Nick said quietly, holding down his
agitation. "I hope to hell I never get like him." He jerked a thumb
toward McCarthy.
    "Don't be so hard on him," Charlie said after a
long pause.
    "God forbid it should ever happen to me," Nick
said.
    "Or me," Charlie whispered. "Just because I
understand how it works doesn't mean I believe in it."
    Nick felt the closeness to his friend.
    "So you burn as well," he said.
    "Yes, I burn too, kid."
    When the Police Chief had lumbered off, his heavy, beefy
face red with drink and the banked fires of humiliation, McCarthy turned
watery, glazed eyes to them. He scowled as if suffering a twinge from a passing
pain in his midsection. His lips rearranged themselves into a thin smile. It
seemed a signal for Nick to come closer. Charlie followed and they sat down at
the table.
    "I like the man," McCarthy said, his lips like
those of an elephant's trunk squirming toward the edge of the shot glass. The
phrase seemed a hurled curse at his own frailty, as if his own humanness was
something to be endured. Nick remembered that they had sat at the table for a
long time saying nothing, until McCarthy's head, sodden with drink, finally
dropped forward on the table.

4
    Nick felt the rolled paper in his fingers. He had stripped
the shattered cigarette in the ashtray and balled the paper into a dry
spitball, as they had been taught to do in basic training. Flinging the little
ball into his wastebasket, he mentally swung back into the habit of his day. A
news aide put a pile of wire copy on his desk, the first trickle of dispatches
from overseas, early stuff coming in from topsy-turvy time zones. He nodded
toward the young man, neat and slim in a white starched shirt. He looked over
Foster Tompkins' copy filed from India, Calcutta, the ultimate chaos of urbia,
a city choking on its own human sewage.
    India was back in the news again: a
hot spot, inner restlessness increasing, guerrilla activity in embryo, turmoil
with Pakistan. He read the dispatch with special care. It told of an interview
with the guerrilla commander in a tiny, fly-infested restaurant, in the
anonymous teem of the Calcutta netherworld. A picture focused in his mind as he
read. The man, Tompkins, was a fine writer, the imagery accurate, the sentences
workmanlike and cadenced. If only the writing throughout the paper were
consistently good. A misplaced metaphor, after all these years, still jabbed
him a painful blow. A dangling participle made his belly positively acidic.
Words! Sometimes he felt he was being pounded by their avalanche, trapped in a
dark comer with rocks of words clunking around him, imprisoning him like the
man from "The Cask of Amontillado." Sometimes he felt helpless,
impotent, a carpenter with a toothless saw, a clawless hammer.
    Oddly, it was only when he read the good writing, subtle
rhythms that controlled the flow like canal locks, that the pedestrian
sentences of the others revealed their pallor. He read the Tompkins piece and
punched the extension for Phillips, the World editor. The response was hoarse,
indifferent. Busy editors hated telephones intruding on concentration.
    "I thought Tompkins in fine form," Nick said.
    "Class tells," Phillips replied. "I just
read the piece."
    Nick began to think about tomorrow's paper, the beginning.
Conception!
    At three they would all bring in the budget line, the
assistant managing editors, one for each department, World, Metro, Sports,
Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Photo. It was then that they thrashed out
the priorities, budgets in hand, with the day's