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Georgia was out of favor.
    There was no one but a tiny old woman standing outside the massive stone building, huddled near the door to avoid the sharp spring winds. Then, with a shock, I realized that was Georgia. Georgia was fifty-five years old, and weighed maybe one-ten if you threw in the wet towel, but she was such a powerful presence I never saw her as any particular age, and never thought of her as small. Now she looked aged and shrunken. But when she saw my blue Jaguar, Ralph, round the corner, she straightened up andseemed like her old self again. She opened the door, took a deep snort, and said, “Damn, I love this car. Smells like money.”
    That was my old foul-mouthed friend. Georgia started at the paper when the highest compliment a woman could get was, “You think like a man.” She cussed and drank like one to prove she could write like one. It worked. Georgia escaped the pink ghetto of the women’s pages, and did some solid investigative reporting before she was promoted to editor. Her marriage fell apart years ago, and her ex-husband moved away. She had no children. The
Gazette
was her life, and now she was afraid she would lose it. That’s why she had me pick her up at her apartment, so no one from the office would see us leaving together, and maybe follow out of curiosity. She didn’t want anyone to know she was going to the hospital for treatment.
    “Are you sure you want to keep hiding this from Charlie?” I said.
    Her face set into a stubborn line. “I don’t want that jackass weeping crocodile tears by my bedside,” she said.
    “Uh, I think you’ve mixed your metaphors.”
    “Animals,” she corrected, ever the editor. Then she said, “I’m not going to die like Milt!”
    “You aren’t going to die, period,” I snapped. I hated when she talked that way.
    “How do you know?” she said.
    “I won’t let you,” I said.
    “I thought only editors mistook themselves for God. Listen, Francesca, you’d understand how I felt if you’d worked at the
Gazette
when Milt was dying of brain cancer.”
    “But I did. I was new, but I remember. Charlie had just started his rise.”
    “He climbed over Milt’s dead body,” she said. “Milt was a great editorial writer. If he hadn’t been so sick, he’d have never let Charlie near him.”
    That wasn’t quite true. Charlie could be charming when he wanted something, and he wanted the great man’s blessing. He didn’t have any integrity of his own, but he borrowed some from the dying Milt, and it would advance him.
    “Charlie professed to be an admirer of Milt’s,” Georgia said. “He perched at his bedside like a vulture. He’d bring back weepy reports of poor Milt’s suffering to the newsroom. He read stories to him when his eyesight failed. When Milt went into a final coma, Charlie left his side only once—to claim Milt’s nearly new computer. Took it right off the dying man’s desk.”
    “Charlie was only an assistant editor back then, wasn’t he?” I said.
    “That’s right,” she said. “He’d never have had a computer that good if he hadn’t swiped it from a sick man. I keep my office door locked.”
    The dying Milt got the standard treatment for seriously sick staffers at the
Gazette
. The power grab went on while they were ailing: the plum assignments and the best beats were carved out of their workload. Sometimes, if their desks occupied prime newsroom real estate, those were taken, too. If the sick staffers survived, they often came back to find themselves shoved off in a corner, doing drudge work. Too tired to fight anymore, many of them took early retirement. If they died, their grieving family was shipped a stack of cardboard boxes containing their things—or at least the things the other staffers didn’t want. Readers never saw this side of the
Gazette
. The dead reporters got wonderfully weepy obituaries in the
Gazette
.
    “I admit Charlie gutted Milt’s office with the sensitivity of a starving sewer