Chapter One

      There are men that you meet and forget. And then there are men who keep you up at night…like Slaid Warren.

      It’s not what you’re thinking. Yes, the newspaper photo made him look like a runway model with his deep-set brooding eyes and long dark bangs swept back off his forehead. But that was all beside the point.

      Slaid worked for one major New York City newspaper, and I worked for another. So the thrusting and parrying between us was professional, all business, and it took place in print and on the phone, not between the sheets—not those sheets, anyway. We weren’t lovers. We weren’t friends. In fact, we had never even met.

      So, you know that I would have done whatever it took to scoop him, not only to get ahead professionally and win kudos from my colleagues, but also to enjoy the end-of-the-day phone call that inevitably followed slighting my success, thus convincing me of my triumph. It was usually brief, just a couple of sentences. But in those few seconds, I chalked up the fact that I had him in a headlock and it wasn’t where he liked to be.

      “You missed the story,” he said dismissively in one of our early conversations just months after I had been given the column. Of course he started the conversation without bowing to convention and introducing himself. Unthinkable to him that someone couldn’t recognize his voice, and anyway, we had an ongoing dialogue, interrupted just to allow for new columns to appear.

      “If it helps you to deal with it,” I said, leaning back in my chair and warming to his discomfort with the realization that my column had left him in the dust. He laughed heartily as though acknowledging a good joke.

      “No, babe,” he said, abruptly cutting off the laughter like a motorboat engine suddenly out of power. “Dealing is not the point. I was out nailing the real story. Your column was filler.” Before I could respond, he hung up.

      To backtrack, Slaid Warren and I both covered city politics. “Slaid in the City” was his column. He had me there. How could I hope to top that? Through no effort of his own, he had the good fortune to be born to parents hip enough to give him a cool, albeit weird, name. The only damage I could inflict was to write him e-mails spelling it S-L-A-Y-E-D, in keeping with that of readers who disagreed with him.

      My column, I’m loath to admit, had an agonizingly mundane name, echoing a sparrow chirping: “Street Beat.” Nothing there to summon the grit and substance of a tough investigative column. Then there was my vanilla name: Jenny George. As one well-intentioned boyfriend once commented, “It sounds more like the name of a cheerleader or talk-show host than a serious reporter. Why don’t you just change it?”

      Just change it? Although there are more things about me that I would change than not, my name isn’t one of them. And while a name that was heftier or more commanding—Lana Davis Harriman or Katherine Clotilde Porter III, for example—might have drawn me into public prominence faster, I love and respect my parents—imperfect as they showed themselves to be when naming their children. (Can you imagine Burt as a name for my older brother? If they had a second son, would he have been Ernie?) Anyway, it was the name they gave me and it seemed almost sacrilegious to consider changing it. Whatever.

      As for the column, it had been called “Street Beat” for years, it was well read, and as my editors saw it, why mess with success? To their credit though, they weren’t interested in redesigning the paper and coming up with younger, hipper column heads like, “Thing,” or “What I Was Thinking,” that other papers presumably thought would attract younger readers because they sounded edgier. The paper was secure in its identity and fortunately it had even advanced to the point of covering music written after the “Blue Danube Waltz.”

      I had put in ten years at the New York Daily before taking over the column, starting as a secretary—not an assistant, the term used more often these days—right after college. Since I showed outstanding capability in juggling the phones and discreetly giving everyone the proper messages so that their colleagues didn’t find out that headhunters were returning their calls, or worse, places like AA, I was asked to stay on after my six-month probation, sparing me the humiliation of circling ads in the Times and calling people in human resources, a name that made me think of organ banks.

      I was promoted to editorial assistant, and finally cub reporter, which meant that I earned the right to go downtown to cover a press conference by the Consumer Product Safety Commission on lawn-mower safety (never mind that as an apartment dweller I had never even seen one) and up to Connecticut to report on a factory that made walking sticks. I had my shorthand to thank—or blame—plus my trusty tape recorder and my reputation for staying with a story until every source was questioned practically to death. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m tenacious about ferreting out the truth, or that I’m so insecure that I overresearch. Let’s just say that I took the old journalism adage to heart—“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

      The column was actually something of a gift following a tense investigation of a shelter for women who were victims of domestic violence. I spent two nights in one and wrote a story exposing the failures of the system, including a lack of policing that led to boyfriends finding their way in and spending the night. Apparently the current columnist had opened the paper one morning to