The Governor's Lady by Robert Inman

knows where all the bodies are buried, and he digs ’em up when he needs ’em.” People told things to Kincaid they didn’t tell anybody else. He had been covering the Capitol for the Dispatch for as long as anyone could remember. Beyond that, nobody seemed to know much about hispersonal life. His wife, said to be a schizophrenic recluse, had died the year before. He had a great deal about him that was unfathomable. He kept his own secrets, and if you were a source for one of his stories, he kept yours.
    But Cooper had glimpsed a different side, and it still baffled her. Early in Pickett’s first term, Kincaid had stopped her in the lobby of a downtown hotel after her speech to a League of Women Voters luncheon.
    “Could I have a minute?” he asked, and his brows shot up, making unruly arcs over intense brown eyes. The security officer who was with her moved to cut him off, but Kincaid said, “You really should.”
    Something in his voice made her say, “All right.”
    Just the two of them in the hotel manager’s office.
    “You’ve got a new personal secretary,” he said.
    A young woman, daughter of a wealthy supporter of Pickett’s. She was not, Cooper had decided, either bright or interested in the job. She handled first-lady details from a small office on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion. She had wandered once into the kitchen and had beaten a hasty retreat when Mrs. Dinkins asked her icily if she was lost.
    “Her family has a weekend place up on the lake,” Kincaid said. “Parties, young people running around without any clothes on, a good deal of alcohol and drugs.”
    Cooper felt her throat constrict. “How do you know?”
    “Got a tip, went to see for myself. Took some pictures.”
    “Why are you telling me this?”
    “Because you might want to do something about it. Before—”
    “I read about it in the paper,” she finished for him. “But you’re not—”
    “What the girl does in her spare time isn’t at the top of my list of crucial matters of state, not right now. But somebody else could get a tip, you know. It would embarrass you.” He reached in a coat pocket, pulled out a spool of film, held it up, and put it back in his pocket. “I’ll hold on to this for now.”
    She stood to go. “Thank you.”
    “By the way,” Kincaid said, “that was a helluva speech you gave the ladies just now. It’s not the kind of stuff I generally hear coming out of your husband’s office. Did he clear it?”
    “No,” she said. “Why should he?”
    Kincaid smiled. “Just asking.”
    Cooper went straight to the Capitol and pulled Pickett out of a meeting of the Oil and Gas Board.
    “My God,” Pickett said, ashen-faced. “How do you know?”
    “I just know.”
    “ How do you know?”
    “I know.”
    Within twenty-four hours, the young woman was gone, dispatched to an obscure job in the Commerce Department. Two days later, a small padded envelope addressed to Cooper arrived at the Executive Mansion. She opened it, pulled the long roll of film from its spool, and dropped it in the trash.
    Why had he warned her? To curry favor with Pickett? If so, why not just tell Pickett? If not, then what? Then she had thought, He said it would embarrass me, not Pickett . And why hadn’t she told Pickett where the information came from? Some instinct—she puzzled over it—had led her to keep that part to herself. Afterward, when she was around Kincaid at public functions, neither had spoken of it again.
    Roger brought her a chair and then reluctantly ushered Kincaid in.
    He asked about Mickey. They went way back, he said, to when he was a young reporter on his first job covering the Capitol and Mickey was a minor clerk for the speaker of the House, just in from the country and secretarial school.
    “She’s holding her own,” Cooper said noncommittally.
    “She’s one of a kind, was from the beginning.”
    The door opened, and Roger poked his head in, glancing at his watch. “Meeting of the