Death on Deadline - Robert Goldsborough Page 0,14

statement about offering forty bucks a share, but didn’t use his “sizable-percentage” comment. Harriet Haverhill was quoted as saying she would “carefully study Mr. MacLaren’s offer.” There wasn’t much else, other than a short biography of MacLaren and a listing of the newspapers and other properties he owned.

After clipping the Gazette article and adding it to my collection, I called the Times, but found that the advertising department was closed until Monday. I debated ringing Wolfe in the plant rooms, but decided to wait till eleven, when he came down. He handles bad news better when he’s behind his desk with beer and book.

As it turned out, he seemed unconcerned that we couldn’t make any progress on the advertisement (he hates the word “ad”) until Monday, and seemed equally unfazed when I reminded him that I would be spending the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday with Lily Rowan at the country place she’d just bought up in Dutchess County. Lily liked to call it a cottage, which I thought was a quaint way to refer to a layout including a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a sauna and two fireplaces and an in-ground pool and tennis court on a ten-acre spread overlooking a stretch of the Hudson which looks like the setting for a travel poster.

I won’t bore you with details of my weekend, except to say it was relaxing. I kept in touch with the outside world just enough to know that the MacLaren Organization offer for the Gazette rated thirty seconds on a national TV news show Saturday night, and that the Sunday Times carried an extensive piece on MacLaren’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune in the business section.

Monday morning after breakfast, I called the Times, and after being passed around to a half-dozen voices, I got a syrupy-sounding woman who told me that the “open, one-time rate” for the type of advertisement I had in mind would be $32,932 on a weekday, $39,699 on a Sunday. I then buzzed Wolfe in the plant rooms, per his instructions, and gave him the two figures. “If you still want to go through with this, I assume we do it on a weekday?”

“Yes!” he snarled, banging down the receiver. One thing he hates even more than being interrupted when he’s playing with his plants is spending money on anything other than food, beer, books, and orchids.

The rest of my morning was taken up trying to get the advertisement into the Times. My first stop was the local branch of the Metropolitan Trust Company, where I had a cashier’s check drawn for almost thirty-three grand. Then it was off to the Times. They liked my check, all right, but one very polite, very attractive, very redheaded young woman patiently explained in a voice like bells that because of what she called the “controversial nature of the copy,” it would have to be approved.

“How long will that take?” I flashed my most sincere smile.

“We might be able to get back to you today,” she answered with a sincere grin of her own. “It depends on how busy Mr. Warner is. He’s the one who decides if it’s acceptable, and he may want to make some changes. Or he may not want to run it at all.”

“If we do get this worked out today, when can the ad run?”

“Probably Wednesday’s editions.” Another sincere smile. We were on the same wavelength.

“Not tomorrow?” I asked, smiling again and raising one eyebrow, which Lily once told me is my most appealing expression.

“No, not tomorrow,” she said, raising an eyebrow of her own. Bright girl. “We’ll make sure you get a call right away, Mr. Goodwin, when a decision has been made.”

After a few more feeble attempts to speed things up, which got nowhere, I wound up by giving the redhead our phone number, and she expertly filled out an impressive array of paperwork on the order. I was revising my opinion of redheads.

It was after eleven when I got back to the brownstone. Wolfe was at his desk going through seed catalogs when I sat at my own desk and turned to him.

“Well, the check’s been cut and the ad—advertisement—is in the hands of the Times, but it may not pass their censors.”

“Indeed?” he said, looking up from the catalog. “On what grounds?”

“They didn’t tell me. They just said that because of its controversial nature, it would have to go through some sort of approval process.”

“Pah!” Wolfe spat. “They won’t alter a syllable.”

“I don’t