The Henderson Equation

BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER

Banquet Before Dawn

Blood Ties

Cult

Death of a Washington Madame

Empty Treasures

Flanagan's Dolls

Funny Boys

Madeline's Miracles

Mourning Glory

Natural Enemies

Private Lies

Random Hearts

Residue

The Casanova Embrace

The Children of the Roses

The David Embrace

The Henderson Equation

The Housewife Blues

The War of the Roses

The Womanizer

Trans-Siberian Express

Twilight Child

Undertow

We Are Holding the President
Hostage

SHORT STORIES

Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden

Never Too Late For Love

New York Echoes

New York Echoes 2

The Sunset Gang

MYSTERIES

American Sextet

American Quartet

Immaculate Deception

Senator Love

The Ties That Bind

The Witch of Watergate

Copyright ©
1976
by Warren Adler.

ISBN 978-1-59006-097-1

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com

STONEHOUSE PRESS

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

To the Third Estate

There will be those who believe they recognize some of the
characters in this novel as persons presently living. Nothing could be farther
from the truth. With the exception of well-known public figures and institutions
cited by name, all other characters and institutions are purely the creation of
the author's imagination. Admittedly superficial bits and pieces of living
people and situations have slipped into the crucible of the author's
subconscious. But there they have been recycled and disgorged in other forms
and configurations. Perhaps, then, the essential message of this disclaimer is
that not even a novelist can, or wish to, live in a vacuum. The impact of the
mass media is ubiquitous. No one can escape. Which is what this book is all
about.

--Warren Adler

Staring into the vast city room, as it subsided now from
the last flurry of deadlines, Nick Gold savored a moment of comparative
tranquility. Deskmen and reporters, lifting weary eyes from copy paper, might
have assessed his mood as one of self-imposed hypnosis, a kind of daydreaming.
News aides turned their eyes away self-consciously, as though fearing their own
curious gazes would be an intrusion on the executive editor.

But while Nick's open eyes gazed into the cavernous room,
the ninety-one clearly visible desks and typewriters, the clusters of nerve
centers through which information had passed from brain to typewriter, from
paper pile to paper pile, paragraph by paragraph, through each penciled checkpoint,
the image was not registering. The mechanism of his mind was simply idling,
lulled by the comforting vibrations of the big presses as they inked the
awesome discharge of a Washington day, the distilled essence of a thousand
minds.

Cordovan brogues planted at either side of his typewriter
table, hands clasped as a cradle for his peppered head, tie loose but still
plumb in its buttoned-downed place, Nick kept at bay any irritant wisp of
thought that might intrude on his self-imposed tranquility.

His adrenaline would not recharge him until the completed
street edition, the freshly inked "practice" sheet, was slapped
smartly on his desk by one of the news aides.

The slap of the
Chronicle
falling on his Lucite desk
top, like a slap on the butt, jarred him out of his stupor. His long legs
unhitched from over the typewriter and curled under the desk as he opened the
first section, smudging the ink with his fingers. He covered the headlines with
a single glance, as his short-fused temper was immediately ignited by a single
word. He pressed a buzzer and waited for the gruff mumble of Prescott, the copy
editor.

"Remove
balk,
Harry, as in 'Russians Balk,'
lower right, beneath the crease."

"Nit-picking.
Balk
is exactly right."

"It's an old baseball term, Harry. Not precise."

"How about
bark?"
Nick could detect the
professional irritation. Copy editors traditionally overreacted to their own
myth. They fought over words like male lions over their mates. Nick's temper
fuse sputtered. Tread lightly, he told himself. Don't take it out on Harry.

"Give it a try, Harry," Nick said, ending the
argument. He peered through the glass and across the room at Prescott, who
turned to glare back. Nick smiled and waved, softening the jab. His eye roamed
the rest of the page, searching for blips, like a trained cyclops soaking up
the neatly inked Times Roman. It was a second look. He had already seen the
proofs of page 1, the smudged lines, the silky feel, the still unfamiliar odor
of the new newspaper technology. The craft unions had fought its coming for
years. They had taunted him with strike threats and slowdowns, sick calls and
deliberate fuck-ups.

"I'm no goddamned union negotiator," he had told Myra. "I'm a newspaperman."

"You're the executive editor," she had said
gently, the veneer of layered softness carefully masking the hard flint
beneath.

"And you're the boss."

"Your job is to get the paper on the street. Mine is
to turn a profit. Neither of us has it all roses."

"But they're being unreasonable."

"Look at it from their point of view. They see
technology as the enemy, robbing them of their livelihoods. They see computers
taking over."

It was hypocrisy not to accept new discoveries, Nick had
thought. It was morally indefensible, if vaguely romantic, like Myra's simplistic view of the
Chronicle
's mission.

He had listened with rising impatience as she outlined her
"views" after Charlie's death, as if in his ten years as Charlie's
honcho he hadn't understood. He didn't mind her borrowing the rather naive
idea, only the way she stated it; it came out so pedantic and self-serving.
Charlie had never expressed it with such self-consciousness. But Charlie had
died, his brains soaked with booze, anger, and madness.

"Objectivity must be our first priority," Myra had told him then. "The unvarnished truth. That was my father's only
consideration. That's the way Dad wanted it and that's the way Charlie built
it." He had listened with impatience. Deference was the proper attitude of
a new widow. But the look of triumph in her eyes was clearly visible. Nick had
said nothing, his hand white-knuckled as it held the Scotch glass.

"I need you, Nick," she had said finally. "I
know they're all laughing at me." Her father, and then Charlie, had stood
between her and the
Chronicle
. Now they were gone.

She had stood up, a sweater thrown lightly around her frail
shoulders, practicing humility, he had thought. She was too clever to make
changes now, too shrewd. And his view of her was still colored by Charlie's
disintegrating mind, the calibration awry. Charlie, toward the end, had seen
her as a monstrous enemy, greedy to wrest the
Chronicle
from his hands.
And despite the obviousness of Charlie's paranoia, Nick had enlisted in his
cause. Was it out of simple friendship, loyalty? Or was Nick, too, secretly
covetous of the
Chronicle?
Toward the end she had had Charlie
institutionalized, straitjacketed. Nick's last view of him was of a broken,
mindless man, hungering for death. Had she known that when she brought him
home? Near all those trophy guns. Charlie's death was, Nick knew, his own loss
far more than hers.

She did not turn from the window.

"Charlie needs you now more than ever," she had
said, invoking the name unfairly, since she knew he could never refuse Charlie
anything.

"Charlie's dead," he had answered. She turned
from the window to face him.

"And I'm alive," she said. In that moment, he
glimpsed the hardness beneath the pose of humility, the chip of granite off the
old block. In the way she stood, good athletic legs planted squarely, jaw
jutted, the image of her father's portrait in the eighth-floor boardroom, Nick
could glimpse both her determination and her frustration. But now no one stood
between her and her rightful legacy. Surely, he thought, she had dreamed of
standing one day in that spot. Charlie had simply been the means, the conduit,
and Charlie had cracked, the victim of genetic poisoning, or so he himself
believed.

It was she who had handpicked Charlie years ago, moved
perhaps by the same forces within her that she sometimes seemed to despise, her
womanliness. To Charlie, his selection had been at first tantalizing, then
burdensome, and finally destructive.

Now Nick sensed danger, as if he had suddenly been caught
in a shark's scent. Watch out, he told himself. He could feel his breath catch as
she came toward him.

"It's my right to be here and I mean to exercise that
right," she said firmly, stopping before him, her hazel eyes moist.
"We could be one helluva team, Nick. Accept me. Like you and
Charlie."

He expelled his breath. The question in his mind was how
long she would need him. Was he simply to be gobbled up like some heavy ripe
fruit, eaten to its core and digested?

But Nick had known all along that this day would come. He
must learn to see her, understand her, stop viewing her from Charlie's poor
vantage point. It was, after all, the price he would have to pay. He must find
the key to knowing her, he thought, suddenly anguished again by Charlie's final
betrayal, the gun in the mouth, the splattered remains that stained forever the
oak panels in Mr. Parker's house, the legacy of his madness. He must learn to
accept her, he cautioned himself. She was mistress of his present, his future.

"Charlie built the
Chronicle
out of the
strength of my father's mind," Myra continued, as if she had practiced the
words. "Out of abstractions. My father hungered for truth. For him, a
banker, the printed word was the ultimate conveyance of truth. The power of the
printed word was all. Charlie made it begin to happen."

There is truth in that, Nick thought. And he had helped
Charlie to build from that beginning. There was credit due her, too, he
reasoned, struggling, as always, to view her objectively rather than through
Charlie's convoluted prism.

Charlie's first objective had been to make the
Chronicle
self-sustaining, to take it off old Parker's dole. That took fantastic skills,
business acumen, horse sense.

"Nothing has to change," she said suddenly,
rechanneling the direction of her thought, perhaps ashamed of her immodesty, as
if she had shown a strip of soft white thigh. "You take care of the
newspapering, just like you did for Charlie in the last days of his ... his
illness. I won't interfere."

"Is that a promise?" he said.

"We'll be a team," she said quickly, ignoring the
question. "Nick, we can make the
Chronicle
the most important paper
in the country."

"I leaned a lot on Charlie," he had said.

"And Charlie on you."

"I suppose."

"Lean on me, then, Nick. I'm a lot stronger than you
might think."

He looked at the frail woman, remembering Charlie's hate. He
had watched it grow, had seen its first frail sprouting in the soil of his
anger, watched the first buds mature even before Mr. Parker had died, then saw
the buds open, multiply, renew, an ugly stalk twisting itself around his
friend's guts.

"God, I hate that woman," Charlie had confided to
him as the martinis at lunch grew to three, then four, then beyond the
counting. And finally Charlie was teetering on the edge of madness, a twilight
world.

Once he had found him in a rat-infested walk-up in the
heart of Washington's black ghetto. Charlie was lying naked on a filthy,
stained mattress in a vile, urine-smelling room lit by a bare bulb, a large
booze-bloated woman sprawled next to him in her own alcoholic stupor.

"Take a picture, Nick baby. I want to send it to Myra; a Christmas card."

He had taken the picture in his mind, all right; then,
disgusted by the stink in his nostrils, inhaled cautiously as he hauled Charlie
from the bed, dressed him, and dragged his dazed body to a waiting taxi. It had
not been the first time, or the last, that he had played rescue squad for
Charlie in that two-year descent.

The scene and Charlie's words bubbled upward through his
memory. From what poisoned stream had come such a deep well of hate, he
wondered? Had he missed something about Myra?

"I'm not going anywhere, Myra," Nick said,
knowing that he was trapped, like a fly caught in the ink rollers of the great
presses.

Her thin hand reached out for his, white and lightly
speckled with freckles. Her hair was reddish blonde, but she was letting the
grey poke through now, the silver strands somehow belligerent in their
glistening validation of age.

Am I surrendering anything? he remembered asking himself as
his hand groped out to meet hers, feeling its coolness. He was embarrassed by
the sweatiness in his own palms.

"We'll take it from here," Myra said, grabbing
his upper arm as well, squeezing it, then releasing it and walking briskly
behind her desk.

"We'll work it out, Myra." He wondered if his
words were symbols of his impotence, the collective pronoun a sign of weakness.
Was he fawning? He became suspicious, of his own motives. She was, after all,
the boss, he reasoned. He'd simply have to find the strategy to cope with her.
If only Charlie's hate had not warped his view.

"I'll keep my promise," Myra said, sensing his
thoughts. "I'm not going to throw any monkey wrenches into the works.
We'll set policy together. If we have differences we'll use persuasion on each
other. No Horatius at the bridge stuff around here."

"I have only one condition," he said, wondering
if he sounded courageous.

"Shoot," she said quickly, the enduring shadow of
Charlie falling over her chair.

"It's got to be just you and me. No layers of
executives, in between. No third parties. No bureaucratic bullshit. The always
open door."

"Done," she shot back without hesitation. He
wondered if she realized what he had meant. It was one thing to have observed
the power and influence of the
Chronicle
from the outside and quite
another to see it from the inside. Could he explain to her what it meant to be
a sculptor fashioning form from raw clay, a painter, palette in hand before the
empty canvas? It was like being God. How long would it take her to find that
out? Or did she already know?