I'll Be Seeing You Read Free

Meghan Collins.
    He reasoned that she had good delivery, could ad lib at the drop of a hat and always gave a sense of immediacy and excitement to even a minor news item. Her legal training was a real plus at trials. She was damn good looking and had natural warmth. She liked people and could relate to them.
    On Friday morning, Weicker sent for Meghan. When she knocked at the open door of his office, he waved her in. Meghan was wearing a fitted jacket in tones of pale blue and rust brown. A skirt in the same fine wool skimmed the top of her boots. Classy, Weicker thought, perfect for the job.
    Meghan studied Weicker’s expression, trying to read his thoughts. He had a thin, sharp-featured face and wore rimless glasses. That and his thinning hair made him look older than his age and more like a bank teller than a media powerhouse. It was an impression quickly dispelled, however, when he began to speak. Meghan liked Tom but knew that his nickname, “Lethal Weicker,” had been earned. When he began borrowing her from the radio station he’d made it clear that it was a tough, lousy break that her father had lost his life in the bridge tragedy, but he needed her reassurance that it wouldn’t affect her job performance.
    It hadn’t, and now Meghan heard herself being offered the job she wanted so badly.
    The immediate, reflexive reaction that flooded through her was, I can’t wait to tell Dad!

    Thirty floors below, in the garage of the PCD building, Bernie Heffernan, the parking attendant, was in Tom Weicker’s car, going through the glove compartment. By some genetic irony, Bernie’s features had been formed to give him the countenance of a merry soul. His cheeks were plump, his chin and mouth small, his eyes wide and guileless, his hair thick and rumpled, his body sturdy, if somewhat rotund. At thirty-five the immediate impression he gave to observers was that he was a guy who, though wearing his best suit, would fix your flat tire.
    He still lived with his mother in the shabby house in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he’d been born. The only times he’d been away from it were those dark, nightmarish periods when he was incarcerated. The day after his twelfth birthday he was sent to a juvenile detention center for the first of a dozen times. In his early twenties he’d spent three years in a psychiatric facility. Four years ago he was sentenced to ten months in Riker’s Island. That was when the police caught him hiding in a college student’s car. He’d been warned a dozen times to stay away from her. Funny, Bernie thought—he couldn’t even remember what she looked like now. Not her and not any of them. And they had all been so important to him at the time.
    Bernie never wanted to go to jail again. The other inmates frightened him. Twice they beat him up. He had sworn to Mama that he’d never hide in shrubs and look in windows again, or follow a woman and try to kiss her. He was getting very good at controlling his temper too. He’d hated the psychiatrist who kept warning Mama that one day that vicious temper would get Bernie into troubleno one could fix. Bernie knew that nobody had to worry about him anymore.
    His father had taken off when he was a baby. His embittered mother no longer ventured outside, and at home Bernie had to endure her incessant reminders of all the inequities life had inflicted on her during her seventy-three years and how much he owed her.
    Well, whatever he “owed” her, Bernie managed to spend most of his money on electronic equipment. He had a radio that scanned police calls, another radio powerful enough to receive programs from all over the world, a voice-altering device.
    At night he dutifully watched television with his mother. After she went to bed at ten o’clock, however, Bernie snapped off the television, rushed down to the basement, turned on the radios and began to call talk show hosts. He made up names