Free Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! by Fannie Flagg Page B

Pamela couldn’t much blame her for not wanting to come tonight. From what Arthur had said, the Frenchambassador and his wife were not what you would call Paris’s fun couple, and he had been correct.
    Nevertheless the dinner went well, and while Pamela was busy being a gracious hostess, she was also making mental notes about the small man with the stocky wife. After the evening was over, she closed the door and went into the living room, where Arthur was waiting.
    “Well …” she said, “I see what you mean.”
    “I told you, I can’t get a straight answer one way or the other. I never can pin him down.”
    Pamela lit a cigarette. “Well, first of all, you are never going to get any serious answer from him. He’s not the man making the decisions.”
    Arthur nodded. “That’s exactly what I thought, I just needed to get your read on it.”
    “Absolutely, that man never had an original thought in his life.”
    Arthur smiled, and suddenly winced in pain.
    Pamela looked at him. “What’s the matter?”
    “I don’t know, must be indigestion.” He started trying to loosen his tie and seemed to be short of breath.
    Pamela saw that he had broken out into a sweat.
    “What’s the—are you ill?”
    “I … feel sick to my stomach.”
    Then another sharp pain hit him and he fell over toward the floor.
    Pamela jumped up and tried to catch him but was not able to. She ran to the kitchen and buzzed downstairs to the doorman and screamed for help. Running back to the living room, she found him unconscious. She picked up the phone, called 911, went back to him, and took his tie off.
    By the time the doorman came running in, she was frantic. She could not feel a pulse.

Trust Me
    New York City

1968
    Sidney Capello was born nervous. Tonight he paced up and down in his fleabag hotel room at Forty-eighth and Third, worried even more than usual. Something was off. Sidney had made a name for himself in certain circles as a freelance reporter who specialized in obtaining private information about public people. He had paid informants stashed in many nooks, crannies, and dark corners who covered New York like a giant spiderweb. There were not many moves that the rich or famous could make without Sidney finding out about them one way or another. But lately Sidney’s people had been letting him down. His stable of snitches had been strangely silent. The gossip and rumor mill that sometimes spewed out profitable dirt twenty-four hours a day had suddenly ground down to a halt. Either people had been behaving themselves lately, or else they were beginning to be very careful. Or sneaky. Tonight Sidney hated all of them. They prevented him from making a living, with all the money they had. Greedy little ingrates each and every one. Although he himself was on an under-the-table retainer from one of the New York dailies, and two top gossip columnists, nothing made him more irritable than having to pay out money for nothing. It was making Sidney sweat. He had not had a big, fat, red-hot scandal in over two months,not even a really juicy tidbit. He was restless and couldn’t sleep. He was just itching for a little something, anything he could grab by the throat and choke a story out of. At about twelve-fifty when the call came, he was ready.
    It was Mary at the Midtown Ambulance Service. She had just dispatched a unit to Beekman Towers, Room 107. He was out the door and on the street in less time than it took a fireman to slide down a pole.
    Sidney had never been a Boy Scout but he was always prepared. He kept about two thousand dollars in cash, a small silver German camera with a great lens, and preprinted release forms in his pocket at all times. He could not afford to waste a second with all the new boys in town trying to rip him off. Sidney was excited. The Beekman Towers was an exclusive eastside residential hotel near the UN and just about anyone there might be a story. Adrenaline set in and in five minutes he hit the building