I shouldn’t have been surprised by Bowman’s revelation, but I was. “You knew about his hospitalization back in 1982?” I said dumbly. “Did you tell anyone at the paper?”

“Probably not. Maybe I told Phil Sellinger. I can’t remember. It wasn’t a great secret among Abelard’s friends.”

I smiled and shook my head. It suddenly occurred to me how silly I had been, nosing around a psychiatrist’s office in Pittsburgh to confirm something that one of my colleagues had known about for more than a decade. It wasn’t my place, but I had to ask Bowman the obvious question.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone at the paper, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Bowman sighed and shook his head. He glanced absently at the photographs decorating the walls of his office. A lost world.

“Because it never occurred to me that we would publish a story about a man’s emotional difficulties. Never imagined it. So, given my assumption that the paper wouldn’t have any use for it, sharing the information would have been the worst kind of gossip. I don’t do that. Not my style.” He looked at me, sitting so earnestly across from him. “But I suppose it’s different now.”

“I’ve been wondering about that, myself. What’s different, do you think?”

“Well, Jim is running for president, that’s one thing. And standards have changed. We publish all kinds of things now that we wouldn’t have dreamt of thirty years ago. We look at these things less as people and more as—what should I say? As journalists.”

A wan smile came back on Bowman’s face. “So, now that you know it’s true, what are you going to do with it?”

What I was going to do with it, for starters, was tell Bob Marcus, the bureau chief. I gave him a brief memo, summarizing what I had. When he read it, he asked me to come see him right away. He had obviously gotten nervous, seeing it all in black and white. He held up the memo and whistled, a soft, sinking sound, like an incoming artillery shell. “This will destroy him,” he said.

I told Marcus about my plans for more reporting and he said it all sounded fine, but that wasn’t the issue right now. He had already crossed the threshold to assuming that the information was true, and was now worrying whether we should publish it. “We need to get Weiss in on this,” he said. He had faxed a copy of my story memo to New York and was waiting for the executive editor to call. A few moments later the phone rang. Marcus put Weiss on the speaker.

“It’s a killer if it’s true,” said the executive editor. “We run this, and James Abelard is revolverized, instantly, as a presidential candidate. Is Truell there? Let me talk to him for a minute.”