“You got moved there, according to Mr., hang on…Mr. Magnuson?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, I had a little chat with him. You got moved out of your feature-writing job because of this difficulty with Mr. Benson, the deceased, this business about trying to get him not to write about Ms. Snelling.”

“That was his interpretation. I never told him not to write about her.”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to ask him about that at the moment.” I felt a droplet of sweat run down my neck and under my shirt collar. “So,” Flint continued, “you went to work for Frieda, and she said things didn’t work out very well there.”

“Not really. But I didn’t have much of a chance to settle in.”

“She told me you were upset about a lot of things, including your troubles with Mr. Benson. She said, and just hang on a second here, I wrote this down. Okay, here it is. She said you referred to him as a ‘dipshit’ reporter. Does that sound right?”

I swallowed. “It does sound like something I might have said.”

“And that you also said you’d be happy if he got caught in a, hang on, got caught in a ‘Wal-Mart cave-in.’ Does that sound like something you said?”

“I was,” I said carefully, “a bit upset.”

Flint nodded again. “I guess you were. I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? Benson, he complains to his boss, his boss is an old friend of your boss, they get talking, and you get demoted.”

“That’s pretty much what happened.” I happened to glance at the clock on the mantel. I had forty minutes to get to my meeting with Sandler. At least now I had transportation.

“I see you looking at the clock there,” Flint said. “Am I holding you up from something?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“So tell me again, where are you off to? It’s clearly not an assignment. I guess you sort of lied to me about that, what with you being suspended and all.”

“My wife and I,” I said, “we’re having a bit of a rough time. We need a bit of space.”

Flint frowned. “That’s too bad. My wife and I, we’ve had our ups and downs too, over the years. Kind of goes with the territory, this kind of job, you know? Long hours, working nights, that kind of thing. But we worked through it.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“So what would make you imagine a Wal-Mart cave-in?”

Flint was giving me a case of mental whiplash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just have that kind of mind, I guess.”

“Creative,” Flint said, helping.

“I suppose.”

“Because I remember, you write science fiction books, right?”