Contents Under Pressure by Edna Buchanan

annoyed. “What’s the point?” she demanded.
    I didn’t want to go into it with several people listening to my end of the conversation. “We can talk later,” I said, “I’m tying up a business phone here.”
    “You shouldn’t have gone out there without checking with me first,” she snapped, then put me on hold, interminably.
    I was tempted to hang up but still thought she might have an important question. The woman cashier sulked, picking impatiently at her chipped vermilion nail polish as though waiting to use her own phone. Gretchen eventually got back to me, brisk and officious. “I want you to check in with me once an hour, so I know where you are.”
    No other editor had ever demanded such a thing. Swallowing my anger, I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “Any questions about my stories for the first edition?”
    “They didn’t make it,” she said lightly. “I haven’t looked at them yet. We had too much other breaking news.”
    “Oh?”
    “The new United Fund campaign, appointments to the Cultural Affairs Council, the groundbreaking for the Performing Arts Center, the Jewish Libraries Convention on the Beach, and a public hearing on the special taxing district.” She sounded pleased; it was her kind of newsday.
    “I think what’s happening to kids in our inner city, the robbery in the classroom, and the children stabbed by the hypodermic needle, is important.” My stomach knotted.
    She sniffed. “You can speak to whomever is on tonight.”
    I knew I would have to go back and lobby to get my stories on the budget of the morning paper. As day slot editor, she would leave the proposed budget for the night slot editor. Stories not on the budget stood far less chance of making it into the newspaper.
    “Since I didn’t know where you were and you didn’t answer your page, I had to assign a good story to someone else.” Gretchen actually sounded regretful. “Get your ass back in here,” she said, and hung up abruptly.
    I was still seething when a thought occurred to me: the air bag. What happened to the air bag in D. Wayne’s car? Once deployed, air bags deflate and lie there limply, like used parachutes. But it wasn’t there. Alma had said the car had an air bag.
    I went to Lucas, who checked, then wrinkled his tanned brow. “Funny,” he said. “The thing never deployed. Guess there wasn’t enough impact.”
    “It was enough to kill him!”
    We stared at each other. His deep-set eyes became a trifle wary.
    “Was D. Wayne still there when you got to the scene?”
    “They were just putting him in the ambulance,” he said, then threw up one hand as though I was a hoodlum aiming a gun. “Don’t you drag me into nothing, Britt. That city contract is the lifeblood of my business.”
    “Of course I won’t. I’m only trying to find out what happened.”
    “Whatever it was, it was all over by the time I got there.” His expression was defensive.
    “Isn’t it odd that the air bag didn’t inflate?”
    “I dunno,” he mumbled. “Maybe it’s defective, maybe the car skidded sideways. The collision has to be head-on for the bag to deploy.”
    “There is damage to the front.” I looked at him questioningly. “Did you see skid marks?”
    He hesitated. “It was dark.” His lips tightened and his eyes focused over my shoulder at nothing that I could see. “Talk to the accident investigator. He’s the man with the answers.”
    “Okay,” I said, then gave him a sweet smile. “But if you think of anything that will help me put it together, you know where to find me.” I handed him my card.
    “Sure,” he said. As I walked away, he called after me. “Hey Britt, you and Lottie should ride together more often. We can use the business.”
    On the way back to the paper I stopped at headquarters to request the tape of the chase again. The public information officer, usually a nice guy, was snotty. “We take more than fifty thousand calls a week from the public. That’s