Read White Hot for Free Online Page A

could stand her smoking, and, two, because no one could stand her. Her abrasiveness aside, she was an old-style gossip columnist who prided herself on knowing what was fair game and what wasn’t. A jewel thief on the loose in Palm Beach was right up her alley.
    “This is too good, Tabak,” she said when he appeared in her doorway. She stuffed out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. “You sucking up to me for information two days in a row is worth a line in my column, except you’re too goddamned boring. If you kept company with something besides reptiles, I could work with it.” She flashed dark, incisive eyes at him. “You don’t sleep with your lizard, do you?”
    “Helen, you make most of my informants seem downright respectable.”
    “They’re cockroaches. I’m a professional. Close the door and sit down. I presume you don’t want anyone listening in on our conversation?”
    “I’m not hiding my interest—”
    “Sure you are.” She waved a tiny, bony hand. She lied about all her personal stats, but she had to be seventy, she couldn’t be over five feet, she weighed at most a hundred pounds, and she prided herself on never having gone “under the knife.” Jeremiah couldn’t imagine what a face-lift could do for her. Rumor had it she’d looked like Loretta Young in her youth. He couldn’t picture it. She pointed at the door. “Shut it. Sit.”
    Jeremiah shut the door and sat.
    Helen tapped another cigarette out of a sequined case. If lung disease or heart disease did her in, she would only say it saved her from a lonely retirement. She’d been declaring she planned to go out of her office on a gurney long before Jeremiah had arrived at the Trib eighteen years ago as a college student working part-time. Most of her colleagues thought she’d simply ossify first. One of the janitors swore she didn’t go home at night. “She’s really a mummy,” he liked to tell Jeremiah. “You just think she’s alive.”
    Jeremiah eased back in the ratty vinyl-covered chair. The tiny office reeked of stale smoke. Helen sat with an unlit cigarette expertly tucked between callused forefinger and middle finger. “So,” she said with a hint of victory in her hoarse voice, “you’re on the cat burglar story.”
    He grimaced. “I’m just nosing around. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”
    “I haven’t taken a vacation in ten years. Don’t believe in ’em. Of course, I can plant my fanny on a cruise ship and call it work. You and me, Tabak, we’re not so different.” She grinned at his stricken expression. “Ha, scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? This work’s either in your blood or it isn’t. It’s in yours.”
    “I have a life, Helen.”
    “Yep, and it’s the job. Might as well make your peace with it now, save you a lot of heartache in the future. Don’t worry, you won’t end up like me.” She grinned, a hint, indeed, of Loretta Young in the sparkle of her dark eyes. “You don’t smoke.”
    Jeremiah reined in any impulse to argue with her. He was not like Helen Samuel. He would never be like Helen Samuel. Thirty years from now, he would not be sitting behind a crummy desk in a crummy office talking Gold Coast gossip with a young investigative reporter. He would be…what? He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. But damned if he’d be an aging, chain-smoking, cynical gossip columnist with a warped sense of humor.
    “If you don’t object,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you know about this jewel thief.”
    “Know? I don’t know shit. But I’ve heard a few things.”
    She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and fumbled for a lighter as ancient as she was. Jeremiah waited impatiently. When she had the cigarette lit and had taken a deep drag and blown what smoke didn’t get sucked into her lungs into his air space and still didn’t go on, he groaned. “Helen, if you’re going to make me beg for every word…”
    “Beg? You, Tabak? Wait, lemme get a