A Disney World

I called Raymond Hopwell again on one of the phones in the office at Oasis Gardens. This time I got through. If you say you're a TV producer, it's amazing how easy it is to get celebrities to take your call.

"Why should I talk to you?" Raymond protested softly, but notice - he was talking to me. His voice was as rich and corrupt as rotting corn mash.

I was spoiled too, just not spoiled rotten. I knew my life at Disney World was Edenic. Outside the window, every plant was in the earth at the newly-opened Animal Kingdom and every herb. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, somewhere out there beyond the densely-landscaped bush, fourteen stories tall, constructed around reenforced steel by a team of Imagineers who had come from all over the world.

"This isn't Hard Copy, Mr. Hopwell," I reminded him. "We're PBS . I'm not beholden to commercial interests..."

"I want Hard Copy, young lady. I want The National Enquirer, someone who'll pay for my story. Do you know what it costs to dodge the independent counsel?"

"I know what it costs the taxpayers to keep him in office. Forty, fifty million dollars for the last two years..."

"And you know that reptile hired a human snake to crawl into my office air conditioning vent and listen to my conversations ... But he still found nothing, not one infraction, not an unpaid parking ticket, and then suddenly, he turns up an old car in a garage in downtown N'Warleans and the car's got a plastic bag of my canceled checks from 1985 in the trunk...."

"That's not what I want to talk about," I murmured. I wasn't interested in their games of gotcha. The independent counsel was scum. Vigilante scum, a lawyer turned preacher, the Stalin of a new American vice patrol. But I knew Hopwell was a sinner too. I had also been to Hitchberry, Tennessee, Hopwell's hometown, and to Memphis, the state capitol, and I had heard the stories of how once long ago Hopwell had traveled north and south, east and west, with bags of money and bought the governorship for Marshall Dodge, now our embattled President. I had heard the stories of their seedy real estate investments while Dodge was running Tennessee, their cavalier attitude toward high public office and the many devious ways they'd found to funnel cash into Dodge's national campaign.

"I loved the man," Hopwell sighed. "I never thought he'd turn on me."

"That's what I want to talk about," I said as the other line began to light up with an in-coming call. I was afraid it might be Louise Pearl, the woman I loved, breaking my heart. I asked Hopwell tohold.

When I said hello, Louise's report was brief and brave. "The test came back ductal carcinoma in situ."

"Where are you?"

"At my office in the Dolphin." Louise was front office assistant manager at Michael Graves' hotel, the fabulous one with four coral-colored guestroom wings, the unbelievable one with the two fifty-six-foot dolphin statues on top - designed, Graves said, to satisfy the needs of a convention of eight thousand proctologists, on the one hand, and an average eight-year-old boy on the other.

"I'll be right there," I told her. Turning back to Hopwell, I said I'd had some terrible news. And then as can happen when you're a reporter who's been flirting with intimacy, but skirting it too, coaxing a stranger into confiding when you don't plan to tell him anything about yourself, the dark miles suddenly glowed like a dying campfire and I confessed, "I'm going to need a lot of help."

Even I could hear how naked I sounded. His answering voice was like velvet. "What can I do?"

"Meet with me. Tell me what happened between you and President Dodge. Not...