Delores Ruddick

Delores Ruddick is 38 and a New York journalist, hired to write Raskin's autobiography. Born in the Bronx, the daughter of a longshoreman and a seamstress, she graduated in journalism from Columbia on scholarships and worked for Sunday magazines, always on the assignment nobody wanted. She learned to interview people who lie by habit and to find the truth in the pause between one sentence and the next.

She lives in a two-room apartment on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan, on the fourth floor of a walk-up, with a typewriter on a drop-leaf table, stacks of magazines, a shelf of cassette tapes labeled by date, a window with a fire escape and a radio that picks up only two stations. She keeps a potted fern, which she waters out of duty. She dines on pizza, standing, at the kitchen counter.

She is thin, with straight dark brown hair with bangs at shoulder length and big tortoiseshell glasses. She wears a cream turtleneck and a caramel corduroy blazer, and carries a portable cassette recorder slung on her shoulder. Between her fingers, an unlit cigarette, which she has held so long she has forgotten it. Quick, ironic, a New Yorker, she writes everything down, even what she won't use.

Since March, she has been recording Raskin at the lake house, three mornings a week. He talks, she cuts the curses. About Wednesday, she says she saw him leave at 1:15 to stop by Kilbane's agency, and that at 1:40 she called there about the rental car. The girl answered that Raskin had stopped by looking for the boss, who had vanished at 1. About the tapes, she says they are a hundred hours of a man talking and that, if the detective asks properly, she'll tell. In the recordings, Raskin spoke of his foster sonfoster son A boy raised by a family that is not his birth family, without necessarily being legally adopted. as a boy always owing money to the wrong people.

It could be the professional curiosity of a reporter who knows more than she shows. It could be the irony of someone who learned that if she doesn't joke, she becomes a suspect. The detective will have to decide which.