by Ed Gorman
“Things were missing?”
“Not missing—just not where they’d been. He must’ve forgotten where things belonged exactly.”
“Did he take the songs?”
“No. But later on we figured out what he did do. He Xeroxed them. There were a lot more songs, too. He was probably going to release them one at a time so it’d look like he was writing them fresh. He must’ve known how good the songs were, even if Sam hadn’t had no confidence in them. And then Osborne starts playin’ them in clubs around here.”
“You’re calling from Chicago, right?”
“Right. So Osborne plays them around here and then all of a sudden he’s this big star. He’s on the tube all the time. He’s in People magazine. His CDs are selling big time. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Why not?”
“He checked us out. Found out my husband was still wanted. He knew we wouldn’t come forward, couldn’t. Same with Sam. Nothin’ Sam could do, either. He’s still out there hiding someplace. And no, I don’t know where he is. He calls every once in a while but just to say hi. From a pay phone. Which is how I’m calling you. The FBI has our phone tapped for sure.”
I asked the most logical question of all. “So why’re you coming forward now?”
“Because Osborne’s dead. Because now’s the time to tell the truth. As long as our names aren’t involved. Sam isn’t any sterling character but he should at least get credit for the songs he’s written. You just leave our names out of it. You’ve got the originals now. Write your story about Sam. You can maybe even get a book out of it.” Then: “I gotta go.”
And go she did.
I sat there not knowing what to do. Sam Reed, killer and song writer. David Osborne, jazz composer wanna-be and fraud. Big-time fraud.
I went uselessly to bed, taking two big shots of whiskey with me. I even smoked a joint so Mr. Sleep would appear sooner. I smoke maybe three or four joints a year and always for the same reason—to relax enough to fall asleep. A recreational pot smoker, I’m not. Disorientation is not one of my favorite experiences.
It was odd what I did first thing next morning. I sat at my portable electric piano playing two of the songs Osborne hadn’t gotten around to introducing yet. I liked them even more than the ones he’d been celebrated for. Both of them had the feeling of “Laura,” which happens to be my all-time favorite song whether done by Charlie Parker or Frank Sinatra or Chet Baker. That melancholy, tender, aching feeling that comes especially on lonely Saturday nights when you walk the neon streets looking not just for any woman but the woman. You don’t think of killers as having tender moments. But obviously Reed had them. His songs had the power to devastate me. Especially those two new ones.
As my fingers played the notes, I imagined that they were my notes, my lyrics. I imagined what it must have been like for Osborne. All that fame and adulation. Maybe by the end he’d convinced himself that they really were his songs. Maybe by the end he’d driven Reed from his mind entirely. He had all these other songs to draw on. He had had an entire career ahead of him.
5
“You’re late.”
She said it in a nasty way. I hadn’t had enough sleep. I was irritable.
“You’re forgetting something,” I said as I slid into the Perkins booth across from her.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t get to be a bitch anymore. At least not around me. We’re sort of partners in this thing. Whatever the hell it is. So knock off the crap.”
“And good morning to you, Mr. Manning.”
And then brought her menu up to cover her face and disappear.
We didn’t talk for the first ten minutes. The waitress could sense it.
She kept looking back and forth between us, the way people watch a tennis match. She took our orders and left.
“I’m sorry I called so early.”
“I was up anyway, actually.” Then I said: “Sorry I was so bitchy when I came in.”
“I was bitchy, too.” She smiled. “Face it. I am a bitch. My father spoiled me when I was a girl and a number of men have spoiled me since I grew up.” She laughed. “And I want them to keep right on doing it.”
“So how’s good old Cal?”
“Good old Cal is ready for electro shock. He doesn’t have an alibi. But even if the police find the real killer, his whole life is going to be spread all over everywhere. He’s always taken shots at the Chicago papers, how we’re actually a better paper because we’re not beholden to ‘special interest groups’ as he says.”
“That’s a crock and always has been. His delusion. The Trib and the Sun-Times are about a thousand times better than we are. And I don’t know what ‘special interests’ he’s talking about. His family owns half this town and he runs the newspaper. If that isn’t a special interest, I don’t know what it is.”
“Believe it or not, he’s worried about his family, Jason. He may be every bit as bad as you say but he does care about his wife and children. He really does.”
It was kind of funny sitting there and talking to her in the lemon colored morning sunlight of an early workday, the coffee smells so good, nearly everybody’s face still a little pinched from sleepiness, God turning the celestial crank to get the town going for another day—sitting there I realized that for the first time, I liked her. It was a testament to gonadic truth that I could feel such profound lust for her for such a long time without ever really caring for her. But this morning, now that we’d both gotten through our usual bitchiness, I saw an aspect of her that I liked. Actually liked.
So I told her about the manilla envelope and the woman who’d called me last night. What I didn’t tell her about were the extra songs. When I finished, she said, “Wow. What a story this is going to make.”
“It sure is.”
“You might even get a book out of it. The same way David did.”
“I know. That would be really nice. I’d have some money for a change. Maybe I could even start selling books on the side. That’s all I ever wanted to be anyway. A writer of some kind. Didn’t matter much what kind, either. I just liked being a ‘writer.’ That’s why I got into newspapering. Closest I could get to it. Being a reporter, I mean.”
“Is that why you got up so early? Have you already started writing the story?” Then: “If I fixed you a very nice dinner—and I’m a good cook, I really am—do you suppose you’d let me break it in the magazine? People never think of a magazine section having a news scoop. We’d probably have to double the number of pages just to have run for all the extra ads. We could warn the advertising department that the magazine was going to carry the most important breaking news of the whole year.”
“Sure. The magazine. That would be very nice. I could kind of get the whole story down in general to show it to a book publisher.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
She didn’t seem to notice that there wasn’t much enthusiasm in my voice for any of this. Which was good because that meant she hadn’t guessed the thoughts I was having. If Dave Osborne had been able to pass those songs off as his own…why couldn’t I pass off the remaining songs as my own? Make it sound as if I’d been writing songs with Dave as my mentor, which is why the songs might be a bit like his. Who could object? Certainly not Sam Reed, who was still running for his life. Certainly not the woman who’d called, her husband being wanted in the South. And certainly not Dulcy, who didn’t know the songs even existed.
This time, I made sure to sound pleased with her ideas.
“Do I get to choose the dinner you make?”
She gleamed, she beamed. “Oh, it’ll be so great. I’ll be able to use this whole thing when I move to LA. On job interviews, I mean. Show them the scoop I came up with thanks to my good friend Jason Manning, who is now about to become a published author.”
“Writer. Not author.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Oh, I just think of an author as some dusty
old guy they make you read in high school. You know, Victor Hugo or whoever wrote Silas Marner.”
“Yuck. Silas Marner.”
“See, that’s exactly what I mean. ‘Writer’ sounds a lot more vital. Contemporary.”
“‘Jason Manning, writer.’” That wonderful smile. “I guess I can see what you mean.”
I paid for the bill at the cash register and left a thirty per cent tip on our table. As we were walking out, Dulcy took my arm and slid it through hers, guiding it so that it brushed lovingly against her breast. Did I dare imagine that this dinner she was talking about would also include a very special dessert?
I spent the entire day trying to see Cal Rawlins. No luck. I couldn’t get within ten yards of his secretary’s desk. She’d never cared much for me, anyway. She shared Cal’s attitude that the newsroom people were at best flunkies and at worst of a sub-species that smelled rank and terrible. All she did was shake her head. She did it quickly, curtly, so as to enhance the dismissiveness of it. Which would send me scuttling back to my desk.
Lawyers came, lawyers went. They were the only ones permitted into Rawlins’ inner-sanctum. At least there weren’t any cops to make the story even juicier for the newsroom. Mid-afternoon, worn out from speculating on would he or wouldn’t he be arrested, somebody wondered aloud what would happen once Cal’s affair came out with Dulcy. Would that force him to resign? Who would take over the paper? Would it be his mean brother? And if it was his mean brother, would everybody presently working here be fired and replaced with people mean brother had personally selected?
Here’s how it works. How it works in offices of every kind in every country of the civilized world. Cal’s resignation becomes speculation.
Would he really resign? Then it becomes gossip. Of course he would really resign. In fact, it was now known that he had discussed resigning this very morning. And then speculation and gossip become hard fact. He secretly resigned at three this afternoon and has now surrendered to the police for the murder of David Osborne.
By late afternoon, it was said, all over the building—in the newsroom, coffee rooms, meeting rooms and, even above the roar of the presses—that within two hours Mean Brother would be landing in black helicopters on the roof of the building and that the entire existing staff would be gassed by men in radiation-style suits.
Finally, the gossip getting crazier and crazier, I knocked on Dulcy’s door. A muffled word or two on the other side of the door caused me to turn the knob and walk in. Dulcy was smoking a cigarette in a violently No Smoking building.
As soon as I closed the door, she said, “Have you heard all the crazy stories that are going around in this place?”
I smiled. “Cal was electrocuted by lethal injection twenty minutes ago.”
“God,” she said, taking a deep quick hit on her cigarette, “I’m sure somebody’s actually saying that by now. These are supposed to be intelligent people. They are intelligent people. How can they say all this crap?”
“Because they’re scared. People like security. This is a very insecure time. Especially for the people with families to support.”
“Poor Joyce Lafferty,” she said. “Four kids.”
“And Paul Arnold. Leukemia. What happens if he loses his insurance?”
She sighed. Nodded for me to sit down.
After I sat, she said, “He called me from his cell. Cal. He was sitting in his car. He had a gun with him. He said he was thinking of killing himself.”
“I knew something good had to come of this.”
“That’s not funny, Jason. You keep insisting he’s this really bad guy. Which, I’ll grant you, he is in many respects. But he’s not all bad. He really does care what happens when all this comes out on the news tonight.”
“Chicago news?”
“He got a tip from somebody. Six o’clock news. Lead story. Respectable newspaper publisher outed as unfaithful husband. I saw a van parked across the street when I left for lunch. No logo. But a porthole. I’m sure they were shooting video of me. They’ll probably super a big A across my chest just to let people know who the scarlet woman is.”
“You don’t really think he’ll kill himself, do you?”
She smirked. “So there is a little humanity left in you after all.”
“Just that I want to see him alive. To suffer.”
“Just admit it, Jason. You don’t want to see him kill himself.”
I shrugged. “I guess you’re right. I hate him but not that much.”
“Anyway, it’s four o’clock. I’m going home now and start drinking martinis. I want to be good and soaked before the six o’clock news comes on. And then I’m going to unplug my phone and put the cell in the linen closet so I can’t hear it ring. Because dear old mother from dear old Oak Park will be calling me to see if her daughter is really the other woman the way they said on TV. My dear old father will be at his girl friend’s apartment—after telling my mother that he has to work late—and when he sees the news he might go into cardiac arrest, his heart having survived two different attacks in the last four years. At which point my goody-goody country club sister will lead a lynch mob of her friends to my apartment. They’ll all be holding torches like in that old Frankenstein movie—and shouting for me to be burned at the stake.” She stabbed out her cigarette.
“This’ll just make my news story all the better.”
She glared at me. “You know, Jason, earlier today I thought you and I might wind up in bed some wintry night. But now I know that’s never going to happen. Now get the hell out of my office.”
The gossip kept on coming. Cops had searched Rawlins’ house, hunting cabin and three classic cars last night. The police were looking for the murder weapon. Turned out Osborne had been killed with a rare variant on the standard .45 caliber handgun. Most of the hysteria was kept in check now. Nobody was talking about Mean Brothers or mass firings. They were back to bitching about the usual things, salaries, expense accounts, other reporters not present, and the diminishing number of available parking spaces in the city lot most of us had to use.
It was funny. Despite the mood all around me, I kept humming the melodies of the two songs I’d taken to the piano this morning. Even in the grind of the workday, they lingered melancholy and romantic in my mind.
I had a trashy tabloid fantasy. Me on the arm of some beautiful starlet beneath the headline “Brooding, handsome composer searches for the ‘mystery woman’ of his songs.” I felt duly ashamed of myself, of course. But I wondered if you ever got so old that you didn’t have fantasies like these. Maybe there were people so content with their lot, so absolutely fixed to reality, that they didn’t need these kinds of fantasies. They might dream of a new riding mower, a new plasma TV set, a new Chevrolet. But they’d never be callow or silly enough to dream of fame. Maybe there really were people like that.
I was eager to have the work day over with.
Just before quitting time, Rawlins called a surprise meeting. He addressed the entire newsroom. You could see that it had all worn him out. It had also beaten the arrogance out of him. His voice, relative to his usual slave master bellow, was gentle and soft.
He said, “I’m going to sound like Richard Nixon did when he said ‘You need to know that your president is not a crook.’ Well, you need to know that your publisher is not a killer. And I hope the police will be able to prove that very soon. But even if I’m not a killer, I’m not a very good man. I’ve destroyed a marriage, I’ve been pretty damned callous as a boss, and I’ve never been properly grateful for everything the good Lord has given me. I’m hoping I can save my marriage. And I’m hoping I can save my reputation here in the newsroom. You people have a lot to teach me. You’re the professionals here, not me. I sit in my office and play at being publisher. But I couldn’t report a story or take a photo or transcribe an interview if my life depended on it. I’m going to try and change these things. I’m also going to try and be a better man as a boss. I’ll never be a touchy-feely sort
of guy, that’s just not my nature. But I sure as hell can keep my door open to any of you who want to come in and talk. And I sure as hell can be a lot more sympathetic to you folks as people and as employees.”
He just stopped, as if his internal word machine was suddenly empty. There was a very long silence and then the applause started, light at first but then heavier and heavier, so much so that at its peak it was louder than I would have thought possible. Men and women alike had tears on their cheeks. It wasn’t that he’d been all that eloquent. It was that he’d been that honest. Maybe he’d go back to being as bastard if and when the police found the real killer. But at the moment, that didn’t matter. He had humbled himself. But it hadn’t been a showy humility. It had been simple and believable and therefore moving. I’d never liked him much but between what Dulcy had told me about him and what I’d just seen and heard, I had to allow him membership in the human race. Which was damned big of me, I thought.
“If I get done early enough, how about I stop by with Chinese for dinner?” Dulcy said as we walked back toward my desk.
“I can see you’re deeply moved by his little speech there.”
She leaned close to me. Smelled wonderful. Her cologne. Felt wonderful. Her breast. “I told you he wasn’t as bad as you think.” She held me even tighter. “And I’m sorry I said that about saying you and I won’t ever wind up in bed together.” She laughed. “Who knows.”
By the time I got home, I was almost ready to call Dulcy and say let’s make it another night. It was a night for Domino’s, a couple of cold brews, and watching a little telly in my boxers. I wasn’t even daydreaming about being a famous songwriter any more. I just wanted to hang out with myself and go to bed early. I was drained.