Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  He could have gone on. How about the Citizen building as allegory of the newspaper’s ownership? The Citizen had been a family-owned operation for most of its history until Michael Rossiter sold it to the Fleming Group, a small regional chain of newspapers, just after his father’s death in 1977. The Flemings had extended the building north to accommodate new presses. Terracotta and stone embellishments had been discarded, but the facade of the addition respectfully echoed the original in its rounded arches and stripped classical detailing. Then in 1981, the Citizen had been sold to Toronto-based Hayward Inc., who added it to its international media empire. To accommodate even bigger and better presses, Hayward found its solution in what resembled a large garden shed tacked onto the existing structure. No windows. Brick a lousy match. One end facing a parking lot covered in what appeared to be aluminum siding.

  But, unable to suck sufficient profit out of a Winnipeg newspaper in short order, Hayward had sold the paper in the summer to Harmac, owned by the moralizing, ultra-conservative, ultra-Christian Alberta businessman Harry Mack, who not only believed freedom of the press was guaranteed to those who owned one, but exercised his franchise on the editorial pages with glee. If he puts an addition on, what will it look like, Leo wondered? An outhouse? Probably didn’t matter. Rumour was that property in the ’burbs was being scouted for a whole new plant.

  “Should I ask you what you were doing in the lilac bushes last night?” Liz gasped, winded.

  “Making my brother-in-law crazy,” Leo replied. He explained the circumstances as they passed through the revolving doors into the Citizen lobby. “All in a night’s work.”

  “Michael Rossiter’s death will put a big hole in the arts community. Well, at least the music part.” Liz jabbed the button to the elevator. “He’s the one who’s bailed the symphony out more than a few times in recent years.”

  “News to me.”

  “Welcome to the Winnipeg arts scene, Leo. I thought you’d figured it out when Guy assigned you that ‘Angels’ piece in the spring.” Her eyes went up to the row of illuminated numbers above the elevator door. The Citizen building, which housed five hundred employees, was served by only one elevator. It seemed to be stuck on the fourth floor, their destination. “What is the matter with this damn thing?” She jabbed again at the button.

  Leo glanced at her, at her hair, which was unusually asymmetrical. “Bad night?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You look a little worse for wear.” Leo scraped a wet leaf off the bottom of his shoe.

  “Great. Just what a girl wants to hear.”

  “Should I ask?”

  Liz turned and cast him a glance of such despair that he had his answer. “Come on,” he said as the revolving door spit a few more people into the lobby, “we’ll have to drag ourselves up the stairs. The elevator’s probably out of commission again.”

  A winding marble staircase took them to the second floor. Two enormous oil paintings loomed, souvenirs of Rossiter days, one of Michael’s grandfather, Conroy, looking wholly seized of his own importance, the other, Thomas, looking somewhat less seized of his own importance, but only just. Was it the style of these latter days, Leo wondered, or was it because the men the Citizen’s subsequent owners picked as publishers were such faceless corporate dweebs in need of personality transplants that no portraits of them existed?

  “Merritt must have inherited her red hair from her grandfather,” Leo remarked, noting the portrait as they passed. Conroy’s hair was eccentrically long for a man of his generation, styled by the artist to plump nearly over the collar of his late-forties dark suit. The red coif, shot through with grey, was the first thing you noticed, that and the preposterous pose, one hand on an immense globe of the earth.

  “Merritt’s hair colour is out of a bottle. Very Fergie.”

  “You’d know.”

  “Trust me. I noted her roots in the washroom one day. She didn’t get Michael’s blonde hair. She’s mouse brown. And those green eyes are contacts.”

  Leo glanced at the portrait of Thomas Rossiter. He was supposed to have been as charming as hell, some of the old-timers around the place said, when asked (they were rarely asked; newspapers lived for the day, not yesterday). But in the painting, he looked like he had a turnip up his ass—the features of his conventionally handsome face were frozen stiff, stern, pained.

  “Painted after his death,” Liz said, as if sharing his thoughts. “Or so I’m told.”

  They reached the second floor. The marble ended and plaster painted institutional green commenced.

  “Speaking of Rossiter deaths,” Leo began, his voice echoing in the narrower stairwell, “did you have to give statements last night?”

  “Brief ones. ‘Did you see anything?’ Blah blah blah. Your brother-in-law said they’d get back to us, if need be.”

  “And did you? See anything, I mean?”

  “Nothing that strikes me as important,” Liz replied, puffing a little bit. “Spence and I drove up, parked in the driveway, and went into Kingdons’. Can’t really see into Michael’s yard anyway, what with those lilac bushes.”

  “What time?”

  “About 6:45. We were the first to arrive—early, in fact. Then the Richters arrived about fifteen minutes later. Then Guy, for some reason. Somehow I don’t think he was an intended guest. Bunny looked sort of cheesed off when he appeared, and then Martin disappeared for a while. Bunny probably told him to add a place setting or throw another chicken in the pot.”

  “Why do you think Guy wasn’t invited?”

  Liz’s shoulders shrugged. “It was an orchestra-y thing. Guy spends most of his time trying to think up ways to antagonize the arts community. Paul thinks he’s a complete idiot.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Sort of. Anyway,” Liz continued, “Guy was alone. No Merritt. Odd number at a dinner table. The lack of symmetry was very un-Bunny. I wonder if Guy and Merritt have broken up?” she added as an afterthought.

  “Why were Guy and Merritt ever together in the first place?”

  “Well, much as I wish Guy would fall down a sewer hole, he has a certain…intensity. Probably not bad in bed.”

  Leo’s stomach turned. A door slammed shut somewhere below, the sound reverberating up the stairwell.

  “And besides,” Liz continued, “Bunny said she had originally invited Michael, but he apparently had something else on.”

  “He was meeting Stevie.”

  “Oh? Well, anyway, if Bunny had invited Michael, she probably wouldn’t have invited Merritt—with or without Guy in attendance. I’m told relations are cool between Bunny and Merritt. Bunny disapproves of Merritt. But then Merritt and Michael apparently didn’t get along either. What a family! Anyway, Merritt has nothing to do with the symphony, so… God, I’ve really got to stop smoking,” she gasped, arriving ahead of him on the fourth floor landing.

  Leo was a little out of breath, too. Maybe he should join a gym, as Axel had suggested. A shudder went through the building. The presses were beginning the final run of the day’s edition, which meant it was 9:00. He and Liz were, technically, late. Liz began to punch the security code buttons that allowed them through the door into the newsroom.

  “Wait,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about your story in Saturday’s paper.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one on the violin.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought Michael liked to remain anonymous about his do-goodery. He made a real point of it to me last spring.”

  “Well, he wasn’t very happy that I found out, but I pretty much nailed him on it.” The door opened with a hellish grind and they stepped into the fourth-floor lobby. “It wasn’t going to kill him to admit once in a while to doing a good deed.”

  Something in Leo’s glance tipped her off. Her face fell. “Oh, no. What is it?”

  “There’s a violin missing from Michael’s.”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  • • •

/>   Leo coughed, then coughed again. His desk, which abutted five others to form one battered expanse of work surface, seemed over time to have become the redoubt of the newsroom’s smokers, most of them young women who waved their cigarettes like newly acquired batons of authority, nervously tapping ash to the floor as they barked into the telephones. The smoke would rise slowly, gathering around the banks of fluorescent lights in little clouds until some tongue of cold air from the ancient ventilation system licked at it. Leo imagined each time another layer of microscopic ash, winnowed from the smoke, settling onto the desks and filing cabinets, the stacks of old papers and boxes and long-forgotten flotsam that had accreted over the years on every horizontal surface without fear of removal. Wasn’t this how the planet was buried? Layer upon layer of cosmic dust falling from the sky, obliterating all man’s glories and vanities? Mycenae: gone. Pompeii: gone. And someday, the Zit: gone, too.

  Or some such bullshit.

  Leo waved away another stray puff of smoke and flattened out the front section of the day’s paper. Two—count ’em—two murders in one night. That bumped poor old Ben Johnson down well below the fold. “A Deadly Duo” the headline read, but the North End murder got the play. And, from one point of view, why wouldn’t it? Within the first two paragraphs such words as “broken,” “glass,” “rip,” “vagina,” and “intestines” stopped Leo from tearing open the miniature Oh Henry! bar he’d pulled from his desk drawer to satisfy his hunger. The murderer—some very disaffected husband—had been caught red-handed. Literally. It was the grisly stuff of down-market tabloids. Which, oddly enough, the local down-market tabloid, the Winnipeg Examiner, Leo noted, unfolding it next to the Zit, had not played up. Instead, on its cover was a single picture, some studio portrait, of Michael Rossiter that made him look, as studio portraits do, more blondly handsome than real life. Leo remembered the night news editor at the Examiner was a woman.

  “Death of an Angel,” the Examiner headline exclaimed in bold red type. Fuck you backwards, Leo thought. That’s my headline, goddamn it. He glanced back at the Zit. Big picture of shrouded corpse being carried on a stretcher from ramshackle North End house. Small picture of Michael—the same one as in the Examiner, bless his little limelight-avoiding heart. He passed his eyes over the sub-head:

  Murder in the South End

  Winnipeg Police are searching for the killer of a 33-year-old man found dead in his Crescentwood home Tuesday evening.

  Photographer and philanthropist Michael Thomas Conroy Rossiter was discovered by…

  Well, at least Stevie’s name was left out. He read on. Paltry coverage. No byline. He glanced at the Examiner’s story. Also paltry. But paltry was the Examiner’s house style: more than five paragraphs might strain its readers.

  And no mention of a violin in either story. He looked over at Liz, whose head was bent over the same front page kitty-corner to his desk. She caught his glance, her eyes squinting in the wreath of smoke from her cigarette, and gave him a weak smile.

  “If I hadn’t written that story, he might still be alive,” she had moaned in the lobby.

  “We don’t know that,” Leo had responded, wishing he’d never opened his mouth.

  “He paid 550,000 pounds for the thing. Over a million Canadian.”

  “I remember. I could retire for life on that.”

  Liz had stared at him as if to say: See? motive. Fault? mine.

  “How did you find out about it anyway?”

  “From Belle Shulman.” Liz groaned.

  “Who?”

  “She’s a rich old ex-Winnipegger living in London. Her late husband made a fortune in ladies’ underwear —

  “Wearing it?”

  “Making it. Anyway, she acts as sort of a hostess or liaison or smoother-over for local artists when they go to London for whatever reason. The RWB is dancing at Covent Garden next month, so I was doing a preview piece and phoned her. She’s having a big party. She happened to mention—she’s a real gossip—that she’d seen Michael at Sotheby’s earlier in the month bidding on a Guarneri del Gesu.”

  “And then you phoned Michael for confirmation.”

  Liz nodded. “He’d intended it as an anonymous gift to the orchestra. Crap! What was he doing letting a million-dollar violin lay around the house?”

  “Gloating?”

  Liz frowned.

  “I mean,” Leo explained, “if I’d just bought a…new Ferrari, for instance, I might kind of hang around the driveway drooling over it for a while.”

  Liz shrugged. “I don’t think Michael’s the sort to do that.”

  “But he trained as a violinist, right? Maybe it fulfilled some dream.”

  Liz had stared out vacantly over the newsroom.

  “What did you think of Michael anyway?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t…didn’t know him that well.”

  “Come on. You travel in those circles.”

  “Not really. It’s Spencer who’s the greasy-pole climber. My father was a middle-manager at Great West Life. I’d rather have some other…adventures in living than go to dinner parties with boring lawyers and their boring wives.”

  “Still, you must have some opinion.”

  Liz studied him. “Why?”

  Leo hesitated. “He was an old boyfriend of Stevie’s,” he allowed, grimacing. “From way back.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “So…?”

  “Well, he was certainly nice to look at.”

  “And I thought it was only men who were superficial.”

  Liz’s expression grew serious. “I think Michael tried too hard.”

  “At what?”

  “At being good.”

  “This is a bad thing?”

  “It’s an impossible thing.”

  9

  Nasty, British, and Short

  Leo turned from the front page and began to flip through the rest of the paper’s front section, wondering as he munched on the Oh Henry! bar if he should slip down to the cafeteria to get something a little more nourishing to eat, a greasy donut and acrid coffee, for instance. But he was expecting the city editor, Ray Alcock, to bellow his name across the newsroom at any moment so he could discuss the day’s assignments. He glanced up from a bus-plunge-of-the-day story (Peru, this time) and noted Alcock and his two assistants with their heads together, their lips moving intensely. Each white-shirted and balding, together they looked like a three-headed Hydra, one or another of the heads curling to look at someone in the newsroom before twisting back to the huddle. He was safe for the time being.

  He thought about Stevie, but since it was a little early to phone, he turned to the sports section—Ben Johnson, Ben Johnson, Ben Johnson. Before he could read a word, a hand stuck a slip of pink paper under his nose.

  “Audrey asked me to give you this.”

  Leo glanced at the messenger—Roger Mellish—and then at the message—from his old pal Axel Werner, former Citizen reporter, now editor of the struggling city magazine Winnipeg Life.

  “What makes him think I’d be here at 8:31?” Leo wondered out loud, reading the time Audrey had printed at the top of the note in her precise hand. “I’ve never been on time in the whole six years I’ve worked here.”

  “Who?”

  “Axel Werner.”

  “He seems a quite driven fellow.”

  “He’s a fucking egomaniac, is what he is.”

  “I thought he was a friend of yours.”

  “And I say it with great fondness.” Leo popped the last morsel of chocolate bar into his mouth, and made a moan of pleasure.

  “Good?”

  “Mmm. Want one? I have a cache in my drawer of these small ones they make for Hallowe’en.”

  “Well, it is a trifle early for me…” Roger appeared to deliberate. Leo watched him try to resist. It was like watching a mongoose try to resist a snake. Being a food editor and restaurant critic had its hazards, particularly if you loved the job, and judging from the extra avoirdupois han
ging on his six-foot frame, Roger loved the job, at least the eating part of it. Your fate, buster, if you don’t get some exercise, Leo addressed himself, observing Mellish’s straining belt, and sucking in his own incipient gut. Fiftysomething, he observed too, is probably not a good age for knitwear.

  “Okay.” Roger plopped a pile of mail he was carrying down on Leo’s desk and accepted the offering, which he opened with the fastidiousness of someone removing an oyster from its shell. Leo watched as he popped a piece in his mouth and rolled it around with a thoughtful expression. Observing him eat reminded Leo of the one time he had accepted an invitation to join Roger at a restaurant for dinner. It had been a few months after Mellish joined the Zit in 1986. Since he knew few people in town, various reporters were inveigled in turn to accompany him. When Leo’s number came up, he’d gone, more curious over the process of reviewing restaurants than expecting a convivial evening with an oddball Brit more than fifteen years his senior. He had expected Roger would remain anonymous to the staff at La Vieille Gare, which served French food at inflated prices, but when they arrived Roger was recognized immediately and treated with extraordinary deference. Worse, Roger seemed to revel in it, behaving to the waiters with an arrogance Leo had seen only in European films. The topper was a burst of outrage triggered by a bad bottle of wine. He had guessed it was being in your element, but it had made Leo want to cringe, so he always found excuses ever after to the invitations proffered before Nan Hughes showed up on the scene. The only thing he had retrieved from the experience, besides the swell food, was the secret to restaurant reviewing without using the red flag of a notepad. Roger would place his briefcase on his lap, open it, root around for a moment as though he were looking for something, and then begin talking quietly as one would to a sleeping cat. It didn’t take Leo long to realize the briefcase contained a tape recorder.

  “Axel’s wife has done a superb job designing the book,” Roger said, dropping the candy wrapper.