by Adam Sommers
She weighed the new information. “Yeah,” she conceded, “he’s got a pipe problem. Not huge, but it’s there. In fact, now I think about it, more all the time.”
“You too?”
She looked down, fearful and embarrassed. But Eric soothed, “Look, I’m not judging, but I can’t pull punches if I’m going after this guy.”
“Yeah, a little. He got me on it.”
“I see.”
“But I swear, I’m done with all that once I’m out of here. I promised myself. My kid.”
Gold, thought Eric, solid twenty-four-karat, platinum-plated gold, but he was always hungry for more. “How often do you two smoke crack?”
LaTonya twisted and fidgeted. Whether it was because she was afraid Eric would tell some cop or simply because she was ashamed of what she had become, it was impossible to tell.
Eric tried to make it a little easier for her. “Ms. Harpe-Smith,” he said sympathetically. “You have no need to be ashamed or guilty or whatever it is you’re feeling. I don’t give a rat’s shit about what you do or do not do. I have no intention of telling anyone at the police department what you do in your own time. You are not running the capital city of the United States of America. You are not a publicly elected official. You do not get your money from taxpayers. I care about what the mayor does. I can’t write about him without writing about you. If I ignore you, then I lose my credibility. You understand where I’m coming from?”
She looked as if a weight had been taken off of her and smiled. “Yes.”
Taking a deep breath, she said softly, “I’m no crack whore, if that’s where you’re going. I don’t walk streets. I don’t have johns. I have a nice place, my own money. And I don’t use it that much. Just with him, and it’s not like he wakes up and he has to light the pipe. When he’s out drinking and he wants to keep going. The smoke helps him keep going. Maybe two, three times a week, with me anyway. How much he does when I’m not around, I couldn’t guess.”
It sounded like the mayor was probably doing a lot more than his mistress was aware of, and that triggered a thought in Eric. He suddenly realized that despite the woman’s incriminating pictures and her shocking story, he really didn’t have anything he could print. It was just him and her alone in his apartment and no one could corroborate they had even met. She would disappear long before the story could be printed, and, for all anyone knew, it could be a complete fabrication. The photos wouldn’t help much since the mayor’s people would be sure to call them fakes. There was only one thing to do.
“Would you mind waiting a couple more minutes?” he asked LaTonya.
“I’m fine,” she said spreading her arms along the top of the couch, the picture of ease. “My plane isn’t leaving until six.”
“Is it okay if I ask my editor to come up and say hello? It’ll keep me from getting in trouble. I need someone to verify that we actually met.”
“Of course, as long as he brings fifty dollars with him,” she winked.
Eric smiled. “Good enough.” He quickly called John Williams and laid out the situation for him.
“Oooh, cloak and dagger,” Williams chirped happily. “Tell her I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“And John, bring fifty bucks with you.” Eric hung up before John could object.
The editor knocked on Eric’s door about fifteen minutes later, held a short interview with LaTonya Harpe-Smith confirming the basic details and looking over her pictures. Eric, feeling much better now that he was no longer out on this limb by himself, walked John Williams out to his car.
“Nice work,” said Williams. “Wrap it up, get in, and type it up. Deadline’s seven-thirty. Clock’s ticking.”
“You’re welcome,” Eric grinned ear to ear as John got in his car.
“Tick-tock,” was all John Williams replied, but his smile, if anything, was bigger than Eric’s.
Ten minutes later Ms. LaTonya Harpe-Smith was in a cab on her way to the airport to either the Bahamas, like she told Fat Tommy, or to Nigeria or Dubai, or who the hell knows where. And Eric was on the road already thinking about the lead.
Chapter 20
Once could be an accident. Twice, especially this twice, was no fluke.
John Williams, Debbie Harrison, even Jayne Grayman had to acknowledge Eric Berger was the goods. Williams got a large feather in his cap. He had found Eric, picked his resume from the stack of resumes, brought him in and, for peanuts, had struck gold.
“He’s still not getting the mayor’s beat. I’m not taking Zalinsky off it. He’s worked too hard,” Jayne Grayman told her editors as part of a debriefing and strategy session in her office the following day. It was not negotiable.
“Maybe they can share,” John Williams persisted despite what he gauged to be a moderate risk. “Look, I hear from people at The Post they’re already snooping around about him. How much does he get paid? Is he happy? That sort of thing.”
“He can get a bonus. Cut him a check for a thousand and give it to him this afternoon.”
That was pretty generous coming from the tightwad editor-in-chief, but John still made a pouty face.
“He’s been here two months, John. Two months. You can’t just waltz in here and get the best beat in the paper. It’s that simple.”
“What’s Zalinsky come up with in that time?” Now, John Williams was being outright insubordinate, but he had made a painful point. Since a big budget scandal the previous winter, Warren Zalinsky hadn’t broken any exclusive stories. That wouldn’t be so bad, if The Post and even ABC hadn’t gotten scoops on Grissom Lester’s personal investment in a giant D.C. housing project, which he had approved as mayor.
Annoyed by John Williams being right, and sick of her underlings anyway, Jayne wanted them gone from her sight. “We’re done.”
John and Debbie stood and made a quick exit, basically defeated, but at least they could tell Eric about the bonus.
Chapter 21
MAYOR LESTER’S CRACK-ADDICT
MISTRESS TELLS ALL
Eric’s story, LaTonya’s pictures and a two-day whirlwind of TV and radio spots for the newspaper, all featuring Jayne Grayman, followed. But the public has a short attention span, and within a week the story, again, began to cool off. The mayor’s crack whore was gone. The police chief, who had been appointed by the mayor, announced there would be an investigation, but preliminary indications were there was no direct evidence of a crime. The City Council had no interest in the subject, since the mayor could turn out the voters against any of them at any time. The only real hope was that one of his political opponents could use the information against him in the election, but that was more than a year away—an eternity in politics.
Wisely, the mayor and his public relations apparatus did not launch a counterattack on Eric Berger, Jayne Grayman or the paper. All they did was issue a snippy reaction statement, decrying the use of “invisible” sources in a crusade to defame a beloved public servant. There would be no lawsuit, or any other action that could possibly keep the issue alive. The establishment closed in around their king, who carried on as usual.
With so little information coming from the Metro PD or City Hall, there wasn’t much for Eric to write about. The well eventually ran so dry that John Williams started sending Eric out on other assignments. Good ones. A drug gang was arrested; some lady killed her kid by putting him in a scalding hot tub; a guy got run over chasing his purebred Yorkie across New Hampshire Avenue at rush hour. He survived but the dog did not.
When he wasn’t busy with these daily chores, Eric plugged away. Union reps put him in touch with some known dealers who might be able to provide him with a link to the mayor’s drug supplier. But so far, that had gone nowhere. The dealers were not really a chatty bunch, and since Eric could not offer them anything for information other than a little cred in some circles. It was another dead end.
&n
bsp; Periodically, Eric checked in with his firefighter friends, had a few beer meetings with Tark and chatted up the guys on some of the ambulance crews in case the mayor or one of his lady friends had ever needed to call 911. Once every couple of days he gave the Nietos a call to see how Julio’s recovery was coming. But he felt like he was on a treadmill. Carrie would come by his desk, usually when Warren Zalinsky was out of the office, and let Eric know, subtly, that there could be a repeat of the kiss if things broke right.
That was about the only thing that brightened Eric Berger’s spirits during those molasses days. As they stretched out, Carrie’s visits became more frequent and longer, and they both liked the direction it was going, though it made Eric increasingly uncomfortable since he and Warren Zalinsky were also getting along well.
From her perch on the mezzanine above the newsroom, Jayne Grayman kept watch on it all. Warren went out on a story, and, if Eric was there, Carrie sauntered over within a few minutes. A few times she watched as they gathered their things and left the building together. On the security cameras she could see them leaving, always in Carrie’s car.
Their romance, if that’s what it was, wasn’t of that much interest to Jayne Grayman. What was of high importance was Eric Berger. He’d broken two enormous stories in as many months and had been thrown crumbs for his troubles. If that motivated him to do more, then that was fine. But the stories he produced were only a secondary consideration. There was an innocence and a purity to him that piqued her interest more than almost any other reporter ever had. But more than that, she sensed another quality. Maybe it was his Jersey attitude or the way the back of his shirt was always untucked, but it struck her that here was a person who didn’t give one good goddamn what she or anyone else thought about him. And that made her lick her lips.
For all of his sources in the police department and mayor’s office, Warren Zalinsky had also been stymied. It wasn’t just that they weren’t talking about the mayor and his appetites, they weren’t talking at all, even about mundane stories. The edict had apparently gone out that The Washington Standard was to be shut out.
This did not worry Zalinsky at all. Such things were regular occurrences and would end the first time one person or faction leaked a story about the other. Then there would be a response, the dam would break and, hopefully, there would be a price for those in power to pay.
Eric had noticed that while Zalinsky focused almost entirely on the police and government sources, he had largely ignored the Fire Department. That was understandable. The Fire Department of Washington, D.C., wasn’t nearly as sexy as the cops and government. Sure, there were a few fires a year, here and there, but relatively few deaths. Washington did not have the same high-rise structures and dilapidated tenements as the northeast corner of New Jersey. This presented Eric Berger with a potential opportunity.
Every few days he met up at some bar with Tark and his friends and used them to get introduced to other firehouses in the city. They did most of the talking and he listened. It was understood that whatever he heard would not wind up in the paper. He was there to relax and get a feel for the people, the system. They were building for Eric an invisible infrastructure of how the city’s bureaucracy actually worked. Patience was the key. This sort of approach was a long-term investment that could pay off enormously at some point, or be an utterly fruitless expenditure of time. Luckily, Eric did not have anything else on his plate, and it was what he loved, so although these rendezvous had not produced any stories, he did not mind at all. Eric just liked being with the guys—and some women—who took care of the city.
One of the guys Eric met was the union superintendent for the Ambulance Service, a seriously no-nonsense, by-the-book medic who had spent years saving the lives of D.C. residents. Ed Cay had been offered untold opportunities to move up in the ranks, become a supervisor, run the EMT Academy, all for more money and better hours, but he never wanted to leave the street. Perpetually underpaid, overworked, and stressed out was the price he paid for doing the thing he loved, which was being there at the car wreck, the cardiac arrest, the high school football injury—to patch the victim up as best he could and haul them to the hospital. As a result, he was regarded as something of a legend.
Over twenty-three years in the service he’d seen the worst and the best and was virtually impossible to rattle. So to see him drooling-on-the-table drunk at the Drop Inn was a little jarring for Eric. Ed Cay was surrounded by a cadre of friends variously hissing and spitting about something and trying to cheer up their heavily muscled friend.
Eric, his senses tingling, edged closer and was immediately spotted by the union leader. “Hey, newspaper guy. C’mere, C’mere,” Ed Cay slurred and waved Eric Berger over. “Motherfucker get ya muther-fuckin’ azz and pen and pad over here fucking cunt bisht newspaper reporter. I got a fuckin’ shtory for yer fucking paper, ya fuck.”
The guys, Tark included, indicated Eric could step toward the table. It was probably safe. Ed Cay wasn’t mad at the paper, or Eric, who certainly didn’t take the cursing and anger personally. He had talked to Cay a few times, and they got along. He was hoping at some point to do a feature on his life in the EMS. Eric sat down in the proffered chair at Ed Cay’s elbow. His face was sweaty and he smelled heavily of body odor, but Eric tried not to recoil.
“You know about thiz little fucker? Thiz kid Tobiash Jones?” he snapped at Eric in what sounded like an accusation.
“No, sorry, I never heard of him,” Eric replied softly.
“Of courz you don’t know ’bout him! How could you pozzthibly? No one’s ever heard of him but his folks and some friends at school. Well, Tobias Jones…” Ed Cay paused, looked up and, if Eric didn’t know any better, he’d swear there were tears in his eyes. This was even more disturbing than the fact he was drunk.
“Cutest fucking kid on the fucking planet,” Ed Cay blurted. “Big eyes, big black eyes, like the size of silver dollars. And this smile with his crooked teeth. Three years old, tiny crooked teeth. Eyes the size of silver dollars. Big fucking black eyes, almost looks like E.T., his eyes are so damn big.”
No need to say a word, Eric thought. But he did notice that as Ed Cay got wound up it seemed to clear his head some.
“The kid and his family just moved up to Bozetown. I knew him when they were on Nineteenth Street in Southeast. Got whacked in the head with a board by his big brother just last year. No big deal. Just a couple of stitches at St. Pete’s. But he’s sitting on the gurney and while we’re checking his vitals he’s going ‘Whoop, whoop,’ like hit the siren. So we hit the siren and he laughed his little ass off and he kept us doing it the whole way there. Big ass smile, great laugh. Whoop, whoop.
“So they scrape enough together and just a couple months ago they moved up to Bozetown, this tiny little house with a tiny little yard like the size of a postage stamp, maybe ten feet on a side. And they’re so proud of it they planted some little tree in the middle of it. Like here we are, we made it out of Anacostia to a house all our own and we’re sticking a fucking tree in the yard like the white suburban people do. Looks like the kind of tree Tobias Jones would have fun climbing one day…. If he wasn’t dead.”
Whoa! Eric did not see that coming. Dead cute three-year-old was definitely a story. But Ed Cay had moved on.
“Ever hear of someone named Marisol Izikoff?” Ed Cay was looking at Eric but not really talking to him. He was talking to no one and everyone, to the universe, to God.
“Lives in the Harris Houses. Asthma patient. Heavy girl, about thirty years old. She has a little boy, plus she looks after her brother’s kid because the brother is locked up because he can’t keep a fucking needle out of his pussy ass arm.”
“Okay.”
“She’s a sweetheart. Lives a life of crap but always has a smile on her face somehow. I’ve been to her building a dozen times. Other guys too when she has trouble breathing. Even when she’s huffing and p
uffing and turning blue, she’ll offer the guys cookies or M&Ms before they get her on the gurney. It’s always like, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you. Oh, I feel like you guys are my angels.’ ”
“Sounds like a doll,” said Eric.
“She IS a doll. Or was. And who’s gonna take care of the boy, and her brother’s kid? You? Are you going to take care of these little kids? No! You’re just a fucking newspaper reporter. You don’t give a shit. You just want a fucking story. Well, here’s your fucking story, Marisol Izikoff is dead. Just as dead as Tobias Jones. And you better put that shit in your ass-wiping paper, and you better say it’s because of the fucking incompetent assholes running this department.”
“I’ll definitely put it in the paper,” Eric said.
“This comes from me, Ed Cay, C-A-Y, shift supervisor, EMT Squad Nine-One. I.D. Number: seven, zero, seven, seven, three. And I’ll go on the record with any of it, okay?” He stopped and looked at Eric.
Eric nodded silent agreement.
“You understand?”
“I understand.”
“I’m on the record because I don’t give a fuck anymore. They can’t do shit to me.”
“I got it,” Eric whispered, knowing whatever was coming was going to be nuclear.
“It was dispatch. That beautiful little fucking kid and that nice lady are both dead directly and unquestionably because of dispatch, and dispatch fucked it up because they don’t get the tools or the training they need to do their jobs. Write that shit down in your notebook.”
Eric wrote it down word for word.
“It took the ambulance eighteen minutes to reach Tobias. He spiked a high fever and his mom panicked and called 911 and it took eighteen fucking minutes for the rig to get there. And the rig is only like a four-minute drive away. But the dispatcher couldn’t find the call sheet, and when they finally did, they sent the rig to the wrong address.
“The guys show up and the people are like, ‘We didn’t call an ambulance.’ So the crew calls dispatch, which finally gives them the right address, and they go racing over and get Tobias. And the kid is gone even before they pull up at Children’s Hospital. And he’s three years old.”