Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  Having failed at the front door, I tried the back door.

  “I suppose you know just how bad I’d be fired if anyone caught me even talking to you,” Ruth said.

  “Did anyone tell you who was calling?

  “No.”

  “Then you know I didn’t give them my name.”

  Ruth is a nurse, the shift supervisor in the emergency room. I met her soon after I came to town when I first started trailing cops into her realm after accidents and brawls. Then I got to know her a little better when her daughter developed leukemia, and I wrote some stories about the facts that she was the single parent of a kid who was dying. The stories led to some benefits, country music shows and the like, to raise money to help Ruthie pay the kid’s medical bills and to take her to Disney World. The kid died about a year ago at the age of seven. In the last interview I did with her, Ruth said that since the kid died she asked for second or third shifts and weekends because she didn’t like the sounds she couldn’t hear in her house any more.

  When I told her I was looking for Lottie Nusbaumer, Ruthie sighed.

  “Are you calling in your chips?”

  “I didn’t know I had any.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Few people are more direct than nurses, especially the ER and cardiac-care bunch. I love them.

  “Tell me what you can,” I said. “Or nothing. It can’t change the past, and it won’t change the future.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, but I heard the rasp when she opened one of those metal clipboards hospitals use to hold records.

  “No Lottie Nusbaumer on my records,” she said.

  “Check again. I know she was brought there.”

  “I don’t have to. There’s no Lottie. There’s a Laney. A Laney McConegal. Brought here early this morning. Treated for gunshot wounds. Sound familiar?”

  Creative pseudonyms obviously were not Detective Sgt. McConegal’s strong suit. Or maybe it was some trooper’s idea of a joke.

  “Admitted?” I asked.

  “Transferred almost immediately after she was treated and stabilized.”

  “Condition?”

  “Listed as serious, but she had been stabilized.”

  “Transferred where?”

  “That particular section of the form is very blank,” Ruthie said.

  “Transferred by whom?”

  “Very blank again.”

  “Come on, Ruthie. This is a gunshot wound, not something you see every day. You people talk. What have you heard?”

  “Me?” she said, sounding suddenly weary. “I’m the blankest page of all.”

  I understood. Whether it was because she was afraid of losing her job or she didn’t want to think about dead children, including her own, Ruthie wasn’t talking anymore.

  In the old days, I would’ve pushed it, and I can justify my decision not to in a hundred ways. If someone won’t tell you, someone else will. Better to maintain your sources than pick a fight. Maybe I’m just getting old. If I’m honest, I guess I decided I’d rather hang up as friends.

  It was nearly seven o’clock on a Saturday night. I’d had a bellyful of the damned newsroom.

  I live in a one-bedroom furnished apartment. Beyond clothes, the only things in it that belong to me are about a thousand paperbacks, a couple of telephones, a TV, and the food in the fridge. I didn’t know how long I’d last here when I leased the place. It’s on the second floor of a house on the edge of town. It’s owned by an old couple who took a big piece of their farm and turned it into a trailer park that now surrounds it. I like the location because it is far enough away from downtown to make going to a bar or a package store a pain in the ass.

  If it’s home, I’m never particularly thrilled about going there, but I thought maybe a little nap and then go see if I could find Moze.

  Marley called me at 10 on Sunday morning. He roused me from some primordial state, dreamless and black. When God first spoke to Adam, I wondered, did Adam hear the same clawed, scarecrow voice?

  “Weren’t at Meeting,” said Marley, without so much as “hello.”

  I was lying on the ratty, sagging couch my landlords provide. A phone sets on a teetering end table at the head of the couch. I had knocked over the table when I reached for the phone. Before I spoke, it seemed like a good idea to catch my breath, take stock, maybe put my jump-started heart back in my chest. I was fully clothed—indeed, I recognized the threads as the same I’d worn the day before—and a Pentecostal preacher barked at me from the TV.

  “Apparently not,” I said a fraction above a hoarse whisper.

  “Well, where were you?”

  I swallowed and said, “Looks like asleep on the couch.”

  “Asleep or passed out?”

  I am not offended by legitimate questions; I’d done a blackout or two in my day. An answer would require inventory. No bottles in sight; dull, aching pain in my lower back, probably from the couch not blown kidneys or liver; no headache; no chills or shakes; unpleasant but moist taste in my mouth; reasonably rested and now alert.

  “I’d have to say asleep, Bob.”

  “There’s another Meeting tonight. Better go. Find the woman?” said Marley, a victim of transition deficit disorder.

  “Not yet. I’m working on it.”

  “You do that. I’m going to the press conference.”

  “What press conference would that be?”

  “The one Crandall and Modine called today.”

  I had not been queasy when I woke up, but I was beginning to think I could be quite easily.

  “They called you? Why not me?”

  “Oh, they didn’t call me,” Marley said. “They called the GM, about a half hour ago. As he was getting ready for church. He called me. You know how he feels about doing business on Sundays.”

  “So he’s pissed, you’re pissed. Shit rolls downhill. That doesn’t explain why you’d go to this gathering of the clans and I wouldn’t.”

  “Because it seems they’re not talking to you.”

  When Wood answered the phone, I said, “I hear you’re not talking to me.”

  He hung up.

  I’d heard right.

  The gray season began that Sunday, the first day of November. The air was thick, damp, and chill, and the sky, when I finally saw it, was overcast, its clouds haggard and bruised. Some days, it’s hard to be a jolly fat man.

  The press conference was to be held on the courthouse steps at noon. I showered, donned a very slimming, striped, sport coat to wear with my standard-issue white shirt and chinos, and arrived at the paper about 11. Framed against the black interior, swamped in a long, orange rain coat, a beacon against an otherwise colorless day, stood a female figure peering, a hand to her brow, through the front door.

  My size and my income require that I drive a rather large beater, an ‘82 Olds 88 that I picked up for a song the last time the State restored my driving privileges. One or two belts are worn, and its muffler was ravaged by elements and time. Thus, the woman, like so many before her, wheeled at the chorus of my approach.

  I was not feeling charming, so when I got out, I said, “We’re closed.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then go away.”

  Instead, she stuck out her hand. Her name was Janelle, she said, as she marched toward me, Janelle Wheeler, Janelle S. Wheeler. She wanted very much to appear confident, but three shots at her own name tended to undermine that impression.

  I suspected her politely aggressive demeanor was more an act to cover insecurity for she was young, to my eyes very young, maybe no more than 22, 23. She was also tall, and beneath the orange tent she wore, I suspected, skinny and a little gawky. Her face was long and narrow as was her nose, which was also a little beaky. The hand she aimed at me consisted of long, tapered fingers on a long, narrow
palm on a celery-stalk wrist. She stood with one foot cocked on the outside edge as though she had foundered.

  But her eyes never wavered. They were a deep, dark brown, almost black, and her gaze was so intense it seemed a black hole that sucked in your awareness. If I were not a trained and experienced observer, I might not have noticed that her hair was the same color as her eyes and cut in a curt, utilitarian wedge and that her skin was olive and unblemished. If I were not a man of some imagination, I might not have thought that she would be one of those women for whom the manifestations of age—a few more pounds, some laugh lines, and a little silver in her hair—would only serve to make her more striking and appealing. And if I had not been a person of some practicality or a drunk, take your pick, I might not have considered such thoughts a pure waste of time.

  She adjusted the strength of her grip to equal mine when we shook. I hooked a cheek on the front fender of my car.

  “So what do you want, Janelle S. Wheeler?”

  “I work for The Chronicle,” she said, as though that should explain it.

  The Chronicle is the state’s largest newspaper, whether you’re talking number of subscribers, pages published, or area of circulation. And truly it is the state’s paper. You can buy it in damned near every godforsaken mom-and-pop grocery in the state, and since it is a morning paper, farmers in outlying areas can get it the same day it’s published through the mail. Since telephones and gossip are what the circulation types call effective means for delivery of local news in a place like Failey, when people around here must choose between subscribing to The Chronicle or The Mirror-Press, they usually choose The Chronicle. It is the competition for any other paper within a 100-mile radius of the capital, and the people who own it and work for it know it. I was not surprised by a certain lack of deference on the part of Janelle S. Wheeler.

  “So?” I said.

  “I’m kind of new. They’ve got me doing regional stuff. I was hoping to get here a little early and do some background.” She clasped her hands in front of her, suddenly demure. “You’re Clay Ambrose, aren’t you? The guy who wrote yesterday’s story?”

  I admitted I was.

  “Well, I’ve heard of you. They say you’re very good. Yesterday’s stories certainly were.”

  I enjoy a good buttering as much as the next guy, but I’m too old, ugly, and alcoholic for it to be more than momentarily effective. I knew where this was going. When they’re young or work in cities where there isn’t a lot of competition, some reporters think we’re all in this together and that we should share. My reportorial childhood had been spent in Chicago, which probably explained why I tended toward a less generous view of my relationship with competitors.

  “If you’ve read my story, then you know what I know,” I said. “If you want to see the scene, maybe talk to the neighbors, I suppose I could give you directions.”

  She hesitated, probably because she knew I was lying about her knowing all I knew.

  “I thought I’d do all that after the press conference,” she said, the implication being that she would just pick my brain until then.

  “You’ve got time now. Apparently, you didn’t get the word they postponed the proceedings until 1. The cops have a lot on their plate right now, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  She hesitated again. “Nobody told me about a postponement.”

  I liked that, a certain instinctive skepticism; it showed potential.

  “Well, call the sheriff. Check it out,” I said, but I knew the reply.

  “He’s not taking calls,” she said.

  I shrugged and looked at my watch. “And there’s nobody in the newsroom this time on a Sunday morning to tell you if anybody called there. I just found out about it myself actually. I’m not surprised. You want directions or not?”

  Of course, she did. She produced a narrow, spiral-bound notepad from somewhere out of the depths of that damned coat. I thought about steering her to the opposite end of the county. But it occurred to me that between coercing Moze, blackmailing the ambulance director, browbeating Ruthie, manipulating Naomi, and lying about the time change of the press conference maybe I was close to exceeding my usual quota of sins working this story.

  Janelle S. Wheeler drove an M & M, one of those small, brightly colored, perky cars that nice girls fresh out of high school receive as gifts from their dads. Hoping to mitigate karma, I gave her the right directions, but if I am to be honest, I will admit to a certain degree of low-rent satisfaction as she pointed it out of town.

  The courthouse square is a block in the center of town, just a short alley’s walk from the newspaper office. The building itself sits on a rise in the middle of the block. A monument to nineteenth-century, civic pride, it is square in shape and formidable, constructed of gray granite to a height of three stories with a disproportionately slender and delicate dome of black slate rising another story and a half. The building is surrounded by what amounts to a park: a wide, green lawn bordered at the sidewalks that surround the block by elderly oaks and maples. On the lawn are benches on which old loafers frequently sit and lie and a boulder upon which, it is said, a handful of forebears one day polished off a bottle of fine whiskey, smashed the bottle, and declared this the seat of our civilization. All in all, it was too pretty a place to hold such an ugly event.

  First, there were the numbers. This was a story with lots of angles and unknowns and therefore a boatload of appeal, so every newspaper in the counties surrounding Austin County, a couple of the larger newspapers from farther away, and a wire service or two sent a reporter and some sent a photographer as well. The nature of the medium requires that twinks travel in pairs or trios—a reporter, a camera guy, and maybe a producer or someone on sound—and I counted six twink teams from the capital and two of the larger cities nearby. Plus, there were a couple of people armed only with tape recorders, the radio guys.

  Then there were the conditions: outside, in the cold, on a gray day against the gray background of a ponderous courthouse, with no place to set up microphones and no place to plug in electronic equipment. The pictures would be static and flat, the audio dirty and faint, and the potential for error even greater than usual because you couldn’t hear or write well.

  Then there were the games played at any gathering of the clans. The twinks and the print people jostled for position. The twinks bitched about the print people standing in front of their cameras and bumping their equipment. The print people bitched about the principals not starting the press conference on time because the twinks were, as usual, twenty minutes late and required another ten minutes to set up.

  Jesus, why wait, the print people screeched at Wood. He and Moze stood guard in front of three strands of police tape that had been strung between the handrails at the bottom of the courthouse steps to hold us back. The twinks used press conferences as excuses, the print people said, to snag sources and make them repeat what they said in the one-on-one standup interviews they always did after the conference was over. It all fell on deaf ears. Wood was not running the show, Crandall was, and that was the real mistake.

  I spotted Marley in his favorite position, at the front and to one side so he could get his questions in and still have the widest view of what was going on. His lips moved as his eyes swept the group behind him: an old habit, counting the crowd. He spotted me at my favorite position, the back of the pack, nodded, and moved on, still counting.

  When it looked like the twinks were set up, Wood nodded up at the door to the courthouse fourteen steep steps above us. A deputy, who had been watching through the window in the tall, oak door, turned away. A moment later, Crandall came out.

  He wore the same rumpled, brown trench coat and dopey blue porkpie he had worn the other night at Aunt Lotty’s. He stopped at the top of the stairs and tilted his head so that he could glare dyspeptically at us over his glasses. For just an instant, his gaze lingered on me. I nodded b
ack at him, but he did not respond.

  Crandall waddled like a penguin down to the bottom of the stairs. At the tape, he paused once more to consider the sound people and reporters who knelt in front of him like supplicants, their arms raised to reach him with microphones and recorders. He closed his eyes momentarily, shook his head slightly, and said, “My name is Potter Crandall. Spelled like it sounds. I am the prosecuting attorney of Austin County. This is what we know.” Gazing over the heads of the crowd in front of him, he recited with perfect precision and accuracy the basic facts that everybody there had already printed or broadcast: the names and ages of dead, when they died, the nature of the injuries that killed them, the name of the survivor, and a description of her injury.

  “The investigation is continuing,” Crandall said, bringing his eyes down for one last sweeping gaze across the faces and lenses that stared back at him. “Until there is an arrest, do not call us. Until there is an arrest, we will have no more to say.” He turned to go back up the stairs.

  Crandall evidently chose to ignore how press conferences work. The deal is that the source gets to tell a lot of reporters the same thing at the same time so that he doesn’t have to waste his time repeating himself. In exchange for this efficiency, the source has to actually say some damned thing and the newer the better. Crandall had apparently decided to hold a press conference and say nothing, or at least nothing that was new.

  It was, in the way of revolutionary thinking, not immediately comprehendible. Indeed, the clans were, at first, nonplussed. They stared at Crandall and then at each other. Then, en masse, they surged forward, nearly pinning Wood and Moze against the tape.