by Gerry Boyle
“She didn’t say when she’d be back?”
“No. We didn’t talk that long. Jack, I know there’s no real reason, not on your part, anyway, but it was a little awkward. Women just can sense these things.”
“Oh?”
“Not that it wasn’t cordial. She’s very nice. She thanked me for helping you and I think she meant it. Well, there was a little edge to it, but that’s to be expected. I invited her to come down if you’re stuck here much longer. She sounded like she might.”
“She did?”
“‘Hey, I can’t have you back as a lover, I can at least have your lover as a guest. God, it would be like a movie, wouldn’t it? We should only speak French. Hold up cards. With English subtitles.”
She laughed. I didn’t.
“No, really, I’d like to meet your friends. It would be like getting a look at your new life, Jack. Hey, listen. How much have you told her about what’s been going on? With Fiore, I mean. Because I didn’t think it was my place to—”
“I’ll fill her in,” I said. “Is that black car still out there?”
“No,” Christina said. “But the van with the wood sides is.”
“God, I wonder who that one is?”
“I don’t know. You want me to go ask them?”
“No,” I said.
“Jack, I was only kidding. Have you seen the papers?”
“Seen ’em. Haven’t read ’em.”
“We’re in the Times. And Ellen called already, looking for you. And the reporter, Robert. Stephanie Cooper. Dateline. 20/20. The phone’s been ringing since five-thirty. Let’s see. I kept a list. I’ve got it right here. A woman from National Public Radio. She sounded Irish. Another woman, said she writes a column in Newsday. A guy from the BBC. A guy from some German newspaper. The Voice again, but that was for me. Time Out New York, that’s mine, too. And the same guy from the Times who called before and I gave him the car number. He said he was a photographer.”
“Young? New Yorky?”
“Yeah,” Christina said. “He said his editor told him to get in touch with you to arrange a fresh photo. About time, I thought. They can’t keep using that one of you with the blood on your shirt. I mean, it makes you look like some kind of—”
“He wasn’t a photographer, Christina.”
“No?”
“He told me to back off, to leave New York or he’d have Roxanne killed.”
“Oh, no. Oh, I’m sorry. Does she know?”
“No. She couldn’t hear me.”
“Maybe that’s better,” Christina said. “It would just scare her.”
“She’s scared already,” I said, and I put the phone down.
I was skimming north along the shore, with the Verrazano Bridge ahead of me and barges and tugs plodding the gray-watered bay to my left. I glanced once, then hit the gas and soon was going too fast to look. Swinging onto the expressway, I cut across Bay Ridge, with its endless gritty rooftops, and thought, Well, maybe this would be better for Roxanne, the anonymity of New York, the crowds in which to get lost.
In Portland, with its dollhouse housing projects, its finite boundaries, its goldfish-bowl downtown, Roxanne couldn’t hide. In New York she could just disappear.
Couldn’t she?
But they’d found me easily enough, as though there were a beeping tracking device on the Rover. Racing north, I glanced around. Caught myself. Was I cracking up, imagining a James Bond movie come true?
I glanced at the note, still on the seat. I wasn’t imagining that. And if they found Roxanne, if they followed her out into the country, got her on some lonely road . . . I picked up the phone and dialed Roxanne’s car. Got the robot voice again. Roxanne was out of range. But not out of reach.
Zwee, the parking lot guy, took a circuitous route between the black-brick blocks, skirting the Navy Yard, coming in from the water side. But there was only so much you could do, and when the Rover swung around the corner, the men in the red car looked up. I saw two of them. White. Middle-aged. Nobody I knew. Then Christina’s door rolled open. Butch’s envelope tucked in my pants, I rolled out. Zwee kept going and Christina snapped the padlocks shut.
In the darkness she brushed against me and I felt her shudder, and it wasn’t with fear.
“Sorry, McMorrow. It’s an involuntary reaction. I’m jumping out of my skin these days, for some reason. Probably hormones.”
In the elevator, the light came on. Christina’s doubts of the previous night had vanished and she chattered about the phone calls that had come in since we’d talked.
“You got call from a producer for Dan Rather,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Her face was alive, her eyes sparkling with an almost coked-out glitter.
“Well, don’t you want to talk to him?”
I shrugged.
“Jack, it’s Dan Rather.”
Christ, I thought. Some hood was threatening to kill Roxanne, and the thought of talking to Dan Rather was supposed to get me all weak in the knees?
“So?”
The elevator stopped.
“You could tell him about Butch. The woman said they’re doing a full-blown profile.”
“Them and everybody else.”
She pulled the door open and turned to me.
“You could tell them about this thing that Butch was working on.”
“That would help matters.”
She started into the dim passage. I followed.
“Maybe the threat of it would help matters,” Christina said.
She unlocked the door.
“I don’t know enough,” I said.
“Do they know that? Maybe it would help to go on the offensive a bit. Say to them, ‘Listen. Leave us alone or I put this whole thing on the national news.’”
Christina swung the door open and light spilled out.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes threats keep somebody at bay. Sometimes they backfire.”
“Well, maybe they should get the idea that their threats might backfire.”
Christina stepped into the loft, cocked her hip, and looked back.
“Just a thought,” she said.
And not a bad one.
Christina had that quality. Just when you’d sized her up as a dreamy artist, she revealed her conniving side, her competitive edge. She’d fought her loft landlord to a standstill, maneuvered her way into galleries and shows. When I’d first met her, she’d deftly nudged out a rival for my affections, just as she’d tried to do the previous night.
So her instincts were sound. But was this the time?
I thought about it as I stood at Philippe’s window and looked out at the red car, still parked at the corner. Could I tell this cop or whatever the hell he was to back off, or I’d take my story to the press? I’d have their ear, but how much of a story did I actually have?
At this point, it was a collection of odd coincidences, old Fiore cases gone astray. Missing criminals in a city where criminals weren’t missed. A comatose victim and her doddering husband. I still hadn’t talked to the woman who was raped. I hadn’t tried to find Drague, the rapist. I hadn’t talked to Digham, the kid whose skull was broken. In terms of a real reportable story, I wasn’t there yet.
So what did I have that really said something was seriously wrong?
I had a guy who was worried enough about me and my questions to threaten to kill an innocent woman, put her in the mail in pieces. That much I had.
So I called Roxanne every five minutes, or maybe it was two or three. In between, I tried the Digham Foundation on East 64th Street. A snooty-sounding woman said there was no one in the office, but I could leave a message.
I said I’d like to leave a message for Mr. Digham.
“Mr. Digham the third or Mr. Digham the fourth?” she said.
“Both,” I said, and I left my name and number. If she recognized it, she didn’t show it. Snooty people are good at that.
I tried Clair, too, to enlis
t him, to ask him again to watch out for Roxanne. But there was no answer. I dialed the detectives’ pagers. Roxanne again and the robot voice answered. The red car still was on the corner and the black car was back. Like foes in opposing trenches, they sat and watched. I did, too.
Christina made tea and toast and we sat with the newspapers like the cozy couple she had wanted us to be, at least the night before. I scanned the Times story about me and Butch, which started with our childhood friendship and ended at the Algonquin. It described Leslie Moore’s death, and quoted police department sources as saying Butch blamed Fiore for botching his wife’s case and letting Georgie Ortiz go. My nemesis editor at the Times said my pursuit of that story was overzealous, that I was a talented reporter and a good writer, but I had turned the Butch Casey story into a cause.
“The Times does not tolerate that,” he said. “No credible newspaper does.”
“Screw you, you pompous ass,” I said.
Christina looked up from the Times arts page. I dialed again. And again. And again. Until finally, at 9:40, the phone rang back.
“Jack.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Robert.”
I sagged. Felt like hanging up, but couldn’t.
“You read today’s story?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
“I thought it was thorough and accurate,” I said. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Don’t thank me. That gets around this place, I’ll be up in Maine with you, writing about the selectmen.”
“You could do worse.”
“I don’t think so. But listen, Jack. I’m calling on official business.”
“Okay.”
“I’m doing a story for tomorrow’s paper. I don’t think anybody else has it.”
“Oh?” I said.
“It was a tip. Guy owed me one, and he delivered. Anyway, this woman, she was scared, you know, afraid she’d get in trouble because she didn’t go to the cops right away. So she went to them today. And I got a tip and I got her on the phone and she talked.”
Sanders paused. Wary, I waited.
“So Jack, this is what I’ve got.”
He cleared his throat. He was nervous. I braced myself.
“Jack, I talked to an employee at the Meridien today.”
“Yup.”
“Jack.”
He cleared his throat again. I waited.
“Jack, the employee said Casey dropped a large envelope for you at the hotel at six o’clock Monday morning. Jack? You still there, Jack?”
OCTOBER 1988
He looked the part. Silver hair. Half-glasses. Sleeves on his custom-tailored shirts carefully rolled up. He went to parties with Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters. Had been ballooning with Malcolm Forbes. There was a photo on his office wall to prove it.
If the editor liked you, you were golden. If he didn’t, you were done. It was just a matter of time.
In the beginning he’d been impressed by the new guy, McMorrow. He’d even stopped and chatted with him in the newsroom. He’d told him he thought his perspective was a little like Murray Kempton’s, but his stuff was a lot more readable. Other reporters overheard the compliment and ground their teeth. McMorrow just smiled.
But there was something about McMorrow, a vaguely irritating aloofness. All reporters had an independent streak, the editor knew, some more than others. But when he told McMorrow he liked his stuff, McMorrow said thanks, but not like he really cared. When the editor offered to edit one of his stories, to go through it himself, McMorrow had acted like he could take it or leave it. Did McMorrow know to whom he was speaking? Did he know the editor of the New York Times didn’t talk to just anybody in the newsroom? What was the man’s problem?
So when Dave Conroy called from City Hall that morning and said he wanted to come over to talk about McMorrow, the editor said, “All right. Come ahead.” When Conroy laid it all out, that McMorrow and the cop whose wife was murdered were childhood chums, lifelong friends, the editor listened.
When Conroy said McMorrow’s reporting couldn’t be trusted, he didn’t disagree. When Conroy said McMorrow had joined up with Casey on this mission to find Casey’s wife’s killer, the editor didn’t say anything. When Conroy said McMorrow was a liability for the Times just as Casey was a liability for the police department, he didn’t argue. When Conroy asked if McMorrow had disclosed his relationship with Casey, the editor said he didn’t know.
Conroy left. That afternoon, the editor called McMorrow. He told him they needed to talk. He told McMorrow to bring a union representative.
McMorrow didn’t. He walked in the door alone, nodded to the metro editor, Ellen Jones. Sitting in a chair in front of the big desk, McMorrow had that same infuriatingly cocky look on his face and the editor had to check his temper.
“Jack,” he said, leaning on his desk, “we’ve got a problem. David Conroy was here from the mayor’s office. He talked to me about the Casey story.”
“What did he do? Try to put a positive spin on letting a killer go?” McMorrow said.
“Not really.”
“Losing his touch, then. Guy could do PR for the devil himself.”
“Jack, I know you’re close to this story.”
“Casey didn’t coach anybody. The witness is solid. It was so obvious, when you talked to her, that she really saw what she said she saw. You read the story.”
“I believe I did.”
“It speaks for itself. She was just afraid. Needed to be reassured that if she told police what she saw, Yolimar wouldn’t just get turned loose. Which is what happened. I guess she had good reason to be scared.”
The editor looked at Ellen Jones. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“Jack,” the editor said, getting up from his chair, leaning across the desk, “why didn’t you tell us you knew Casey when you were a kid?”
McMorrow didn’t answer right away. The editor picked up a legal pad and read from notes.
“That your fathers worked together at the Museum of Natural History.”
“It’s a big place. And they didn’t work together. Butch’s dad was in security. I mean, my dad was in entomology. So what?”
“Or that you were close personal friends as kids. That you’ve kept in contact with Casey for all these years. That you had dinner with his wife at least twice in the six months before she died.”
“So I send him a Christmas card. So what? We had dinner once. Once we were supposed to have drinks and I was late. Saw him for fifteen minutes.”
“You’ve put this newspaper in a terrible position.”
“No, I haven’t. I was the only one willing to tackle this story. And she said nobody coached her. Nobody influenced her. You think I made that up? Hell, get her in here. She’ll tell you. She was a good witness and Fiore tossed her. That’s the story. Why did he dump a key witness in a high-profile homicide? That’s the—”
“This newspaper’s integrity is the story,” the editor exploded. “This newspaper’s integrity stands above everything else. We don’t write about our personal friends.”
“Baloney. Read the op-ed page.”
“That’s opinion. I’m talking about the news pages.”
“You think reporters don’t know cops? You think reporters here don’t have drinks with flacks and assistant commissioners and staffers and everybody else?”
“That’s different, Jack, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t. I covered this issue just like I would for any other cop in the New York Police Department.”
“For any other cop? We don’t do stories for people.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I thought I did, Jack, but I’m not sure anymore. You should have recused yourself and you didn’t. You should have told Ellen and you didn’t. Your stories are tainted by the appearance of bias.”
“My stories are straight down the middle.”
I said, ‘appearance.’”
“I’
m not biased. I’m interested.”
“Who gave you the name of the witness?”
“A cop.”
“Casey?”
“No. Another detective, one who’s working the case.”
“Gave it to you because you’re a pal of Casey’s.”
“Gave it to me because it was an injustice and he knew I’d write about it.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I won’t come on. This is a damn good story, and it isn’t done.”
“It is for you, Jack.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I want you to take a couple of weeks off and think this over.”
“I’m suspended?”
“Yeah, you’re suspended. You’ve given me no choice. Go home.”
“Just like that? Some two-bit flack from the mayor’s office comes in and feeds you a line and I’m gone?”
“Jack,” Ellen said. “This is ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous is you covering this story, Mr. McMorrow,” the editor said.
“What was wrong with my coverage?”
“I don’t know. Now I don’t know.”
“What about all the people you know socially? All these New York movers and shakers. You going to turn down the next black-tie invitation?”
“You goddamn disrespectful son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”
“I know exactly who I’m talking to. And when Ortiz kills somebody else, I’ll send you the clip. From the News or the Post, ’cause I’m sure we won’t cover it.”
“You’re gone, McMorrow. Get out of here.”
“Let’s cool off,” Ellen said. “Let’s just take a break and get ourselves together.”
“Am I fired?” McMorrow asked.
“No, Jack,” Ellen said, stepping between them.
“ ’Cause I’ll go,” McMorrow said. “You just say the word. I’ll do this someplace else. I didn’t sell my soul when I came here. I’ll find a paper with some balls.”
“Go then, McMorrow. Go find some crusading rag.”
“Come on, guys,” Ellen said, moving Jack toward the door. “This isn’t constructive.”
She got McMorrow into the newsroom, where all work had stopped and all eyes were on them.
“See, Ellen?” McMorrow said. “This is what happens when you have these social climbers in the newsroom. Goddamn ass-kissing sycophant. Sucking up to all the goddamn celebrities. It’s pathetic.”