by Allen Eskens
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 by Allen Eskens
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ISBN 978-0-316-50976-3
E3-20181002-DA-PC
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part 2 Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Allen Eskens
Newsletters
To Ben
Part 1
Chapter 1
I’m lying on the hood of my car, my back reclined against my windshield, knees bent, fingers laced together on my stomach, my breathing relaxed to ease the throb of pain. I’d like to say that having the tar beat out of me was the low point of my day, but that would be a lie. The beating that thug laid on me can’t compare to the hurt I inflicted upon myself. The night around me is large and weightless, the kind of a night that demands honest contemplation, and I’m doing my level best to oblige.
I feel like I’m in exile, a nomad of sorts, sharing my night with the stars and the trees and the occasional thistle seed that floats by on the summer breeze. I try to ponder the wrong turns that brought me here, but I can’t seem to get past my pathetic excuses about why this shouldn’t be my fault. I want to be like Adam and point my finger at the one who handed me the apple or, better yet, find a way to blame the serpent, but my conscience won’t let me do that. I want to believe that I am a better man than I am, but I know that I am not. This one is on me, nobody else.
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I got cocky. I stopped counting my faults and became charmed by the image I put forth for the rest of the world—a side of me that allows people to find their own kindness in my plight. You see, I’ve been taking care of my autistic brother, Jeremy, going on six years now, and I have a girlfriend who I helped put through law school. People see those things and think, What a good guy that Joe Talbert is. They have become so blinded by the gleam of my armor that they haven’t noticed that it’s only tinfoil. I always expected the world to someday figure out that I didn’t belong here, that I had risen far above my ditch-digging station, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when it all started falling apart.
Years ago, when I ran away from home to go to college, half-cocked and broke, I had no real expectation that I’d ever earn a living with my head instead of my hands. Working my way through school as a bouncer, I often found myself harboring equal measures of contempt and envy for those guys who lived in that higher strata of life, men who wore pants wrinkled at the hip from sitting all day, their soft hands holding drinks poured with high-end vodka—no steel-toed shoes needed where they worked. If I could just be one of them, I thought, I’d be happy.
I still remember getting my first paycheck from the Associated Press, how I held it in my hands and stared at it for hours before taking it to the bank. Someone had actually paid me to think—to use my brain. No scraped knuckles. No sore back. A far cry from when I first ventured into the workforce back when I was sixteen—the summer that I worked for my mother’s landlord remodeling apartments. His name was Terry Bremer, and I learned a lot from him, but boy that job sucked.
Once, on a scorching August day, half-blinded by the stinging sweat in my eyes, I crawled into a dusty attic dragging thick batts of fiberglass insulation to its farthest corners. The itch from that experience stuck with me for a week. Another time, I wore out a pair of leather gloves digging a truly foul-smelling trench to replace a collapsed sewer line. Who’d have thought that I could screw up a desk job so badly that I’d look back at shoveling sewage with a fond nostalgia? Yet I had managed it.
When it comes to bad days, it’s hard to beat one that starts with a short, bald man serving you with a summons and complaint. I was absorbed by an article that I was writing that day and didn’t even hear the man knock—you need a punch code to get into the AP office. I had no idea that he was in the room until I heard him say my name. Another reporter pointed me out, and the man walked up to my desk with a smile on his face.
“Joe Talbert?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He held out an envelope, which I instinctively took. Then he said, “You’ve been served.”
I didn’t understand at first because he performed this act with the cheer of someone hoping to receive a tip. “Served?” I asked.
His smile grew bigger. “You’re being sued for defamation of character. Have a nice day.” Then he turned and left the office.
I stood there with the envelope in my hand, not sure what to think. Then I looked around the room at the faces of my fellow reporters, hoping to see the smile of a prankster, someone holding back a laugh or biting a lip, but all I saw was a mixture of fear and pity in the eyes of my colleagues, people who were figuring this thing out one step faster than I was. I opened the envelope, pulled out the documents, and recognized the name of the man listed as the plaintiff. State Senator Todd Dobbins. I knew then that this was no prank.
This wasn’t supposed to
happen to me. I had done everything right. I had written the article over a month ago and it had everything: sex, scandal, political power—everything, that is, except a second source, a fact that made my editor, Allison Cress, more than a little nervous at the time. But I had given Allison the bona fides of my one source as well as the corroborating evidence to back up the story. I had convinced Allison that the source was solid. In the end, Allison ran the story as much on the strength of my word as anything else.
I walked to Allison’s office to show her the document naming me and the Associated Press as co-defendants in a lawsuit, hoping to hear words of comfort, something like: this happens all the time, or don’t worry, it’s just a stunt by a corrupt politician. But what she said chilled me to the point that I nearly threw up. Her face went pale as she read the documents; then she told me to close the door and have a seat.
“This is bad, Joe,” she said. “Really bad.”
“But the story’s true,” I said. “Truth is a defense to defamation.”
“The story’s only true if we can prove that it’s true. That’s the problem with stories where you only have one source—an anonymous one at that.”
“But I have a source. That’s the important thing,” I said, hoping that Allison would agree.
“The last I heard, your source doesn’t want to be identified. That’s a problem. If we can’t produce a witness—especially given the circumstances of this story—it’s going to look like we made it up. It’ll be your word versus his word.”
“Their word,” I said meekly. Allison looked confused. “Mrs. Dobbins wrote out an affidavit backing up her husband’s story.”
Allison had large, chocolate eyes that undermined any chance of her holding a poker face. I could tell she was trying to look calm as we spoke, but I could see fear settling in. “What are the odds that the source would agree to come forward?”
Come forward? My source had let go of her rope and now dangled in my grip, trusting that I would not let her fall. Unmasking her identity not only would break a promise that I had made, but would cost her everything. Some lines can’t be crossed. “But reporters use anonymous sources all the time,” I said.
“Yes. And those reporters run the risk of something like this happening.” Allison shook her head slowly as she continued to read the complaint. I eased back into my chair and waited. When she came to the end, to the part where Dobbins was making his demands, she looked up. “He wants a retraction, and he wants you fired,” she said.
“He also wants a buttload of money. Did you read that?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think this is about the money. Your story killed his political career. He’s finished at the Capitol. The only way to get that life back is to get some kind of declaration that the story was false. To do that, he needs the retraction. I think having you fired is just icing on his cake.”
“They wouldn’t fire me, would they?”
Allison looked at me with a sad expression that all but said, Oh, you poor, naive little boy. Then she told me about a reporter who got fired last year for making a single mistake. He had a perfect record—not one error in twenty-eight years; but then he misidentified a set of initials on a document, attributing the initials to the wrong politician. That was all it took.
I stared out through the windows of Allison’s corner office, a view I’d taken in many times before, the last time being a week ago when Allison and I discussed whether my article would be submitted for Pulitzer consideration. Now we were talking about the end of my career. She balled her hands together and leaned onto her desk, the legal papers at her elbows, her knuckles pressed against her lips. “There’ll be an investigation,” she said without looking up. “I’m on the hook with you. I approved the story. If they fire you, they’ll fire me too.”
And I didn’t think I could feel any worse than I already did.
“The AP will give you an attorney. I went through this once when I was a reporter. It sucked. You’ll have to waive any conflict of interest, or you can hire your own lawyer.”
“Lila’s about to take the bar exam.” I’m not sure why I said that; I guess I was thinking out loud.
“You’ll need someone who specializes in journalism law. I’m sure Lila’s very smart, but don’t take this lightly. If you get fired, no legitimate news outlet will ever hire you again. You’ll be blackballed. Just sign the waiver and let the AP lawyers handle it.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s the smarter way to go.”
I waited for Allison to say something to lift my spirits, but that didn’t happen. By the time I left her office my head hurt and my chest squeezed in around my lungs making it hard to breathe. I spent the rest of the day staring at my computer screen; I didn’t trust myself to type a single word. I kept seeing the accusations from the complaint, words and sentences floating across my field of vision. This could be the end of my career. Then what? Go back to digging ditches? Pull up a bar stool and man the door at Molly’s Pub again? Every time I let those thoughts loose, they nearly choked me.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I went home to tell Lila the bad news. The twenty-minute trip took me from the crystalline towers of downtown Minneapolis to the working-class neighborhood of St. Paul’s Midway, an old part of the city where small houses elbowed each other for space and boxy apartments wore the same dingy yellow brick as the outdated storefronts.
The apartment that Lila and I shared, a two-bedroom inside of an eight-unit complex, was the kind of place that most people would drive past and never think back on. It had no balcony, no lawn, no view other than that of the apartment building across the street, and because of a weird guy in that building who liked to stare into our windows, we kept our blinds closed, adding to the prison-block feel of our place. It was cheap, however, and close to Lila’s law school, and that’s what we needed for now.
Lila Nash was still just my girlfriend, and when I say just, I mean that I hadn’t done the one-knee thing yet. I’d thought about it often, but it never seemed to be the right time, with college and then law school. I didn’t want to propose to her when she had this final or that memorandum of law to work on. I was pretty sure that she would say yes if I asked, but then she would have put the ring aside and gone back to her books. I wanted to wait until we could enjoy the moment, give it the gravitas and attention it deserved. I had hoped that the right moment might come after she graduated from law school—but then came the bar exam.
We were only eight days away from that soul-sucking ordeal, and Lila was riding the bull with white knuckles and gritted teeth. She had a job offer with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, an offer that would disappear if she failed the bar. So for the past two months she’d been studying for that test to the exclusion of everything—everything except for Jeremy, that is. In the middle of all the chaos, Lila somehow found time for my brother.
From the start, it was Lila who took the lead in caring for Jeremy. She was the one who trudged through the bureaucratic maze to get Jeremy his first job, sorting items at a recycling center. Lila educated herself on autism, reading a dozen books on the subject after Jeremy came to live with us. She found time for this even as she trimmed back her time with me, because law school was “kicking her ass.” She and I used to play gin or cribbage almost every night. I can’t remember the last time we did that.
Her latest project had been reading books with Jeremy. My brother learned to read when he was in school, but our mother never valued that skill, so at home he watched movies. Lila started him on children’s books, classics like Snow-White, and Beauty and the Beast. And though Jeremy didn’t like reading books at first, Lila persisted, working with him every day when he came home from his job, going over the words and the pictures, comparing the story on the page to the story on the DVD. After a few months, those books became part of his routine.
That’s where I found them when I came home that day, sitting on the couch together, going over the words of a new book—Dumbo. They both looked up
when I came in, Jeremy for only a second before turning his attention back to the page. He had no idea that I was home three hours early. Lila, on the other hand, looked at me, then at the clock, and back at me again, lines of confusion tracing across her forehead.
“You’re early,” she said. Neither a question nor an accusation, more of a note that she was jotting down in her thoughts.
I walked to the couch, sat next to Lila, and handed her the summons and complaint. Then I leaned back and waited for her to read it.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “This is…” She looked at me, her confused expression melding into concern. “You’re being sued?”
I nodded.
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, sounding more defensive than I had intended.
“I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.” She turned on the couch to face me, as if she wanted to look in my eyes as she asked me her next question. “They’re saying that you made up a story. You didn’t do that, did you?”
“Of course not. I would never make up a story.”
“Todd Dobbins…he’s that state senator you wrote about…the one who beat up his wife.” Lila turned her attention back to the complaint.
“Yes, he beat up his wife.”
“But…” Lila read some more, and I could see that she was reading the affidavit, where Mrs. Dobbins was now swearing that her trip to the emergency room happened because she fell down some stairs. She was swearing, under the penalty of perjury, not only that her husband did not hit her, but that he had saved her life by taking her to the hospital.
Lila looked up from the document. “If he says that she fell down the stairs…and she says that she fell down the stairs…then…”
“I have a source.”
“Who?”
“I can’t divulge that—not even to you. I gave my word.”
“Joe, this is serious.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” I heard my voice rise, and I immediately felt bad. Lila wasn’t the enemy. I took a deep breath to calm down.