by G. M. Ford
“Seven on Wednesday, then,” Corso said.
She offered thanks and good-byes all around and was nearly back to the door when Hawes said, “Blaine Newton will be going with you guys.”
Unsure whether the remark had been directed at her, Meg Dougherty stopped and turned around. “Excuse me?”
Corso cursed himself. He should have seen it coming. Hawes had his Leanne Samples exclusive. He was willing to take his chances on the rest of it. Clever little bastard knew exactly what Corso would say to the idea of working with Newton. Not only that, but he gets two for the price of one. Gets Corso to renege on his promise to Mrs. V. and then gets to spoon-feed a national story to his personal-reporter project.
“I’m not working with Newton,” Corso said.
“You’re working with whoever I say you’re working with,” Hawes said.
“There’s a great deal of background work to be done here, Mr. Corso,” Mrs. Van Der Hoven said. “Not to mention the day-to-day follow-up. If you’re going to be lead man on the story, you’re certainly going to require some help.”
“No question about it,” Corso said. “I’m definitely gonna need some help. But not Blaine Newton. Anybody but Newton.”
Hawes’s scalp was beginning to glow. “Hey…,” he said. “You’re not making personnel decisions around here, Corso, I am. You don’t like my decisions, feel free to take it up the road. But don’t stand here and tell me how to do my job.”
Mrs. V. jumped in. “Mr. Hawes believes that Mr. Newton will profit from the experience. That he can learn the rudiments of investigation at your knee…so to speak.”
Corso kept his gaze on Hawes. Wishing like hell he hadn’t let himself get backed into a corner like this but too pissed to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m not working with Newton,” Corso said again.
The red glow had worked its way down Hawes’s ears. He was smiling like a piranha. Before Corso could open his mouth, another, calmer voice said, “I could do it.” Meg Dougherty from the doorway.
“What?” Hawes growled.
“I said, I could help out with the background and follow-up. Right after I got out of college, I did that kind of thing for Barton and Browne,” she said, naming the city’s largest law firm.
Dead silence.
“Works for me,” Corso said in a hurry.
“That’s not the goddamn point,” Hawes snapped. “We’re not talking about what works for you, Corso; we’re talking about who and what works for me.”
Hawes stood glaring at Corso. Weighing the value of a personal victory versus the magnitude of the story. Tough call. Super Bowls, both.
“What’ll it be, Mr. Hawes?” Mrs. V. asked. She checked her watch. “As I see it, we have very little moral or ethical latitude here. We’ve got something like a hundred hours to do everything we can to see to it that a miscarriage of justice does not take place under our very noses.” She folded her arms across her chest. “The decision is yours, Mr. Hawes. But I think you would have to agree that if indeed Mr. Corso has been correct all along and something is rotten here, our chances of getting to the bottom of the matter in the meager time left to us are considerably better with Mr. Corso’s help than without.”
She was slick. Made it easy for him. He made a resigned face and forced a strangled “Okay” from between his lips.
Chapter 8
Monday, September 17
7:40 P.M. Day 1 of 6
“No eat?” the waitress asked.
“Just coffee,” Corso said. He wrinkled an eyebrow at Meg Dougherty.
“Two,” she added.
The waitress scowled at the pair, stuffed the order pad into her apron, and walked away muttering beneath her breath.
The dim overhead light cast a feeble yellow circle over the center of the table, leaving the rest of the booth bathed in shadows. She thought Corso might have smiled.
“Thanks for bailing me out upstairs,” he said.
She waved the notion away. “Just saving my own gig, Corso. I don’t do lifeguard work. Believe me, I need the money.”
The fall of his hair was silhouetted by the windows. Of his face, only the thick black eyebrows were visible in the gloom.
“You were going to push it, weren’t you?” she asked.
“I’ve got a bad temper,” he said. “Gets me in trouble sometimes.”
“He was going to fire your ass.”
“No,” Corso said. “He can’t fire me. He wanted me to quit.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“Hawes and I have quite a history,” Corso explained. “You walked in on the culmination of something that’s been going on for years. It all just sort of came to a head today.”
Outside, daylight was losing ground to the elements. Cars on Elliott Avenue had their headlights on at three-fifteen in the afternoon. A ground fog, brown with exhaust fumes, stretched upward, reaching to join the thick gray clouds hovering above.
“You asked for me by name?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Mr. Hawes wouldn’t have called me if you hadn’t.”
“I saw those shots of the bus accident,” Corso said. “Good stuff.” The waitress reappeared. Slid two steaming white mugs across the table.
“You sure? No eat?”
Corso said they were sure, sending her muttering back into the kitchen, where she began practicing for the national pot-banging finals.
“What do you do other than string for the Sun?”
“Anything I can,” she answered. “Do quite a bit of work for the Post Intelligencer and the Times. The alternative rags, when they’ve got money to spend. I’m working on a photo essay of the club scene for the local PBS affiliate. In my spare time, I’m trying to get somebody interested in helping me put together a new show.”
“You said you worked for Barton and Browne?”
“I started out taking accident pictures. Cracks in sidewalks. Faulty steps. That kind of thing. After a while, they started letting me do witness interviews and victim depositions. Right before I left, I was doing background checks on prospective clients.”
He had an interesting way of mirroring her actions. Every time she leaned forward into the light, he receded farther into the shadows. If she sat back, he moved forward, as if, for some reason, he needed to maintain a specific distance between them.
“What about you?”
“What about me?” he asked.
“What’s all this big mystery thing surrounding you?”
“There’s no mystery thing,” he said.
“Come on,” she countered. “I asked around the newsroom. You’re some kind of famous true-crime writer these days. They say you just about killed a reporter who snuck up on you one time. Put him in the hospital for months.”
“He was stealing from me,” Corso said.
“Stealing what?”
“My privacy.”
She searched his eyes for irony. Didn’t find it. “They say you haven’t been in the building for years. Nobody knows anything about you.” She hesitated for a moment. Corso read her mind.
“Except for the libel suit,” he said with a sneer.
“That just makes it all the more mysterious,” she said. She held a finger to her dark lips. “Famous disgraced reporter turned writer. Syndicated in a couple of hundred papers but works for the lowly Seattle Sun. Not part of the regular staff. You’re supposed to be like this real dangerous dude who works directly for the owner.”
“See…people know things about me.”
“Phooey,” she said. “They say that even back before the books you worked all by yourself. Nobody knew what you were working on. All really hush-hush like.”
“I’m very shy.”
She laughed out loud at him and, for the first time, felt him tighten up.
“You’re not going to be like this all the time, are you?” he asked.
&
nbsp; “Like what?”
“Like”—he searched for a neutral word—“inquisitive,” he said finally.
“And pushy,” she added.
“You said that, I didn’t,” Corso protested.
“It’s what you meant, though, wasn’t it?”
“I’m renowned for being able to say exactly what I mean,” Corso said.
She cast an annoyed gaze his way, and quickly changed the subject.
“I cried when I read that piece of yours on the housing-project shootings.”
She could still see the room, as Corso had described it. The rotting plaster and the peeling paint and the young mother, blank behind her eyes, telling him the story of how her little girl had been killed one morning by a stray bullet as she left for school. Of the surprised look on the little girl’s face at the moment of impact and of how her red plastic pencil box had fallen to pieces on the cement steps. And the bumps and the shrill cries of the other children as they ran madly through the apartment, because she no longer allowed them to play outside in the battle zone her project courtyard had become.
Instead of responding, Corso leaned back into the deep shadows and closed his eyes.
“You remember Leanne Samples?” he asked after a moment.
“From the TV this week?”
He told her the story of his day.
“No shit,” she said when he finished.
“No shit.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I take it you probably know your way around the courthouse.”
“It’s been a while, but I remember how.”
“Okay then, spend tomorrow down there. I want to take a fresh look at everybody involved with Himes’s trial. The judge, the prosecutor, the defense. All of it.”
She extricated a spiral-bound notebook from her bag. She wiggled a green golf pencil out from among the coils of wire.
“The judge was a guy named Sheldon Spearbeck.” Corso spelled it. “He’s still around. I see him on the tube once in a while.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“First off,” Corso said, “find out about his work habits. Some judges come early and stay late. Others waltz in at noon and are on the golf course every day by two. I want to know where this guy falls on the continuum. I want to know what his caseload was like at the time of the trial.”
“I’ll look up the dates of the trial and then check the docket. Then see what kind of case backlog he’s got now.”
“I want to know how often his decisions are overturned by appellate courts and what the normal rate of overturn is.”
“I’ll look him up in Legal Times,” she said.
She wrote for a while and then looked up.
“I want to know how many contempt citations he issues against lawyers and how that number compares with other judges’ citations.” More hurried scribbling.
“I want to know about his financial status.”
“I’ll call the election commission,” she said without looking up, “have them fax me a copy of his financial statement; then I’ll call the Washington State Bar Association and see if any complaints have been filed against him. If so, I’ll get copies.”
Finally, she looked up. He’d make a lousy poker player, she thought. Wore everything right there on his face. Like right now. He was impressed with what she knew about legal research but just couldn’t bring himself to say so.
“What else?” she asked in her best bored voice.
“New page,” Corso said. “The prosecutor. I don’t remember his name.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find,” she said.
“I want to know where he ranked in his law school class. I want to know about whatever lawyer jobs he may have had prior to public service. Check his case-load at the time of the trial. Check his caseload now. Find out how many of his cases go to trial and how many are plea-bargained and how those figures square with the norm.”
“I’ll look at the recent docket. See which defense attorneys have jousted with him lately. Maybe call a few. See what they have to say about him.”
“Good idea,” Corso said.
She crossed her legs, rested the pad on her knee. She had a cramp in her writing hand but wasn’t about to shake it out in front of Corso.
“What about the defense attorney?” she asked.
“Where is he now? How much trial experience did he have at the time? How many capital cases? What was his won-loss record at the time? What was his caseload? We’re looking to see if he had the time to be thorough.” Corso thought for a second. “And get a copy of his bill to the county. Let’s see what that looks like.”
She leafed back a couple of pages and read the list back to Corso.
“That it?”
“If you have time, see what you can find out about a police lieutenant named Charles Donald. East Precinct. He was one of Himes’s arresting officers and the guy Himes supposedly confessed to. Find out who his partner was at the time of the arrest and where he is now.”
“What do you want on Donald?”
Corso thought it over. “When I saw Lieutenant Donald earlier today, he was wearing a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of duds, which says to me that either he spends his entire salary on his wardrobe and sleeps in the trunk of his car, or that he has some outside source of income.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Not that I can think of,” Corso said.
She leafed back through her notes. “This is going to take more than one day.”
“Take your time. I’ll do what I can to see to it you get paid a living wage.”
She got to her feet. Something about Corso’s manner gave her the urge to make damn sure he wasn’t sitting around on his ass while she was out working.
“What are you going to be doing while I’m tearing the courthouse down?”
“I’ve got to have the Leanne Samples story ready by nine. And then first thing tomorrow morning, I’ve got an idea about how I might be able to dig us up a story for Wednesday. Which I’m then gonna have to write.”
“If I need help or have questions?”
He wrote a telephone number on the back of a business card. Gave it to her.
“I could get a pretty penny for this from one of the tabloids,” she joked.
“We are one of the tabloids,” he said.
Chapter 9
Tuesday, September 18
10:25 A.M. Day 2 of 6
Special Agent Edward Lewis pushed the earlybird edition of the Seattle Sun across the scarred face of the table. The headline screamed “I LIED.” Leanne Samples’s story covered pages one through three and then jumped to page thirteen for the finish and the sidebar. The street edition had completely sold out by 9:30 A.M.
“Is this your work?” Lewis asked. He had a way of looking at you over his glasses that seemed to ask you to consider your answers carefully.
They sat together in an interrogation room on the eleventh floor of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building. The room was a low-ceilinged, lime-green rectangle that smelled of piss and desperation. The table was bolted to the floor. Behind Agent Lewis, the obligatory mirrored wall loomed like a tunnel. They’d been trading snappy repartee for twenty minutes.
“Sure is,” Corso said.
“You must be feeling pretty good about yourself.”
Corso shook his head. “Way I see it, there’s no ‘feel good’ in this one. Just a lot of prolonged pain for a lot of innocent people.”
“That’s what you journalists do, isn’t it?” Lewis said.
“What’s that?”
“Muck around in other people’s tragedies.”
Corso ignored the barb. “I had a professor once who said that journalists are charged with writing the first draft of history. After that, he claimed, the job fell to editors and historians.”
Lewis shrugged. “So then I’m sure you’ll understand why the Bureau is going to maintain its distance here.”
“
Why’s that?”
“We’d prefer to wait for the final edition.”
“Walter Leroy Himes doesn’t have that option.”
“You’ll excuse me if I seem callous, Mr. Corso, but I just can’t work up a great deal of remorse over the idea that Mr. Walter Leroy Himes will soon no longer be among the living.”
“Who can?” Corso said quickly. “Walter Himes is a big, fat, ugly, child-molesting chunk of dog meat who’s probably committed a barrelful of unchronicled crimes, and who’s spent the past three years belittling the victims and taunting the survivors.” Corso hesitated, held up a hand. “None of which, however, makes him a mass murderer or a candidate for a lethal injection,” he finished.
Lewis curled his lips slightly. “Your capacity for compassion is noteworthy, Mr. Corso. You sound a bit like a man of the cloth. Have you ever thought that perhaps you missed your calling?”
“What I think, Agent Lewis, is that tomorrow morning I’m going to print with a story that says that back in ninety-eight the FBI developed a profile of the Trashman murderer and that Walter Leroy Himes wasn’t anywhere near a match.”
Lewis took a sip of his coffee, then picked up his spoon and began to stir the mixture. He smiled. “You know, Mr. Corso, with your unfortunate past history, I’d be extra careful about what I put into print.” Lewis began to read: “January ninety-eight, fired by the New York Times for fabricating an investigative story. Subject of the article sues the paper for ten mil…eventually settles for three and change. A month later you end up at the Seattle Sun. In April of that same year, you’re attacked outside your Capital Hill apartment. Coupla guys who took issue with your sympathy for Walter Himes. Left you with a skull fracture, a broken nose, fractured collarbone, five broken fingers, and a severe concussion.” Lewis looked up, as if expecting rebuttal from Corso. Corso checked his cuticles.
“Then July ninety-eight.” Lewis flipped a page. “You’re no longer in the direct employ of the Sun. Indicted for first-degree assault.”
“Acquitted.”
“August…same summer. Charged with destruction of property—a fifty-six-hundred-dollar camera and simple assault on the cameraman.”