White Collar Girl

by Renée Rosen

  “I know, but I have to say something and I have to say it now before I lose my nerve.” I leaned in closer. “We have to talk about your pieces.”

  “What about my pieces?”

  “Oh, Marty, this is a painful conversation to have—and I hope to God you have an explanation, but—”

  “What the hell are you getting at?” His brows knitted together. He looked genuinely confused. He had no idea what I was about to spring on him.

  “Marty, some of your pieces, some of the facts, they’re not checking out.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.” He shoved his coffee aside, sloshing it onto the table. His cheeks grew dark as his fingers crumpled up his napkin. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. You’ve got some nerve, Walsh. I don’t know what you’re implying, but—”

  “Your sources, Marty. Your quotes. C’mon, the jig is up. I know what you’ve been doing. You made them up.”

  The moment I said that, all his indignation evaporated. He looked like I’d punched him in the gut. The color drained from his face, and he brought his hands to his forehead. “Oh, God. Oh, good God.”

  “Why, Marty? Why would you do something like that? You’re a brilliant journalist—you don’t need to do something like that.”

  He dared to meet my gaze. “It was just the one piece,” he said. “Just that one on Gertrude Lammont.”

  “Marty—”

  “I just needed that one extra quote,” he insisted. “I was on deadline and Ellsworth was breathing down my neck and . . .”

  “Marty, I know it wasn’t just that one time. I know what you’ve been doing. It’s been going on for a while. What I don’t know is why.”

  He squared his elbows on the table and dropped his head to his hands. His shoulders started to shake, and I realized he was crying.

  “Marty—”

  He raised his head as tears trickled down his face. “You don’t know what it’s been like for me. I don’t care if Big Tony is in prison—you think I don’t still worry about that? Ever since the hospital. Ever since I got sick. I can’t take the pressure. The deadlines. The expectations. It’s been too much.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask for help?”

  “A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist doesn’t ask for help, Walsh.”

  “Then why didn’t you quit?”

  “I have a family to support. And I only did it when I absolutely had to.”

  “No, Marty. You never have to do that. You’re a journalist, not a fiction writer. The past three months your work’s been full of holes.” I reached in my bag and handed him a tissue.

  He ignored it and continued to let the tears run down his face. “Are you going to tell Ellsworth?”

  I sighed. That was the question I’d been wrestling with. “I don’t want to do that to you. You know I don’t. But you can’t go on doing this.”

  “I promise. I won’t ever do it again.”

  “Marty, you’re tainting the whole paper, the whole field of journalism. If you were a doctor, it would be malpractice. If you were a lawyer, you’d be disbarred.”

  “This will destroy my whole career. My reputation. I’ll never be able to work again. If word about this gets out, no one else will ever hire me. How am I going to support my family?”

  My head was throbbing. I pressed my fingers to my pulsing temples and tried to steady my breathing. I took a moment and gathered my thoughts. “You’re too good, too talented to take a shortcut like that.” Despite what he’d done, despite how morally wrong it was, I looked across the table and I still saw the man who had inspired me, who’d taken me under his wing. I couldn’t turn him in. I just couldn’t do it. Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I said, “This’ll stay between the two of us. I won’t say a word. But—”

  “But what?”

  “But if I see it again, you know I’m going to have to say something.”

  “Oh, Walsh.” He let out a deep breath and grabbed my hands. “Thank you. Thank you for understanding.”

  “I don’t understand, Marty. I really don’t. I just don’t have the heart to bring you down.”

  • • •

  Marty didn’t come back to the city room with me. He said he needed to take some time, get some air. I watched him heading south, walking across the Michigan Avenue Bridge, with hunched shoulders and shrinking pride.

  The rest of the day dragged for me. I finished up my workload and begged off when the others went across the street for a drink. I was exhausted from the night before and not in the mood to socialize.

  I went straight home instead, poured myself a big glass of wine and wondered if I had anything besides eggs in the house for dinner. My body was stiff and ached to the bone, so I took a bath in my tub that never drained right.

  I sat while the water lapped against my body, the waves slapping at my limbs. A ship lost at sea. My mind replayed the past twenty-four hours as the bath turned cold. I was so disillusioned and disappointed. Especially with myself. I wished I hadn’t let Scott get away. I wished Marty hadn’t let me down. And mostly I wished that I’d hadn’t backed off my story about Daley and the Mafia stealing the White House.

  I always knew that I would have had to tread lightly with the Mob, watch what I set to ink—but even that went against everything I believed in. Everything the press had been founded on. But the Outfit had won. They’d frightened me into submission. I had allowed them to intimidate and censor me.

  I was toweling off when I heard someone out in the hallway. Maybe the lady with the mysterious baby buggy. As I slipped into my bathrobe, someone knocked on my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. It gave me a start, and Giancana flashed through my mind. Everything inside me clenched together as I tiptoed out to the living room. There was another round of knocking. And then I saw the doorknob trying to turn. I had one sharp knife in the kitchen, and I reached for it, inching toward the door. I held my breath as I dared to look through the peephole.

  I couldn’t believe it. My heart nearly stopped. “Dad? What are you doing here?” I unlocked and unlatched the door, yanking it open.

  “It’s about time,” he said. “This is heavy.” He stepped inside, carrying Eliot’s typewriter in his hands. “I thought you might like to have this.”

  “Really?” My eyes misted up.

  “Really.” He groaned as he set the typewriter down on the table. “Your mother and I started packing up Eliot’s things. It’s time.” He said this as if he’d come to this realization on his own. I didn’t mind though. I was just grateful that he’d gotten there at all.

  He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Next time, consider a building with an elevator, would you?” He did a quarter turn in the middle of the living room, assessing it all. “So this is where you live, huh?”

  “This is it. Do you want to sit down?” I asked tentatively, composing myself, clearing my eyes.

  “You got anything to drink in here?”

  “Just wine. Sorry.” I shrugged. “No whiskey, and I’m all out of vodka.”

  “Wine, huh? Well, okay, then wine it is.” He hated wine.

  I poured him a glass and asked if he was hungry. “I was just about to make some eggs.”

  “Eggs for dinner? You know how to live, don’t you?” He laughed.

  “So are you doing okay?” I asked, handing him his wine and perching myself on the arm of the sofa where he was sitting.

  He took a gulp and winced. “I don’t know how you can drink this crap.”

  “It gets the job done.” I took a long sip, painfully aware of the silence mounting, interrupted only by the occasional creak of the building, the drip of the kitchen faucet.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” My father got up, went out to the hall and returned with a box held together by twine, which he presented to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your brother’s files—his paperwork, his notes, his clips. I didn’t have the heart to go through any of it, but yo
ur mother thought you’d like to have them. There’re two more boxes out in the car.”

  I was speechless as I ran my hands over the box, blinking back tears. I took this offering as a sign, permission to finally talk about what really happened to Eliot.

  “Dad, I know you never wanted me to look into his death. But I have a feeling some of the answers are in these boxes. . . .”

  My father reached for the wine bottle and poured himself another glass.

  “Dad?” I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. “Are you prepared for what I might find?”

  He gazed into his glass. “I always wanted to believe that it was an accident. Just a random, senseless act. That’s what I told myself. That was easier for me. Easier for your mother. And for you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because I knew you’d want to look into it and find out what happened. Hell, even that night at the hospital, you were questioning the police, the doctors.” His chin began to crumple, and his eyes were clouding up. “I knew then that you had the family curse. You’re a reporter, Jordan, and that’s what we reporters do. We question. We probe. We go into those dark places that scare everyone else. They even scare us, but we still do it because we have to. We just have to.” He paused and took a drink. “I didn’t want that life for you. I wanted to protect you. In the back of my mind I always knew what happened to Eliot could have been tied to his work. I’m not stupid. But if it wasn’t an accident, I didn’t want you involved.”

  “But wouldn’t you rather know what really happened? Wouldn’t you rather seek justice for his murder? Doesn’t Eliot deserve that?”

  “But I—I can’t do it.”

  We were silent for a long time. Then I said, “I know. I know you can’t do it. But I can. I can do this, Dad.”

  For the second time in two days he broke down, his shoulders shaking. “I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you too. You’re all I’ve got.”

  “Then don’t shut me out. Don’t push me away.”

  With tears running down his face, he opened his arms and I fell into them.

  • • •

  After my father left and I’d dried my eyes, I untwined the boxes and began sorting through Eliot’s notes. I understood his fears, but I also couldn’t deny my brother the justice he deserved, especially if it was sitting in these boxes on my living room floor.

  I sat in the center of the room, surrounded by piles of yellowing papers and tattered folders. All his early clips were there, and I grew nostalgic reading through them. After I emptied the last box, I noticed a folder dated 1952: Butcher Field Work.

  I opened the folder and began to read through his familiar scrawl:

  Willis Packing, Topeka, Kansas, verified shipment: 20 tons of horsemeat to Chicago each week. Chicago hamburgers contain up to 40 percent horsemeat. Illegal in Chicago and Illinois to sell horsemeat for human consumption. Multimillion-dollar horsemeat racket—traces back to Chicago Mob and Governor Stevenson’s office.

  The Chicago Mob? Governor Stevenson? I looked up and reached for my glass of wine. I knew some powerful people were probably involved, but I had no idea it went this deep.

  I went back to the file: See Department of Agriculture. Get statement from mayor’s office. . . . No wonder the superintendent I met with got so jumpy.

  I dug a bit deeper and found his appointment book stuffed in the very back of that file. It was peppered with birthdays, city council meetings, names and phone numbers jotted in the margins. There was a random street address here and there. A few doodles. Telephone numbers, hastily scribbled down. Lots of dates penciled in with Susan Hirsh. A star next to her name in one instance. These all meant something to him. All bits and pieces of his life.

  I was about to close the appointment book when my eyes landed on something that bewildered me one second and made my pulse race the next. There it was, right in the margin, written in black ink and underscored: Richard Ahern—BELMONT 5-9081.

  Chapter 41

  • • •

  All it takes is one thing to shuffle your deck and reprioritize everything for you. The worries that had consumed me just twenty-four hours or even twenty minutes before had now sifted to the bottom of the pile, and an investigation that had been on the back burner for years was suddenly front and center. My world was tossed upside down, and my thoughts kaleidoscoped into a million fragments. Ahern. Eliot. Marty. My father. The Mob. A horsemeat racket that went all the way to the governor’s office.

  When I left my apartment early the next morning, it was breezy and cold. The wind blew up my collar and sent a chill from the base of my neck down the length of my body. The clouds were hanging thick and low in the sky, bathing the whole city in a grayish cast. I was weary from the night before, having stayed up till four in the morning, reading through Eliot’s notes, trying to piece it all together and decide what to do about it. With everything that had happened, I’d almost forgotten that today was Election Day. I passed by the flags displayed outside the school where I voted. There were posters in the windows and people already lining up to exercise their rights.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to vote or do anything else until I spoke to Ahern.

  I telephoned his office. It was only a quarter past seven and he wasn’t in yet. I went around the corner and had a cup of coffee. I smoked two cigarettes before I went into the phone booth in back, fished for a nickel from my handbag and dialed Ahern again. When his secretary said he was in a meeting, I hung up the phone and headed for Dearborn and Washington, to the state’s attorney’s office.

  It was a huge building, home to some nine hundred lawyers and investigators. I rode up to the sixth floor, where the Criminal Prosecutions Bureau was located. As soon as I got off the elevator, I could sense the somber mood in the place, and I wasn’t surprised. Adamowski was on the ballot for reelection that day, going up against Daley’s candidate, Daniel P. Ward.

  I saw the big gold letters stenciled over the frosted glass on Ahern’s door and headed toward his office.

  “Excuse me, miss?” his secretary called to me. “Miss, you can’t go in there—”

  But I already had my hand on the door before she could stop me.

  Ahern was reaching for the phone but put down the receiver as soon as he saw me. “Walsh? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the secretary. “I tried to stop her, but she—”

  “It’s okay,” he told her, a hand raised, followed by a gesture motioning her out of his office. “Come on in, Walsh. What’s going on?”

  “You knew my brother?” I rushed over to his desk. “How did you know him?”

  He looked sucker punched. His eyebrows hiked up on his forehead as his mouth dropped open.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”

  “Calm down. Have a seat.”

  “I don’t want to have a seat.”

  “Just give me a minute and I’ll explain it all to you.”

  “How did you know him?” My hands were clenched—my entire body was clenched. “Answer me, dammit.”

  “Okay. All right. Just calm down and I’ll tell you.” He rubbed his forehead and took a deep breath. “It was a long time ago. Eliot saved my career. He saved my life.” He reached for a pack of Kools on the corner of his desk and lit a cigarette. “I was just getting ready to graduate from law school. I had my whole future ahead of me. I’d made it to the last semester of my final year. I was shooting pool one night with some buddies. We’d just come off of studying for the bar. We’d been drinking since noon.” He took a drag from his cigarette, as if to calm himself.

  “Anyway, we started shooting pool, and your brother showed up with another guy. We’d never seen them before. They seemed like good enough fellows, so we started playing a game of eight-ball with them. Then, I don’t know—too many beers, too many shots of whiskey and things got out of hand. Somehow we got into a fight. I was drunk. I started the whole damn thing—it was my fault. The cops were called in. They c
uffed me, threw me in the slammer. I was sure your brother was going to press charges. I know I would have. If he had, I probably wouldn’t have gotten my license, and that would have been the end of my career. But for whatever reason, Eliot took mercy on me. He decided not to press charges. And because he did that, I went on to pass the bar and got my job, and I vowed that I’d do whatever I could to help him in his career.” He got up and started pacing the room.

  “So I landed a job working for Mayor Kennelly and I was privy to certain goings-on. Pretty heady stuff for a kid just out of law school, and so I started giving Eliot tips and leaking things about what was going on inside City Hall. I stuck my neck out to bring him information and he ran with it. He was a good reporter. Discreet. Smart. The way I saw it, we were doing each other a favor.”

  I pulled out the chair across from Ahern and dropped down in it. “You were Eliot’s source? Before you were mine? You were Eliot’s?” I felt kicked in the stomach. “I asked you—how many times did I ask you—why you came to me? Why didn’t you ever tell me it was because of Eliot?”

  He sighed and examined the tip of his cigarette. “Because I didn’t want you to think of my help as a handout. Or charity.”

  “But it was. That’s all it was.” I’d always believed I’d earned Ahern’s respect and trust. Learning now that he’d been my brother’s source first undid all of that. It made me feel like a fraud. Like I hadn’t gotten to where I was on my own. I’d been thrown a bone. “So what—you took pity on me?”

  “No, I did not take pity on you.”

  “Jesus Christ . . .”

  “Look, I knew Eliot had a younger sister. He said you would make a brilliant journalist. Said you were smarter than he was, and I found that hard to believe. Jordan, I may have come to you because of your brother, but you proved yourself. And that is no lie. I remember seeing you at the funeral. You didn’t shed one tear. You just stood between your parents. You were a rock. And I’ll tell you something else—you’re a lot like your brother, you know. He didn’t like me in the beginning either.” Ahern laughed and ground out his cigarette.