Burkhardt smiled weakly. “A vague image at best.”
“Brings in the tourists.”
“So does Disney terrain,” he replied. “And for those who reside here their entire lives, what do their epitaphs say: We lived in nice weather where we could ride floating planks of fiberglass?”
“People have lived for worse,” LaFontaine offered.
Burkhardt crossed his arms. “I’ll allow that for the 1960s, Alta Bay was somewhat visionary. It transformed five hundred acres of marshland into a wonderful urban water park. And I’ll allow it gave what was a town masquerading as a city something to point to, but surely not the definitive backdrop a city so desperately requires.”
News said, “Alta Bay also represented the end of Mayor Jennings.”
“True enough,” Burkhardt replied. “Before your editor there, what’s his name? Lawlor? exposed the corruption, Jennings blocked Alta Bay. And I suppose by finally building it, my father put the nail in the old mayor’s coffin. But that was thirty years ago. The population here has increased tenfold since then and even now there’s nothing that says definitively that this is our city.”
“You think the arts center will do that?”
“As much as the opera house in Sidney, Australia.”
LaFontaine fought the urge to titter. “You actually believe that?”
The developer pursed his lips. “I believe the entire development will become the force that says this community is ready to be a twenty-first century city.”
“Architecture can create civic attitude?”
“Desire is perhaps a better word than attitude,” Burkhardt said. “I’m a student of desire, of dreams, of primal urges. Father said that one must understand what motivates people to influence change.”
The receptionist entered and placed the coffee cups on the table. “Your dinner appointment has arrived, Mr. Burkhardt,” she said.
“Are we almost finished?” the developer asked.
News looked at his list. He was just getting started. Straight to the tough questions. He tapped his pen on the pad. The tip broke, spattering his hand with ink. He rubbed it on the notebook, threw the busted pen in the wastepaper basket, then took another from his pocket. “Sorry. A couple of other areas I’d like to cover.”
“You have five minutes.”
“Several of the other developers who bid on the project think the selection process was unfair.”
Burkhardt shrugged. “Sour grapes. Cote D’Azure was the best project. Period.”
“By most estimates I’ve seen, the shipyard’s land is worth a minimum $14 million. Under the deal the city gave you, you pay $4 million.”
“This project is good for the city,” Burkhardt said firmly. “As such, the city is a partner.”
“What about the financing?”
“What about it?”
“The majority of it came from Bobby Carlton’s bank.”
“True,” he said, shifting in his chair. “So?”
“So how do you swing a huge real estate loan from a bank under federal scrutiny at about the same time the bank’s president dies?”
Burkhardt chuckled. “You’re really perusing the chaff for a kernel, aren’t you? You act as if such deals are consummated in a matter of days. We, and by that I mean myself and my partners, negotiated with Carlton Bank for eighteen months on Cote D’Azure.”
Now Burkhardt turned serious. “Bobby Carlton’s death was a shock for me, for this city. He had a deep understanding of where we were trying to take it with this project.”
News scribbled all that down. “You’ve given a great deal of money to Mayor Portillo and members of the city council.”
Burkhardt hesitated, then said: “I make political contributions to almost every candidate who supports economic development. It gives me access to defend my projects, nothing more. I declare it as the law requires.”
With that the developer stood. “I hope you have a nice day, Mr. LaFountain.”
“That’s LaFontaine, Mr. Burkhardt,” News said. He deliberately offered his ink-stained hand. “I’m sure we will be talking again as the project goes forward.”
Burkhardt glanced at the proffered hand with distaste, then gingerly reached out and shook it. “I’m sure we will, Mr. LaFontaine.”
Fall from Grace …
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT now.
McCarthy had filed his story on the discovery of the body and driven north of the city to his house, dark and quiet now save for the breathing of the children. He stood in the hallway outside their rooms and listened to the little girl, Miriam, and the older boy, Carlos. Ordinarily their gentle night noises would calm him enough to sleep.
Tonight they did not help. He padded across the bare wood floor out into the living room of the single-story hacienda-style home. He got his father’s trumpet from its stand. He went out through sliding glass doors to the deck. He slumped into a white wicker chair, barely aware of the brilliant stars and the rustling of the avocado trees.
He cradled the trumpet in his arms. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts wander back thirty years. McCarthy’s mother cooked dinner while he played with his toys. Outside there was a hundred-acre avocado orchard. And down the hill a shed where his father kept the tractor, the sprayer, the ladders, and the other tools he used to eke out a living. From beyond the shed came the wilting sound of a muted trumpet echoing like a rumor retold.
His father had revered the land but loved the horn. Every evening after the day’s work he would perch on the big rock at the edge of the canyon and play bebop to the sky. After an hour or so, the old man would return to the house, cradling the trumpet as McCarthy did now. He would rub his son’s head, ignore his wife, who chastised him for wasting time, wash up, then polish the instrument before setting it on the stand.
McCarthy opened his eyes. How it had changed. His father died of a heart attack fifteen years ago. His mother sold all but twenty acres and the house to a developer for a minor fortune. Now she lived in Palm Desert, golfed and assured friends her late husband had been an investment banker, not an avocado grower with an affinity for jazz.
The developer had uprooted most of the orchard to build a residential paradise for the newly wealthy he called “The Ranch.” Pink-roofed houses. Swimming pools. Tennis courts. Elaborate gardens.
McCarthy’s remaining property included the old rock on the edge of the canyon where his father used to play. An Oklahoma natural gas millionaire had been after him to sell the acreage surrounding the rock, but McCarthy had steadfastly refused. It was on that rock that he’d asked Tina Rodriguez to marry him and allow him to be father to her two children. It was there she’d said yes.
McCarthy got up from the chair, opened the sliding glass doors, and reached inside for his stereo headphones. He flipped on Dizzy Gillespie and returned to his seat, the extension cord of the earphones playing out behind him. He waited until Gillespie’s horn began, then gingerly pressed his father’s trumpet to his lips. He fingered the valves in time with the music, but did not blow through the tube.
Three selections later McCarthy felt a tap on his shoulder. He started and tugged off the headphones. The woman was older than she looked. Her beautiful silver hair hung about her shoulders. She clutched a quilted black night robe about herself.
“Why you no play la trompeta for real no more?” she asked.
“Don’t want to wake the kids.”
“You no fool me. You no play even when they are up.”
He pointed at the brass mouthpiece. “Since the accident, it hurts my lips to play.”
She shook her head. “You know, I, too, love Tina more than myself. But la vida, she goes on. She has to.”
McCarthy didn’t say anything. Estelle was Tina’s aunt. At times he couldn’t bear to look at this woman. Tina had derived her dark grace from Estelle’s family.
Estelle said, “What you want, to spend all day wearing black like me?”
“You loved Miguel Los Rochas.”
“Like he squeezes my heart even now since forty years. But, you know, this is something okay for a woman of my heritage: to ache my whole life for the boy who dies before he becomes the man. But not for you.”
McCarthy hugged the trumpet to his chest. “I wasn’t thinking about her so much tonight.”
“You worried about Charley?”
“No.” He was surprised to feel his throat tighten. “Yes.”
Charley Owens. The children’s natural father. Nearly five years after his divorce from Tina had been finalized, Charley Owens wanted the kids back. He’d asked to visit them. There was a court appearance the day after tomorrow. Owens was flying in from Santa Fe for the hearing.
“You’re their father, Gideon,” Estelle said.
“Charley has rights under the law that I don’t,” McCarthy said softly.
A small white terrier with a brown head trotted out on the porch and yapped. Estelle smiled. “Malice, he bite that Charley if he comes near Carlos and Miriam.”
McCarthy nodded, rubbed the dog’s head, and looked out toward his father’s rock.
Estelle got up and patted him on the shoulder. “You sleep soon, huh?”
“With luck.”
She rustled off into the house. He wondered if the scenes that raced through his mind every night about this time would ever stop replaying. McCarthy reached to the small blue medallion around his neck. Kokopelli, the Anasazi flute player. Tina had given it to him on his birthday.
The accident occurred two years ago last month, a week after his birthday. The police report said the driver of the car that hit them head-on was two and a half times over the alcohol limit. The impact flung McCarthy onto the dashboard, shattering every tooth in his mouth. It broke his jaw in three places. It snapped his right arm below the elbow. It sheared the steering column, which penetrated Tina’s chest.
Tina knew she was dying. McCarthy held her hand through the shards of the windshield while the firemen tried to free her. She made him swear on Kokopelli, god of her ancestors, that he would be a good father to her children.
The wind shifted, turning out of the desert. A Santa Ana. Tomorrow the land would seethe again. The terrier grimaced at the dust the wind churned.
McCarthy stirred, thinking about his promise. For eighteen months after the crash, he’d drifted through his job at the paper, every story perfunctory, straight, unenlightened. He worked because he had to. For the sake of the children.
Then the circulation war heated up between The Post and The Beacon. By all accounts the city could support only one paper. One would have to die, spilling hundreds of writers and editors into the streets. The competition grew vicious.
McCarthy’s fall from limbo into hell occurred on a Friday, the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. Preceding such weekends there are three simultaneous deadlines on Friday evening: one for the Saturday edition, one for nonbreaking Sunday copy, and a third for holiday assignments.
The week before Memorial Day, McCarthy had covered a prostitute named Carol Alice Gentry. Gentry testified before a grand jury that patrol cops were coercing street hookers for sex in return for protection. Ordinary stuff in Southern California. But in a news war this brutal, ordinary stories were lobbed like mortar shells.
Grand jury proceedings are ordinarily secret. The fact that Gentry was talking got out, however, and a media circus pitched its tent. McCarthy was The Post’s man in the three-ring mob, writing and reporting on Gentry’s allegations, snippets of which she made public after each session. The first day she named two uniformed officers, one a patrolman, one a supervising lieutenant, as having extorted sex from her. The second day she threw a grenade into the trenches, telling reporters that corruption went higher, much higher, than street cops.
The hooker wouldn’t be more specific. She just rolled her eyes at their questions and said, “It will all come out in time.” The Beacon and The Post played it page one. This was war, after all, with only one paper likely to survive, and nothing, absolutely nothing, sells papers like the foul whiff of scandal. Except, perhaps, the horoscopes.
On Thursday night Claudette X asked McCarthy to follow Gentry’s allegations with a reaction piece for Saturday. That was on top of his news analysis assignment, slated for Sunday, which would review the implications of her testimony.
To make matters more complicated, the editor-in-chief himself had asked McCarthy to write a piece to be published on Memorial Day. It concerned the psychological trauma endured by families of soldiers who’d died in Vietnam. All three of McCarthy’s articles were due at 5:00 P.M. Friday evening.
Professor J. D. Clapper, a veterans expert who’d spent five years studying the ancillary effects of combat fatigue, hated reporters. He refused to talk with McCarthy. The only writer he’d ever spoken to about his work toiled for an obscure academic journal called Homecoming. McCarthy read that piece, which quoted Clapper and a professor at the University of Virginia studying some of the same issues.
That Friday morning, as McCarthy attempted to deal with the backbreaking series of assignments, a California state social worker called. She told him that Charley Owens had filed papers to block his application to adopt Carlos and Miriam. He had to meet with her at five-thirty or risk losing the children.
McCarthy tried three times to get out of the Vietnam veterans’ piece, but the editors were adamant. McCarthy went to Professor Clapper’s office and home. Clapper had already left on vacation. University of Virginia Professor Lisa Kraul did not return repeated phone calls.
Dread underpins the worst of dreams. By two o’clock McCarthy knew he was in trouble. Panic set in after he wrote the analysis piece. He framed the Vietnam article from notes taken earlier from interviews with families found through a veterans support group. He left message after message with Professor Kraul’s answering service.
At four-thirty, he thought of Carlos and Miriam. He thought of Charley Owens wanting custody. He thought of his promise to Tina. He thought of the thousands of stories he’d written over the years that had disappeared into the black hole of news with no comment from editors or readers.
He stared at the veterans’ journal. Circulation 350. A pothole on the information highway. He opened his computer. He typed in altered versions of the quotes Professor Kraul had given the editor of Homecoming.
McCarthy opened his eyes. He sighed, remembering how Lawlor had summoned him to his office the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
“Sit down,” the editor-in-chief had ordered. “I’ll be a minute.”
Lawlor’s office occupied the northeasternmost corner of The Post newsroom. The floor was raised six inches above that of the other senior editors, a not-so-subtle reminder of who ran the show. McCarthy took one of the two red leather chairs before the great mahogany desk. He swallowed nervously as the editor tapped away at his keyboard.
As always McCarthy’s attention was drawn to the three framed objects on the wall. A black-and-white newspaper photograph showed police officers leading a much younger, gaunter Lawlor from the county courthouse in handcuffs. Underneath the picture was the headline:
Reporter Jailed For Refusal to Name Sources in Mayoral Scandal
Within a second black frame, this one larger, was a front page from The Post, March 12,1963. The banner headline read:
Mayor Jennings Guilty on Three Counts
The third and smallest frame held a certificate elegantly embossed in black ink and gold leaf. It conferred on Lawlor the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. The greatest honor in journalism. Every other time McCarthy had looked at the award the hair on the back of his neck had prickled erect. Now its presence turned his stomach to vinegar.
He looked away to find Lawlor’s famous blackthorn cane, the finish worn and dull, standing in its familiar position in the corner. During his months in jail inmates had assaulted the editor. The leg never healed correctly.
Lawlor continued to type. Below the rolled-up sleeves, his muscular forearms popped and roll
ed. Even at age fifty-nine, with steel gray hair and a face etched as deeply as a printing plate, the editor exuded power. And why not? He’d won it all, hadn’t he? He had the credentials for power. And on a breaking story or an investigative project he was the best advisor McCarthy had ever had.
A knock came at the door. A short, rotund, florid-faced man in his late fifties sporting a black French beret entered. Ed Tower, the Editor for Newsroom Operations, The Post’s number two man. McCarthy moaned.
Tower said brightly, “Got Winnie Winkle! Stole her right from under their petty noses.”
Lawlor didn’t respond. Tower babbled on, “I say we’ll take three thousand readers from The Beacon on Winnie alone. Not to mention the residual effect of getting Mike Nomad and Steve Roper last month. Market research is clear: Nothing pulls readers like comics.”
Without looking up from his keyboard, Lawlor said, “Good job, Ed, but we’ve got something more pressing to consider.”
It was then McCarthy noticed the manila folder in Tower’s hand. Tower took the other red chair. He crossed his crisply creased white linen pants, adjusted his black polka-dotted bow tie, and flipped open the folder. He cast McCarthy a glance that said he would be cruel and that he would enjoy being cruel.
Tower didn’t like McCarthy. The feeling was mutual. McCarthy didn’t know if Lawlor actually liked Tower. But Lawlor valued loyalty and Tower had been more loyal than a Saint Bernard. As Lawlor had climbed his way to editor and then owner/publisher of The Post, he’d pulled Tower up behind him. The office scuttlebutt held that Lawlor probably needed Tower’s social connections because, like most independent publishers, he was always looking for new infusions of cash to keep his newspaper alive.
Two years ago the paper had been in very big financial trouble and appeared on the verge of closing. Money from a silent backer had suddenly appeared. Everyone assumed Tower and his connections had been behind the investment. Beyond all that, Tower ably performed the newsroom function that Lawlor loathed. The Editor for Newsroom Operations loved to swing the hatchet.
Lawlor stopped typing. He swiveled his chair to face the window. He pointed across Broadway to the Palmer skyscraper. Editors and reporters scurried over there in The Beacon’s newsroom.
Hard News Page 3