Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  Rivers shouted, “Excuse me, Mayor, but it was well-known that Patrick and Blanca were under investigation for extorting sex in return for protection on the Boulevard. Why weren’t they placed on leave? Why were they allowed to continue to work, and, if the allegations are true, get rid of the woman who fingered them?”

  Good question, McCarthy thought. She’s not cowering like a whipped dog.

  Chief Leslie held up his hand. “I’ll answer that, Mayor. That was my decision based on an investigation carried out by Internal Affairs. The fact is that the grand jury decided not to indict Blanca or Patrick or any other member of the Boulevard precinct because of a lack of substantiation to Gentry’s claims.”

  McCarthy snorted and whispered to Perez. “That’s bullshit. I’ve heard at least three other hookers tell me the same stuff.”

  “However,” Leslie went on, “our internal investigation showed otherwise. We believed that the two officers in question were involved in questionable activity, but we did not have enough concrete evidence to suspend or fire them. The removal of civil servants is covered by a stringent set of union rules. But we were actively moving toward relieving both officers when the information about the contract came to light.”

  Perez said, “Do you regret not suspending them now?”

  Leslie scratched at his cheek. “I guess what you’re asking is do I believe that by suspending them I could have saved Carol Gentry’s life? I suppose I’ll be asking myself that question for many years to come.”

  “What’s your answer today?” she pressed.

  “I should have suspended them,” Leslie grimaced. “I’ll have to live with that.”

  Fairbanks shouted, “Any ideas of who carried out the hit? Another police officer?”

  Fisk winced. Cohen, a bearded fellow in his early forties, said, “There’s nothing to indicate other police officers are involved at this time. But as the mayor said, we are continuing the investigation and will prosecute without fear or favor.”

  McCarthy finally spoke. “Do you believe Gentry was blackmailing these officers?”

  Leslie looked at Fisk and Cohen, then down at the reporter. “We are looking into that angle.”

  “What was she blackmailing them about?” Rivers cried.

  Arlene Troy moved in front of the dais. “I believe that’s all the questions we’ll take now.”

  The reporters groaned. Portillo and Leslie moved quickly toward the door. Jackson, Perez, Fairbanks, and Rivers raced after them. McCarthy ignored the obvious and cornered Fisk.

  “You looked pained when Fairbanks asked about who carried out the contract,” McCarthy said.

  “Guys with abnormal hairdos and chains around their ankles bug me.”

  “C’mon, Fisk. You know something.”

  “I know you’re sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong, as usual.”

  McCarthy waved his notebook in front of the little detective’s nose. “I made you look pretty good in my piece this morning. I could have rubbed it in that The Post got to Dusk first, but I didn’t. You owe me.”

  Fisk’s expression didn’t change. Finally he said, “We’ve got some leads, but nothing’s panned out yet. Talk to me in a couple of days. Fair?”

  “Fair.”

  McCarthy walked away. He waited until Jackson and Perez had finished. He said, “I’ve got the arraignment in half an hour.”

  “We’ve got the rest,” Jackson said. “Isabel will write the lead analysis piece and the news angle that Leslie offered to resign.”

  Perez seemed shocked. “You’re giving me the reaction story?”

  Jackson nodded. “I want the insider’s view on this, how the campaign attempts to recover from the blow. Teddy White stuff. Besides, you deserve it.”

  Perez and McCarthy looked at him suspiciously. “What are you up to?” Perez asked. “Magnanimity has never been your strongest suit.”

  Jackson pressed his palm to his chest. “I’ve undergone a difficult time of late,” he said. “I’m trying to change.”

  “Don’t argue,” McCarthy said as Jackson hurried away.

  “I won’t,” Perez said. “But Kent’s wily. I’ll have to cover my back.”

  Now McCarthy saw Perez sitting in the corner of the Slotman’s with Arlene Troy, having a drink. She looked pretty damn uncomfortable about something. He swiveled on his stool, stirred his drink, and mulled over a couple of facts that bothered him.

  Cops, probably Blanca and Patrick, had broken into Gentry’s place looking for a tape. What tape and what was on it? It was one thing to talk generically about blackmail. But it was the details that made motive clear. McCarthy liked things to be clear.

  Then there was the way Patrick and Blanca had appeared at their arraignment. Patrick, a rotund balding man with an unkempt, walrus mustache, had come into the courtroom as if he didn’t understand where he was. He stumbled twice. The bailiff helped him to his chair, where he stared blankly at the floor. Blanca, a muscular guy with raven black hair and a square jaw, acted defiant. After taking his seat, he turned to Sue Tripp, a public defender McCarthy knew, and said something. Tripp pointed at McCarthy.

  Blanca looked at him carefully, then mouthed: “This is bullshit. We never killed anyone!”

  When it happened, McCarthy tossed it off as the usual protests of innocence. Sitting in the Slotman’s six hours later there was something in his memory of Blanca’s face that unnerved him. He thought about it a moment. Blanca wasn’t angry. He was confident.

  Playing against the back wall of it all was the fact that Gentry wasn’t a regular on the Boulevard. It bugged him, but he couldn’t figure out why. He reached in his wallet and drew out the outcall phone number Dusk had given him.

  “Drink on the house for the conquering hero?” the Slotman asked cheerfully.

  McCarthy refolded the slip of paper and returned it to his wallet. “Why are you so happy?”

  “Call me a marketing genius,” the barkeep grinned. “A freaking marketing genius!”

  The Slotman tossed his head in the direction of the kitchen door through which Ralph Baker came in a full-length black leather apron emblazoned with the words “The Slotman’s Bluesman.” McCarthy put his head on the bar and moaned. He saw immediately what the Slotman was up to: having one of the city’s journalistic burnouts—even one who’d pulled a Lazarus on his final day of work—pouring cheap booze for reporters and editors would heighten anxiety, which in return would create a mad lust for liquor and continue the steady rise in the value of his retirement portfolio.

  “You’re evil, Slotman,” McCarthy said.

  The Slotman cried, “I’m telling you Madison Avenue lost a great one not recruiting me! Ralphie, a beer on the house for McCarthy!”

  Baker picked up a beer glass with trembling hands, then pulled the tap. He almost got it filled before it slipped and shattered. The half dozen patrons seated at the bar stared in horror. All of them ordered another round. The Slotman served them himself.

  “Here’s your beer, Gideon,” Baker said after he’d cleaned up the mess. “Great story yesterday.”

  “I appreciate it, Ralph,” McCarthy said. “Your piece on Hale was dynamite.”

  The Roy Orbison look-alike nodded appreciatively, but didn’t say anything.

  McCarthy said, “Never figured you to work for the Slotman.”

  Baker leaned toward McCarthy as if he were a first-time singer approaching the mike on amateur night. “Didn’t see much else I could do. Tried to call up a couple of P.R. firms in town yesterday. But every time I heard them pick up the line, I’d get sick and hang up. Slotman offered me the job last night, said everyone I know comes in. Kind of like home. And I can work the evening shift. Gives me my days to walk and think.”

  “What do you think about, Ralph?” McCarthy asked, trying to get his mind off the Gentry case.

  “How it all goes. How it’s tough to keep up. I don’t know why it should surprise me. Lester said it was the same down at the post offic
e, just kept piling up on you.”

  “Lester? As in Hale?”

  Behind his thick black polymer glasses, Baker’s eyes grew watery. “Couldn’t get him out of my mind, Gid, the image of him lying on top of that pony at the end. Went down to see him at the hospital this morning. Figured he might be lonely, you know?”

  At that revelation, McCarthy needed another drink. Something stronger this time. Maybe Slotman was a marketing genius. “I need a bourbon, Ralph. Straight up.”

  “You got it,” Baker said.

  “Ralph?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you don’t mind me asking: why did you start dressing up like … well, like that?”

  Baker adjusted his glasses and flicked a piece of popcorn off his black silk shirt. He hesitated, then said, “Used to be all a reporter had to do to succeed was get down, get dirty, and break stories. It made sense: work and payoffs. Then something happened after I’d been in it a while that made me change my mind. Since then I’ve seen it all get screwed up with quotas, and politically correct stories, and all the power plays of the newsroom. Hell, you can get to the top just on image now.”

  “What happened?”

  Baker shrugged. “I figured out that news is a commodity now, like corn or sowbellies.”

  “You saying the black leather was all a form of protest?”

  Baker shrugged again. “I was sending a message.”

  That was a funny thing to say. “To whom?”

  Baker twisted his apron and didn’t respond.

  “Ralph, you’re not in the business anymore. You can’t get hurt.”

  Baker thought about that, then said simply, “Ed Tower.”

  McCarthy hunched over the bar. “What about him?”

  Baker described how in the early seventies he’d worked on a story involving an investment guru who was really running a Ponzi scheme. He’d written the story, but Tower sat on it for months before allowing a watered-down version to run. A couple of years later, after the guru had gone to jail, Baker figured out that Tower had been invested. He’d used the story to force the guru to pay him back before the pyramid collapsed.

  McCarthy shook his head. “I knew he had marginal ethics, but I never would have figured him for this kind of thing. But who am I to talk?”

  “At least your dirty secrets are out in the open,” Baker said. “There are a lot more buried inside The Post, believe me.”

  “Like what?” McCarthy asked.

  But before he could answer, the Slotman bellowed: “Ralphie. We got wet whistles down here. C’mon. C’mon. This isn’t newspapers anymore. We’re in business here.”

  Prentice LaFontaine yelled, “Wet whistles here, too, my good Mr. Orbison. A daiquiri and a tequila neat, if you please!”

  McCarthy swiveled in his chair to find News standing behind him with arms held open wide. He wore a pair of sunglasses.

  “Sporting the celebrity look now?”

  LaFontaine’s raffish grin fell. He took the glasses off to reveal a black eye. “Took a terrible fall down the stairs last night. Part of the reason I took the day off.”

  A ball formed in McCarthy’s stomach. He felt very small. “Prentice, you don’t have a very good record with this sort of thing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” News sniffed.

  “I’ve sat next to you for the better part of thirteen years. History repeats itself.”

  “Brad’s not like that, you’ll see,” LaFontaine said.

  “Just tell me he hasn’t moved in.”

  News ignored him, turning to greet a fashionable man in his early thirties. McCarthy could have picked out LaFontaine’s new beau anywhere. News loved faddish guys.

  “Gid, Brad,” LaFontaine said. “And the vice versa.”

  “Charmed,” Perkins said dully.

  “Yeah, pleasure’s all mine,” McCarthy said.

  “Gid broke the story of the prostitute being murdered by cops,” LaFontaine said.

  Perkins examined his fingernails. “Isn’t there a boite with more class than this we can frequent tonight, Prentice?”

  LaFontaine gritted his teeth. “I told Gideon I’d buy him a victory drink.”

  “Suit yourself,” Perkins said. “Maybe you can catch up to me at Pony’s or the Bull Ring.”

  “Don’t be like that, Brad,” LaFontaine complained.

  This was the last scene McCarthy needed to be involved in tonight. He downed the shot of bourbon. “Actually, News, I’ve had my fill. I’ll head home to see the kids.”

  “Too bad you had to leave so soon,” Perkins said brightly. He reached past McCarthy to retrieve the shot of tequila and drank it.

  LaFontaine hurried after McCarthy. “Sorry I was so late, Gid. Brad can be …”

  “Difficult?”

  For an instant News’s shoulders sagged. Then he tossed his head back, his normal bravado intact. “Challenging is how I prefer to see it.”

  McCarthy smiled sadly. “You take care of yourself.”

  “Always,” LaFontaine said. “I may be a hard news reporter, but I’m no victim!”

  McCarthy patted him on the shoulder and exited through the door of the Slotman’s into the night air. He almost knocked Karen Rivers over. She jumped back in embarrassment. She looked at the pavement, then adjusted the strap of her pocketbook over the shoulder of her blue denim dress.

  Rivers said, “I, I guess I owe you an apology.”

  “Yeah, for what?” She looked better than she had this morning. He liked the way she’d braided her hair and flung it over one shoulder.

  “I called you a has-been,” she said, still studying the pavement. “You may be many things, but that isn’t one of them. That was a great story today. I almost threw up.”

  “I was kind of hoping that would happen.”

  “I said almost.” Her jaw was set when she finally looked up at him.

  “You did at that. An admirable opponent.”

  Now she smiled. “Can the admirable opponent buy the cagey veteran a beer?”

  “The cagey veteran has to go home to see his children.”

  She seemed surprised. “I … I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I’m not,” McCarthy said. “A rain check on the beer?”

  “Sure,” she said. She adjusted the pocketbook again, hesitated, then yanked open the door to the Slotman’s.

  The blare of the bar faded behind McCarthy as he walked north on Broadway. Rivers had a quality about her that annoyed him and intrigued him. She could play the charming naive one moment and the hardened reporter the next. She’d make a very good journalist someday.

  The ocean breeze made the night air cool. He drew his jacket in and buttoned it. He walked quicker now, thinking how good it would be to sit with the kids, maybe read them a book or two before bed, talk about their lives, smell their hair after their evening baths, hug them before they slept. He hated not being there every night, especially with the visit from Charley Owens looming.

  McCarthy turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue. There were fewer streetlights here than out on Broadway. He always kept his battered Toyota at a lot on Ninth between L and M Streets. It was the only spot in town that charged less than ten dollars a day to park. He was entering the nearly empty lot from the far side when he saw a shadow move inside his car.

  He shouted, “Can’t you read, asshole?! There’s no radio inside!” Then the whine of the old starter motor echoed and died. “Oh, shit, he’s going for the whole thing!” He didn’t have money for another car. He began to run.

  McCarthy was fifty feet away when the whine came again and then the ball of fire ballooned out orange and blue. The roar smothered him like a blanket and twenty horses kicked him in the chest all at once and then there was darkness.

  A Deft Double Backstab …

  FIFTEEN DAYS AFTER THE explosion, Claudette X glowered P into the reflective glare of her computer screen and begged the powers that be for sleep without nightmares.
Make that anytime, day or night, without nightmares.

  Gideon McCarthy had been home more than a week. He’d spent seven days before that in the hospital with a concussion, four broken ribs, and a hairline fracture of the jaw.

  That was bad enough, but the bombing had been a herald of dark events, the coming of a shitstorm the likes of which The Post had never seen.

  Day in and day out, the police scanner had squawked with word of tragedy after tragedy upon tragedy. Just this morning, Augustus Croon and Abby Blitzer had squealed tires from a helicopter crash in the foothills to a canyon fire that engulfed the homes of two quadriplegics and an abortion-rights activist to the drowning of three divers entangled in the kelp beds offshore. A report of a copycat weirdo threatening to blow up a pony stable unless immigration laws were changed had just come in. Blitzer had radioed to the newsroom that she couldn’t keep up.

  There had been a series of preliminary hearings on the Gentry murder trial. Requests for bond by both Patrick and Blanca had been denied. The prosecutor had persuaded the judge that the police officers were a flight risk.

  Lawlor was still on a rampage over the bombing. He had Kent Jackson hounding the offices of the mayor and Chief Lawrence every day, demanding answers on why a reporter from his paper could almost be killed by a car bomb after identifying two cops as murder suspects. Prentice LaFontaine had been drafted to write a “police force out of control” story, which was published yesterday.

  All this despite protests from Lieutenant Fisk that the attempt on McCarthy’s life was likely a case of mistaken identity. Lao Pot, the seventeen-year-old killed in the blast, was a fringe member of a violent Asian street gang known for drive-by shootings and pipe bombings.

  “Our intelligence indicates Pot was being initiated into full membership,” Fisk was quoted as saying in this morning’s edition. “We believe he was carrying the bomb and trying to steal McCarthy’s car when it accidentally detonated.”

  Claudette X didn’t know what to think. The explosion had come so quick on the heels of the Gentry hit story that it reeked of retaliation.