“I’d hardly call it destructive,” Mills said. “It’s fun. Don’t you and Margaret ever have any fun?”
Pace ignored the question. She had rehearsed the scenario from every angle she could think of this afternoon. But she hadn’t considered the remote possibility that Mills might be going to the motel on State Street because she wanted to. What was wrong with this woman? If Mills read the papers these days, she’d see that no woman really wants to have sex with her boss, with her husband, with anyone. Except, of course, young, confused artistic guys. Other than that, it’s all rape and domination and harassment. Or at least unfulfilled desire. Didn’t Mills keep up with the times? Better take another tack, Pace thought.
“So you and Neil have a fulfilling relationship outside Room 11 B?” she asked. “Go to movies, art galleries, candlelit dinners on the harborfront?”
“It’s not like that.”
“No, it isn’t, is it?”
“What’s your point?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You think you’ll still be his research assistant at thirty?”
“If I want to be. I may have a knockout body, but I got the job because the brain is Stanford trained. B.A. in economics with a minor in applied statistics.”
Pace’s laugh rattled. “So smart and yet so naive. Take it from a gal who’s been there. You don’t have a chance.”
“I think I do. Remember, I’ve seen what he’s like in Room 11 B.”
“Right. He’ll leave his rich wife for lust.”
“Everyone shows love in different ways. Anyway, Lydia’s hardly what you’d call a real wife. Her idea of a hot time is composting.”
“Money, dear, is a strange lens. It makes people see the world differently. When that taut body of yours begins to sag, and it will, Neil will shift his gaze. Because whatever you give Neil is over when he puts his pants back on. Lydia gives him much, much more.”
“Lydia will be history when Ed Tower finally leaves,” Mills insisted. “He’s promised me.”
“So he does know about Tower,” Pace said. She bit at the quick of her fingernail. “I’d suspected, but wasn’t sure.”
“Know what about Tower?” Mills asked.
For a brief instant, Pace took on the insightfulness of Margaret Savage. Even if Harpster didn’t know for sure, this was an angle she could exploit. “Then he hasn’t told you that Ed is about to retire?”
Mills didn’t want to hear that. The bombshell research assistant jumped up and made her way to the refrigerator, where she fished for a jug of distilled water and a banana.
Pace followed her. “He hasn’t, has he?”
Mills would not look at her. She drank the water. She wanted to throw the glass against the wall just to hear it shatter.
“Has he?”
“No,” Mills said finally. “How long has he known?”
Pace saw the lines in the young woman’s face, lines that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago, lines that made her seem suddenly older. “I’ve known for almost three weeks,” Pace said. “I’d assume he found out about the same time.”
Three weeks, Mills thought. Fur leggings and a pan flute. Romance novels and torn bodices. Not a word about the promise he made her. She looked out into the condo at the bare walls. She thought about the two years she’d lost in the motel on State Street. Time to look out for herself.
Mills put her water glass down and said, “He put me in a situation where I found it difficult—no, downright impossible, to deny him sex. I was forced into it.”
Pace was overcome with a vision of herself with her feet up on Ed Tower’s desk. A scribe from the Columbia Journalism Review took notes on her every word about changes at The Post under her watch. She took a deep breath to clear the vision, then said, “Admitting you have no control is the hardest part and the first step in recovery.”
Mills went on as if she were rehearsing it all for her day in court, “He made it clear that I’d lose my job if I didn’t submit to his every sick whim.”
Pace played Greek chorus. “You’re going to be a survivor, Connie.”
“He robbed me of two years of my life, of my dignity, of my self-respect.”
“You’ve got to fight to get your self-esteem back!”
“He degraded me.”
“And made you wear strange costumes.”
“I want $1.5 million for my suffering.”
Pace thought of the wonderful American legal system and how it granted reporters the right to quote freely from the stipulation of facts in law suits. No matter how slanderous. No matter how trumped-up. Harpster was finished!
“My dear, I think the slavery you’ve endured is worth at least $3 million.”
Mills leaned on the countertop, already preparing herself for a life without Room 11 B. Too bad. Neil could be so imaginative. But she knew she could be just as creative. She thought of life with a muscular male research assistant/secretary of her very own.
“After Neil resigns in disgrace, The Post will require a new director of market research,” Mills said.
“I know the perfect candidate.”
Kent Jackson couldn’t believe his good fortune. He’d just had a remarkable dinner with the most beautiful women he’d ever met. Now she was back at his apartment for an after-dinner drink! He poured from a bottle of Amaretto that had been gathering dust in one of the cabinets. Caitlin Donnelley was in his office making a phone call to her agent about a photo shoot scheduled for the next day. If he’d put a thousand on the odds any right-minded bookie would have laid on this happening to a political hack like himself, he’d be free and clear of debt right now.
He shrugged off a moment of concern over the interest mounting daily with his loan shark to listen to Caitlin’s sweet murmur from beyond the closed door to his office.
Jackson beamed, thinking how well dinner had gone. They’d chatted of current events over spicy Thai pork and shrimp dishes. He’d sprung for a bottle of expensive wine and had drunk much of it at her insistence.
He made it a rule not to talk of himself or his work with acquaintances. But Caitlin had a way of making him seem like the most savvy guy around. She laughed at his comments on the local political scene. She clucked sympathetically at his explanation of Patti and the minister. (He left out that nasty detail about his virility.) She put her lovely hand on his and asked him what he was working on now.
“I’m really not supposed to talk about it,” he’d said.
“Oh, c’mon. It’s not like I’m going to spill it to the photographers or hairdressers,” Caitlin pouted. “I just think your job’s so fascinating.”
He’d looked into those perfect emerald eyes above that boudoir body. A safe bet. Roll the dice. He told her he thought there was a scandal brewing inside the campaign of Mayor Ricardo Portillo for governor.
She leaned on her elbows, her eyes wide. “What sort of scandal?”
“I’m sure the mayor and the chief are involved in some kind of shady land deal. Most likely in Nevada. Historically, real estate scams are the most likely ways a politician will meet his Waterloo. I’m just waiting for some documents to be freed up that describe the deal. I should have them in a couple of days.”
Caitlin cocked her head to one side. The reporter couldn’t help but admire the planes in her face. “But all politicians have skeletons in their closets, it’s part of the game, isn’t it?”
“Only if you let it be part of the game,” Jackson insisted. “I won’t let it be part of the game.”
“You’re an idealist,” she said, smiling.
He smiled back. She seemed to like the idea he was after the story for noble purposes. Better than admitting the truth: that he needed the scandal to help him get money to pay off his enormous gambling debt.
Caitlin asked, “So what do your editors say about all this? I mean, I saw in that movie All the President’s Men that you guys always talk with them.”
Jackson squeezed Cai
tlin’s hand and was thrilled when she squeezed back. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said. “The key to getting a big story into a newspaper is not to get the editors involved too early. Most of them have been away from the action for so long that they have a skewed view of the world. They’ll try to impose their slant on your facts. Nothing wrong with slants; they’re in every story. But their slants are uninformed, manufactured at cocktail parties with their cronies.
“The best thing for a reporter to do is get enough of the story nailed down so you can present it to them your way. Then that becomes the conventional wisdom editors can deliver at cocktail parties and is the one most likely to make it into print.”
“So you haven’t told them, yet?”
“And probably won’t until I nail down the exact nature of the land deal.”
Caitlin took a sip of wine. “I never knew so many secrets were kept inside a newspaper.”
“A newspaper is as much about rumor and secret as it is about fact,” he said, shamelessly borrowing a line from Prentice LaFontaine, that vulture.
“I’ll remember that,” she’d said.
Jackson put the brandy snifters on a tray and brought them into the living room. He daydreamed about what her body would look like nude. The door to the office opened behind him. He turned around with a big grin only to find the lingerie model frowning.
“Bad news?” he asked. “The shoot’s off for tomorrow?”
“Sit down, Kent,” Caitlin said.
Jackson did as he was told, moving over to make room for her on the couch. She took the studio chair across the glass coffee table. The muscles in her face tightened.
“What’s the matter?” Jackson asked. This wasn’t going the way he’d hoped.
She held up her hand to stop him. “Let me say for the record that this is just business. I kind of like you.”
Jackson put his brandy snifter down. “What are you talking about, just business?”
Caitlin fished in her pocketbook, came up with a piece of paper and slid it across the table at the political reporter. He picked it up and felt immediately ill. It was a copy of the loan shark’s note on his gambling debt.
“How did you? Who are you?” Jackson stammered.
“A friend who has friends,” she said icily. “And friend, you owe these friends a great deal. They know you can’t afford to pay this off, that the revelation of a gambling problem and indebtedness to a loan shark would mean the end of a promising career. So they propose a win-win situation for everyone involved.”
Jackson’s tongue had dried. “Who’s they?”
The model shook her head. “Irrelevant.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Laziness and ineptitude.”
“What?”
“Be a lazy reporter. Be an inept reporter. Don’t follow through on your instincts. Don’t go fishing for big stories that might cause certain people trouble.”
Jackson sank back into the couch. “This is bigger than I ever thought. Oh, my God.”
“There is no God, Kent. Haven’t you figured that out by now?” Caitlin said impassively. “People and institutions have power in other people’s lives, not some being up there in the sky.”
Jackson shrank from those words. “And what if I just decide to go on and dig this story out anyway, the repercussions be damned?”
“I don’t think you’re big enough to handle the repercussions. You make one more inquiry and a copy of this loan note will find its way to your editors. Story or no story, you’d be finished, disgraced, ruined.”
Jackson was quiet for several moments. “And if I choose to be a lazy reporter, just writing up press releases, no more questions?”
She smiled. “A thousand dollars a week comes off the note. I meet you, you sign at the bottom.”
“Nice touch,” Jackson said. “So if at the end of fifty-six weeks I should get the idea to start digging again …”
“Evidence suddenly appears that you had a hand in a cover-up.”
“You’ve got me.”
“We do.”
The Cinema LaFontaine …
THE STRANGE BLARE OF tabloid television was missing at the Milkman’s mother’s house. McCarthy knocked on the back door, telling himself that motion was good, go forward on the story, it was the only way he had to keep his mind off the children.
On his fourth rap, Larry Milk opened the door. He was shirtless. His belly hung like dead fish skin over his jeans. He held a broom and dustpan.
“Great, our savior,” Milk said, disgusted. “Thanks for nothing, pal. Couple days after homicide came to talk to us, county mental health stopped by. Took my mom away. Declared her incompetent. We have to be out in two days.”
“I didn’t know,” McCarthy said.
“Yeah, right,” Milk said. He turned and walked off.
McCarthy stepped inside. Dusk was packing. Her hair was drawn and tied at the back. She wore a drab tan dress. She turned away when she saw McCarthy.
“I’m not talking to you,” she said. “Fisk says you don’t believe me no more.”
“That’s not true,” McCarthy protested. “I think you heard exactly what you said you heard. But maybe there’s more to Tiger’s Escort than meets the eye.”
Dusk chucked off her shoes and plopped down on the corner of the bare mattress. She was quiet for a few moments, then, “Shirl’s sister said the same thing.”
“Who’s Shirl?”
“I told you ’bout Shirley Barfield,” Dusk said. “Gentry gave her the number to Tiger’s, too. Only her sister, Lorraine, says Shirley called it and went to one of them parties with Carol. She’s scared.”
“Hold up a second. How do you know that?”
“I ran into Lorraine downtown yesterday. She said Shirley ’bout freaked when she read that story you wrote ’cause it was wrong.”
“Where do I find Shirley?”
Dusk said nothing.
“Did Fisk tell you not to tell me where to find her?”
She said, “Didn’t tell him about it. He’d probably get mad at me. As it is, he keeps acting as if I must have heard more than I did through the window of the van. I’ve told them what I know. I’m not going to make nothing up.”
“C’mon, Dusk,” McCarthy pleaded. “Give me Shirley, or at least, Lorraine.”
Dusk stubbed the cigarette out and lit another, then looked at Milk, who now leaned against the wall nursing a beer. He said, “Ahh, go ahead. We’re out of here anyway.”
“You don’t think I was lying ’bout what I heard?” she asked McCarthy again.
“I told you I believed you,” McCarthy said. “Still do.”
That seemed to satisfy her. “Lorraine said Shirley got the willies after Carol turned up dead. Split for L.A. She got popped up there for carrying with intent to sell. She’s in the L.A. County Jail under another name: ‘Annie Carris.’ She don’t want to make bail. She’s hiding out until this blows over.”
A half hour later, McCarthy hung up the phone in a booth off the Boulevard. Visiting hours at the L.A. County Jail were over. He slammed his open palm on the side of the booth. “Damn it!”
If what Dusk said was true and Shirley Barfield had gone to a Tiger’s Escort party with Carol Gentry, she might be able to link Diane Tressor to this whole mess. He phoned LaFontaine’s house to tell him what he’d found. No answer. He tried News’s pager and waited ten minutes for a callback. Nothing.
He was at a standstill. Without motion to quell them, the memories of last night came back. Of how the children went limp when he told them that they might have to go live with their father. Miriam crying, “I want to stay here and no one can tell me I can’t.”
And McCarthy saying, “Honey, a lady at the courthouse probably believes it’s better for you not to be here.”
Carlos, quiet, so very quiet up to that point. “What’d we do wrong?”
And McCarthy, going to him, holding his chin up with his hand, “Nothing, son. If anybod
y’s done anything wrong, it’s me.”
He’d woken up this morning to find them both in bed with him.
He checked his watch. Half past noon. He had a 1:30 P.M. appointment with the doctor to remove the wires from his jaw. Nothing more he could do on the story today. He’d take the kids up to the reservoir, rent a boat, and go fishing this evening. Try to give them good memories to take away.
Four hours later, Prentice LaFontaine did a jig in The Post elevator. He raised his hands high over his head, gave the Richard Nixon victory sign, and bellowed “I am King Snoop! Gossip personified!”
The elevator slowed, dinged. News composed himself. The door opened. He lifted his briefcase, heavy with documents and an interview that broke it all wide open.
He took ten steps into The Post newsroom and froze within the fury of a paper approaching deadline, seeing it all as if for the first time.
Kent Jackson, stoop-shouldered, trudged to the fax machine for a press release. Isabel Perez pranced about with a copy of her latest front-page story on the Jim Barnes toxic dumping scandal. Augustus Croon mooned over an empty chair, his ear glued to the police scanner. Margaret Savage whispered furtively into a phone. The Zombie flipped through an old copy of House & Garden. The Stepford Editors slapped mindlessly at their keyboards. Claudette X held her forehead as if someone was drilling there. Stanley Geld bobbed to some unseen dance music before his computer terminal. Over there on Lobotomy Lane: Neil Harpster listened intently to the phone, face flushed, eyes closed. Connie Mills perused a law book. Bobbie Anne Pace read this morning’s Beacon with her feet up on her desk. Ed Tower gestured wildly to Connor Lawlor. The editor-in-chief stared unbelieving at the newest circulation report that showed that Swingo had them up three thousand.
News paused for a moment, fighting off the urge to climb on top of his desk and spread his arms like Moses, the original reporter just down from the mountaintop, to tell them he believed he understood it now, the code that solved the mystery, the words that had opened his eyes to dirt he could not have imagined in the weirdest of closets.
Hard News Page 30