Drawing on an inner peace he hadn’t possessed earlier in the day, News restrained himself. The pieces of the big picture were definitely in place. And he thought he knew how it would appear when finished: one of those odd drawings that seems to be one thing looked at from one perspective, then from a slight shift in angle reveals itself to be something very different. A beautiful woman and then a hag.
Being this close to the exclusive of his life he was determined not to blow it. He had to work now. He had a ton of checking and reporting to do before the picture could be unveiled.
LaFontaine slipped quickly to his desk. He hunkered down behind his terminal so he wouldn’t be drafted into action should travesty break out on deadline.
A quick chore first. LaFontaine got a white notebook from his briefcase. He paged through it until he found the details of a rumor having to do with Judge Evelyn Crawford and its proof discovered this morning in the courthouse. This he outlined in a memo to McCarthy. He filed and printed it, put it in an envelope, and stuffed it in the top drawer of McCarthy’s desk.
He returned to his own terminal. The phone rang.
“Prentice?” It was Brad Perkins.
“Hello, lover,” LaFontaine cooed. “We have reason to celebrate tonight.”
“Yeah, got your message earlier. Can’t make it. Got a meeting with someone about the personal training service.”
“This is important,” News bristled. “More important than any job.”
“Potential business,” Perkins said, equally tart. “I don’t think sharing drinks while you crow about some stupid story is worth screwing up my future.”
The reporter put his forehead in his hand. McCarthy was right; he was too old for these kind of relationships. End it now.
“Listen, you brainless hunk of muscle …”
“Watch it, Prenty,” Brad cut in.
“No, you watch it. I’m onto the scandal to end all scandals here and you’re being more than indifferent. You’re a tiresome 1960s movie, Brad. I want you out of my house by the time I get home. Maybe your business date will … put you up.”
Brad’s voice turned menacing. “If I leave, who’ll be around to slap the little puffball around? Or should I tell our friends along the bar scene exactly what the hardnose Post reporter loves to do behind closed doors? There are lots of people dying to get the low-down dirt on you, you know.”
LaFontaine went ballistic. “Get out of my house! I want you and your weights and your foolish Lycra outfits out in an hour. Or I’m calling the cops!”
News slammed the phone down and looked up to see half the newsroom—city desk, Stepford Editors, a few reporters, the Lobotomites on the Lane—watching him. He wiggled his fingers at them all, then shrank down behind his terminal. Claudette X lumbered over. “Thought I told you to get lost for a couple of days.”
“I’m just getting a few things in order,” LaFontaine said, doing his best to control his quavering voice.
“Love problems?”
“Nothing I can’t handle with an eviction notice.”
“Sorry to hear that, but I’d rather the rest of the newsroom not listen to the gory details. Know what I mean?”
“Heard and understood, Ms. Muslim. Now if you please, I’m officially not here and I’d like to conclude my unofficial business and go home to make sure my personal affairs are in order.”
Claudette X made a clucking sound, then said. “By the way, unofficially, you make any headway on our little … um … project?”
“I’m in no mood to talk, right now. Can this please wait until tomorrow?”
The executive assistant city editor noted the slight tremble of LaFontaine’s lower lip. “Sure, News. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
When the fire left his skin and the first hint of the loneliness to come reached him, News opened a new file in his computer, dated it, and began typing in his notes. Brad had spoiled his relishing of the delicious scuttlebutt before him. He looked at the quotes and their implications objectively. He typed them as fast as he could, putting in brackets his suppositions, the links he needed to flesh the story out.
The picture of the pretty woman, he thought, before closing the file and printing it. He brought the seventeen-page document back to his desk, then drew out the manila file folder marked “Burkhardt” and added these pages to the notes he’d taken over the last several months. Next he reached into his briefcase and brought out a thick bound report. It was yellowed with age.
On the back of the Burkhardt file News scribbled the phrase “Other Documents:”, and under it “U.S. Justice Department Report 1963.” He opened the bottom drawer he used for material too large to keep in his active file drawer and dropped the report inside.
Last, he opened GOSDI, his computer gossip file, and typed up a description of what he believed was the deeper, scarier implications of the Burkhardt story. It was almost entirely conjecture. But that was the thing about an altering of perspective; the two stories could be based on the same facts and yet be entirely different by a change in interpretation.
The writing took half an hour. The entry contained a basic narrative of what he knew had occurred as well as several possible explanations for certain events and motivations he had not yet fact-checked. Time would winnow out the details. Such is the lot of a newsman, he thought, we put down the first flawed draft of history. The passing of years allows the historian to cull the lies from the truth.
He closed the file and hit “P.” He raced to the printer and grabbed the document before any other reporter or editor could see it. He put it into his hard copy gossip file folder. He put both the Burkhardt file and the gossip file into a drawer. He shoved a key in the desk lock, turned it, and heard it click.
With the cool demeanor of a card shark who has drawn a straight flush queen high, he snapped his briefcase shut, stood, gave brief appraisal to the battlefield on which tomorrow, the day after at most, he would launch the equivalent of thermonuclear device, then headed for the door and the elevator and home.
LaFontaine never noticed that from the moment he raised his voice to Brad, the Zombie had put aside House & Garden to study and listen to him with an intensity he normally reserved for the denizens of Lobotomy Lane.
The Zombie watched the elevator door shut. He stayed Zen-still for forty-five minutes, until nearly seven o’clock, when the fever of The Post’s deadline was at its zenith, when no one noticed a presumed brain-dead reporter sliding his chair behind the desk of a fellow journalist. He found the file drawer locked. The center drawer, too. He tugged at the bottom drawer. It groaned, clicked and gave, a fortuitous malfunction in the mechanism.
The Zombie drew out the yellowed report News had brought in. He read the title on the cover. His eyes flared like rocket exhaust. He slid his chair back to his desk, tugged his shirt out from his pants, and slid the report up against his Karate-chiseled abdomen.
By eight-thirty Neil Harpster was frantic. All day long someone had rung his office phone line and then breathed heavily into it. Never a word. Just the breathing. Who was harassing him?
He picked at the vegetarian dinner Lydia had left on the kitchen counter. He gave thought to the enemies he’d made over the years. He glanced at the insulated gardening jumpsuit he’d been sleeping in outdoors the past ten days. It hung on a hook near the back door.
The phone rang. Harpster picked it up. “Hello?”
“Damien?”
“Damien? No, I’m afraid …”
“Damien, it’s Laura Lee. Tell me that No means Yes.”
“Connie?” he whispered. “I told you never to call here like this.”
Upstairs, Lydia yelled, “Who is it, Neil?”
Harpster held his hand over the mouthpiece. “No one, honey. Wrong number!”
The voice said, “It’s not Connie. I’m much more than Connie could ever be.” There was a clicking noise on the line. Then, “I’m your living Laura Lee, your secret admirer.”
“Were you the one calling my
office all day? Are you the breather?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice. Your blues guitar voice.”
Harpster’s tongue dried. He listened closely. He knew that voice, didn’t he? Wait, what was that? Something about the breathing on the line; it echoed as if there were two people listening.
“I’m thinking about you in your tight black pants and your maroon pirate’s shirt,” the woman said. “I want to touch …”
Harpster couldn’t help it. “You want to touch what?”
A creak behind him. Harpster wheeled to find Lydia in her flannel nightgown clutching a trowel. He slammed the phone down. “It was an obscene phone call!” he cried.
“I was listening!” Lydia sneered. She swung at him with the trowel. “You pervert. You loved it!”
“I didn’t!” He ducked the first swing and the second and the third. She grunted with effort, but kept coming. Long days filling in the root holes of assassinated plants and the side effects of the psychotropic drugs the doctor had prescribed had combined to give her superhuman strength. Harpster backed up against the open broom closet.
“I was trying to keep her on the phone long enough for a trace,” he yelled as the tip of the trowel caught him hard in the rib cage.
“Liar!” Lydia raised the trowel over her head and let it come flying down.
Harpster dodged at the last second. Lydia reeled forward. The trowel struck the rear of the closet. He slammed the door shut on her arm and leaned on it with all his weight. She screeched and snarled and spit at him.
“No, it’s true,” he said, lying with every inch of his being. “I saw it on one of those reality-based cop shows. You try to keep them talking so the record of the call shows up at the phone company.”
The contorted rage on Lydia’s face ebbed ever so slightly.
“It’s true,” he said again. “How could I want to be degraded like that?”
“You sounded interested,” Lydia whined, doubting herself now.
Neil bit at the inside of his lip so his expression would appear pained. “Obscene phone calls are as bad for a man as they are for a woman.”
Lydia’s features softened. Tears welled in her eyes. “Do you love me, Neil?”
“Oh, Tulip,” he cried. “There’s no one in my garden but you.”
All the tension went out of her shoulders. He reached out to stroke her tortured face, but kept the full force of his body against the broom closet door. Just in case the phone should ring again.
It took News just under an hour to pack Brad Perkins’s gear and lug it outside onto the patio of his condo. He taped a note to the front door: “Mr. Pecs, you’ll find your muscle-inflating devices out back. Don’t bother to say good-bye.”
That done, he changed into silk pajamas and bathrobe, which always made him feel better. He changed the name of the movie on the marquee above his bed, then put the sound track from South Pacific on the stereo.
He mixed himself a margarita. A troublesome choice, he knew, but easier than facing the love loss cold turkey. He guzzled the drink and poured a second from the blender.
That was better. Not good, but better. He pushed aside negatives, imagining how his life would change once the story hit. He knew well that many considered him a buffoon, a cartoonish newsroom sideshow. Perhaps that’s how he’d wanted it. The angry clown is a brilliant defensive posture to mask insecurity. Now they’d see him differently.
Oh, how he’d wanted someone to share in his news tonight. That was the thing about gossip: the pleasure of knowing grows in the telling. He looked around his condo and then at the clock and understood if he did not have companionship tonight he’d become self-destructive and either drink too much or head out to a leather bar.
LaFontaine had planned to make the unveiling as much of a surprise to McCarthy as to the rest of the newsroom. They were friends, of course, but this was such a singular triumph he did not want to share in the glory.
He admitted, however, that the events of the day were too much for a lonely rumormonger to handle solo. He needed to boast. He needed a shoulder to cry on. He dialed McCarthy’s home.
“I have gone where no man has gone before,” News replied to McCarthy’s hello.
“What are you Captain Kirk?”
“Everyone knows he had a thing for Spock.”
“What’s up, News? I tried to get in touch with you earlier. I’ve got something interesting …”
“McCarthy, save your triflings. I’ve figured it all out. I know the answer to the mystery. It was under our nose the entire time.”
“Burkhardt? Leslie?”
“One does not deliver such dramatic messages over the phone. Too impersonal. Hurry over and I’ll render a story that will drop your BVDs about your ankles.”
“Just as long as you aren’t standing behind me.”
“Your humor smacks of the playground.”
“Yeah, yeah. Give me an hour to get there. I’m just getting the kids to bed.”
“Destiny awaits you,” News said. He hung up the phone.
He busied himself preparing a guacamole and mixing up a fresh batch of margaritas. Thirty minutes passed. The doorbell rang.
“McCarthy!” LaFontaine cried as he trotted toward the door. “You’re not going to believe it!”
He flung the door open and held his hands out before him palm up, playing to his audience like a magician who has just made an elephant disappear. He stopped short. He drew his lips back into a sly smile.
“You got to me quicker than I ever thought you would,” News said. “Then again, anyone who’s as good at this game as you are must feel it when a big story’s about to bust open.”
McCarthy parked his rented Buick in the lot next to LaFontaine’s Miata. He yawned, wincing at the ache in his newly unleashed jaw. Prentice’s news better be good, he thought, as he climbed out of the car. He heard someone running behind him and turned to see Brad Perkins in full sprint toward the park.
“Oh, no!” McCarthy said. The last thing he wanted to be involved in was another of LaFontaine’s histrionic breakups. He almost got back in the car, then remembered the knowing tone of News’s voice on the phone.
The gossipmonger’s condo was the last unit in the complex and faced a canyon developers had not yet managed to rape. The torn remains of a note was taped to the door, which was ajar. The stereo blasted. A woman sang “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.”
McCarthy pushed the door open. “News?” He took a step inside and almost slipped on the tile in the foyer. He stood in a pool of blood. There was something black and bloody next to it. He stooped and turned it over. A toupee.
He turned around and saw a bloody handprint on the foyer wall as if someone had staggered from a blow and reached out for support.
That same disconnection, that hovering over himself he’d gone through the night Tina died, swept him aloft. He followed the red splatters down the hall. More bloody handprints. Gushes of blood on the rug. The living room was a shambles. Drawers opened and flung on the floor. Papers from his filing cabinet strewn everywhere. The bloody handprints were on the floor now. A trail of them led to the bedroom double doors. McCarthy pushed them open.
News was sprawled at the foot of the bed. His bald head was caved in on the right side. His dead eyes were open. Blood seeped dark from his nose. At first McCarthy thought that the blows had knocked LaFontaine’s teeth out. Then he saw dentures next to his friend’s face. News’s robe was open. A girdle was cinched tight about his waist.
He fell to his knees and stroked Prentice’s shoulder. Then looked up and broke into sobs when he saw the movie marquee.
From Here to Eternity was playing at the Cinema LaFontaine.
Part 3
THE GHOST BETWEEN THE LINES
Requiem for a News Reporter …
“CONNOR GAVE PRENTICE A wonderful elegy,” Isabel Perez said.
“Called him a newsman’s newsman,” Augustus Croon said. “Unafraid of the cons
equences of his probing style of journalism.”
“But a bit misguided at times,” Abby Blitzer said.
“He was that,” Stanley Geld said.
“Oh, hell, he was a bitch,” Claudette X said. “But when he was on, he raised bitchiness to an art form.”
“I’ll miss him,” Perez said. She began to cry.
“We all will, honey,” said Claudette X, who threw an arm around Perez’s shoulder. Were those price tags she felt under Perez’s beautiful black mourning dress?
Kent Jackson shrugged off the sensation he was being watched. “I was no real friend, but I can’t believe Tower didn’t go to the funeral, yet shows up here.”
They all looked over at the Editor for Newsroom Operations who was sipping white wine at the bar watching Paul Fairbanks interview Lawlor for the evening news.
“Ed always hated Prentice,” McCarthy said simply.
The reporters and editors gathered around the long table inside the Slotman’s Bar and Grill nodded. At one time or another almost everyone had hated News.
Behind them Ralph Baker, a.k.a. Roy Orbison, was pouring another round of drinks while the Slotman hung a framed copy of the obituary the Zombie had written. It carried the headline:
Death of a Messenger
Next to it, the Slotman fashioned a banner of black crepe paper around a publicity photo of LaFontaine he’d gotten from The Post. The Slotman looked about himself, vaguely disappointed. Though the place was packed with mourners, all of them drinking heavily, this was hardly a record-breaking angst.
Not that he hadn’t made an effort on such short notice. He’d convinced the jukebox supplier to bring him a couple of Gregorian chants and some Peter, Paul and Mary tunes (“Abraham, Martin & John” in particular) for the machine. He’d taken a color coordination tip from Roy Orbison and rushed out to buy a mortician black two-piece suit. A business expense. The last time he’d be able to use Prentice LaFontaine to create gloom.
He rang open the cash register and took a peek at the receipts. Not a record setter at all. Probably all the working reporters here from The Beacon and the radio and television stations kept the place from descending into the longed-for mawkish guzzle-fest.
Hard News Page 31