Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  The Slotman brought a round of drinks to the stiffest group in the bar. Somehow in the crush following the graveside ceremony, Bobbie Anne Pace, Margaret Savage, Connie Mills, and Neil Harpster had all been squeezed into a corner. The Slotman took their money, noting more than grief in their eyes. He told himself to come back in five minutes. This crew looked ready for a protean swill.

  Harpster threw back a vodka martini. He grimaced at the fact that Pace’s dress featured long black sleeves. He was sure if he could raise those sleeves he’d find scratches on her forearms. And was it possible she was behind the obscene phone calls? Connie had denied knowing anything, though she did seem a bit remote.

  “What do you think of gardens, Bobbie Anne?” he asked.

  Pace took a belt from her Sea Breeze. “I think they grow well if they aren’t force-fed fertilizers.”

  Mills sipped furiously on her Madras. She prayed Pace wouldn’t blow her cover; the attorney they’d hired said the lawsuit was still a few days from being ready to file.

  Savage said, “I find the plant world sensuous.” She hiccuped. She rarely drank hard liquor. She was halfway through her fourth Kamikaze.

  “Sensuous?” Pace asked.

  The columnist waved her hand in space. “A turn of phrase. I like the smell and … touch … of flowers.”

  Harpster froze at the way Savage said “touch.” He took her in sidelong, a voice inside screaming: It’s her! She’s the one calling me!

  Savage smiled at him. She reached up slowly to readjust the sleeveless top of her black cotton dress. For some reason the need on the columnist’s face frightened Harpster more than Lydia armed with pruning shears.

  “I think I’ll be going,” he managed to say. “Do you need a ride, Connie?”

  “I’ll stay a while,” Mills replied.

  “I could use one,” Savage said sweetly.

  At that Harpster hyperventilated. “I, um … I, um …”

  “I’ll give you a ride, Margaret,” interrupted Pace, now studying her chief advisor with growing concern.

  “No, no,” Savage said. “I’ll go with Neil.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot.” Harpster was sweating profusely. “I’m supposed to meet Lydia in half an hour at a restaurant at the beach. So, um, sorry.”

  He rushed off through the crowd.

  Savage started to follow, but her boss grabbed her by the wrist. “Margaret! What’s the matter with you?”

  Savage turned, spitting venom. “Get your hands off me!”

  Pace’s stunned reaction broke through the haze of desire that had enveloped Savage. The columnist shook as if a bitter wind had blown about her new silk panties. She thought fast. “Don’t you see? He’s such a lecher that he might have tried to force me to do something against my will!”

  Pace released her grip. “And you could join the lawsuit.”

  “Yes,” Savage said. “That’s right.”

  Pace took her friend in her arms and hugged her. “A martyr for me.”

  Mills tossed aside the straw from her Madras and sucked down the rest of it. And she thought being alone in a motel room with Neil was weird! She better get at least $2 million out of this fiasco.

  The two women ended their embrace. “I promise not to interfere again,” Pace said. “Sometimes I just can’t keep up with the way your mind works.”

  “It’s understandable,” Savage said. “I think I better go for a walk now, clear my head. Is there a bookstore nearby?”

  “Bookstore?” Pace asked. Ooops, she’d promised not to interfere again. “Yes, of course, down the street at Eleventh and Broadway.”

  Savage shook hands with Mills and made for the door.

  Pace watched her go. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

  “You mean horny?” replied Mills. She waved at the Slotman for another round.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know: excited, turned on, wet?”

  “Impossible! Margaret’s never had a sexual feeling in her life.”

  Mills stopped waving for a moment. “You’re kidding?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “Well, she was having a whopper of a sexual feeling just then. Neil has that effect on some women. It’s something about the way his throat resonates when he’s tense.”

  Pace stared in disbelief at the door closing behind the columnist.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Bobbie Anne,” Mills said. “It’s just sex.”

  Pace stammered, “But I feel like I’m losing my best friend.”

  By then the Slotman had caught sight of Mills’s waving and cut through the crowd to deliver another round. He leered when Pace took her Sea Breeze, inhaled it, and demanded another. He waddled off through the crowd, gleefully telling himself that the night could be saved; record-breaking inner turmoil was within his reach.

  Geld had witnessed the confusion from across the room. He wanted to rise and pirouette, but given the solemn nature of the occasion restrained himself. Got to keep calm, he thought. Got to be patient, let events play themselves out.

  He asked McCarthy, “How’d your kids handle it?”

  “I try to tell myself that they’re resilient, but they’ve seen too many funerals in their lives. They went home with Estelle after the service.”

  “The Zombie sure stayed at graveside a long time,” Blitzer observed.

  “He was there when I left,” Jackson said. “Probably still there.”

  “Prentice would have said something reprehensible about that,” Perez said.

  Ralph Baker brought their drinks to the table. He stroked at his black sideburns and asked morosely, “They get Perkins yet?”

  McCarthy shook his head. “Four days and not a peep. I should have gone after him when I saw him running.”

  Geld said, “You couldn’t have known.”

  McCarthy put his head in his hand. “If I’d been there twenty minutes earlier, maybe I could have stopped it.”

  “SEAL training teaches you not to think like that,” Croon said. “Death waits for no one.”

  They all took long belts off their drinks at that thought. The silence went on for almost a minute, until Claudette X said to no one in particular, “He wore a wig?”

  They all looked up from the table and burst into gales of laughter.

  “I can’t believe he got away without us knowing that for years!” Perez cried.

  “And a goddamned girdle, too,” Geld said. “Remember how he always used to boast about his physical fitness regime?”

  “Dentures,” McCarthy chortled. “He liked to lecture me about how he kept a perfect smile via dental floss, hydrogen peroxide, and baking soda.”

  “News was all surface,” Blitzer said. “Can you imagine what he would have said if we’d come apart like that?”

  They laughed again and gradually quieted.

  A shadow fell across the table. “Laughing, drinking, and crying over the dead,” said Lawlor. “You’d have thought he was Irish.”

  “Everyone’s Irish at a wake,” McCarthy said.

  “True enough.” Lawlor put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder. “We’ll all miss that tough, sneaky, whining, belligerent, secretive, beautiful gossipy bastard.”

  He raised a glass and his blackthorn cane. “To News!”

  “TO NEWS!” they roared.

  And behind them the entire crowd packed into the Slotman’s heard them and joined in. “TO NEWS!”

  When the cheering and the hubbub had died down, Lawlor wiped tears from his eyes. “Can I have a word with you a moment, Gid?”

  McCarthy got up and followed the editor-in-chief as he limped to the back hall.

  “Quieter here without the Slotman’s depressing music grinding at us,” Lawlor began. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “It’s a great loss when you think what Prentice might have been had he applied himself.”

  “The last couple of months he was app
lying himself,” McCarthy said. “He was coming into his own.”

  “But he always seemed to chase tangents like that Lollipop Kids angle.”

  McCarthy didn’t feel like arguing, so he let it slide. “He had an eccentric’s mind.”

  “You do, too,” Lawlor said. “Which is what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m considering starting a special investigations unit that would report directly to me. I’d like to know if you’d be interested in leading the team as its assistant managing editor?”

  McCarthy put his hand to his forehead in disbelief. “You mean …?”

  Lawlor laughed again. “Whatever News used to think of we who reside in the Glassholes, you don’t have to undergo a lobotomy to get one.”

  McCarthy jerked his hand down. “That’s not what I was doing. I … uh, actually it was … I, uh … honestly don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything right now,” Lawlor said. “Claudette told me about the situation with your kids. I want you to take a week off, get over News’s death. It’s a big move with a lot of responsibility, not to mention a healthy pay raise. If you come back and accept, I’ll want you to commit one hundred percent. If not, I’ll understand.”

  “Okay,” McCarthy smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” Lawlor shook the reporter’s hand. “Oh, and one more thing. I’ve been giving interviews all afternoon about News. Karen Rivers of The Beacon wanted to talk to someone who knew him well. I suggested you, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure, I’ll talk to her,” McCarthy said.

  Lawlor pointed across the crowded bar room toward the jukebox. “She was over there somewhere last time I saw her.”

  McCarthy shouldered his way through the increasingly plastered crowd, thanking those who offered their condolences, turning down several of those who offered to buy him a drink. Halfway across the room, he eased by a rotund Stepford Editor and came face-to-face with Ed Tower.

  Tower opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Anything kind I might say to you would appear hypocritical.”

  “I know,” McCarthy said.

  The editor’s face reddened. He sputtered, “Any word on his boyfriend?”

  “Not yet,” McCarthy said.

  “Connor has informed me of his offer,” Tower said. “I would hope whatever differences we have could be put aside.”

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose,” McCarthy said. “If you’ll excuse me, Ed, I’m supposed to talk to someone from The Beacon.”

  Tower put out his hand. “One thing. I read in your story that LaFontaine’s place was torn apart. What do you think Perkins was looking for?”

  McCarthy paused. “I hadn’t even thought about it.”

  “Something we might want to ask the police.”

  “Sure, next chance I get,” McCarthy promised.

  He spotted Karen Rivers perched on a stool at the far end of the bar hard by the jukebox. He tapped her on the shoulder and yelled over the blare of a Gregorian chant, “What do you want to know?”

  With her white reporter’s notebook, Rivers pointed over to an empty table. When they’d gotten seated, she batted her eyelashes, and said, “He was a dear friend of yours.”

  McCarthy screwed up his face. “Spare me the Barbara Walters/Connie Chung routine, okay? I’m not going to boo-hoo for you.”

  “I was trying to be nice.”

  “You were and you weren’t. By being nice on the surface you hoped to crack me open for the sake of your story.”

  Rivers took a deep breath and let it out. “No, I was actually trying to be nice. I’ve heard a lot more about you since that night when they found Gentry. I know you’ve suffered a lot. I feel bad about the way I’ve acted. I feel bad that your friend died.”

  McCarthy saw that she was telling the truth; there was nothing of the hyena about her. He hesitated, then said, “I guess I feel bad about the way I’ve thought of you, too.”

  It started slowly with him telling her what she needed to know, that LaFontaine was from Louisiana, that his mother was dead, that his father considered him dead years ago, that he’d been a first-rate reporter at a small weekly outside New Orleans and an erratic reporter, but colorful character at The Post, that he loved old movies, that his own personality confused him, that he cared deeply about many people even though he tried to hide it.

  “And he had dark side as everyone does,” McCarthy said.

  “That arrest years ago?”

  “It’s public knowledge,” McCarthy said. “I’d appreciate it, however, if you didn’t play that up. It was the sensational part of him, but it’s not what I choose to think about when I think about News.”

  “You cared for him,” Rivers said.

  “I sat next to him and listened to his dreams and his disappointments for more than ten years.”

  “He was gay.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I mean it’s unusual for a heterosexual male to be so close to a gay man.”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way. We didn’t let our sexual orientations interfere with our friendship.”

  Rivers chewed on her pen thoughtfully. “You’re an unusual man.”

  “Not really. After all I’ve been through, I just believe in getting by.”

  “Getting by what?”

  “Getting by life … with the people who are important to you safe and warm. A pipe dream I have.”

  She closed her notebook. “I’ve got to call in these notes for the final. Do you have any plans, afterward, I mean?”

  McCarthy shook his head.

  “Could I ask you to dinner?”

  “You could.”

  The bright sun shining in through the open window roused McCarthy. He opened his eyes. He saw hardwood floors and a hooked throw rug and a framed jazz poster on the far wall. He smelled her then, the thick woman smell he’d lost himself in last night. He felt her heat behind him and the sure rhythmic movements of her breathing.

  He closed his eyes and thought of it, how they’d left the Slotman’s and gone to eat at a Greek place she knew. She’d lost her father, a steelworker in Pittsburgh, the same year he’d lost his father. He told her about Tina and the children. She talked about being so far from home and wondered whether this was the right business to be in.

  Outside in the first light rain of the year, a fluke rain coming this early, she’d turned her face to him and he realized how terribly lonely he’d been the past two years and how much worse it might become in the future. He’d kissed her and they’d come here and he’d fallen into that wonderful mushy smell and the sure powerful movements of her body.

  McCarthy opened his eyes. He inhaled through his nose and felt himself aroused. He rolled over and found her looking at him from underneath tousled hair.

  “How long have you been awake?” he asked.

  “About an hour,” she said. “You looked so relaxed I didn’t wake you.”

  Rivers slid up tight against him, her scent everywhere and he felt himself drifting away. From somewhere in the room came a high-pitched peeping noise, followed by another. They broke, both up out of the bed to claw through the pile of clothes they’d left on the floor in the rush of the night before.

  McCarthy pressed his beeper. “City desk.”

  “Me, too,” Rivers said. “I go first, my apartment.”

  “I thought we had something,” he said, feigning hurt.

  She grabbed him hard by the buttocks and kissed him. “We do. But this is business.”

  She crossed to a nightstand and reconnected the phone and dialed.

  “This is Karen. … Sorry, I’ve had some problem with the phone.” She listened intently for a few moments, then said, “I’m on my way.”

  “What’s going …” McCarthy was saying, but she was already by him and on her way to the shower.

  McCarthy ran to the phone and dialed The Post newsroom. Claudette X answered, “Where have you been? They got Brad Perkins. Arraignment
in an hour.”

  “I’m on it,” McCarthy said. He dropped the phone, sprinted into the bathroom, and jumped into the shower.

  “Really,” Rivers said. “A lady likes to be alone at times.”

  “You’re not a lady,” McCarthy said. “You’re a journalist. And journalists have to suffer sometimes for a story.”

  He took a bar of soap and began to wash her. She shivered in the hot water and murmured. “But the arraignment’s in an hour.”

  McCarthy grinned and said, “That’s okay. I’m used to working on deadline.”

  Playing It Venomous …

  PAUL FAIRBANKS HOPPED FROM one Gucci loafer to another while his field producer did a sound check on the microphone. He loved the strike and clang of heavy gold chain at his ankle on every rebound. It made him think of the thick ankle bracelets slaves wore in movies about ancient Rome and Greece.

  Wearing the ankle bracelet was a reminder to Fairbanks of what he was, an admitted pagan. His golden calf: the snout lens of the television camera. Six days a week he gazed into it and offered up human sacrifice. The idol gave him the power to alter reality, to cut and trim events to meet his sound bite vision of the world. It granted him eternal life. His image and his producer’s words emblazoned on video for all time.

  “Paul Fairbanks, Channel 10 Eyewitness News,” he intoned. “How’s that sound?”

  His producer, a short Jewish woman named Rose, saw what he wanted, and, being a lackey to the talent, she gave it to him. “You’re in wonderful tone this morning, Paul.”

  Fairbanks beamed. “How should I play this?”

  “Venomous,” Rose said. “One of your own has been murdered. His killer’s been brought to justice.”

  Fairbanks hesitated. “Um, what’s venomous mean?”

  Rose sighed, knowing her mother had been right; she should have gone to law school. “Angry, with a touch of evil.”

  “Oh!” Fairbanks said. “I can do that.”

  “On the first take, I hope,” Rose said. “Ready? Three, two, one and you’re on.”