Fairbanks snapped his six-foot frame erect. He curled the right side of his upper lip just like Clint Eastwood always did before he blew away the whackos. “A homosexual reporter’s lover and suspected killer brought to justice, we’ll have the details live at six!”
“Beautiful!” Rose said. “We’ll run that promo the two hours running up to the show. Now the stand-up.”
Fairbanks resumed the Dirty Harry pose. Rose signaled the cameraman to run tape just as the sheriff’s van pulled into the garage of the courthouse.
McCarthy and Rivers stopped watching Fairbanks’s broadcast antics. Perkins was led out the back door. His hair was disheveled. A couple of days’ growth of beard shadowed his face. They already had him dressed in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit.
Perkins hunched over and covered his head when the klieg lights burst on. Fairbanks broke in perfect transition from his introductory monologue to wheel to let the camera catch him in near-perfect profile and shouted: “Brad! Brad! Did you kill him? Was it a lovers’ quarrel?”
Rivers was yelling out the same kinds of questions. McCarthy couldn’t bring himself to say a word. He wanted to jump the barrier and strangle them. McCarthy led the pack up the back stairs to the third floor, where the superior court arraignments were held. It all went quick and perfunctory. A plea of not guilty was entered on Perkins’s behalf. Bail was denied because he was a flight risk. The pack surrounded the deputy district attorney and Millie Dubrovsky, Perkins’s public defender whom McCarthy had known for years.
McCarthy hung back, waiting until the other reporters had their fill. He caught Dubrovsky’s eye finally and she motioned to him. Rivers tried to follow, but Dubrovsky said, “Sorry, this is private.”
McCarthy walked backward, hands out to Rivers. “I’ll call you.”
Rivers pouted and nodded.
They walked to a window overlooking Broadway. Dubrovsky said: “Over my objections my client wants to talk to you.”
“Nothing to talk about,” McCarthy said. “He killed my best friend. I saw him leaving the scene.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Prentice had a thing for guys who liked it rough. Brad’s a classic example. He killed him, sure as I’m standing here.”
“Gid, I always thought you reporters liked to hear the other side.”
McCarthy thought about it for a moment, then said, “Make sure we’re talking through glass. I don’t know what I’ll do if I know I can get my hands on him.”
Two hours later, a guard led Perkins to a chair in a glass booth inside the downtown jail. He had the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled up to expose his beefy forearms. Without expression he picked up the black phone that hung from a cradle inside the booth.
McCarthy didn’t pick up his phone for almost a minute. All he could see was News’s head bashed in and the bloody handprints on the rug and the way his friend’s body had contorted in death.
“Please,” Perkins mouthed.
McCarthy finally put the phone to his ear.
Perkins talked fast: “I know you saw me running from the condo. But I swear I didn’t kill him. He was dying when I got there, lying on the rug in the bedroom, making these awful noises.”
“You hit him enough times.”
“No! I didn’t hit him. I never hit him.”
“Bullshit. It’s what you did together. It got out of control because he told you to leave and you started swinging.”
“No! No! What we did alone was different. That was role-playing. That’s what he seemed to like, so I fed into it. But whoever killed him was there before me.”
Perkins shivered now. McCarthy wanted to smack him upside the head.
“Look,” Perkins said, “the last time I talked to him he said he was onto the biggest story of his life. He said something about ‘the scandal to end all scandals.’ How do you know he wasn’t killed because of that?”
McCarthy had been so caught up in the grief and the funeral arrangements that he hadn’t had time to think clearly about the phone call he’d had with News that night. LaFontaine had said something along the same lines.
Before he could reply, Perkins continued, “The story in the papers said his place was ransacked. If it was a lovers’ quarrel, why would I tear the place apart?”
“I figure you were looking for money.”
“I had money. The reason Prentice got mad at me that afternoon was I had to meet with an investor who was interested in backing me in a personal training service. He agreed and gave me five thousand dollars to get me on my feet and start buying equipment.”
“You have this investor’s name?”
“Carl Tracy,” Perkins said.
“The guy who owns the Pink Stag?”
Perkins nodded. “Carl has a thing for me and Prentice suspected it. We were trying to keep the deal under wraps until I was up and going. Ask Carl; he’ll tell you it’s true.”
McCarthy hated himself for thinking it, but it was possible that Perkins was telling the truth. News’s memory surrounded him, telling him he’d better check it out.
“Did Prentice say how he broke the scandal?”
“To be honest, I didn’t tell him. I was sort of taunting him. And I feel so bad about it, because when I tried to tell him I was sorry, when I was holding him there in his bedroom, he died. And I got scared when I knew he wasn’t breathing anymore, and I ran.”
Perkins’s shivers became violent shaking. McCarthy hung up the phone and left.
Ed Tower came up to McCarthy’s desk while he wrote the story of the arraignment. “I heard you got an exclusive with Perkins.”
“He talked for a while. Said he’s innocent. Said News was alive when he got there, died in his arms.”
“Doesn’t hold water?”
“I saw the guy running from the scene,” McCarthy said. “They found his bloody prints all over the place. But I’ll quote him to be fair.”
Tower hesitated, then said. “He mention anything about the place being torn apart?”
“He said that’s why I should know he didn’t do it. That he had no reason to go through his papers.”
Tower looked off toward the distance.
“Why the interest, Ed?” McCarthy asked.
Tower’s lips twitched. “I take it personally when one of my people is bludgeoned to death and that part of it bothers me. Keep me posted on what happens.”
“Sure,” McCarthy said. The Editor for Newsroom Operations stalked back through the newsroom, shut his Glasshole door, and immediately got on his phone. McCarthy shrugged it off and worked on the story another fifteen minutes when his phone rang.
“Post. McCarthy.”
“Gideon, this is Jeanette Fry.”
“I was hoping I wouldn’t hear from you.”
Silence, then, “You should know I received a call this morning from Judge Crawford’s clerk. She’s scheduled a disposition hearing a week from Friday.”
“Ten days? Can’t we stall or make some kind of motion to hold it until I can get more information on Owens?”
“Brady called me this morning, too. In so many words, he implied that if we try to block the hearing on frivolous grounds, Owens would file a lawsuit against you.”
Since finding LaFontaine’s body, McCarthy had not allowed himself to do anything but move forward. Now, time seemed to stand still.
“What are my odds?”
“I’d say seven to three against.”
“Any chance I’ll get visitation rights?”
There was a long pause. “It would be unusual, but this is an unusual situation. It depends on whether Crawford looks at this from precedent or her own sense of justice.”
McCarthy didn’t hear Fry say good-bye. He didn’t hear anything until Claudette X growled directly in his other ear, “How much longer until that story’s ready?”
He hung the phone up. He looked at the screen. “Ten minutes … I’m going to lose the kids.”
“Oh, no!” she moaned. �
�It’s final?”
“Not until next Friday. But the odds are against me unless some miracle happens.”
“Gid, I’m very sorry. Why don’t you finish the story and go on home, okay?”
He nodded. He typed in the last three paragraphs of the story on autopilot, filed it, printed it, and then sent it to the city desk. When the computer beeped to indicate it had been received, he opened his desk drawer to file his hard copy. A manila envelope addressed to him in Prentice LaFontaine’s handwriting lay on top of his hanging files.
He slit open the envelope and drew out a single piece of paper.
PL 10/l;Gid:l
Gid—Today I’ve come to understand we live in a time of subjective reality, where the flood of information is so great that it is impossible to trust any one analysis of events. In the end, each person must interpret facts to find his own truth, a truth he can live with.
Here are some facts I thought you should know:
Item: The disclosure forms of Judge Evelyn Crawford indicate her husband has taken heavy financial losses each of the past two years.
Item: Crawford is sixty-four, due to retire next year. Her husband is sixty-two. She might work, then again she might not. Her pension will hardly cover the cost of their home and condo in Scarsdale.
Interpretation: ??????
McCarthy read it through three times, then folded the paper in half and slid the memo into his coat pocket. On his way out, he thought about what Perkins had said about the condo being ransacked. It hit him. He ran back to his computer and quit out of his personal work area.
It took him nearly twenty minutes, but he finally struck the two-word combination—Yankee/Clipper—needed to open up Prentice LaFontaine’s work area. An enormous directory of files appeared on the screen. He typed in a series of commands that culled through the files by date, specifically the date News was murdered.
He hit enter and immediately the words NO SUCH FILES FOUND sprang up on the screen. Impossible. Must have made a mistake. He typed in the code and the date again. He hit enter, NO SUCH FILES FOUND
He pulled out LaFontaine’s memo and typed in the exact file code that appeared at the top of the page, NO SUCH FILE FOUND.
McCarthy slouched back in his chair. It was possible that News had deleted the file, but unlikely; LaFontaine had been an information pack rat. No speck of dirt, no snippet of intrigue, no thread of gossip went … Gossip!
If McCarthy had learned one thing sitting next to LaFontaine all those years, it was that he kept a running log of the intricacies and outrages inside The Post. News used it to create the top twenty gossip items of the year, an underground list he published every Christmas. McCarthy typed in GOSDI with the 10/1 suffix.
NO SUCH FILE FOUND
McCarthy chewed on the inside of his cheek. Prentice had been at his desk for more than an hour the afternoon before he was killed. That’s where he was when he’d had the argument with Perkins everyone had overheard. Emotional turmoil, bureaucratic or personal, always sent News to his keyboard.
He slid his chair over to LaFontaine’s desk and tugged at the drawers. They opened, chock full of neatly arranged files. He bent low over the bottom drawer and thumbed his way through them. BURKHARDT, SLOAN.
He took the file from the drawer and opened it. LaFontaine would have made a wonderful clerk. All his notes were dated at the top and filed in reverse chronological order. The most recent printout vaguely described his interview with Fernando Trujillo. It mentioned T. Lawrence Leslie, Sloan, and Coughlin Burkhardt, but didn’t give the detailed account News had related to McCarthy. That was strange. LaFontaine always prided himself on keeping specific notes. He glanced at the computer tag. Truj;9/30; 4/5/ The last page was missing.
He thumbed his way forward through the file, trying to find page five. It wasn’t there. But on the inside back of the folder he found a yellow Post-it note, scrawled with News’ handwriting. “For 10/2—GET T.L.L DOCS; FIND P.R.”
GET T.L.L. DOCS. That had to be Leslie’s disclosure documents, the ones LaFontaine had ordered at the clerk’s office. But what or who was P.R.?
McCarthy shut the folder and tossed it over onto his desk. He dug deeper into the drawer until he came across the hard copy version of GOSDI, three folders, each of them more than four inches thick. He shuddered to think what he might find here. He flipped open the first one and was dumbfounded to discover that, again, the most recent entry was September 30, the day before News died. Nothing about his fight with Brad Perkins.
He read quickly through the September 30 entry, grinning at News’s scathing description of Trujillo’s eating and drinking habits, including a reminder to himself to ask The Post’s medical reporter if bunions were related to gout.
The next section made him wince: News speculating on the psychological effects of McCarthy losing the kids. He glanced up at the model LaFontaine predicted he’d emulate. The Zombie stared back at him with dead eyes. The fire was out.
“Just looking for some things we were working on together,” McCarthy said.
The Zombie nodded, but didn’t reply. McCarthy looked away, shut News’s drawer, and rolled his chair back to his desk. He opened an empty drawer of his own and dropped the gossip files inside. He reached for the Burkhardt file and saw the note scrawled on the back: “Other Documents:”, and under it “U.S. Justice Dept. Report 1963.”
LaFontaine always kept cumbersome reports in his deep bottom drawer. McCarthy opened it, looking for the Justice Department document. Not there.
It was almost as if LaFontaine’s files had been sanitized. But by whom? McCarthy jerked his head up to look toward Ed Tower’s glasshole. The editor had swiveled his chair so his back was turned to the newsroom. He was still on the telephone.
McCarthy gathered up as many of News’s files as he could and dumped them into his own drawers, locked them, then hurried home.
In the Shadow of the Snake …
THE LATE-DAY SUN shone hard and hot on the pale rock outcropping at the top of the hill. McCarthy held his hand to his brow to block the light, looking for the white terrier that wiggled and snuffled in the undergrowth of the canyon below him. Every once in a while he heard a faint yip as the dog flushed an animal or a lizard, then several bays as it gave chase and finally whimpers and frantic scratching when he lost it down a hole.
“Malice’s over there,” Miriam said. She pointed to a rustling bush about eighty yards away, back toward the house.
“He’ll be all right,” Carlos said. “We come out here all the time.”
McCarthy smiled. “I used to play out here when I was a kid, too.”
“Tia said your daddy played the trumpet on the rock,” Carlos said. He pointed to the instrument in McCarthy’s lap. “You going to play today?”
“No,” McCarthy said.
“Why bring it, then?” Miriam asked.
“You like to sleep with your elephant, don’t you?”
“Babar’s my friend.”
He turned the horn over in his hand. “This is kind of like my Babar.”
“Oh,” Miriam said, accepting it naturally. Despite the pain she’d gone through she still trusted. She balled up the hem of her blue dress. “Does Mr. News have a Babar?”
“He’s dead, honey.”
“I know,” she said. “But you said being dead is like going to sleep for a long time.”
“I did, didn’t I?” McCarthy said. He didn’t know what else to say. Carlos wandered off toward one of the dozen avocado trees, all that remained of his father’s orchard. Carlos picked up a fallen avocado and threw it down the hill near Malice. There was a flash of white in the underbrush as the dog raced to the sound.
Miriam got up to join the game. McCarthy didn’t allow himself to watch her go. He wondered if he’d have the same strength when she left with Owens.
He thought about LaFontaine’s memo. His attention traveled down the length of the little canyon to where the Oklahoma gas man lived in a red-roofed hacienda. H
e stroked the surface of his father’s rock and tried to tell himself he could do it.
Malice began barking then, crazy, loud, hoarse, jaw-stretching brays cut with high-pitched yips and snarls. And then above it screams, Miriam’s screams. “Gideon! Gideon!”
McCarthy sprinted along the canyon rim before she could scream again. He ducked under the thick branches of an avocado tree. He skidded to a halt. Fifty feet below him on a broad flat-topped boulder among a tumble of bone white rocks Carlos trembled like an off-balance washing machine. To Carlos’s left the terrier leapt side to side, its muzzle drawn back to reveal angry, sharp teeth.
The triangular head arched over thick scaly coils. Disturbed from sleep on the warm rocks, the snake hissed, fangs revealed. The stiff bony rattle argued with the air. Black pearl eyes darted from the boy to the dog and again to the boy.
“Don’t move, Carlos,” McCarthy said.
“It’s going to bite him,” Miriam cried. She was in the rubble above them. “It’s going to bite him.”
“No, it’s not,” McCarthy said calmly. He edged toward them, soft, quiet, all focus on the snake and the boy and the dog, which raced back and forth, just out of range, snarling, nostrils flared.
He reached Miriam. She moved to hug him, but he gently pushed her away and murmured “It’s going to be all right.”
The snake was no more than twenty feet below him now.
“Look at me, son,” McCarthy said.
“I can’t,” Carlos said. Tears welled in his eyes.
“Yes, you can,” McCarthy said. “I want you to look at me as if the snake wasn’t there. It’s just you and me.”
The tears came heavier now, but the boy didn’t lift his head from the snake.
“Carlos, tell me what you do when you’re two and two on a fastball hitter.”
“I can’t.”
“Two and two on a fastball hitter.”
As if it were a heavy weight winched from mud, the boy’s chin oozed up and through the blur he looked for McCarthy. “Change-up.”
“Right. You show him something he doesn’t expect.”
“I’m … I’m scared.”
“That’s okay. Because we’re going to throw this snake a change-up, okay?”
Hard News Page 33