Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  Barfield tossed her thick hair back over one shoulder. “Maybe not officially, but that’s what he was doing. He told me he was working directly for the chief of police on sensitive internal matters.”

  “No offense, but why would someone like Fisk spill to you?”

  She drew a fingernail along the lapel of her jail shirt so the shadow of her heavy breasts appeared. “Some men, especially short ones, need to prove themselves to women.”

  “He slept with you?”

  “Fucked is a better description. Fucked Carol Alice, too, I’d think. Once a week I’d meet him to turn over what I had on who was up and who was down on the streets. Bad boys or good guys, he didn’t care as long as I was giving him dirt and some of the nicey.”

  “So he was investigating the sex for protection scheme on the Boulevard …”

  “At the same time he was screwing me and Gentry.”

  That’s why Fisk was so quick to seize on Dusk’s story. It cleared the books and shut the door before his role in the sex scandal could be discovered. McCarthy asked, “How do you know he had the same relationship with Gentry?”

  “She told me.”

  “And that’s why you don’t think Patrick and Blanca killed her?”

  “No,” she snorted. “Different stuff.”

  McCarthy stayed silent until he could see her getting antsy for him to say something reassuring, to tell the child inside once again that it was okay to tattletale. “Don’t you think it’s time you told someone all that you know?”

  “You’re really going to help me?” she said in a voice that was almost sweet.

  “I said I would.”

  She looked at her fingernails for a long time, then adjusted her bra strap. “There was a party back in February or March sometime, I can’t exactly remember. Before then I’d done a few tricks for Tiger’s just like Carol Alice, only she was more a regular, I think.”

  “Who ran Tiger’s?”

  “I don’t know. I called a number and a woman talked to me a long time, said Carol had spoken highly of me. Asked about my prior employment. I lied and said I worked the upscale hotels near the beach. I got hired. They called me when they needed me.”

  “All right. What about the party?”

  “I didn’t get a call for that one, just Carol coming up to me midweek and asking was I available for a special event that Saturday night? The deal was for the maximum, fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “Where was it held?”

  Barfield waved her hand. “Somewhere up north of the city on this swank estate. A limo picked us up around five in the afternoon. Pulled up to a gate, then up a steep driveway. The house was one story, white, and had a big patio, a pool, and a Jacuzzi. We were up on a hill because I could see the city lights below us. Besides the five gals in our limo, there were six or seven other ladies I’d never seen before already inside.”

  “Nothing else about the estate?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t like I was there to take inventory. The place looked like someone very rich owned it.”

  “Okay. How many people at this party?”

  “With the gals from the second limo, probably twelve pros. And fifteen, twenty men, typical Johns—forties and older.”

  McCarthy flipped a page in his notebook. “Go on.”

  “We went in and mingled like we were told to by this woman, Dee.”

  “Describe her.”

  “About my height I’d guess. Five-eight, five-nine. In her forties. Pretty, sort of silver blond hair. Dressed to kill.”

  McCarthy stopped writing. “Was there a guy with her, this Dee?”

  “Not right then, but later, yeah. But I’m getting to that. So we went in and played the party hostesses, telling them what studs they all were, having a few drinks. The guy who latched onto me’s name was Dickie. Early fifties, balding, kind of tubby. He was a medical equipment salesman or something. Anyway, by about ten, people were swimming nude in the pool and in the Jacuzzi. It was getting kind of crazy.”

  Barfield stopped and chewed on her lip. McCarthy said, “Where was Gentry?”

  “That’s the thing,” she went on. “I’m busy with Dickie and another couple in the Jacuzzi. I look over my man’s shoulder. She’s heading inside with this older guy in white tennis shorts. A half an hour later my randy boy’s getting his second wind when bang, out of the house comes Dee. She’s in a black silk robe now, moving fast. She’s going from scene to scene, voice low, saying there’d been an accident that could prove embarrassing. Everybody starts going for their clothes.”

  McCarthy was writing as fast as he could to keep up. “What kind of accident?”

  “Give me a second here, will you?” Barfield pouted. “Dee walks away and old Dickie’s freaking ’cause he can’t have any more of my nicey. He’s asking me do I want to go to a hotel? But I’m not seeing Carol and I’m getting real nervous, cause I wasn’t leaving without her and I told Dickie so. I got in my clothes and headed for the house.”

  Her expression sobered. “I get inside the house and it’s like you read about. Paintings on the wall. Designer furniture. Huge living room with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city. Only there’s one strange thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sinks in every room. Like they have in doctor’s offices, you know, with those high kind of curved faucets and the paddle things to turn the water on and off?”

  “Burkhardt,” McCarthy murmured.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Just someone I’ve been thinking about a lot.” He refused to show excitement until he’d heard the whole tale.

  He could tell she didn’t believe him, but she didn’t press the issue and continued. “I was looking at this one sink—built in to the wall of the library with nice fixtures—when I heard a bunch of voices, including Carol’s down one end of a hall.

  “Carol started screaming, so I ran down the hall. There’s this pale guy with a ponytail in red boxer shorts. He’s got Carol pinned by the throat against the wall. Her man’s on the bed, belly-up, naked, with this silly smirk on his face. He ain’t breathin’.”

  McCarthy’s jaw hung slack. “Gentry used to boast that she fucked a guy to death.”

  Barfield pressed her tongue against her bottom teeth. “No lie, lover.”

  A female deputy came up behind Barfield and signaled that they had three minutes.

  “Finish it,” he said when the deputy had left.

  “Okay. Mr. Ponytail sees me and stops choking her. She’s coughing, telling him it was only a joke. I figure she made a crack about the dead dude only he didn’t think it was funny. Ponytail tells me to get the hell out. I told him I wasn’t leaving without Carol. He stares at me like I’m a dog or something and makes a move toward me, but I pull out the can of pepper gas I always carry and he stops. He thinks about it for a second, then gives me a cat grin, throws her dress and bag at her, and tells us to go.”

  “And you go?”

  “You bet we do. Outside the driveway is nuts, with these old guys jumping into BMWs and Mercedes and limos. Carol, she’s laughing like it was all a ride at Disneyland.”

  McCarthy jumped in. “The choker, did he have a mole over his lip?”

  Barfield thought about it for a second. “Yeah, he could have. But it all happened so quick, I can’t say for sure.”

  “But you’d recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I think so. But there’s more to the story.”

  “Hurry up. We’re almost out of time.”

  Barfield turned to her left and held up a finger to the deputy who was approaching now. “Please, just one more minute.”

  The deputy crossed her arms, but nodded.

  She whispered, “Me and Carol were the last to be dropped off that night. As soon as the last girl was out, she starts laughing again. And I tell her it’s not too cool to be laughing about a John croaking under you. I believe in ghosts, you know? She pulls out a little cassette recorder from a side pocket of he
r bag and tells me the joke, ‘the cosmic joke,’ as she put it, is who got a phone call after her man died.”

  McCarthy squirmed in his chair. “Who?”

  “She didn’t say. But she sure had whoever it was recorded. She kept singing that song about ‘having a ticket to paradise.’ Couple of months later she bought that condo.”

  The deputy was back. She put her hand on Barfield’s shoulder. Barfield grimaced, then looked at McCarthy and rubbed her thumb and finger together. His legs had melted at the rush of these disclosures. He steadied himself enough to stand and smiled weakly at the woman and the deputy. He pointed to the guard station.

  The guard gave him an envelope into which he stuffed all the cash he had in his wallet. He passed it through the iron drawer. She drew the lever down, opening the drawer again. Inside was an envelope from Barfield. In the room on the other side of the guard’s bulletproof cubicle, the hooker mouthed a plea “open it.”

  The piece of paper inside read “DON’T USE MY NAME. I TRUSTED YOU. I’M SCARED. MORE $$ SOON?”

  McCarthy glanced at her and nodded. He walked unsteadily to the door and down the gallery through the gate past the obnoxious deputy. One part of his mind was already sorting the awful facts into story form, seeing the gaping holes still to be filled. Gentry had been blackmailing Burkhardt and whoever else was on the other end of the telephone over the death of one of the boys at the sex shindig. The odds-on favorite for the corpse had to be Burkhardt’s banker, Bobby Carlton.

  The challenge was to place Carlton at a party that everyone would swear had never happened. And, of course, to figure out just who had been called and how they got Carlton’s body to The Ranch Country Club. Lurking at the periphery was the question of how News had figured it out and who had killed him for his knowledge.

  He’d do whatever it took now to figure it all out. He’d lied to Shirley Barfield. He would use her name in the story. She didn’t matter to him. She was information, not a person. She would hate him and he didn’t care. He tried to tell himself he was doing this for a greater good. Self-deception fled with the memory of himself proposing a bribe to the husband of a superior court judge. He didn’t know who he was or what he stood for anymore.

  Before he got in the car for the long drive south, McCarthy stuck two fingers down his throat and vomited. There were no humans involved. No humans involved in this story anymore.

  An Exotic Minority Hire …

  THE NEXT MORNING, ISABEL Perez fondled the contraband sniffable badge through her red silk blouse while admiring the front page of this morning’s Post. Her fifth A-l piece in a week, a humdinger based on a leak she’d gotten from a regional staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency detailing a broadening of the federal probe into night dumping by candidate Barnes’s high-tech company.

  On a common day this would be occasion for the home run trot around the newsroom bases gathering kudos from editors and reporters, blatantly drubbing Kent Jackson’s nose in the knowledge he’d been one-upped again. These trips were necessary to keep the career trajectory steep and the fragile ego in its proper distended state.

  But today was no common news day of twisted events, contorted civic platitudes, and grandstanding promises never to be kept. Cyclone winds had blown inside The Post these past twenty-four hours.

  Connor Lawlor and Ed Tower had gusted into the aftermath of the brawl between Bobbie Anne Pace and Neil Harpster, demoting the former back to fashion bimbo and the latter to a cubicle at the rear of the room from which it was rumored he would edit the food and garden news pending the outcome of the sex harassment lawsuit.

  Margaret Savage had been ordered to write her farewell column on the Metro page. She’d been given the society beat in recognition of the sudden and decisive dulling of her point of view not to mention her newfound love of frippery, mock cashmere, and Ralph Lauren at discount.

  Fearing her litigious bent and in acknowledgment of her Stanford education, Lawlor had assigned Connie Mills to work for Tower managing the Swingo game and any other game of chance her fecund, if deviate, imagination might devise.

  And then there was the Zombie. He’d showed up to work wearing a Hawaiian lei around his neck. A weird smile was pasted across his lips and he’d turned his desk to face the cubicle where Harpster toiled in exile.

  No doubt about it, Perez thought, the old hierarchy of Lobotomites had toppled. The fast-trackers derailed. Now the question was: whose ass was best smooched to assure an unchecked ascent to the strata of the sniffable?

  Stanley Geld had been given the responsibilities of the former Assistant Managing Editor for News and Information and the Assistant Managing Editor for Form and Content. The wags in the room were calling him the Assistant Managing Wizard for Machiavellian Alchemy. In hushed tones in private, of course. No need to screw up the future with an objective, public assessment.

  At this very moment, Geld had his spit-shined combat boots up on the desk in Pace’s old Glasshole. He sported aviator sunglasses and waved an unlit cigar over his head while blaring into a phone with all the fire and pig lust of a Hollywood agent.

  Claudette X now occupied Geld’s old spot. She’d been offered Harpster’s Glasshole, but strangely turned it down. Perez’s lightning-quick news analysis? Claudette X lacked true upper-level newspaper leadership qualities. Still, she was a woman to be feared. Especially because she could not be ass-kissed.

  It was rumored that the carrot of investigative editor had been dangled in front of McCarthy’s nose, but The Post’s premier gumshoe had not made an appearance in the newsroom in several days.

  Which brought the consummate careerist back to herself. There was no doubt that she’d supplanted Kent Jackson as Big Foot political reporter. Jackson was coasting these days, a member of the vast political journalism stockyard, feeding contentedly and without follow-up on fax fodder, position papers, and news releases.

  Perez knew that more bovine reporters would be ecstatic at this turn of events. But she understood that even with this promotion she was nothing more than a big fish in a small pond. In the greater stream of the news business she was no closer to becoming an odor-producing, agenda-setting reporter than she had been four months ago.

  She got her credit card folder from her purse. A good binge and purge would quell the current inferiority complex. She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to noon. She’d saunter off for a quick buying spree and be back by one, able to survive to deadline with the anticipation of a little sinsemilla and evening fashion show with her mannequins.

  The phone rang. She snatched it from its cradle.

  “Post. Perez.”

  “Isabel Perez?” A man’s voice with an assured East Coast accent.

  “Speaking.”

  “Phelps Harrison. A.M.E. Human Resources. The Wall Street Journal.”

  “Yeah, right. Who is this?”

  The man laughed in a hale manner that struck Perez as somewhat forced. “I get that all the time,” he said. “This really is Phelps Harrison.”

  “Good God,” Perez said, immediately annoyed at her reaction. She smacked her forehead with the butt of her palm to calm herself. “What can I do for you, Mr. Harrison?”

  “Ms. Perez,” Harrison began. “We, at the Journal I mean, have been terribly impressed by your work of late. Breaking Barnesgate and all. And we asked around a bit and, to be honest, we’re attracted also, well, by your, um, background and your … er … how do I put this? … lifestyle.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Getting me to qualify,” Harrison stammered. “Good reporting instincts. Okay, Ms. Perez, I won’t beat around the bush here. Of late the Journal has been criticized for its rather limited, Eurodollar outlook, and we’re looking to broaden it.”

  Perez’s heart beat wildly. “With a Hispanic …”

  “Lesbian perspective,” Harrison finished the thought for her.

  “Bisexual,” she corrected.

  “Oh, right, bisexual,” Harrison coughed. He coughe
d again. “Now the position we have open is on the editorial page. Are you wed to the reporting side of the business?”

  Perez swallowed and fought off the impulse to shout No! Whatever you want! Whatever it takes! She played for broke. “Depends on what the job entails.”

  “General editorial writing at first and, within a year, as we see how you get along, signed editorials offering your, er, unique viewpoint on politics, social trends, issues of the day. You get the picture.”

  “I do,” Perez croaked.

  Her temples roared. She was having trouble breathing. Black dots appeared before her eyes. She realized with horror that in her attempt to retain composure she’d twisted the chain of the stolen Washington Post amulet so tight around her neck that she’d almost choked herself into unconsciousness. She untwisted the chain and let the blood flow back to her brain.

  “Ms. Perez? Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Well? Does the position interest you?”

  “One question. Do your editorial writers go to national political conventions?”

  “You’d eventually be based in our Washington bureau, so I’d imagine so.”

  “I’d get a badge on a chain? A badge that says The Wall Street Journal?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Perez sat up straight to savor the moment. She imagined at her feet a rainbow of career possibility arcing up at an impossibly steep angle into the journalistic ionosphere. She flared her nostrils at a dreamy wind. She inhaled slowly, sweetly, swearing to herself that even now there was the unmistakable pheremonal scent of agenda-setting power wafting up from between her damp breasts.

  “Well, then, Mr. Harrison,” she purred, “you’ve got yourself an exotic minority hire!”

  Full Disclosure? …

  MEANWHILE, OBLIVIOUS TO THE status inversions occurring inside The Post, McCarthy leaned on the public counter inside the coroner’s office, a low-ceilinged, cream-colored affair tinged by the faint but troubling odor of chemicals. He was studying the complete autopsy report on Robert S. Carlton III under the watchful eye of Dr. Nicholai Trush, a Ukranian expatriate and one of the city’s deputy assistant medical examiners.