Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  “How then do I explain to my editor the coincidence of Mr. Crisp’s name on land holdings on Lake Mead, Blue Coast, and those Texas partnerships?” McCarthy asked.

  Burkhardt had anticipated that question, too. “The mayor mentioned to me at a political dinner a few years back that he was interested in planning for his retirement. I knew Max was involved in some valuable raw acreage. I made a referral to a trusted business associate, who also happens to be a gifted financial planner. What other investments Max may have recommended to the mayor and his friends, I couldn’t say.”

  “But you do have documents to prove it.”

  “Of course.” He drew out a second sheaf of papers. Filings stamped by the Security and Exchange Commission concerning the Texas partners.

  “SEC stamp, impressive.”

  “An acquaintance inside who owed me,” Burkhardt said.

  “But this can be double-checked in the documents room in Washington.”

  “Could be. But won’t. The aura of authenticity surrounding an SEC stamp coupled with the notorious laziness of the vast majority in your profession will more than suffice.”

  The wind changed, blowing the odor of dried feces across the bay. “Anything else?” Fisk asked, wrinkling his nose.

  McCarthy’s bravura composure faded, replaced by the demoralizing realization that he had maneuvered himself out of the best story of his life. His career was finished. He shook his head wearily. “Nothing else.”

  “Then remember the deal and get the fuck out of here,” Fisk said.

  Burkhardt didn’t look at him. He was languidly opening a new Wash N’Dry when McCarthy turned to drift up the hill.

  The anesthetized, yet hyperaware state the conversation left him in reminded McCarthy of the mushroom trip he’d taken his sophomore year in college. The grass in the late-afternoon turquoise light had Technicolor edges that shimmered. The back of his tongue tasted of foil. His vision was watery, yet his understanding of his situation was lucid and complete. He was amused at the overall feeling. And he almost laughed out loud when he recognized that it might be best termed “an objective point of view.” He was a bona fide member of the cult of modern journalism once again.

  “You get the story, Gid?” Croon asked. “Shit, that sun made getting the photos hell. Had to fart around with three or four filters to get it to work.”

  McCarthy was surprised to find that he had made it back to his car. His cassette deck made a peeping noise. He remembered that as he had approached Fisk and Burkhardt he’d pressed the record button. He thumbed it off.

  “No, Croon, I didn’t get it. Thought I had the goods and didn’t. Sorry for hauling you down here for nothing.”

  Croon fiddled with a 400-mm lens. “Hey, don’t look so goddamned low,” he said. “We all chase ghosts sometimes. Part of the game.”

  “Me more than most.” McCarthy opened the car door. He threw the recorder and the notebook inside on the blue vinyl seat. “Do me a favor, knock on Lawlor’s door. Tell him the story’s a bust. I’ll explain tomorrow.”

  Croon drew off his sunglasses and leaned in the window as McCarthy started the engine. “Where you heading?”

  He threw the photographer a shell-shocked grin. “Montana soon. Gonna be a dental floss tycoon.”

  Old Gossip Never Dies …

  OVER THE NEXT FEW hours McCarthy coursed aimlessly along freeways, over gritty back streets, and through swank seaside developments. As he drove he developed a prescription for surviving in the journalism world in the 1990s: Go with the flow and you’ll find yourself at The Wall Street Journal. Screw with the Powers That Be and you’ll eat shit.

  The sun hovered low over the Pacific. He stared at the ocean. And a sobering thought flooded in. Burkhardt had been in his backyard today, maybe seen the children. He raced home.

  He slipped through the back gate unnoticed. Estelle rocked on the back porch. Miriam clambered about the swing set. Carlos tossed a baseball at a backstop with elastic strings that sent the ball popping high into the air. McCarthy stood for several minutes in the twilight beside a camellia bush where they couldn’t see him, taking solace in the fact that this evening they were normal kids and if he did as directed, they’d be assured some degree of future normalcy.

  When the ball struck the elastic net the next time, he ran out and grabbed it from over Carlos’s outstretched arms. He picked the boy up and swung him in a big circle before setting him down to do the same thing to Miriam. Estelle got teary when he whispered that in the long run Owens would not receive custody.

  “But the judge, I thought …” she stopped in mid sentence, deciding it was better not to question Providence. “Mr. Lawlor has been calling here for hours.”

  “Take the phone off the hook,” he said. “I’m in no mood to talk.”

  McCarthy spent the remaining time before bed with them, going over Carlos’s math homework, reading Miriam two books. A father at peace. He thought of Karen Rivers and decided in the long run it was probably for the best to cut it off now. She thought of The Beacon as her beginning. He thought of The Post as his end.

  After he’d tucked them in, McCarthy got into bed. In the darkness he gauged the effect his resignation would have on The Post. None, he admitted; there were so few journalism jobs available that a hundred naive kids would come hungering for his slot, hungering for a shot, any shot, not understanding the hard lessons they would have to learn. His position could be filled in a matter of days. The war machine would keep rolling. His secret buried. The story untold.

  He couldn’t sleep. Voices whirled to him in a maelstrom of mental chatter he couldn’t silence: the tabloid witch blathered of twisted circumstance, Charley Owens lied about the past, Diane Tressor whispered of desires unfulfilled, Shirley Barfield pleaded with him to keep her safe, Lawlor lectured him about the crimes of journalism, Fisk and Burkhardt laughed at the notion of fairness, LaFontaine confided some bit of newsroom gossip. All of it spiraled downward, speed and gravity of fact and analysis arcing into a directionless black hole until he lurched out of bed sweating and claustrophobic.

  McCarthy got into his clothes. He slipped from the house and backed the car down the driveway, not knowing where he was going. The aimless approach had soothed earlier.

  He stopped at a bar and had a double bourbon, which calmed his stomach and stopped the sweats. He left before a second round. Becoming another statistic for Mothers Against Drunk Driving wasn’t the answer either.

  Another half hour behind the wheel and he found himself downtown. The city’s streets were deserted at one in the morning. Tattered pages of newspaper whipped by the sea wind fluttered and burst up the sidewalks between the skyscrapers. He got out of the car on lower Broadway and walked west.

  The security guard in the lobby at The Post barely acknowledged his presence. He went upstairs. The newsroom was silent and empty. He sat at his desk before the green glow of his computer tube. The mounds of printed material rising around him were as big as they were the first day he’d reported to work. Only the facts in the information garbage heaps differed.

  McCarthy wondered what he’d accomplished in almost two decades of churning out copy. A feeling that he’d been witness to some history. A few stories he regarded as significant. A dozen or more plaques on the wall at home, notice that his peers considered some of his work exemplary.

  The sad truth remained, however, that his work had been of fleeting importance and ephemeral interest. He always thought it absurd that book companies published collections of daily journalism. Such work was all too fragmented and transitory to make any enduring sense; the lasting patterns required time and distance to reveal themselves.

  “Story of my life,” he said out loud. He got up and left.

  Outside the wind had gathered force, throwing the grit of the city around him. He walked west again with the gale at his back for several blocks. Ahead a solitary figure in black leather lurched toward him.

  “Hello, Gid,” Ralph Baker slur
red. “Ya missed last call. Slotman pulled the plug on the blues forty-five minutes ago.”

  “That wasn’t where I was heading, Ralph.”

  “Ah, shit, call me Roy. Roy Orbison,” he said, weaving unsteadily on his feet. “I’m thinking of having my name changed. In memory of News. He named me, right?”

  “Right, Ralph, er Roy. Prentice would have thought that was funny.”

  Baker threw his arm around McCarthy’s neck and brought his boozy face close. “I knew you guys used to bet on when I’d spill my coffee, you know. I was more aware of things than you guys thought.”

  McCarthy felt rotten at the memory. “I’m sure you did, Roy. But it was all in fun.”

  “Course it was,” he said. “I did the same kind of thing twenty years before. Same guy did it to another old fart twenty years before me. You know what that’s called?”

  “No, what?”

  “An institutional memory!” he cried, and pointed to himself. “That’s what I am. The things I could tell you!”

  “I’ll bet you could, Roy.”

  The old reporter got a bewildered look on his face. He belched. “Roy Orbison, that’s me,” he sung, horribly off-key. “Only the lonely, do do do do dee dee do.

  “Ha! Don’t know the lyrics yet. Got to know them before the legal switcheroo. Amazing thing, you know? You get an attorney to change the letters on a few pieces of paper and you got yourself a new identity. It’s California! Hell, it’s America now, it was just invented out here. No one’s interested in substance. Image is all!”

  McCarthy smiled in spite of himself. He hadn’t heard Baker this worked up in years. “Figure on rounding up some groupies and heading out on tour, Roy?”

  The leather-clad wonder scowled. “You can invent yourself, McCarthy. You can concoct things that never happened and say it did. That’s the way it works now. Want to go to Congress as a military hero? Write it up in the resume that you flew in Vietnam even though you barely spent a month at a supply depot in Saigon. Hell, there’s a couple of assholes in the House of Representatives … the damned U.S. House of Representatives did it. And you know what?”

  McCarthy shook his head.

  “Everybody knows. But no one cares. And those dickwads get reelected year after year. No one gives a shit anymore about the truth. Do you care about the truth, McCarthy?”

  McCarthy hesitated. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Do you really? Does anybody in our business really care what’s real and right anymore? Or is it just about spin?”

  Baker lurched to one side. McCarthy grabbed him under the armpits. His head lolled. Spittle dripped from the corners of his mouth.

  “Look at us, McCarthy,” Baker mumbled. “You and me, we’re part of a farce that goes way back and no one gives a hoot. The things that I could tell you. …”

  Baker passed out then, the weight of oblivion buckling his knees, almost dragging McCarthy over onto the sidewalk with him. McCarthy was afraid the old reporter would choke and vomit. He got him upright and dragged him back down the street toward his car. For reasons he couldn’t comprehend it seemed more important than anything he’d done in a long, long time to get this poor raving burnout safely home to bed.

  He shoved Baker into his car and buckled him into the front seat. He realized he didn’t even know where the old reporter lived. He fumbled around inside Baker’s black motorcycle jacket until he found a wallet. He cringed when he recognized the address on Baker’s driver’s license as a single-room occupancy hotel in a seedy neighborhood.

  A burly front desk attendant took five dollars from McCarthy to help Baker up the stairs and into his little room. When they had him on his bed, no bigger than a cot really, McCarthy covered him with a blanket.

  “I’ll stay with him a little while to make sure he’s okay,” McCarthy said. The attendant shrugged and shut the door.

  It was a tiny room. A new reclining chair, an old couch, a battered coffee table, and a stereo with a collection of vinyl jazz and blues albums. A television, a VCR, and a small kitchen table with a red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth. Two wooden chairs in need of fresh paint. In the closet were four sets of the Roy Orbison wardrobe. On the wall hung a copy of the front page of The Post the day after the apocalyptic albino took the pony hostage. The paper had already yellowed and curled at the edges.

  A stack of thick brown scrapbooks several feet high occupied the far corner near the window. McCarthy brought several over to the reclining chair and opened them. It was strangely hypnotic to read clips from years gone by: the events that made news, the fashions in the photographs that accompanied the stories, the issues of the day.

  McCarthy passed the hours between 2:00 and 5:00 A.M. that way, reading backward in time through Baker’s life as a reporter, back through the intermittent dispatches of his last days on rewrite, back to the early eighties, when his production was quicker, his prose tauter. Here a tender portrait of a gang kid who’d extricated himself from the streets, there a series of articles on migrant workers. And earlier still to Baker at the height of his journalistic powers, covering the state government with authority, at Nixon’s Western White House and, before that, two years of admirable work out of Saigon, including a number of eyewitness combat accounts from Hue and Khe Sanh.

  A fifth scrapbook. The work no longer published in The Post, but the defunct Chronicle. Court coverage mostly.

  In the middle of the book, McCarthy came across a headline and subbar:

  Jennings Aide at Center of Scandal Kills Self Grisly Jump from City Hall at Rush Hour

  He read down through Baker’s account, most of it detailing the same facts Pablo Ramirez had recounted to him not twenty-four hours before. He turned the page and was surprised to find a similar headline from The Post, this one with a byline by Ed Tower. Lawlor was in jail by then. The facts were essentially repeated, but told tougher, more forceful in their detailing of the alleged link between Quintana and Jaime Ramirez and Harold Jennings. It was typical: in a news war every brigade crows loudest about the breaches it has wrought in the defensive line.

  Baker grumbled in his sleep, rolled over, and began to snore loudly. McCarthy kept going. He found dozens of Baker’s stories about the Jennings investigations, all of them accompanied by similar accounts written by Tower and earlier by Lawlor. Twice he read one of Baker’s stories concerning the fact that only The Post reporters had ever claimed to actually see the district attorney’s report documenting the link between Quintana, Ramirez, and Jennings. The other papers were quoting The Post on the report.

  The lack of sleep the last forty-eight hours crept up on McCarthy. He nodded into that semiconscious state in which artists say creativity lurks. He wandered in a swirl of shadows and fog. And in the mist he caught sight of a tubby reporter given to flamboyant, bitchy statements. He ran after the ghost. LaFontaine faded and disappeared. A light in the fog now, pinpoint and red. The light moved. It glittered like a kid’s sparkler on the Fourth of July. It arced and left orange trailers in the air, faster and faster until at last they connected into a fiery circle that exploded into a ball of phosphorescent brilliance, like the flashbulb of an old news camera.

  McCarthy startled awake, rubbing his eyes. He looked about himself. He didn’t know whether to leap with joy or sob at what he now understood.

  McCarthy was home at dawn. He took his father’s trumpet from its stand near the fireplace, softly slid back the glass door to the back porch, and he and the dog went out. They walked down the old path through the avocado trees. The dew had thrown the tangy scent of sage and a mélange of cinnamon and thyme into the air.

  He crawled out onto the stone where his father used to play. Below he could see the vague outline of the home of the Oklahoma natural gas man. He thought about what he would be forced to do later in the day, felt tears again, then choked them down.

  He closed his eyes. He listened to sounds of the land waking up, sounds that went back as far as his boyhood. He pressed the trumpet to hi
s lips and blew. The music rolled sweet from the horn, one of his father’s favorites, old and yet new under the effort of his lips. The music floated away into the canyon, rolling off the rocks on the far side, echoing back to him like fresh gossip.

  The Ghost between the Lines …

  FIRST EDITION DEADLINE AT The Post was 7:00 P.M. McCarthy entered the newsroom at five minutes to five in the afternoon, just as the crescendo of the day’s work started to surge. The beat reporters hunched over their keyboards, telephones cradled in their necks, taking the final interviews, pounding out the copy. The line editors frantically examined the stories already in queue for instances of imbalance, incongruity, and editorial aside. And beyond the Glassholes, there on the other side of Broadway, he could make out the same rising energy at The Beacon.

  He knew he’d probably never witness it again from the same perspective and for a moment he was struck by a profound sadness. As flawed a world as it was, he’d given his life to it and loved it for just this time of day when the pace and pressure compressed, when the competition for story was at its peak, when he knew what others didn’t and he was about to spring it on the city.

  He shook the melancholy off. No allowances. No pity. Go for the jugular.

  McCarthy marched through the maze of desks like an avenging angel. Isabel Perez twirled by in an elegant navy dress. She stopped, made as if to interrogate him, then said. “Oh, who cares what you’re up to. Do what you want. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “No it doesn’t, does it,” McCarthy said.

  The Zombie stopped typing as he passed. The flaring orbs of the living dead followed his every move. Claudette X called out to him, asking if he could make a few calls on deadline. McCarthy shook his head and kept moving toward Lobotomy Lane.

  Ed Tower and Stanley Geld were having an argument about story placement inside Tower’s office. McCarthy made a mental note of Tower’s position as he strode past the open door to the easternmost glasshole, the floor of which was raised by two inches.