by D. F. Bailey
※
“Finkleman, I need your help,” Finch said as he sat beside Gabe Finkleman at the window bar in the Starbucks on Fourth Street and Mission.
“You do?” Finkleman took a first sip of his mochaccino, then pinched his lips as if the drink was too hot.
“And this has got to be off-record for now. Wally doesn’t know about this. Not yet anyway.”
Finkleman hesitated and pushed his glasses along the bridge of his nose. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you unless you agree to keep it secret.” Finch understood the blind jeopardy this created. Nonetheless, it was the only disclosure he could provide right now.
“I think that’s called a Hobson’s choice.” Finkleman looked away, torn by his allegiance to his mentor or having to deny a favor.
Finch nodded. “I guess. You either take the option or walk away.”
They both drank from their cups and after a long moment Finkleman let out a sigh. “All right. What are we talking about?”
Following his summer internship at the eXpress, Gabe Finkleman finished his grad degree in journalism at Berkeley. After a few weeks of negotiation with the Parson brothers, Wally was able to swing a deal to bring Finkleman onto the staff as a part-time researcher. To make his case for more money, Wally convinced “The Brethren,” the staff nickname for the owners of Parson Media, that if the eXpress was going to turn a profit, it would have to pick a news niche and fully exploit it to the exclusion of all else.
After the successes that Will and Fiona had achieved in breaking open the murders and fraud in the Whitelaw case the previous year, Wally convinced The Brethren to steer the eXpress’s media positioning toward crime and corruption—and simultaneously drop sports, lifestyle, food, the arts and every other classic news beat. They knew it was a gamble but Wally and the Parsons understood that to survive another year, the eXpress had to distinguish itself from every other internet news outlet. Specialization was the strategy. A laser focus on crime and corruption provided the tactics. To do that they would need to make two adjustments.
One, reassign the current reporters, stringers, freelancers and interns to the crime and corruption beat. Those who accepted the new assignments would be trained by Fiona. Those who did not, would be shown the door.
Two, beef up the research capacity of the eXpress. Uncovering organized crime, government corruption and corporate fraud required behind-the-scenes, in-depth investigative reporting. So when The Brethren agreed to the changes, Wally’s first new hire was Gabe Finkleman.
Finch knew it was a smart move. Although Will wanted to quit crime reporting, he believed that the eXpress could make the shift. But they needed to move quickly. He hadn’t told Wally or Eve that he’d had enough. The crime beat was too grim, too dangerous, and bad for his mental health. Privately, he’d decided to see the eXpress move through the transition and give them six months to settle into their new groove with his support. Then he’d take his agent’s advice and try his hand at writing a second book.
Every time Finch came across Finkleman he had to smile. He liked the kid. Fresh-faced, toothy and whip-smart, he stood about six-four but couldn’t weigh more than one-forty. Like an unanchored Tower of Pisa, he walked with a sway that suggested he might topple over at any moment. More important, Finch knew he could trust Finkleman’s research skills. During his internship, he’d unearthed the corporate details about GIGcoin that allowed Finch and Fiona to break open the case against Senator Franklin Whitelaw. For that, Finch and Eve had rewarded Finkleman and his girlfriend (who was blessed with much more balanced proportions) to a five-course meal at the Ritz-Carlton.
Finch took another sip of his coffee and drew a copy of the list from his jacket pocket. “Twenty-four names on this list, see? I want to know who these people are right down to the color of their underwear. And I want to know what, if anything, they have in common.”
Finkleman took the sheet of paper in his hand and studied it. “You want to give me any hints?”
“No. I don’t want to bias you. And ignore the fact that my name is on the list. Research my connection just like everyone else.”
“So when do you need this?” Finkleman’s eyebrows notched into twin arcs. “You should know that I’ve got a lot on my plate. And I’m still just working mornings only.”
“Yeah. I understand.” Finch waved a hand. He’d lobbied Wally to give Finkleman a full-time position, but the managing editor couldn’t convince The Brethren. “Everyone’s carrying a double load. And until I can bring this to Wally, I know it can’t be your priority. Still, I’d like to see what you’ve dug up by next week.”
“What about Fiona. She know what this is about?”
He shook his head. “Just you, me and Eve.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.” Finkleman smiled with the look of a man who’s just been invited into an inner circle. One that he’d been hoping to join from the day he’d caught sight of it.
※
Later that afternoon Finch slipped on his sunglasses and tugged his sweatshirt hoodie over his head. When he felt suitably disguised, he returned to the Turk-Hyde Mini Park and sat on the green bench.
He had the park to himself and a moment to indulge in contemplation. The playground was barely larger than a standard backyard in suburban Hillsborough or Piedmont. Unlike those idyllic spaces, however, this was penned in on all four sides. It reminded him of the cage that surrounded Gilly at the Vincent Hotel.
Decades ago self-imprisonment had become a means of survival in the Tenderloin District, a forced choice in the dog-eat-dog world of the street creatures who inhabited the surrounding flophouses. The area frightened Finch, not with any imminent physical threat, but because of the shadows it cast against his future. As he watched a grizzled hobo pawing through the garbage bin across the street, he tried to imagine himself living here in twenty or thirty years. How do you survive in your fifties or sixties when all you have is a pair of cast-off shoes, a torn jacket from the local church, and maybe a pocket peppered with a few dimes and quarters? He didn’t see how the life he now lived could lead to such destitution, but the prospect haunted him with recurring premonitions. A shudder rolled through his shoulders and he forced his mind back to the problems at hand.
Over the years his intuition had been sharpened by experience and he learned to rely on his instincts when pursuing a lead, especially at the moment when the heat of the chase jumped to a full gallop. Then he would just gut it out, charge over the top and wrestle the beast to the ground. On other occasions, when all the threads to a story drifted in the wind, he constructed a systematic approach to his job. He’d set up a plan of attack, stick to it like a military operation, sift through the ruins and track down every clue. He knew that his current situation called for the second approach. For logic, patience and persistence. He had to wait out Mr. X, let him show his face. And then pounce.
He nodded to himself with a sense of self-assurance. He decided to patrol the area once a day for a week. If he couldn’t find anyone to identify Squire and Mr. X, then after seven days he’d give up the plan. Give up and wait for a new opening to appear.
※
As Finch studied the empty park from the interior of his car he began to doubt his instincts—and his plan. Every day over the past week he’d staked out the Hyde-Turk Mini Park, either from the interior of his RAV4 or from the wood bench inside the park. And each day he took ten or fifteen minutes to walk the sidewalks in the surrounding area. After a while he began to recognize a few of the locals, but whenever he approached them with the polaroid picture, no one would identify Toby or Mr. X.
Nonetheless he gained new sympathies for the citizens who sauntered past him or hunched on the street curbs or tried to stretch out in the narrow building doorways. Most seemed lost in a haze of booze or drugs, others inhabited a near-complete psychosis that left them babbling to themselves while others engaged in screaming matches with ghosts. At best he figured twenty percent of t
he people living in the Tenderloin District were in full possession of their faculties. Of those, the majority were immigrant women walking in twos and threes with a procession of children following them along the sidewalks. Only a few could respond to Will’s questions in English.
As he calculated these percentages he noticed a familiar face walking along Hyde Street pushing a stroller with one hand. In the other she nudged along a toddler who stooped to pick up a series of pebbles and toss them into the road.
“Come on now,” he heard her say. “Natty, those rocks ain’t for playing.”
He smiled. It was Alice Armani, the woman who’d surrendered Toby Squire’s jacket for ten dollars. She wore a white-on-black polkadot blouse and white shorts that bore a small coffee stain on the right leg. A pair of rose-tinted sunglasses covered her eyes. He watched her slip through the park gate and settle on the bench. When her son raced over to the slide, Finch approached her.
“Alice, good to see you again.” He smiled, an effort to disarm her automatic shrug. “Remember me?”
“No forgetting you, Mr. Will,” she said and adjusted the sunglasses on her face. “Made ten dollars for saving your jacket.”
“That’s right.” He paused a moment, surprised that she remembered his name. Then, unable to think of how to ease into a conversation about the polaroid picture, he decided to just press on and pulled it from his shirt pocket.
“Look, I’m having a hell of time trying to find anyone who knows this guy.” He presented the picture to her. “The one on the right.”
Alice lifted the sunglasses onto her forehead, studied the image for a moment then lowered the glasses back into place. “Yeah. I know him.”
“You do?” He sat at the far end of the bench and leaned toward her. “Do you know his name?”
“Sure I know his name. Rat Bastard.” Alice stared at Finch through the glasses and then turned to watch two boys enter the park with another woman. The children ran a loop around the perimeter before stopping at the slide to watch Natty heave off and drop to the ground.
“Natty you play with them nice now, understand?”
Finch tried to draw her attention with an earnest look. It was difficult trying to communicate with her while the shades covered her eyes. “Rat bastard? So who is this guy?”
“The one who hurt Fay so bad. And her little girl, Teejay. One day the two of them just disappeared. I never seen them again. Not ever.”
“Who’s Fay?”
“Fay Flood. I used to know them when we all lived in Emeryville. Her and Teejay. Raymond would come round every few days to torment them.”
“Raymond who?”
“Raymond Guzman.” Alice rolled her lips into an angry sneer and jabbed a finger at the photograph. “Teejay’s father. But Fay never did marry him. Said he was poison. Then they disappeared from Emeryville and two years later Natty and I had to move over here and wouldn’t you know it? I start seeing him around Turk Street. Rat bastard.”
“So you’re saying this man is named Raymond Guzman.”
“None other.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“In the sewer, I guess.” She spat on the ground.
“What about the other man?” He pointed to Toby Squire. “You know his name?”
“No. But I seen him, too. Sometimes sitting right here.”
He sensed she was growing weary of his questions and he didn’t want her to brush him off before he learned all he could.
“You see them together a lot?”
“Half the time maybe. Look, why all these questions? What’s he done now?”
“You remember that jacket?”
Finally she let out a half smile. Barely a grin. “All ten dollars’ worth.”
“Well, I’m trying to find him. I think he might know where that jacket came from.”
She lowered her head and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “So that wasn’t your friend’s jacket after all.”
“No,” he confessed.
She shook her head and gave him a look of disgust. “Mister, ten dollars or not, you’re just like all the rest.”
He thought of asking what exactly she meant, then the implication dawned on him. He was just another liar trying to justify his means by his ends. And she’d known far too many double-talkers to give him another thought. Still, he had to press her.
“Alice, is there anything else you can tell me about Guzman?”
“I prob’ly told you too much already.” She scoffed and looked away. When she spotted her son at the gate she called out to him. “All right, Natty, time to go.”
Will watched her pull herself off the bench. “Thanks,” he called out to her.
As she walked toward the gate she waved the back of her hand at him as if she were swatting away a pesky fly. It was then he noticed her missing fingers, the third and fourth fingers of her right hand severed at the second joints. He’d forgotten about the injury. He wondered what had happened—what trauma or accident had struck her? As she sauntered through the gate and out of his sight, he realized this was one more mystery he would never unravel.
※ — EIGHT — ※
WHEN FINCH RETURNED to his desk in at the eXpress on Monday morning he found three voice messages waiting for him. One from his agent with a rambling apology that ended on an upbeat note: “Sorry Will, but Netflix has nixed my pitch to produce Who Shot the Sheriff. Let Nix-flix go, I say, ‘cause guess what? HBO is ringing my phone off the hook. They want it. And they want it bad. Seriously, they are creaming themselves over this.”
The second message came from Fiona Page asking if he’d give her ten minutes to help sort out the new “mandate shift.”
The third message was from Gilly. “Mr. Finch, Gilly here. Just following up on the podcast idea. If you’re honestly interested, then we can record a session tonight. The studio’s in the basement of the Vincent. My shift at the reception desk finishes at 7.00. Meet me there at 7.30. In case you’re wondering, the topic is always the same: living large in the T-loin. In your case we’ll talk about how the media sees us. Call me if you want to green light this.”
Before he could respond to Gilly, Fiona peered over the top of the office partition into his pod.
“You’re here,” she announced with a hint of surprise. She rounded the corner and crooked her thumb back to her desk. “I didn’t notice you come in.”
“No? I saw you talking to Wally.” He arched a brow. “Looked important.”
“Yeah. It is I guess.”
She propped herself on his guest chair and ran a hand through her shoulder-length hair. Despite her continuing addiction to lipgloss everything about her look had become more natural over the past six months. No hair dye, no eyeshadow, pastel cotton blouses and twill pants, clear varnish on her nails. And her demeanor was more calm, more at peace with herself. Everyone in the office respected her for the way she’d emerged from her abduction by Justin Whitelaw last year. She appeared stronger, tougher, more compassionate. The new, improved Fiona.
“So what do you mean by ‘mandate shift’?” Will tipped his chin to his phone. “I didn’t quite understand your message.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Parson brothers and Wally have been talking about a new approach.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and she pointed to the other writers in the bog. “Moving the eXpress to focus exclusively on criminal and corporate corruption. No more sports, arts, food, lifestyle. No more celebrity dramas.”
He smiled at this, their common disdain for the lives of the rich and famous. “Yeah. Eve told me something about this.” In fact, he knew all about it, but he didn’t let on.
“Eve’s in on this?”
“Maybe. She’s not sure yet.” He felt constrained. He didn’t want to reveal too much about The Brethren courting Eve. “Anyway, you think we can do it and make payroll every month?”
She glanced away to consider this, the one question at the heart of every struggling newsroom in
the world. “Maybe. Look what we did with the Whitelaw scandals. For the first time the eXpress broke a major story. You and I did that.”
“We did.” But he knew he never wanted to do anything like it again.
After a pause, Fiona continued. “Look, I don’t know how to say this. I think you might be offended somehow.”
“What?”
“That I’m jumping rank.”
He shrugged. “What are you saying?”
“Wally talked to me about re-orienting the other writers. You know, turning them from sports writers and film critics into investigative journalists. I told him you should be the one to do it.”
He laughed and waved a hand. “Nonsense. I’d be terrible, and we both know it. I’m a lone wolf, not a shepherd.”
She laughed too. “True enough. You’d start gnawing on their shanks before they’d had a chance to sharpen their pencils.”
He smiled, happy that they were comfortable enough to talk this way, trusting one another. He only had that with Wally and Eve. And maybe Finkleman. His inner circle.
“Do it,” he concluded. “Once they realize they have to adapt or die, they’ll adapt. Besides, they’re all smart and they know how to dig a story out of the swampland. And every one of them can write three thousand words a day without breaking a sweat.”
“All right,” she said and stood up. “I’ll do it. But I’m going to lean on you. You know that, right?”
His desk phone rang.
He ignored it. “What’s that song?” He began to sing: “All you have to do is call.”
“Carole King. You've Got A Friend.”
The phone buzzed again.
“That’s it. You’ve got a friend,” he said to her and picked up the handset on the third ring.
As Fiona walked back to her pod, Gabe Finkleman whispered into his ear: “Okay, I’ve got it. But you’re not going to be happy.”