Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  Upstairs, where men had dominated the news pages throughout the Blight’s history, the women’s bathroom was an afterthought, a cramped, windowless room carved from a corner of the original men’s room, barely large enough for two stalls. But this bathroom near the former Woman’s Page was a two-room suite suitable for an attack of the vapors. The lounge had a long sofa and two upholstered chairs. It even had a vending machine, stocked with sanitary napkins and pantyhose in formidably large sizes. The dispenser, dusty and dented, didn’t look as if it had been restocked since the late 1960s, about the same time the Blight had stopped discriminating against black and Jewish brides on the wedding page. Tess took her place on a banana-yellow vinyl chair and waited.

  At precisely 10:30, Colleen walked in, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag before the door swung shut behind her.

  “It’s against the law to smoke in Maryland offices,” Tess said helpfully.

  “If you have a problem with cigarette smoke you can leave. In fact, you can leave even if you don’t have a problem with cigarette smoke.”

  Jack Sterling came through the swinging door and did a not-bad job of feigning surprise to see Tess there.

  “Given that Miss Monaghan was to be the subject of our discussion here, don’t you think she should stay?” he asked. Very cool, Tess thought.

  “No, I don’t. I think she should go to her desk, clean it out, and get the fuck out of here. We don’t need her. We never needed her. This weekend’s story makes the first one look like a goddamn puff piece. Who cares any more how it got in the paper? It led to the second story, which is even better.”

  “What if—and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here—what if his widow still tries to sue?”

  “Let her. You can’t libel the dead. Besides, we didn’t libel anyone. Wink’s suicide proves we don’t know how much shit he had to hide. This is a goddamn fucking purple orgasm of a story, and it gets better every day.”

  “A little self-examination won’t keep us from nailing the story, Colleen,” Sterling said.

  “It won’t get us jack shit.”

  “What are you so scared of? That Tess’s investigation will lead us straight to your protégé, Rosita?”

  Tess sat on the sofa, feeling as if she were watching her parents bicker. Jack Sterling and Colleen Reganhart had an odd chemistry. It wasn’t sexual, not like one of those television romances where hate turns to a clinch in mid-quarrel. This tension was the kind one expected from romantic rivals or siblings. And the object of their affection was the Beacon-Light, as embodied by Lionel Mabry, dear old dad.

  “We all have our protégés,” Colleen told Sterling, exhaling smoke aggressively into his face. He didn’t flinch or cough. “We hired Miss Monaghan because Lionel’s would-be-proté, Whitney Talbot, talked him into it. But that was last week, when Wink was alive and Five-Four couldn’t eat at the Center Club without someone waggling a finger in his face for screwing up the basketball deal. Now we look brilliant and Five-Four can pretend a great enthusiasm for the fourth estate. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Lionel’s not. And neither am I. We got lucky. It doesn’t change the fact that tampering with Page One isn’t something to be taken lightly, and the use of unnamed sources on this story has been far too liberal. Wink Wynkowski died without knowing the names of his accusers. Do you think that’s right?”

  “The bottom line is cash: this investigator’s salary comes out of my budget—our budget, Sterling, the newsroom’s budget—and it’s a waste of money.”

  Tess was tired of being discussed in the third person. Sterling hadn’t tipped her off about this meeting for her to sit here meekly.

  “Paying me is not a waste of money, Colleen.” The name felt strange in her mouth, but Miss Reganhart, for a woman not even ten years her senior, would have seemed stranger still. “Besides, it’s not something you can renege on. This morning, I checked with my boss, Tyner Gray, and he confirmed he had inserted language to that effect into our contract. You can play me or trade me, but you still have to pay me. Colleen. For at least two weeks’ work.”

  Reganhart looked stunned, a poker player who had plopped down a straight only to be confronted with a flush. Spike always said arrogance was the worst thing you could bring to a wager. “Math don’t play favorites” was how he put it.

  “So you have a contract, too. And the union has its contract,” Colleen said at last. “Me, I can be fired at Lionel’s whim. If he can’t get the tee time he wants, or the counterman in the company cafeteria forgets to put his salad dressing on the side, I’m outta here. Whatever happened to the idea of a meritocracy? Whatever happened to people doing their jobs without counting on all these…gimmicks?”

  “A contract’s not a gimmick. And the problem with meritocracies is they assume one or two individuals have any clue about what merit is, uncolored by their own biases.”

  Reganhart slumped on the orange plastic sofa. She was neither as tall nor as large-boned as Tess had first thought. Unlike most women, she dressed to maximize her size—four-inch heels, seriously big hair, oversized and out-of-fashion shoulder pads tucked into her pea-green wool jacket. On the losing side of a battle, she seemed to shrink, like a Persian cat caught in a rainstorm.

  “Assuming that you’re telling the truth about your contract—and you can bet your ass I will check—then you can go ahead as planned.” She turned to Sterling. “Now I’m actually going to use this room for its intended purpose. Could you give us girls a little privacy?”

  As soon as he left, Colleen fixed a hard, blue stare on Tess.

  “Your contract also stipulates thirty hours of work a week. I want you here six hours a day, Monday through Friday. And you’re to check in and out with my secretary. If we pay you to work here, you work here.”

  “No problem.”

  “The problem will be how to fill your days. You see, I’ve just decided I don’t want union representatives sitting in on your interviews with staff. The union will, of course, file a grievance over my decision. I’ll fight it. I’ll take it to arbitration. I’ll take it to the fucking Supreme Court. And we’ll end up putting the whole investigation on hold until the matter can be resolved, which should be well after your contract expires. So go ahead, collect your paycheck. Doing nothing is the hardest work you’ll ever do. If you don’t believe me, I can refer you to some reporters I’ve put in the same position. In the end, they all quit.”

  “This isn’t about money,” Tess said. “What’s your problem with me?”

  “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any friend of Whitney Talbot’s. Jack Sterling’s gunning for my job and she thinks she’ll get his job if he forces me out.”

  “Whitney doesn’t want to be an editor. She wants to go to Tokyo.”

  “I’m sure Whitney would be willing to forgo three years in Japan if she could become a deputy managing editor before she turns thirty. You may know your friend; I know ambition. How do you think I went from city editor in Wilmington, Delaware, to managing editor here in just five years?”

  Reganhart dropped her cigarette to the floor and crushed it beneath her pump. Deprived of a prop, her hands flopped nervously at her sides, and she quickly lit another Merit. Tess had a hunch the managing editor was a collection of barely controlled tics—a reformed fingernail biter, a hair twister, a scab picker, an earring fiddler. Chain smoking probably kept her from tearing herself to bits.

  Before Tess could make her exit, an excited Marvin Hailey pushed his way into the room, followed by Jack Sterling.

  “We’ve got a good murder in Northwest,” Hailey panted. “Really juicy. Two carjackers tried to take a minivan from an Orthodox Jewish mother with seven kids. She put up a fight and they shot her, right in front of the kids. The kids were so freaked they wouldn’t get out of the van, so the carjackers left on foot, heading over to a fast food place on Reisterstown Road for fried egg sandwiches. Cops arrested them while they were still on line. One of the photographers heard the call on
the radio and managed to get to the scene before the police. Great stuff. Amazing. But we need to decide how to make it big, how to tell people something tomorrow they won’t see on the television news tonight. TV is all over this.”

  “There are no good murders.” Sterling’s voice was gentle in its reproof. “But Marv’s right, we do need to throw a lot of bodies at this. Our readers will expect the definitive version from us, something more than what they’ll get on TV tonight.”

  “I assume the art department is already working on a map—where it happened, where the guys were caught.” Colleen dropped her fresh cigarette and rubbed her palms together, as if the story were a rich meal or a pile of money set before her. “I want Bunky Fontaine on the community angle, rounding up the usual rabbis. And isn’t Northwest the police district where the community was bitching about the decision to suspend foot patrols?”

  She rushed from the room, Hailey hard on her heels like a happy puppy. Sterling followed, moving more slowly, but still following. Whatever their personal differences, Colleen and Jack could work as a team when the situation demanded it.

  “A good murder,” Hailey had said, and to Tess’s sorrow, she knew exactly what he meant. In her own newspaper days, she had done a brief rotation on the night rewrite desk. There, at a safe remove from victims and grieving relatives, one quickly learned that value system. Good murders, great murders, wonderful murders, all determined on a sliding scale of hometown, money, race, body count, and celebrity.

  “We’ve got a good one.” How many times had she said the same thing? How many times had her fingers flown with delight over the details of someone’s final moments on earth? It was small consolation to remind herself that Colleen was the one who had called Wink’s death the ultimate orgasm, a climax powerful enough to bring an entire newsroom to a collective shudder.

  Chapter 12

  Whitney was waiting in Tess’s bare bones office when she returned from the ladies’ room. Sitting in Tess’s chair, scrolling through files in Tess’s computer. Tess had nothing to hide, but still.

  “So did Reganheartless try to shut you down?” Whitney asked, without lifting her eyes from the computer screen.

  “She did shut me down. I’m still getting paid, but she’s arranged it so I won’t be able to talk to anyone on staff. Yet if I don’t put in my hours, she’ll say I’ve breached the contract and stop payment. I’m fucked. I have to come in here every day and sit at this desk doing nothing.”

  Whitney tapped a few keys and Tess heard a modem’s rasping beeps and gurgles. She hadn’t known the Blight’s computer was equipped with one.

  “Didn’t Dorie tell you about the on-line capabilities built into the system here?”

  “You mean the electronic library? I tried to use it over the weekend, but it’s a fussy little program. Make one mistake and you have to start all over. The court files aren’t much easier to use.”

  “Yeah, well, Marvin Hailey had a hand in designing our computer network, so that’s to be expected. It’s as jumpy as he is. But there are other things on the computer, too. Nexis, MVA records, Autotrack.”

  “I know about the first two. What’s the last one?”

  “A little program that allows you to find all sorts of stuff. Social Security numbers, past addresses, mortgage histories, current and former neighbors. Might be interesting to put Rosita through it.”

  “And Feeney.”

  “You know where Feeney has been the last twenty years of his life. And you know where he was that night.” It was hard, to hear one friend’s lie in another friend’s mouth, as casual and uncontested as a passing comment on the weather. Why had Feeney told Whitney he and Tess were together that night? Now it was Tess’s lie, too, and it was too late to disown it. “Rosita’s the mystery woman.”

  “Not so mysterious. I talked to her over the weekend. Pretty routine résumé—last job was in San Antonio, she’s from Boston, wants to move back there. No husband, no boyfriend.”

  Whitney picked up the receiver and held it out toward Tess. “You don’t need Colleen’s permission to dial long-distance. Just an access code and I’ll give you that: five-four. Sheer coincidence, I assure you, nothing to do with our beloved publisher. What’s the paper in San Antonio, the Eagle? No harm in checking out Rosita’s reputation down there.”

  Tess took the phone and placed it back in its cradle. “You got me the job, Whitney. Now let me do it. My way.”

  Unlike most blunt people, who tend to be extremely tender about their own feelings, Whitney was nearly uninsultable “Okay. Just trying to be helpful. I’d ask you to lunch, but I have a squash date with Sterling, assuming it hasn’t been overtaken by recent events.”

  Perhaps Colleen Reganhart wasn’t so paranoid after all. Tess was surprised to feel a little stab of jealousy on her own behalf. “Lobbying for Japan? Or something bigger?”

  “Japan is big enough. For now. And yes, I’m working all the angles. Luckily, Sterling is a better player than I am, when he isn’t having problems with his back, or his carpal tunnel. It’s hard to throw games without being too obvious about it.”

  Tess waited about five seconds after Whitney left, then pulled out the phone book and looked up the area code for San Antonio.

  Newspaper bureaucracies are as byzantine and hierarchical as any government office. It took Tess almost an hour to find a San Antonio editor who would talk to her about Rosita Ruiz. Rosita’s supervisor, the sports editor, seemed the obvious choice, but he referred her to the managing editor’s office, where she learned the assistant managing editor for administration handled all such queries. It turned out this editor had an assistant who oversaw the two-year intern program, in which Rosita had been employed, and only he could serve as her reference.

  “Edward Saldivar.” His was a soft, young-sounding voice with a slight accent, one Saldivar seemed to try and minimize, anglicizing his first name as much as possible. Quite the opposite of Rosita, hitting her consonants with hurricane force.

  “My name is Tess Monaghan and I’m checking Rosita Ruiz’s references. She listed you as the contact there.”

  “Ah.” When stalling for time, Saldivar made a singing sound, as if he were warming up his vocal cords for a chorale performance. “Our policy is to confirm the position an individual held here, and verify dates of employment, no more, no less.”

  “That’s not exactly a reference.”

  “Ah.” A little higher this time. “I see your point. But recent litigation by, uh, disgruntled workers, suggests companies should adopt uniform policies, lest they be accused of slander. Unfortunate, but that’s the way everything is going today. Besides, Rosita left here more than six months ago, for a job at the paper up in Baltimore. Why don’t you call them?”

  “I’m calling for them, from their offices. Did you provide a reference then?”

  “I don’t recall being asked, and I don’t know if someone else was contacted. But whoever was called would have given only the dates of employment. That’s our—”

  “Your policy. Yes, I understand, Mr. Saldivar. But Rosita has the job and she knows I’m calling you.” A harmless lie. “Surely you should be able to speak freely about her work at the Eagle. She covered minor league baseball, right?”

  “She worked here for nineteen months, leaving last October to join the Baltimore Beacon-Light.”

  “I thought she had a two-year internship. Why did it end in nineteen months?”

  “It’s not unusual for our two-year interns to leave for permanent positions at other papers before their terms are up. Rosita Ruiz resigned on October first after securing a job at the Beacon-Light, a larger paper that could afford to pay her much more. We were very happy for her. Good day, Miss Monaghan.” Saldivar was not the type who would slam a phone down to end a conversation. No, he slipped the receiver back into place, almost as if he regretted breaking the connection. That was something she could learn from Saldivar, Tess decided, without the benefit of a two-year internship: Good m
anners are a great way to be rude.

  It was almost 7 when Tess left the Blight, a lonely time in that forsaken neighborhood, especially on a rainy March night. Her shoulders ached, as did her neck, and she had a splitting headache. Doing nothing was hard work, and she had done little more than play solitaire with the computer after running into the dead-end known as Ed Saldivar. Out of sheer perversity, Tess had stayed even later than Colleen Reganhart had specified, forgetting she would have to walk back to Tyner’s to get her car. On top of everything else, the Blight had forgotten to provide her a parking place, and the Nazi who supervised the lot had told her the visitor spaces couldn’t be used by an employee, even one as tenuous as she.

  Head down against the wet wind, Tess shuffled along the sad, deserted blocks of Lexington, bricked in during the 1970s, when downtown “malls” were thought to be the secret to urban renewal. There were still stores here, discount chains and cheap clothing boutiques, but they closed along with the state offices at 5 P.M. Even the Nut House was shuttered, much to Tess’s disappointment. A handful of pistachios would have made a big difference in the quality of her life just then.

  She was crossing Park Avenue when she noticed a long, brown-colored car with bits of salmon paint peeking through. It made a sudden U-turn on the one-way street, fishtailed to a stop with a great squealing of brakes, then made another U and headed back in the right direction. Downtown Baltimore, with its warren of one-way streets, often had that effect on out-of-town drivers.

  Two blocks later, as Tess turned north on St. Paul, the same car passed her again, heading south. Again the brakes whined and the car almost spun out on the slick road. But even at this hour, one-way St. Paul was too busy for the car to dare going the wrong way. She watched it turn left at the next side street, suddenly overtaken by a sinking sensation that these might be her hospital-bound buddies, in another untraceable vehicle.