Obituary Writer (9780547691732)

by Shreve, Porter

  I never respond well to acts of kindness. I wish I could look a person in the eye in a way that says, What a decent gesture—one day I'll do the same for you or for someone else with you in mind, but invariably I'm embarrassed by the attention and go out of my way to avoid an encounter. Still, I was comforted to know that I had an in-house supporter.

  After starting and scrapping several longer messages, I managed to write back, through interoffice mail, "Dear Jessie Tennant, Thank you very much for your nice note. With gratitude, Gordon Hatch."

  I organized my advancers and slipped them into an envelope along with Jessie Tennant's note. I sealed the envelope, rotating it, feeling its impressive weight in my hands, and in black felt marker wrote,

  ADVANCERS

  September 13, 1988–October 5, 1989

  R. Nixon through J. DiMaggio

  and tucked the envelope in the pocket of my briefcase.

  I had forgotten about the photo of Arthur Whiting that Alicia had left for me at the security desk that first night she called. I took another look at it now—his small eyes, the sharp angles of his face. He did resemble his sister, Margaret, though the similarity had less to do with features than with a common edge, an intensity they seemed to share. The first time I had seen his photograph, he had reminded me of those daguerreotypes of Old West homesteaders. Tall, drawn, remote, even a bit lost. But now I saw a fervor in his eyes that I hadn't recognized before.

  I slipped the photograph back into the envelope, and as I did so, I could feel something else at the bottom of the package. I reached in to pull out a folded piece of paper. I assumed that it would be a pleasant note from Alicia, thanking me for placing her husband's obit, but as I opened it I saw a grid—one of Arthur's weekly schedules.

  Attached to the schedule was a yellow Post-it note. "Copy and send to Margaret." Someone, I assumed Alicia, had written it in a hasty print. Typed along the top of the spreadsheet was "Schedule for the Week of September 30 to October 6, 1989." It was partially filled out, through Wednesday, October 2. I got the chills thinking of Arthur at his computer working on this document not knowing that he would die the next day. I wondered if his own hand had touched this same piece of paper.

  Alicia had described these schedules well. Every half hour was accounted for. Monday night they had watched a video, On the Waterfront. Under the title of the film, Arthur had written, "Elia Kazan, director/ Marlon Brando, male lead/ Eva Marie Saint, female lead." He had gone to bed at 11:30 after reading Discovery magazine for half an hour. The next day at 7:30 A.M. he had returned the video before going to work. For lunch he had chili, for dinner that night pasta primavera, which he had cooked. Tuesday and Wednesday evenings he had "worked on the newsletter," but was no more specific than that. Peppered throughout the grid were trips to the park with the dog, daily one-hour sessions on a stationary bike followed by the NBC Nightly News, and long blocks, thoroughly notated, describing the work that he did at the bank—"Kinney IRA," "Walker account," "Promissory notes from NDSL."

  I added Arthur's grid to the other envelope along with my advancers and the note from Jessie Tennant, then went about my morning chores—reading the obits from Kansas City and the suburban weeklies, looking over the story budget, sifting through the mail, checking the fax machine and the AP wires, losing myself in the day's repetitions.

  When I returned from lunch, there was a message on my desk from Thea, left by one of the switchboard operators.

  "The flowers are beautiful. They just arrived. Thank you. Apology accepted."

  I immediately called my mother at the journalism school.

  "You're unbelievable," I said.

  "What?"

  "You're really beyond help." I hunched over the desk so I wouldn't be heard.

  "What did you send her?" I asked. "A dozen red roses? A note saying I'm sorry and I'll always love you? I wonder if you're ever going to quit."

  "Look, Gordie, don't give me that attitude."

  "What did you tell her?" I asked. "Where did you say I was?"

  "I'm the one who should be angry," she said. "Don't turn this on me."

  "I'm not turning it on you, but this is none of your business. She called me! It was our dinner date! I'm the one who needs to deal with this."

  "Listen, you made it my business by not showing up."

  My mother's voice had an annoyingly even pitch when we fought. The more excited I became, the calmer her voice. She spoke her words slowly, as if my poor comprehension required such care.

  "She called me because she was concerned about you," she said.

  "What about you? Why weren't you concerned about me?" I shot back, recognizing my mistake.

  "I knew you were home by ten because I called you twice," she said. "Your machine sounds different when the messages have been erased. Why weren't you picking up the phone, Gordie?"

  I had no answer.

  "So have you called her?" Her tone was nagging again.

  "I plan to call her, Mother. I've been incredibly busy."

  "What happened?"

  "I forgot, okay? It slipped my mind. I talked to her in the morning. Everything was all set. Around midday I had to go to St. Charles for an investigative piece I'm working on. I had an interview with a witness and totally lost track of time."

  "What's the story?" she asked.

  "I can't tell you right now. I'm at work."

  "I just wish you had called her when you got my message."

  Apparently, my mother had woken Thea at one in the morning to say that I was too ashamed to call but had just returned to the apartment from a surveillance mission. She said I had been tailing a certain high-level official in the city government who, I had reason to believe, was involved in money laundering, that I'd followed him in the car from his office to a warehouse on the other side of the river, watched him enter the place through a rusted-out door, and couldn't help myself from going in behind him.

  She said I had moved in his shadow along the corrugated walls of the warehouse, hiding behind some boxes next to an office with no door. A host of suspicious types emerged from the office, fanning out around the warehouse to stand guard. The meeting lasted from midday until well into the night and there was nothing I could do; I was stuck with no way out. The whole time I sat crouched behind those boxes, my life in danger, unable to make a sound, I had one eye on my watch thinking, "What will I ever tell Thea?"

  "I hated to lie, Gordie," my mother said. "But I had to tell her something."

  "Well, it was very imaginative," I said.

  Back at my apartment that night, I wanted to call Thea to apologize, but my mother had made that impossible. I should have been angry with her for meddling in my affairs as she always did, but this time I could only blame myself.

  My alarm clock was at exactly 9:00 when I sat up from the living room couch. I waited for the red numbers to read 9:01, then swung my legs around and got up to make myself dinner. Most nights when I made dinner for myself, my repertoire generally limited to prepackaged meals for one—Swedish meatballs, pepper steak, macaroni and cheese—I turned on my scanner and listened to the police channels with the soft hum of the microwave in the background.

  Not many obit writers have a need for a scanner, but toward the end of summer I had become obsessed with its macabre details, tuning in every night from dinner until bedtime. It was vicarious adventure, but thrilling all the same.

  When the homicide unit was called, I would feel a rush, imagine the scene—a police officer cordoning off the entrance to a run-down housing complex. "What's the victim's name?" I'd ask, and coolly display my Independent ID.

  The phone rang as I was pulling my Swedish meatballs out of the microwave.

  "What were you going to tell me this afternoon?" my mother asked.

  "About what?" I cut open one of the packages, sliding the noodles onto a plate.

  "About this story you're working on," she said.

  "It's nothing, Mother. Just a little human interest story. No b
ig deal."

  "That's not what you told me this afternoon," she said. "You implied you were on to something important."

  I cut open the meatballs, poured them over the noodles, distributed the gravy evenly with a fork.

  "Can't we talk about this when I'm further along with the investigation?" I said, filling a glass with milk. "It should be at least another couple of weeks. I'd rather we talk about it later."

  But she wouldn't let it alone. I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, and as I held the receiver away from my mouth and quietly chewed, she reminded me of how much more my father had achieved by this point in his career.

  "I realize it was a different time then," she said. "Newspapers have gotten very competitive, but it only took him eight months before his byline was everywhere."

  I slid my plate aside.

  "I know you have to pay your dues," she was saying. "But your father had a great instinct, and that's what put him above—"

  I cut her off. "To be honest, I'm trying to finish dinner here, so I didn't want to go too deeply into it, but since you're so anxious, I may as well tell you that this story I'm working on is beginning to look like a breakthrough."

  I told her that I'd been snooping around at City Hall and had found a source who was talking about some unaccounted-for campaign funds. "Let's just say that the mayor's brother has suddenly found himself rich," I said.

  My lie wasn't even original; the story came directly from a piece I'd seen in the Tennessean. The mayor of Nashville had set up a fund for his contractor brother, and millions of campaign dollars had ended up in a golfing development for country-and-western stars.

  "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone in the J-school," I said. "This has to stay quiet while I get more details."

  And that wasn't all. I told her that my name kept coming up for a beat job, that I'd been making inroads with police administration, that I was keeping sharp with hard news by showing up at crime scenes and assisting the cop reporters. "I look at Obits as a day job," I said.

  I wasn't sure what had gotten into me, and already I was feeling the metallic queasiness of guilt. First Thea and now the lies I had to tell. My mother used to know everything—we kept no secrets between us—but now with my career under way, separated by a hundred miles, I no longer needed her reminders.

  When we hung up, I waited for something to happen on the scanner's reports. Anything. That night I had to go to a crime scene.

  The call came around eleven o'clock: two cars needed at the riverbank north of downtown. One wounded for sure. I grabbed my ID on my way out of the apartment to the Gremlin, not bothering to wait for the next wave of information.

  I expected to find the victim along one of the cobbled lanes of Laclede's Landing, the bar and club district just north of the Gateway Arch. He'd be sitting up against one of the old-fashioned streetlamps holding his wounded arm and answering questions. Three policemen would have a suspect pinned against a nearby wall. The guy would be slurring something like, "He had it coming." And that would be that. My first crime scene.

  But the map didn't lead me to Laclede's Landing. It took me farther north, up Memorial Drive past the Adams Mark and the bars on Wharf Street, up the river along the eastern edges of The Ville, where Tina Turner had sung in the choir and Chuck Berry learned to duckwalk, where Annie Malone made her first million. It took me far from the city, down a dark street that dead-ended near the riverbank. I pulled the Gremlin up to the levee and turned off my headlights. Forty yards downriver, lit by a high three-quarter moon, stood a half-dozen figures circling a white bundle. From the car, it looked like a nativity scene.

  I got out, quietly shut the door, and took a few cautious steps forward. A police cruiser had pulled up ahead of me, cutting his lights, and an officer jumped out to join the huddle. Moving closer, I noticed that all of the figures were police officers. They stood around as if waiting for something, talking casually among themselves, laughing, shifting their heaviness from foot to foot.

  Off to the right, hidden by the long shadow of the McKinley Bridge, were three more figures, somber and removed, looking on in silence. I approached the first one, a big-bellied guy, glowering in his Army jacket and Budweiser cap. He had a permanent lean to the left.

  "I'm with the Independent," I said. "Can you tell me what happened here?"

  "You're what?" he spat.

  "I'm a reporter," I said, feeling my chest tighten. "I want to know what happened."

  His upper lip was curled over broken teeth.

  "I'm with the Independent," I repeated, taking a step backward, as if doing so would rewind and start the scene again, this time with me in charge, the way I had always imagined it.

  One of the men standing behind him stepped around and introduced himself. "Dr. Osborn." He held out his hand and smiled. "We've got a shooting victim. No suspects," he said. "The sheet's mine. I always keep a few in the trunk."

  "What branch of law enforcement are you with?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "No branch. But I come when they call."

  He was thickset and jowly and looked out of place in his yellow sweater and tartan pants. A pair of half-spectacles hung from his neck on a helical chain.

  "So, what did the victim look like?" I asked, thinking I'd need a physical description for my write-up.

  "Black male, late teens, same as always," he said, lowering his chin, holding my stare under his pale brow. "They shot him execution style, probably knocked him off his bicycle first. It's over there." He pointed up the levee beyond the white bundle where the bicycle lay on its side.

  It occurred to me that this was all my mother's fault, that she had driven me to coming here. How would she feel, I wondered, if she could see me alone in this place, with these treacherous people, the police joking about a dead body at their feet?

  "Who shot him?" I asked. A bloodstain in the shape of a kidney was spreading near the top of the white bundle.

  "Like I said, no suspects." Dr. Osborn shrugged.

  The third figure stepped up, mousy and squint-eyed. He said he had taken some pictures. "You're with the newspaper, right?" His voice was staccato. "You probably want what I got."

  I looked down at his crazy, matted hair, his rough face, as he lifted the camera off his neck.

  "See, I took pictures. You wanna see my work? I've got all kinds of pretty pictures. Here, look at this!" He shook his camera. "You want front page? I've got front page right here!"

  "Lucas is a photographer," Dr. Osborn said as the mousy man bent down, rifling through a gym bag.

  "Ah!" Lucas lofted a photo album in the air, then brought it over and shoved it at me.

  He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket and handed it to me. "My portfolio," he said, and took a little bow. "If you want names, I've got names for each one. Let me get my book."

  As he returned to the gym bag I brought the flashlight up to the smudged pages of his photo album. They were all shooting victims. Some dead, some alive, some covered with a sheet. Some were taken from a distance, some right up close.

  I shut the book, feeling lightheaded, and handed it over as he returned.

  "What do you want?" he said. "What do you need to know?"

  Before I could respond, there was a hand on my shoulder. "Hatch! What the hell are you doing here?"

  I sprang back and turned the flashlight on the Independents police reporter, Marshall Holman.

  "Didn't know you lived in The Ville." He laughed.

  I lowered the flashlight, handing it back to Lucas.

  "These dudes friends of yours?" Holman asked.

  He took my arm and led me closer to the huddle of police officers, who paid no attention to us. We stopped by one of the squad cars. "You know who those guys are, don't you?" He nodded back at Dr. Osborn and friends.

  "No."

  "They're ghouls. That's all they are. Sick mugs who get off on crime scenes."

  I looked over my shoulder. The one in the Budweiser hat was flipping through th
e photo album.

  "They sit around their apartments listening to the scanner," Holman went on. "When they hear 'homicide,' they crank up their jalopies and race to get to the crime scene first. Sometimes they even beat the police. Then it's Vincent Price Theater until the coroner comes."

  One of the police officers had gone over to look at the bicycle. I was beginning to feel nauseated.

  "Three ghouls is par for the course." Holman pulled a cellular phone from his windbreaker. "I've seen as many as eight at one time. The big one in the pants drives a Crown Victoria. He's got everything in there: scanner, a little TV, telephone. He goes to pretty much all of them."

  He punched some buttons on his cellular. Up close, in the moonlight, he looked much larger than I had remembered him from the newsroom, with a powerful neck that tensed when he spoke and a three-day beard that glistened.

  "This damn thing better work."

  "Trouble?" I asked.

  "It's the battery."

  I shrugged, thinking of other ways to change the subject.

  "So what are you doing here?" Holman asked.

  I looked up at the bridge, across the river to Illinois, and let the silence hang in the air for a moment. "A tipster called me," I said.

  "What do you mean, a tipster?" He put the phone to his ear.

  "It's confidential," I said. "Someone I've been working with. I'd love to tell you about it, but I can't."

  Holman put his hand up as the night editor's voice came over the receiver. "One second." He held the phone away from his mouth.

  I began to move back toward the Gremlin.

  "See you in the newsroom." I waved. He held up a finger to say hold on, but I was already walking briskly away.

  Back on the road to St. Louis, my fuel tank was nearly empty. I hadn't counted on going anywhere that night and had forgotten that I'd let it get so low. Rolling down the deserted streets of The Ville, I cursed my mother and the police and the city for not having more streetlights out here. I cursed the people hidden away in their darkened houses, the buildings and storefronts all locked and barred now, and the Gremlin for being an old car without a fuel light to assure me that I'd make it a few more miles.