"You're wrong about her," Margaret said. "It's okay to set the past aside for a time, but you can't discard it. You can't just pick up, clean the slate, and become someone else." I heard somebody whispering in the background. "I'll just be another minute," Margaret told the person, then got back on the phone. "Maybe I neglected to tell you about my brother's will."
"He had a will?" It seemed unusual that anyone would have a will at forty-three, without any children.
"We wrote up our wills while we were living at the house on Dalecarlia, before Alicia," Margaret explained. "Our family has a terrible history of heart disease. Both of our parents had heart attacks, and my father died of one, so we did it just to be sure.
"It had nothing to do with money," she said after a moment. "Neither of us had much anyway. The wills were just part of our bond, a way of ensuring that each of our lives mattered and would continue to matter if something were to happen. We were especially concerned about Joe's livelihood if one of us were gone."
I sensed where this story was heading. "So when Arthur married Alicia, he changed his will."
"Of course. Alicia had complete control over him almost immediately, and he signed everything over to her. The dogs, his share of the Winfield farm, the house, all of its contents. And now she's just getting rid of it all, piece by piece, as fast as she can."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ritger making his way toward the desk. His jaw was wired shut. His face was deep vermilion. I got off the phone quickly.
He took a reporter's notebook from the inside pocket of his tailored suit and, standing over me, scratched out a message, the pen nearly ripping the paper as he wrote.
The company does not pay for your personal business!
"What do you mean?" I asked.
A call to Texas at 11:30 A.M. None of our stiffs has relatives there. I checked the log.
I didn't know what to say. I wasn't aware of a company policy regarding long-distance calls. Reporters were free to make them, I assumed, so long as it was for a story. Mine could have been for a story.
How had he found out, I wondered. He reached over and hit the redial button.
"Who ish dish?" he spat through his metalwork, the veins in his neck standing out like snakes.
"What shitty ish dish?" he asked.
Slamming down the phone, he wrote me a note:
Fucking Ohio!
Someone other than Margaret had obviously picked up, and now I was in trouble. Ritger stormed away.
I did my best to look busy for the rest of the afternoon. I scraped together the day's obituaries, ran around the newsroom with a determined look, appearing as though routine tasks were thrilling. During the six-thirty meeting, I cleaned up some files that I hadn't touched in months, dusted around the desk, replenished our stock of dummy sheets, legal paper, notebooks, and pens. After the meeting was over and the newsroom had begun to empty of daysiders, I signed on to the computer one last time.
"I've spoken with Dick," read a message from St. John. "Keep this up and your job is more than on the line."
It was seven, now dark, when I arrived home. The painters had finished Alicia's house over the weekend, and she had moved back to St. Charles in the morning. We had decided for the first time since getting together three weeks ago to spend a night on our own. After four days in my cramped apartment we had both become tense.
It felt strange eating dinner alone. I pictured Alicia in the photograph, sunken and pale, thought of what Margaret had said about the will and how Alicia was thoughtlessly discarding the past, and I realized how much easier life had been before I'd cared about knowing the truth.
Already I missed her. I wanted to call, but we'd agreed that morning that I'd see her tomorrow. By nine o'clock, though, I couldn't stand the thought of sleeping alone, and flipped on the scanner. At half past, a female voice came across the airwaves:
"Units be advised. All I have is two gunmen running down Delmar Boulevard."
I quickly switched the station, picking up a male voice a fraction down the dial:
"I have a confirmed shooting at the 1600 block of Shepard Drive."
I called Alicia.
"Are you ready?" I asked.
She sounded tired.
"We have a crime scene. I'll meet you there."
"You what?"
"A crime scene," I said. "You wanted to go. We've got a good one."
"Really?" She seemed to come to life. "Where is it?"
On my way out to the car, I realized that she was a half-hour drive away and didn't know the city too well. But she'd find it; of that I was confident.
17
AT SIXTEENTH AND SHEPARD, everyone was gone. It had taken me twenty-five minutes to get there, and now all was quiet, just a strip of yellow police tape crossing off the entrance to a corner store.
I parked in front of Lucky 7 Liquors and waited for Alicia, feeling stupid that I hadn't brought the scanner so I could find another crime scene. I turned on the radio on the off chance that something up to the minute might come over the all-news AM station, then a car pulled up, a gold Crown Victoria that glowed chariot-like on the dilapidated street.
The driver rolled his window down. I didn't recognize him at first. He wore a tam-o'-shanter too small for his head and was smoking a long cigar. Three scanners were cranked up loud.
"Are you out buffing?" he asked, taking off the hat and tossing it on the passenger seat.
It was Dr. Osborn, one of the ghouls.
"You know, scanner buffing, looking for crime scenes, trying to make a buck on the side."
"I'm with the Independent," I reminded him.
"I don't understand buffers," he said. "You're too busy working to appreciate the drama. You lose your feel for the human condition."
I looked down the street, hoping to see Alicia's Delta 88, but there was no sign of her.
Dr. Osborn turned up one of the scanners: "Units be advised. I have a shooting at the 2300 block of Cole Street. Second call."
"How did I miss that?" Osborn began rolling up his window.
"Wait a minute," I yelled at him. "Can I come with you?"
He waved me over, and I wrote a quick note to Alicia with directions to Cole Street, nine blocks away, and left it on the Gremlin's windshield.
When we rolled up to the crime scene, a tight cluster of flashing red lights, some of the crowd walked toward Osborn's car.
"They think we're undercover," he explained. "It's the Crown Vic. It gets them every time." When we parked in an alley and headed for the whop, whop of an arriving ambulance, Marshall Holman emerged from the crowd, too quickly for me to hide. For a second I thought I might sneak by, but then he caught a glimpse of me just as we were passing and twisted back around, grabbing my arm.
"Hatch!" He seemed far more happy to see me than I ever would have guessed. "It's about time!"
He sounded as if he had been expecting me.
"Your girl is a trip." He laughed. "I better watch out or she'll take my job. What's her name again?"
I had no idea what he was talking about. "What?"
"Your girl, whatshername, the budding journalist?" He was amused by how confounded I looked.
"Alicia?" I asked.
"That's it! Alicia. Hold on to her!" He smiled and walked away.
Dr. Osborn was tugging at my sleeve, leading me into the heat of the crime scene. The ambulance had stopped. A teenage boy was lying on a stretcher surrounded by paramedics. He was still alive, moaning, having been shot in the chest. The photographer, the little man with wild matted hair, jumped in and began taking pictures.
"Look at Lucas," Osborn said. "Right in there! Every time!"
A police officer walked up to Lucas and gently took his arm, saying, "Okay, that's enough," and pulled him away from the tight circle that had formed.
Lucas seemed satisfied, shooting off a few more frames as he backed away, bumping into Dr. Osborn.
"Did you see? Did you see?" he asked. "I'm the only on
e. No other stills around."
Osborn introduced me to Lucas, who didn't remember me. "He's with the Independent. That'll save you a phone call."
I told Lucas thanks but no thanks, that I didn't make those kinds of decisions. I gave him the number of the night city editor, whose name he already knew, whom he no doubt harassed on a regular basis.
As the paramedics lifted the teenager into the ambulance, someone laughed from across the circle. The crowd filled the space where the stretcher had been, and that's when I spotted Alicia. She was talking to a policeman who was smiling at something she'd said.
"Gordie!" She caught my eye. "You were here all the time!"
The doors of the ambulance closed, the whop, whop beginning again. The crowd parted as the ambulance crawled forward. Alicia put her arm around my waist, leading me away from Dr. Osborn and the rest of the group, half a block up to a church, where we sat on the steps.
"You wanted me to be on my own, didn't you?" she asked. Her face was lit up like a child's, glowing from the heat of the crowd. She was thrilled, intoxicated by the whole experience, looking at me as if I owned the night and had given her a part of it.
"What happened?" I asked.
She told me she had arrived at the liquor store as everyone was leaving and the yellow tape was going up. I had forgotten how fast she drove; she'd probably beaten me by a good ten minutes. Lucas had been there and another ghoul with a scanner and they had tipped her off to the shooting on Cole. She had left straightaway, arriving before the police did. By the time Holman showed up, she already had the whole story. She knew he was with the Independent by his ID, so she had taken him aside and briefed him, every detail confirmed when he checked with the officers.
Most amazing was how much the police had told her. They said the shooting was gang-related, that it was a payback all the way, that they knew the kid—he was a multiple felon. There were two likely suspects: a cousin of his girlfriend, from a rival gang, and another kid called Smoot. They told her the names of the gangs involved, said it started with a turf war on another side of town. They gave her more for a small police story than any reporter could have hoped for.
"You were watching me, weren't you?" she asked with a sly smile.
And I went along with it, because that's how it was with Alicia; that's what she wanted.
"You did great."
She was exhilarated. She couldn't stop talking. "Did you see all the blood? It was unbelievable, like his heart had blown up."
She described the teenager in detail, the sounds he was making, the gurgle in his chest, the way his eyes rolled back, the sparkle of his diamond earring, his white shirt painted red, the blood, until finally I interrupted, "I was there. I saw it. I know what you mean."
"My daddy owned guns," Alicia said, as if an afterthought, and for a moment I remembered Texas.
The Delta 88 was parked nearby, and when she turned to me, her eyes wide and grateful, I had the sense that I held the power, that despite her newfound success, I was in charge.
"I think that's enough for one night," I said. "Let's get a beer."
I was caught in a role, waiting to see how this drama would play itself out.
Blueberry Hill was a crowded bar in the middle of the U City loop, with photos and memorabilia from the seminal artists of rock and roll. They had Chuck Berry's guitar and Muddy Waters's harmonica, LPs signed by Fats Domino, every wall covered with the conks and pompadours of 1950s idols. Alicia found a booth near the window while I got a pitcher of Budweiser.
"Crime reporting isn't so hard," she was saying. "I'm catching on fast."
I drank the beer quickly.
"Where do you think they'll put the story?" she asked.
I told her Metro, [>], if anywhere. "Someone gets shot every day. You only make the paper if you die."
We talked about what makes a story a story, how the better part of the daily is already reserved, for politics and business, for local interests, for national and foreign news dragged off the wires, for sections like Obituaries that follow the ebb and flow, how there's only so much space each day for fires and car wrecks and homicides, things that come up unexpectedly.
"Gang shootings happen all the time," I explained. "Like anything, it's how rare something is that makes it a story."
I ordered another pitcher. Alicia had stopped drinking.
I talked about the country's increasing obsession with grisly news, its appetite for shock and psychopathology, and gave her an example from that morning where a housewife in Arizona went crazy, thinking her children were possessed by the devil. She shot them one by one as they got off the school bus.
"That story made national news. Front page, because she was a woman."
"Why?" Alicia asked.
"Because women don't kill," I said. "When a woman kills, it's big news every time."
When the late news came on, we moved up to the bar to watch Channel 8. Alicia was fixated on the television. I drank another beer. The news anchors looked blurry.
After sports and the weather, they cut to the shooting on Cole Street. Alicia grabbed my shoulder. "There I am, that's me." The teenager was being lifted into the ambulance.
"Did you see me?" she asked, as Channel 8 cut to a fire in East St. Louis.
"You were great," I said.
On the Inner Belt Expressway, Alicia was driving far too fast on mostly empty road. She was switching lanes, something she liked to do even when she wasn't passing cars. I felt dizzy, out of focus. The "New Car in a Can" that she had recently sprayed in the interior was making my stomach turn. I was sitting in the middle of the front seat, with the armrest up, not sure how I had gotten there. I looked at the empty passenger seat, thought of rolling down the window, but instead leaned closer to Alicia. The radio was on. A country-and-western station.
"Where are we?"
"Guess," she said, veering off the expressway. A green sign appeared on the side of the road: CITY OF ST. CHARLES.
"Home." And that's all I remember.
I woke up on the living room couch, startled by the cold emptiness of the room. The doorbell was ringing, amplified by the pounding in my head. The sun poured through the bay window. Alicia, in khakis and a white sweater, was standing at the front door.
"I'll call Clyde and tell him that you'll be over some time today," she was saying.
I couldn't see whom she was talking to, but the conversation had something to do with dogs. "He'll give you the updated records and everything. All you need is the pedigree folder, right?"
Alicia's back was turned and she was rummaging through a file box. I came up behind her and put my hands over her eyes. "Morning," I said.
She jumped. "Don't surprise me like that."
"Sorry." I stepped back. "What are you doing? Who's at the door?"
She was fingering the files, not looking up at me.
"That's the woman who's buying Gavin."
I hadn't seen the dog in almost a week. Alicia had sent him to Joe's farm the day before the painters arrived. I assumed he was still there.
"You sold him?"
"She paid five thousand dollars." Alicia sighed. "I don't have time for that kind of responsibility anymore, Gordie."
Alicia drove me downtown so I could pick up my car. I was already late for work. NPR was reporting from Bulgaria that Todor Zhivkov, the country's dictator for thirty-five years, had been replaced, his Stalinist government purged. She turned down the volume. "That's almost the end of it," she said. "Romania's next, then all the excitement in Eastern Europe should die down for a while.
"You know," she continued. "I have an idea for a story that'll make big news. I realized last night that I can become a reporter. It's all I ever wanted to be."
I was still groggy, thinking about the dog. I should have been pleased—Gavin was the last trace of Arthur—but the way that she'd just gotten rid of him made me uneasy. I thought of Joe scratching and nuzzling the dog and the Whitings' long history of champion wolfhounds,
and I worried about how Margaret would take this last bit of news. She seemed already at a boiling point.
I was also beginning to wonder if there weren't some truth to Margaret's theories about Alicia—her cold method of discarding the past, her transformations. I thought I loved her, but I knew from my experience with Thea that once distrust sets in, it has a way of becoming absolute.
At Sixteenth and Shepard, Alicia stopped the car to let me out.
"Then you'll help me with the story?" she asked.
"Of course," I said as she pulled away.
I walked toward the liquor store. The Gremlin was gone.
It took me until noon to get the car out of an impoundment lot and an hour more to clean up and take a taxi to the office. In my fog, I had forgotten to call Ritger. When I signed on to the computer, he had sent me a message: "You're a piece of work," it read. "Consider this a last warning."
Somehow I didn't take it seriously. I had given them fifteen months as a model employee. A few rough weeks couldn't do me in. I was going to Dallas and nothing could keep me.
18
MY FIRST DISAPPOINTMENT was flying into the international airport rather than Love Field. I hadn't realized that Dallas would need more than one airport, so when the travel agent said Dallas-Fort Worth, I had assumed I would have the same descent as President Kennedy had that clear November Friday, 1963.
Coming down the runway, I imagined my father packed behind the fence at gate 28, surrounded by cheerful Texans and members of the press. As the plane slowed, making its final turn, I thought of the questions he was hoping to ask when the door to Air Force One opened and the President descended the stairs.
I secretly hoped, even expected, to find myself at gate 28. There'd be an enormous glass window with a view of the apron where Kennedy's plane had sat, an exhibit nearby with the famous pictures—Jackie smiling in white gloves and her pink pillbox hat; children holding signs saying ALL THE WAY WITH JFK; the young handsome President, squint-eyed, waving to the crowd; the Lincoln Continental, top down, standing by to take him away.
Obituary Writer (9780547691732) Page 16