Obituary Writer (9780547691732)

by Shreve, Porter

  Jessie Tennant raised her eyebrows.

  "My story is going to be front page," Alicia said, looking severe.

  When the doors opened on the sixth floor, I tried to signal Jessie Tennant to let her know that she shouldn't worry, I'd explain it all later, but I failed to get her attention.

  Alicia headed straight for the conference room, walking fast, not looking around.

  "We're doing the story here." She opened the door, waiting for me.

  "How do you mean?" I asked.

  "I mean we've got to do the story now and we're doing it here. We don't have all night."

  "You can't write the whole story in the conference room," I said. "When I write a story, I do it on the computer, and there are no computers in here."

  "Well, I don't know computers. And I want to do it right here, right at that table." Alicia sat down at the head of the glass table, St. John's place. "Why don't you get a tape recorder, then," she said. "Let's not get anything wrong."

  "I guess I'll put the story on the computer later." I went to Marshall Holman's desk to find an extra tape recorder, wondering how I was going to finesse this.

  The newsroom had mostly emptied out. A couple of copy editors were still at their desks, as well as the night city editor, who was dispatching Holman from crime scene to crime scene. The late crew, many of them demoted from dayside, were haggard looking, embittered, not a likely group to guard the sanctity of the conference room.

  I found a tape recorder in the middle drawer and tested it, taking some extra batteries and tapes. On the way back I passed Jessie Tennant's desk, and whispered, "I promise I can explain this later."

  Alicia was ready.

  She had lined up several pencils and a notepad alongside an assortment of newspaper clips, different from the ones she had brought to Union Station. I noticed that my own envelope, the one with my advancers and Arthur's grid and notes from Jessie Tennant and Margaret, still sat undisturbed in the inside pocket of the opened briefcase.

  I glanced over the clips. Alicia had clearly lost interest in features. This new batch held the kind of stories that lead off the evening news: shootouts, sieges, domestic tragedies.

  I set the tape recorder on the conference room table, prepared to play along. "Ready?" I asked.

  "Of course."

  She adjusted her drugstore spectacles and pressed Record.

  "This is A. A. Whiting." She leaned over the tape recorder. "The following account is my front-page story."

  "Let's begin at the beginning," I said.

  I had thought out how I was going to do this, rehearsed it at the Roma as my mother dispensed advice, though I realized my control was now limited. "I've done a little research," I began. "And I understand that in Weatherford, Texas, 1973, you knew a boy who was poisoned—"

  She didn't seem at all surprised that I knew this. Instead, she corrected me. "Let's not say that I knew a boy who was poisoned. Remember, I'm the reporter and I've got to protect my source. It's one of the first rules of journalism."

  "How do you propose to do that?" I asked.

  "Let's just say instead, 'There was a girl who knew a boy who was poisoned.' We'll call her 'the girl' and we'll call him 'Phillip.'" A glassy look came over Alicia's eyes. The presence of the tape recorder seemed to be having a soothing effect on her. "Phillip was a scientist, and he performed scientific experiments in his lab in his basement."

  "What kind of experiments?"

  "I know what I'm doing, Gordie," she said. "First I wanted readers to know that his parents were divorced and he lived with his father, who was hardly ever home."

  He used to mix poisons, she said, and test them out on small animals, mice and squirrels, cats, and eventually dogs from the next town over. "Four milligrams of ricin could kill a cat. Six milligrams could kill a dog, and anything after that could probably kill a person, but he didn't use ricin on people."

  Phillip was working on a number of different poisons—some that killed slowly, the victim showing symptoms of a short natural death; others that took effect immediately, causing cardiac arrest.

  "And how did the girl feel about Phillip killing animals? Didn't it seem barbaric?" I asked.

  "She was just a girl. She hadn't been out in the world, so nothing seemed real," Alicia said. "And he was very convincing, very sure about himself. He put a lot of importance on the process of dying. He wasn't religious, but he did talk about the afterlife, how you had to be prepared." She was leaning over the table, speaking dreamily. "He thought if death catches you by surprise, then you have to relinquish a kind of eternal control."

  The girl fell in love with Phillip. They were two people in a world that didn't understand them. He was a genius and she his assistant. The beginning of the end occurred when he took her to the film version of Romeo and Juliet, the one by Zeffirelli, shown downtown at the Mayfair Theater.

  "He was Romeo and the girl was Juliet. The story was the most perfect romance ever told and they took it as a call to action, a personal message meant just for them," Alicia said. "They believed it was their fate to die together."

  Outside pressures only strengthened Phillip's resolve—from his mother who lived in Dallas and had married a wealthy man, from his father who drank too much and wanted him out of the house, from people in town who saw him at the counter of Woolworth's and told him he was squandering his future. What he had not foreseen was that the girl might change her mind.

  "She told him she would do it. She imagined herself doing it. She thought about drinking the poison and dying in his arms. But then the girl realized it was a bad idea." Alicia shook her head. "Besides, Phillip wanted to die. He was obsessed with death. Perhaps he didn't want to lose himself to the vastness of his own talent. Dying was a form of control."

  By Valentine's Day, the girl had lost courage. "They went to the cemetery at dawn, to the mausoleum of a man named Robicheaux. Phillip said he thought Robicheaux was a romantic name," Alicia said. "They had the poison with them, in the pockets of their lab coats—four jequirity beans ground up in sugar water. Phillip drank his glass and the girl drank hers, but she had secretly switched her beans for hard candies."

  "What did the beans look like?" I asked.

  "They're half black and half red and about this big." She showed a space of less than a quarter of an inch between her thumb and forefinger. "They're the size and hardness of lentils, but rounder," she said. "They have this yellow stuff inside called abrin. It kills you."

  She slid the notepad and pencils toward me. "Don't you want to write some of this down?"

  "I can get it from the tape. How long did it take for him to die?"

  "A couple of hours," she said. "Phillip loved jequirity beans because they're rare and pretty. In Mexico, they put them on rosaries."

  I checked the tape. It was less than a third of the way through.

  "For a long time the girl felt guilty about what happened," Alicia said. "For years after she left Texas she actually wished that she had followed through with the plan. But unlike Phillip, she wasn't so fascinated with death and had never considered suicide before meeting him. The fact is, if the girl hadn't come along, he was going to kill himself anyway. She is still convinced of that. The way she looks at it now, at least he was in love and thought he wasn't dying alone."

  Alicia had little to add about the aftermath. She said that the girl lay with her eyes closed on the cold ground trying to distract herself by thinking of cartoons. Then she ran home and got a camera to take some pictures of Phillip lying outside the mausoleum, pictures she later put in a photo album which she had since lost.

  "She thought it was important to capture that moment. She did it for him," Alicia said.

  The girl would have left Weatherford right away, but she'd never been anywhere and didn't know where to go. The way she eventually did leave, and later left the other places she moved to, was by bus, going to the station and getting on the first bus out, regardless of where it was going.

  I
couldn't help but think of my father's trip to Dallas then, an eerie parallel.

  "She got off at Albuquerque. It was the last stop," Alicia said.

  I turned off the tape and excused myself, saying that I'd be back in a second, I had to use the men's room. Alicia nodded patiently, saying she'd wait.

  In the men's room, I felt queasy. I leaned over the sink, thinking I might be sick. At the mirror, I touched my face, as if to make sure I was really there. My eyes were mapped with blood veins.

  Outside the door, Jessie Tennant was taking a drink at the water fountain.

  "That woman I've been talking to has a big local story," I said to her. "Don't mind what she said in the elevator. She's not all there."

  Jessie Tennant nodded her head conspiratorially.

  Alicia was sitting up straight, her superfluous glasses at the end of her nose, her blond hair in a high ponytail, a number 2 pencil behind her ear. For a moment, seeing her there, I felt sad. She was like a child, with her clear eyes, her serious, almost sweet expression, the way her small hands were folded on the table. I wondered if she just didn't know what she had done.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting." I sat back down.

  Picking up the tape recorder, my hands were shaking. I couldn't feel my fingers pressing Record. "And Arthur?" I asked, trying to make my voice sound strong.

  Alicia was eyeing me pensively, pulling at her lip.

  "Let's say that the girl became a woman and married an older man. She had kept her four jequirity beans, the ones she had promised to drink with Phillip. She had carried them from place to place, hidden among her things."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. She just wanted to keep them," Alicia said. She took off her glasses and looked toward the ceiling, as if she were trying to think of something.

  "But then her marriage goes flat. She realizes her husband loves someone else, that she will never be the primary woman in his life," Alicia continued. "She becomes angry. She tries to force her husband to love her, but he disappears into his work. The tension becomes so great that the husband threatens to leave. Now, let's say that the girl, the woman, loses her mind one day and grinds up the jequirity beans that she's been keeping. She puts them in his Gatorade. He always drinks Gatorade when he rides his exercise bike, and just like Phillip the husband dies."

  She looked me in the eye. "Well?" she asked.

  I said nothing.

  "That would be a front-page story, wouldn't it?"

  I couldn't stand the feeling of her eyes on me. "Yes," I said.

  "Then you should type it in and move it to Print."

  As we were getting ready to leave, Marshall Holman appeared at the conference room door. Behind him, the night editor was putting on his coat, making his way to the elevators.

  "So you're here to take my job?" Holman said to Alicia.

  She did not seem pleased to see him. "Why would I want your job?" she asked. "I have a story for the front page."

  "Really?" Holman pulled up a chair.

  It was a chance to excuse myself. "I'll be right back." I got up from the table and shut the conference room door, went to my desk, and looked up the home number of Margaret Whiting.

  I felt compelled to call her. The news was too much to carry alone.

  She picked up on the first ring.

  "Margaret," I said.

  "Yes." She seemed wide awake, though I knew it was getting late and she had work the next day.

  "It's Gordon Hatch," I said quietly into the receiver. "I only have a second but I have to tell you something," and in the suspended moment that followed, I felt that she probably already knew.

  "How did you find out?" she asked.

  "She told me," I said.

  "She told you?"

  "She told me the whole story."

  Margaret was quiet.

  "I see," she said.

  "My editors will have the story in the morning," I told her.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the conference room door open and Holman attempting to leave. "I'll call you again," I said, adding—and I'm glad I did—"I'm so sorry."

  I passed Holman on my way to the conference room.

  "Your girlfriend's crazy. You know that, right?" he asked with a nasal laugh.

  I ignored him and walked on, opening the conference room door. I turned off the tape recorder and told Alicia that it was a terrific story. I had no doubt it would go front page.

  "You're a great reporter." I pocketed the cassette. "Congratulations."

  "Will it be in tomorrow's paper?" she asked.

  "Probably not tomorrow," I said. "There are a few things left to do with it. Maybe Saturday's, if that's okay?"

  Alicia was packing her things into my father's briefcase, and she suddenly stopped. "It has to be in tomorrow's paper!" She was glaring at me. "You said it was going on the front page, and it's got to be tomorrow's!" She closed the briefcase and left the conference room, heading for the elevators.

  "Okay," I said, catching up to her in the lobby. "Give me a second to drop off the tape with Rewrite. I've got to talk with the copy desk to be sure that everything is all set. I promise the story will be in tomorrow's paper."

  I walked back toward the middle of the metro area and stopped behind a pillar so Alicia wouldn't see me.

  I had no idea what to do.

  I considered calling St. John at home. It was past midnight and he had fired me earlier in the day, but I had this tape sitting in my pocket, ready to back up the story. The last edition rolled off the presses at two-thirty A.M. There was still a bit of time, maybe, to write something quickly, a stand-alone brief on the front page promising further coverage in the next day's paper. I felt a wave of hope, followed soon after by more dread. It was absurd. St. John would hang up on me. Moreover, Alicia had not yet identified herself as the source.

  I wondered if I could call the police and have them meet me at my apartment. I had all they'd need: the tape, the contents of my briefcase, her journals in the boxes crowding my living room. And I had Alicia herself, her craziness clear as day.

  As I stepped into the elevator, still wondering what to do, Alicia linked my arm with hers. "We're going out dancing," she said. "We need to celebrate our front-page story."

  She took me to a place called Quest, a crowded disco a little north of Laclede's Landing, with low ceilings and black lights that lit up our shirts and made our teeth look rotten. Glow-in-the-dark skulls covered the walls, bright-colored planets orbited the bar. Alicia pushed ahead, ordering me a whiskey and water.

  "Let's have a toast," she said, standing on tiptoe to talk in my ear.

  The place was loud, too loud for conversation, and it smelled of smoke and new plastic. We were standing at the edge of the dance floor, caught in the strobe light, getting pushed toward the middle. Alicia was dancing, moving with the music, flashing at me in stills with the pulse of the strobe.

  The music had an industrial sound, the same metallic beat over and over, one endless song interrupted by howls and screams and sound bites of radio-era propaganda, a futuristic kind of music, self-consciously anonymous.

  Alicia brought me a second drink, another whiskey and water. I was sweating and thirsty. I drank it fast, the bourbon rushing to my head.

  We were dancing close. She had one arm around my waist; her eyes were closed. In the heat, the flashing light, in my delirium, I turned her around, ran my hands over her shoulders and arms. Face to face, she looked into my eyes, then away—thoughtful, bored, intense, remote—still frames flashing in the darkness.

  Her back against a steel column, she pulled me toward her, tucked her fingers under my belt. A warbled voice screamed over the giant speakers, three words in another language repeated a hundred times.

  Alicia let go of me, and in the next still I saw the back of her head, her profile opening up in slow motion, then the faces of a stranger, each more remote than the last, strobe light flashes of Alicia turning cold.

  "We have to go hom
e," she said in my ear, and turned away.

  We drove in silence, south along the river back toward my apartment. It was past two o'clock. We had been dancing for a couple of hours.

  She was slouched in the driver's seat, speeding along, flying through yellow lights and through a red light at Market Street. At Busch Stadium she turned west, swinging by the Independent, where she pulled up to the curb and parked the car.

  "Can we get a paper?" she asked.

  I hedged. "Why would you want to do that?"

  "We have to read my article," she said cheerfully.

  "The paper won't be up for another hour," I said, hoping she wouldn't notice the distributors lined up in the alley loading the final edition into their trucks.

  Alicia threw the car into drive and peeled away.

  "The story is great," I said. "Don't worry, you can see it in the morning."

  I tried to imagine what was going on in her head, whether it occurred to her that her taped confession would have repercussions beyond the printing of the story. She must have realized that something was going to happen out of this, something beyond a "breakthrough" in her "career" as a journalist. And then I thought that, like "the girl" in her story, she must have no sense of consequences.

  We passed under I-64, minutes from my apartment.

  "After this, we won't be doing any more stories together," she declared, staring over the wheel. "I'm on my own now. I have ambition."

  She shot through another red light. I slid my arm over, unlocked the passenger door, turned my body so I could see the whole of her.

  She pulled over and stopped in front of my building.

  "They'll tow you if you park here," I said, as if that might change the course of events.

  "I park where I want to," she said.

  I followed her to the entrance of my building, where she pulled open the front door.

  "It's unlocked," I said stupidly, and followed her into the lobby.

  My last reserves of energy were pouring through me. The elevator doors closed and Alicia pressed 3. How would I call the police with Alicia in the apartment?

  We were separated by three feet. I was trying to look casual, leaning in the opposite corner.