by D. F. Bailey
He clicked the camera app on his phone and took a picture of the driver’s door with the open window, then snapped six wide-angle shots revealing the full scale of the big car and the scrawl of bear claw marks scratched across the black paint beneath the driver’s window. Nature versus the machinery of mankind. The image would make quite an impression on the eXpress website.
He moved closer to the SUV, took a breath and held his nose to the open window. He exhaled and tested the air with short, tight sniffs. The black leather seats, smeared with dried blood, exuded a heavy, sickly odor that drove his head backwards.
“Jesus,” he yelped and took a step away from the car.
After a moment he held his breath again, dipped his head back through the open driver’s window and took a dozen quick shots, each with a slight variation of angle and depth. With every flash from the camera the horror of Toeplitz’s death briefly flared back to life. Each shot blinded him and soon he couldn’t see anything clearly.
He stood off-balance for a few seconds and tried to blink the residual flashing from his eyes. He stepped back toward the fence and leaned against the gatepost. As he wobbled half-blind in the darkness he heard the crunch of gravel grinding up the hill outside the auto shop.
Still wavering, he tucked the phone into his pocket and teetered past the gate and shut it in place. Then he heard the Econoline engine shudder to a halt and Bob Wriggly call into the yard. “Finch? You here, Finch?”
The latex gloves puckered under Finch’s thumbs and fingers as he tried to clip the padlock shut. Exasperated, he tore the gloves from his hands and shoved them into his bag.
“Finch? That you in there?”
He heard the key clicking in the far door.
“Yeah!” Finch yelled. “It’s just me!”
As the exterior door yawned open a wide blade of the evening light flew along the concrete floor and landed at Will’s feet. Finally he snapped the padlock shank into its case. Then without looking at Wriggly, he bent forward and began to sweep the floor with both hands.
“Finch?” Wriggly studied him from the distance. “What’re you doing?”
“Oh. Bob. Gee, I’m glad you’re here.” He glanced at Wriggly, then turned his attention back to the floor. “You haven’t seen my key, have you? I think I lost my motel key when I was here.”
“Your key?” As he stepped into the shop, Wriggly’s head swept from side to side, assessing the tool racks and cases, the hoist, the SUV parked behind the chain-link fence.
“Yeah. Crazy, I know.” His hand brushed against the asphalt shingle. “Oh crap, will you look at that. Here it is!” He stood up and presented the key dangling from its plastic fob. He brushed his free hand over his eyes in an effort to wipe the lingering blindness from his sight.
“Funny. I never saw that all afternoon.”
“Yeah. Well, it was under this shingle.” He kicked it away with his heel. “Must have fallen from my pocket with my phone. He pulled his phone from his pocket, then slipped it back into place.
Wriggly studied him in silence.
“Look. I’m sorry, Bob. When I realized you weren’t here, I thought I’d come through the back door” — he swung an arm toward the open door — “without bothering you. Was that not okay?”
Wriggly inched forward. “No, that’s okay, I guess.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I guess I’d have done the same.”
“Good. That’s what I thought, too.” Will smiled. “By the way. You were right about that.” He crooked his thumb toward the SUV.
“About what?”
“The smell.”
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t smelled anything that bad since I toured an abattoir in Fresno for a story on the meat industry.”
A look of certainty crossed Wriggly’s face: I told you so.
※
Before he called Fiona Page, Finch sat on the bed in his room at the Prest Motel, opened his laptop and typed a list of the key questions he’d encountered:
1. What was Toeplitz doing so far from home?
2. The open window in Toeplitz’s Mercedes. WHY?
3. What’s the conflict between Gruman and Lee?
4. What’s holding Lee from pursuing her questions about the blood inside the Mercedes?
Except for the conflicting analyses of Toeplitz’s car by Gruman and Lee, Finch couldn’t build a story on any of these questions. Especially since Lee had negotiated a temporary off-the-record deal. After a full day of investigation, all he possessed was a fog of evasions from Gruman, some digital photos, and a few quotes from Wriggly that he could weave into a feature about Toeplitz’s final minutes on this earth.
He leaned forward and typed the first two sentences of the story lead: Astoria’s medical examiner and sheriff cannot agree on the circumstances surrounding the grisly death of Raymond Toeplitz. Until they do, the Mercedes GLK in which he died in a remote Oregon forest will remain secured by a private towing contractor.
A pretty sleepy opening. He could see Wally Gimbel instructing Jeanine Fix, the SF eXpress copy editor and web master (or “web mistress” as a few of the men in the bog called her) to insert the story on the bottom of the home web page for a day and then shuffle it into the digital archive. He began to click through the images he’d taken in Wriggly’s garage and up in the hills, scanning them quickly to determine if any of them could be pimped into making a picture that Jeanine could use. He settled on the wide-angle shot of the GLK, the window still wide open — and with it the pressing question that lingered in the minds of everyone following the story: Why did Toeplitz open the window as the bear approached? Finch decided to make that question the hook for the story and within ten minutes he’d written two hundred words that Wally could use.
He liked to write in ten or fifteen minute bursts, like a diver plunging into the ocean, forced under until a near-death intensity pushed him up for air. Then he’d read over the sentences he’d written, correct the typos and phrasing, and dive in again. After five or six submersions he’d have most of the story in hand. Then he’d take a longer break, walk around, drink some coffee, and plod through a final edit. When he was satisfied, he’d send the text through the pipe to Jeanine Fix.
First, however, Finch decided to call Fiona to see what she’d uncovered about the Whitelaws. Depending on what she’d pried loose — and he wasn’t expecting much — Will could roll her paragraphs into his story and they’d share the byline.
“Okay, brace yourself,” she said. He could tell she was at home as the incoherent banter of her son, Alexander, resounded in the air behind her. Finch had met the boy only once. He was a shaggy, rough-and-tumble three-year-old who reminded him of Buddy when he was still a toddler.
“All right I’m braced. Did you actually manage to get one of the Whitelaws to go on record about Toeplitz?”
“No. Because they’re not in town. They’re no longer in California.” Finch could picture her face, the tight smile she displayed when she unearthed some facts that might reveal buried treasure.
“All right. You’re teasing me. So where are they?” He stood up and paced between the bed and the TV unit.
“Teasing you am I? Mmm, that’s good I think.” She laughed and continued, “The whole family’s in Cannon Beach. A resort town that’s about twenty miles south of you.”
“Cannon Beach? What are they doing there?”
“That’s for you to find out. Anyway all eleven of them are up there, right down to the chef, the maid and maintenance staff.”
Finch paused to consider this. On the way up to Astoria he’d passed Cannon Beach on Highway 101. A remote play land, which made it attractive to anyone hankering for some seclusion.
“Want to know how I know all this?” she asked without prompting. “I drove to the family estate up in the Berkeley Hills. The gardener had just unlocked the front gate to their compound, so I buttonholed him. A Mexican guy, Cesar Diaz. Good thing I speak a little Spanish. He told me everything.”
> Finch smiled. “Must be a new employee. Obviously no one’s briefed him on the Whitelaw code of silence.”
“Yeah. Then I went online to the Clatsop County property appraiser’s website and searched the deeds listed under Whitelaw. Looks like the place has been in the family for seventy-plus years. So,” she paused, “I have an address for you.”
Finch found his pen and note pad, ready to take down the address. “Shoot.”
“It’s not so much an address, as a location: Lot 2, Section A. If you go online, you’ll see it’s south of the village, just before Tolovana Park. Google doesn’t seem to have a street view, but it looks like it might be on a slope facing the ocean.”
“Everyone with money faces the ocean here,” he told her and slipped the notepad into his courier bag. “You know, this explains something important.”
“What?”
“What Toeplitz was doing up here. He must have been meeting with Whitelaw.” Finch realized that he’d have to rewrite his story to suggest that Toeplitz had a meeting with Whitelaw. He now had a probable solution to the question at the top of his list: What was Toeplitz doing so far from home? Answer: Meeting Senator Franklin Whitelaw.
“Of course.” She considered the implications for a moment. “But after the prosecutor turned him, I assume he’d be fired from the firm.”
“Yeah. Maybe that’s why he’s dead now.”
“What does that mean?”
Finch stared at the wall. He couldn’t unravel all the threads. Not yet. “Look, there’s nothing concrete, but there’re these … circumstances. For instance, Toeplitz car’s been impounded by the medical examiner. And other things I’m not sure of.”
“Oh.”
“You’re brilliant, Fiona. I hope you know that,” he said and opened the laptop and clicked on the story file.
She laughed. In the background Alexander chirped playfully. “Mom always told me, if you can’t be good-looking, then you gotta be good.”
“She told you that?” Finch considered Fiona’s situation. A smart, hard-working single mom who’d divorced her husband before his advanced obsessive-compulsive disorder drove her, and her son, into madness.
“Think she was onto something?” Her voice revealed that she half-believed it.
“Nonsense. You’ve got the full package, kiddo.” He could tell she needed someone to give her a boost. He decided to play it up a little. Besides, he hadn’t flirted with a woman in a long time. Over the phone it felt safe. “You’re smart, funny and gorgeous. Never forget that,” he said.
“You know when you were gone last month I asked around about you.”
“Oh yeah?” He sat on the bed and stared through the window. “And?”
“And there’s a story about you in Iraq that just doesn’t go away. So I figure part of it must be true.”
“Which part?”
“The part about the prison in Abu Ghraib. The army torturing the Iraqi prisoners and how you broke the story.”
“I didn’t exactly break the story.” He wove his fingers through is hair and recalled those weary days. He was twenty-four and completely over his head. “60 Minutes and The New Yorker did. It was late April and early May, 2004.”
“Most people here think you broke it.”
“The truth is almost the exact opposite.” He wanted to tell her the facts but he’d been sworn to secrecy. Instead, he relied on his usual explanation, the cover for his stint in Military Intelligence: “I was in the army, deployed in Baghdad with Public Affairs.”
“You were a flack?”
“Before I saw the light, yes. That’s what they called us.” He laughed. “I was one a few guys who figured out Abu Ghraib. Let’s just say I had the inside story.”
“And you passed it on to 60 Minutes?”
He stood up, walked across the room and stood in the bathroom doorway. “You know, I should get going.”
“Me too,” she sighed.
“Don’t forget what I said, okay.” He tried to imagine her sitting at the dining room table in her apartment in San Francisco. Her dark hair would be down as she pulled it with one hand across her shoulder, her face looked clear but discontented. Standing in the Prest Motel next to the bathroom door in room 203, dreaming this image into his room, he blew a kiss into the phone and hung up.
※
Finch finished the rewrite and sent the story to Jeanine Fix. In a second email, he attached the photo of Toeplitz’s car. Although it was a wide-angle shot, the mess of bear claw scratches etched across the black paint was clearly visible, and he advised Jeanine to write a caption that would lead the audience to inspect the damage the bear had inflicted on the vehicle. They could only imagine the horror Toeplitz had to face. An enticing news image drew readers into the story — made them want the picture and a thousand words.
He sent another email to Fiona recommending that if someone wasn’t already on it, she should pitch a story to Wally: a background feature on bear attacks in general with a profile of black bear, versus brown bear, grizzly, and polar bear fatalities. From what he’d googled, he realized that while rare, almost every year two or three people were victims of horrible attacks. It wasn’t his job to assign Fiona, or any other reporter, to the task but he hoped she’d grab the story so he’d have a single collaborator working with him inside the bog.
Job done, he propped himself on the pillows, tuned the TV to CNN and tapped the mute button on the clicker. He picked up his phone and checked the latest text from Bethany Hutt. Bethany was neither Will Finch’s wife, nor Buddy’s mother. But a month after they’d literally bumped into her in the dairy section of the Jackson Street Safeway, she adopted the role of wife and mother, which endeared her to both Will and his five-year-old son, Buddy. The two of them had lost Cecily to breast cancer a year earlier and Will realized that he and Buddy needed someone to embrace them both. Someone to smile the way Cecily had smiled. To look into Buddy’s eyes and see him the way the boy’s mother had seen him. Will knew that no one could replace Cecily, but Bethany made him imagine that she could. That she was the one.
Bethany had texted him every day since he’d signed into Eden Veil. Because he’d surrendered his cellphone the day they admitted him to the clinic, it wasn’t until three weeks later, when he discharged himself, that he read the unbroken record of her desperation. Although this was shorter than all her previous texts (a simple plea: “call me”) he deleted it, too. She blamed her disaster on Finch. Blamed her drinking on him, her depression, and the final, fatal car crash on him. In one brief flash she’d destroyed everything at the center of his life.
Once Buddy was gone, the only thing Finch could think to do was to destroy the last memory of them. All of them, Buddy included. That required a seventy-two-hour life course correction with a twelve bottle case of Dos Manos and some brand new friends that he met at Tres, a tequila lounge on Townsend Street near the Giants baseball stadium. Once the tequila was drained and all his money spent, two of his new pals kindly deposited him in a gutter next to the front tires of an SFPD squad car.
From that low and lonely patch of broken concrete his recovery began. After two days in the drunk tank, a brief court appearance (and five-hundred dollar fine), Finch walked back to his office, requested a medical leave from Wally, and signed himself into The Eden Veil Center for Recovery. To some of the residents, Eden Veil was an alcoholic rehab program, to others a general-purpose addictions recovery center.
To his surprise, Finch emerged in better shape than anyone imagined possible. He realized that, unlike Bethany, he wasn’t an alcoholic. The visceral compulsion to drink didn’t course though his blood. He had no nostalgia for the glorious binges of his youth. They simply didn’t exist.
Tequila had provided the key to unlock Bethany’s sexual inhibitions and it became part of their daily ritual. After two or three months, the ritual was reduced to drinking only. With Bethany now out of the picture he had no live-in drinking partner and no motivation to drink. In fact, drink
ing seemed like a manifestation of boredom. Or worse, self-loathing. Instead of all that, he discovered something deeper, that something more haunting gripped his soul: the hand of bereavement, with its chokehold of unremitting emotional loss.
At first he turned away from this realization. Then he learned an indispensable, primary lesson: never run from emotion. Better to look it in the face — whatever it is: love, fear, jealousy, loss — stare it down and embrace it. The insight occurred during the second week of his stay, when he was forced to confront the possibility that he might not be strong enough to address the death of his son.
“So if it’s not alcohol that brought you here, it’s something else.” Dr. Michael Petersen, the senior therapist, offered this conclusion after Will dismissed the notion that he was alcoholic.
Finch rolled the palm of one hand under his chin and looked away. They sat alone in Petersen’s office, a windowless cube off the corridor of the center’s second floor. A bare, mute space that inspired introspection.
“I guess,” he said.
“Your son.” Petersen’s eyebrows wove together. “Buddy.”
Will glanced at Petersen and nodded. He hadn’t yet spoken Buddy’s name aloud. He felt as if the sound of the child’s name coming from his own mouth could somehow amplify the pain of his loss. “Something like that,” he said when the silence between them deepened.
“Something like that, but not that?” Petersen drew himself up in his chair and leaned forward. “I’m going to guess that it’s not losing Buddy that brought you here, but the fear of embracing his death.” He spoke these last words slowly, in a low pitch meant to penetrate Will’s resistance.
What was he saying? Will dragged his eyes across the floor. Was it fear that had shaken him so badly?
When Finch failed to respond, Petersen continued. “Maybe you’re afraid to acknowledge your responsibility in Buddy’s death.”