by Julie Kramer
He had just gotten back to Minnesota and was rushing to find his car in the sprawling airport parking garage. He didn’t have time to get together just then, but I asked him to keep his ears open for any buzz.
“It’ll be tough, being a Wisconsin case,” he said.
Cops are territorial, not just about their turf or snitches but about their information as well. Two departments, working the same case, fighting for jurisdiction, don’t necessarily share data with each other, much less with outsiders.
“But I’ll see if I can find someone who knows someone who knows something,” he said. “Just for the record, Riley, suicide cases typically cause more problems for cops than homicide cases.”
“So you think she probably did kill herself, huh, Nick?”
“I didn’t say that. And also, just for the record, suicidal women don’t generally shoot themselves in the head. That’s a macho thing. The ladies, they go more for pills or hanging.”
I tried shutting that image out of my mind.
Garnett and I also made plans to meet for a movie the next night to hash over the shooting, hash over the missing bass, and hash over our lives.
We’d often met in movie theaters over the years to hand off documents clandestinely. Now that he wasn’t a homicide detective, we didn’t have to sneak around, but we both fancied ourselves film aficionados.
“Don’t worry, Riley,” he said, “it’s not like it’s a date.”
But it would be the first time we’d be alone together in a social setting since last fall when our friendship nearly took a dive. Perhaps that’s why he was so quick to establish boundaries. I felt a tinge of regret at his choice of words, wondered where that sentiment came from and why.
“You don’t worry me any,” I answered before saying goodbye.
I had plenty of real worries. Even though Noreen had again nixed the missing-groom story, I needed to get some things straight in my own mind. I stuck my interview of Mrs. Lefevre in a tape deck, shut my office door, and hit Play. I wanted to watch it before erasing it.
I got to the part where I pressed her about why she hadn’t called the police earlier when her son went missing. I watched her cry. And then I almost cried when Noreen knocked on my door and Miles held out his hand for the now controversial videotape.
“It’s better if this video doesn’t exist,” he said.
I handed it over, but I made one last pitch to save it. I reminded him of our policy to keep everything from our news-gathering process for investigative stories, because the station stands a greater risk of being sued in those reports. Notes. Tapes. Documents. Miles had always maintained that these items would prove, to a jury if necessary, how thoroughly we check each story before airing it.
“There’s an exception to every rule,” he said.
“And besides that,” Noreen added, “our save policy only applies to stories we air, and we’re not airing this one.”
Miles took the tape, about the size of a deck of cards, and he and Noreen turned and walked down the hall.
For about ten minutes I pouted at my desk with the door shut. Then I e-mailed Xiong to run a criminal background check on Jean Lefevre. Within minutes it came back—clean—except for a huge stack of parking violations, still unpaid. That proved how little effort the police put into her son’s disappearance. If they’d even run her name, they’d have run her in and made her settle up. Instead, they assumed Mrs. Lefevre to be an overly protective little old mama.
And I learned during my college years, from an old journalism professor at the University of St. Thomas, what happens when we assume.
Ass-U-Me. We make an ass out of you and me.
I ducked my head in the newsroom to look for Noreen and tell her we shouldn’t just assume Mrs. Lefevre’s interview tape meant trouble. But I saw her standing near the news control booth, lecturing the anchors and technical staff on avoiding gaffes with wireless microphones.
A CNN anchorwoman had left her wireless mic turned on when she took a bathroom break during a presidential speech that morning. Her ladies-room gossip was broadcast live coast-to-coast before she was alerted that her mic was hot.
I could hear the techies arguing with the talent over whether the debacle was the anchor’s fault for not turning off her mic or the audio guy’s fault for not potting it down after her last read.
Then Noreen started stressing how That Better Never Happen Here. Her monologue sounded like it might go on for a while, so I backed away lest I get drawn into that distraction. I didn’t want to be forced to take sides. Whoever’s position I didn’t pick—anchor or audio—would be mad and just might remember this tiff the next time I had to sit on the news set or go to the bathroom.
hen we meet people, we size them up. Often by their face. Honest or shifty. Attractive or not.
Unlike the famed Helen of Troy my face would not launch a thousand ships. Maybe not even a bass boat. But in my line of work, what I have going for me may be better: my face opens doors.
Physically, I look safe. Sympathetic. Ordinary. On some level, my face inspires trust. For a journalist, that’s a gift.
Often my colleagues and I are knocking on strangers’ doors on the best or worst days of their lives. Maybe they’ve just won the lottery, or recovered a missing child. Or maybe they’ve just learned their daughter was killed in a school shooting, or discovered their son was the shooter. We want their stories. They want to be left alone. Sometimes to celebrate. Sometimes to grieve.
Yet more often than not, when I knock, they open.
We have this saying in the news business: you can’t get the interview if you can’t get inside. The most obvious interpretation means inside their house. But often you have to get inside their mind as well. Sometimes they need empathy. Other times, information about what’s happening with their case or how the media works and what options they have.
If I sense nervousness about appearing on live television, I offer to tape the interview, so they can start again if they stumble. If I sense nervousness about being edited or having their comments taken out of context, I suggest a live interview.
Being the first reporter on the scene can certainly help lock in an exclusive. But not always. Subjects might ignore the buzzer or slam the door in reporters’ faces. They might regret that move, but can’t change their mind without admitting a mistake. So if I come along later, after the media mob has given up, and make a new offer, pitched a different way, they can tell themselves they were smart to wait.
Because that’s what I tell them.
But Madeline clearly wasn’t taken in by my face. So something else must have drawn her to me.
“NEVER HEARD OF this face-blind business,” my buddy Nick Garnett said.
We were chatting over the phone while I was curled up in bed, Shep sprawled across my feet. But Garnett was insisting that some people are simply better at reading faces than others. “It’s a talent.”
He told me about a street cop in Detroit, a Legend at the law enforcement shoot/don’t shoot training camps. The cop and his partner watched a man approaching their vehicle on foot. Legend rolled down the window and shot him dead, no questions asked, horrifying his partner, who was riding shotgun. But investigators found the dead man had a flamethrower and was just yards away from turning their squad car into an inferno.
In another episode, the same cop refrained from shooting at a teen waving a gun—a real gun. Later, after he’d disarmed the youth, all he could tell his backup was, “I knew he wasn’t going to fire.”
Both times, Legend explained, he could judge his adversary’s intent by his face.
“How about you, Nick?” I asked. “Can you read truth in a perp’s face?”
“No way. Not something you learn at the academy. That’s why cops like lie detectors. Takes the pressure off. Me, I can’t even tell truth in a woman’s face, much less a perp’s.”
I wished we weren’t on the telephone for that particular exchange. I would have liked to watch his
face as he said that last line, because his emphasis suggested he was suggesting something.
I WAS WALKING through downtown Minneapolis, just past the statue of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air, when my cell rang. I’d been rethinking my face theory and by the area code could tell that Professor Emmett Vasilis, the prosopagnosia researcher from Harvard, was calling me back.
As journalists, we use our occupation as an excuse to call up just about anybody and ask just about anything and we usually get answers. Especially from scientists who don’t get a lot of public recognition for their work. To them, questions are the ultimate compliments.
“Face blindness is very real, Ms. Spartz.” Professor Vasilis was flattered by my interest and urged me to try an experiment sometime. “Pick up a handful of stones.”
“Wait,” I said, stopping. “I can do that now.” I bent over and grabbed some grayish landscape pebbles from a foliage display on the outdoor pedestrian mall.
“Name each stone,” the professor told me.
“Name them what?”
“Whatever you want.”
Seemed like a crazy experiment, but I leaned against a storefront, followed his instructions, and named the stones after the seven dwarfs.
“Put them in your pocket,” he said. I complied, still not sure where this would lead. “Now take them out. Call them by name.”
I couldn’t tell Dopey from Doc or Sneezy from Sleepy.
“That’s what it’s like to be face blind,” Professor Vasilis said. “Not everybody suffers to that degree, but a surprising number do. Some studies suggest perhaps 2 percent of the population might be impaired to some degree.”
While he was talking about the part of the brain that controls facial recognition I staged an obvious experiment of my own and removed my brainy-girl glasses and walked down the street, gazing at the blurred images approaching. But when I shared my findings with the professor, he disputed my methodology and conclusion.
“That’s not prosopagnosia,” he said. “For them, the faces would be blurry, but the rest of the scene would be in focus.” As another example he explained that the face blind can tell cars apart, just not faces. And they can also discern expressions, like whether a particular face is happy or angry.
“A face is integral to being human,” he said, “that’s why it’s easier to recruit doctors to fix cleft lips in Third World countries than to treat AIDS victims.”
“And that’s why there was so much controversy over the first face transplant,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Then the professor and I talked about how “face” has become a part of our vernacular. Face the facts. Face the truth. Face the music. Face the consequences. Face the voters. Face the jury.
“In some parts of the world, face is even synonymous with honor,” I said. “In Japan, status is all about saving face.”
“Very true,” he replied, “yet it would be a mistake to limit the concept of face to Far East geography. The Cuban Missile Crisis hinged on neither side losing face while the world watched. Understandable. Humiliation requires witnesses.”
Quite understandable, I thought. If Mark had simply called off the wedding, Madeline could have moved on more easily. As it was, three hundred guests witnessed her shame. I decided to weave her case into our discussion.
“Are some faces simply more recognizable than others because of certain characteristics?” I asked. “Like if a person had a facial scar?” I was thinking of Mark and what made his face so special.
“A scar could make someone more memorable,” he said. “As could facial hair, like a beard or mustache.” Mark’s Groucho Marx look seemed obvious. “While long hair isn’t actually part of the face, it might be useful to distinguish individuals. A person of a different race in a homogeneous population could be recognizable to someone suffering from prosopagnosia.”
“Let’s say a woman is severely face blind.” I was careful not to use Madeline’s name. The last thing I needed was patient confidentiality to bring our conversation to a halt if he realized we were discussing one of his research subjects. “But one day she meets a man whose face is recognizable to her. How big a deal might that be?”
“It could be a life-altering event.”
He explained that face-blind people are often socially isolated and have difficulty bonding. “They’re searching for a connection they might never find.”
“Sounds a little like sociopathy.”
“Not exactly.” Professor Vasilis laughed. “Sociopaths are focused on themselves, not on relationships. They don’t really care about human interaction. People afflicted with prosopagnosia seek a personal connection, sometimes desperately, and don’t understand why it isn’t happening for them.”
“And if it suddenly does?”
“Conceivably, it could feel like winning the lottery,” he said.
I stopped walking and sat on a cement bench in Peavey Plaza across the street from the station. A couple of Canada geese were swimming in a concrete pond with fountains outside Orchestra Hall. City officials would have preferred swans, but this is goose country.
The professor continued analyzing my hypothetical example. “It might not matter to the individuals if their love interest isn’t suitable on other more traditional levels, like age or education.”
“You mean if a wealthy, face-blind person is suddenly drawn to a person of low economic status, they could still find happiness?” I asked.
“Exactly, but let’s say we’re dealing with the opposite concept, a person of low status is drawn to someone of high status, if the love interest does not reciprocate, the attraction could turn into an obsession. Such a rejection could be brutal because they might go their entire life without finding anyone recognizable again. Worst case, it could develop into a stalking scenario.”
His insight gave me so much to think about that I didn’t realize he was waiting for me to speak.
“Do you know of such a case?” Professor Vasilis repeated the question. “I’d be interested in interviewing the person for my research.”
“Let me talk to her first.”
Then I thanked him for his time and left open the possibility of calling him back with follow-up questions.
While I sat, absorbing all this new information, I tried skipping one of the seven dwarfs over the pond in front of me. Not flat enough to catch air, it sank abruptly. Just like my chances of airing this story. I tossed the rest of the stones in the water in a single throw and they made a scattered series of splashes.
crowd gathered around the dock by Tally’s, a small bait shop and marina on the east shore of White Bear Lake. Black ducks tried swimming but weren’t making much headway against a brisk spring wind. Shep barked at them and they scattered like a school of minnows while we walked along the path that hugged the shore.
My mind was processing the new piece of information I’d just obtained over lunch at Rudy’s Redeye Grill, where Madeline and Mark’s rehearsal dinner had been held. I schmoozed the owner, a guy named Bill, not Rudy, who must have figured Bill’s Redeye Grill lacked a certain panache. But Bill also owned the hotel that housed the restaurant. And by dessert, I’d confirmed that Sigourney Nelson had been a registered guest at the White Bear Country Inn the night before the wedding.
What was she doing there? Besides kissing her old boyfriend in the parking lot? And that didn’t require a room.
Shep barked again and brought me back to the present.
White Bear Lake was staging a premier Minnesota bass competition to kick off the season. For some time, the town had lobbied to host the Governor’s Fishing Opener, a tradition dating back sixty years in honor of walleye season. The outing is a cooperative venture between the resort industry, the media, and public officials. But politics seemed to decree that the annual event to pay homage to Minnesota’s state fish be held outside the metro area to build name recognition for more obscure lakes.
The White Bear Lake Chamber of Commerce became convi
nced their time would never come, even though they’d sent smooth-talking emissaries, dressed like fish, to make their case before the governor. So they’d spent the last year making plans to buy an insurance policy should a lucky angler catch a state-record-breaking bass in their water.
The winner of such a trophy fish would net half a million bucks, plus prestige throughout the bass world. If no record fish was landed, the top bass of the day would net a new pickup truck and ten grand for its captor.
A record bass would also benefit the town: its namesake lake would become a tourist magnet for bass lovers. And that image meant full hotels, bars, and restaurants for fishing seasons to come. The White Bear Press had been absolutely giddy in its editorial endorsing the idea.
Even without a record-breaking fish, town leaders could use the contest to demonstrate their organizational skills in pulling out all the stops in the name of fish. That might land them a step closer to luring the actual Governor’s Fishing Opener to their shores the following spring.
Because the area is a Republican stronghold, the current governor was forced to accept the mayor’s gracious invitation to join him and the bass on the water even though it carried some political risk. A governor who gets skunked fishing in public loses the confidence of his people.
Governor Wendell Anderson set a high bar in 1973 when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine holding an impressive walleye to illustrate “The Good Life in Minnesota.” Minnesota governors ever since know that their political virility is measured each spring by the size of their catch.
Our current governor, Tim Pawlenty, had slipped up during a recent live radio interview, revealing that his wife preferred fishing to sleeping with him.
I walked up to a guy wearing a sweatshirt that read WOMEN WANT ME, FISH FEAR ME and hoped he wasn’t in charge. Thankfully, he pointed to a man at the end of the pier, surveying the lake.
“So you’re the mastermind behind all this,” I gushed. He beamed.
He seemed mildly interested when I introduced myself as a Channel 3 reporter, but when he realized I was the one covering the Billy Bass story, I had his full attention.