by Dana Perry
Twenty-Three
Norman Isaacs wanted to see me in his office. There was a message telling me that when I got to work at the Tribune the next morning. Getting called into the city editor’s office like that is generally not a good thing. Especially when the city editor was Norman Isaacs, who hardly ever talked to reporters unless there was something wrong. I suspected that Isaacs was not going to give me a pay raise or a promotion or a pat on the back.
No, this was about my visit to Deputy Police Commissioner Walsh’s house.
“I got a call from Jonathan Larsen,” Isaacs told me when I sat down in front of his desk. Larsen was the owner of the New York Tribune. “He was not happy. He got a phone call from NYPD Deputy Commissioner Walsh complaining that one of my reporters showed up at Walsh’s door and invaded the privacy of his home.”
“I can explain, Norman.”
“Did you push your way into the house and confront Mrs. Walsh, Jessie?”
“No, not at all. She invited me in. Even made me tea. It was all going fine until Walsh called and found out I was there.”
“Why were you there?”
“To try to find out what she and her husband knew about the death of her daughter.”
“You should have formally asked Walsh for an interview at his office.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He never responded.”
“So you took it upon yourself to just go to his house and knock on the door? A house where the people inside have recently lost their daughter to a violent crime?”
“We knock on the doors of crime victim families all the time.”
“Not when the crime victim family is the Walsh family.”
I sighed.
“Not to mention he happens to be a personal friend of the owner of this newspaper.”
“I wasn’t aware of that when I went to Walsh’s house.”
“Would it have made any difference if you were?”
“Probably not.”
Isaacs shook his head.
“What the hell did you think you were going to find out about the murder anyway from Walsh and his wife?”
“I’m not sure, but I have a lot of questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
I told him. I told him everything. Well, almost everything.
About Maura Walsh’s troubled relationship with her father. About her ex-boyfriend Charlie Sanders saying how she’d been acting strangely and seemed upset for the past few months. About her trips back to Saginaw Lake where the family had spent summers when she was growing up to look into the death of her young brother. About some of the questions and inconsistencies I’d discovered in the circumstance surrounding Patrick Walsh’s death back then.
And, most of all, I told Isaacs about the payoffs to her that had been reported by people at the places she visited that last night. I wrapped it up by including my speculation that maybe Maura Walsh had gone rogue as a dirty cop as a way to embarrass and get some sort of bizarre revenge against her father for whatever reason they’d grown apart.
“Is there any official confirmation about these alleged payoffs?” he asked when I was finished. “Are the police investigating that angle as part of the murder investigation?”
“Not that I could find out. Or, if there is anything to it, they’re not talking.”
Isaacs sighed.
“We can’t go with the payoff stuff in your story, Jessie,” he said.
“I agree.”
“You do?”
“Yes. We don’t have any official confirmation from the police, just hearsay from people on the street. There’s no indication that the investigators on the Walsh murder are looking at the payoff angle or think anything like that might be the motive for her death. And, maybe most important of all for me, I have no desire to be the reporter who accuses a cop, especially one from a revered family like Maura Walsh, of being corrupt. Calling out dirty cops doesn’t make you very popular with the other members of the force. Being on good terms with the police is very important for me if I’m going to be able to do my job well. I could lose a lot of my sources and my access and my credibility with the NYPD. I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to go with the story if I really had it nailed down. But I’m not prepared to risk my police reporting career with what I’ve got right now.”
I also knew I didn’t want to go with the payoff story because I felt some sort of empathy for Maura Walsh and whatever she’d been going through that might have pushed her into doing something like that. That I wanted her to remain a hero in her death. But I didn’t tell that part to Isaacs.
Isaacs looked relieved when I was finished talking. I was relieved too. I’d held onto the secrets I knew about the Maura Walsh payoff activities for too long. If it came out publicly at any point now, I was covered. I’d reported it to my boss. I could have told Danny Knowlton or Lorraine Molinski, instead of Isaacs. But, despite all his faults, I trusted Isaacs. He’d been a stand-up guy for me on the last big story I’d done. Every once in a while, No Guts Norman showed me something.
“Are you ready to write about what you have now?” Isaacs asked me.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, let’s go with it in tomorrow’s paper. ‘Baffling Questions Remain in Hero Woman Cop’s Death.’ That way you can get in all the other stuff you told me about. And maybe you can even drop a few hints that there might be more to come.”
“Okay, but Danny said he wanted to hold it for a Sunday edition lead feature.”
“I’m the city editor here, not Danny Knowlton,” Isaacs snapped. “If I want to run this story tomorrow, that’s what we’re going to do!”
Like I said, sometimes Norman surprised me.
I went back to my desk and started writing from all the notes I had. It was easy to do because I’d made such detailed notes over the past few days. Plus, I’d been thinking about it a lot. So it didn’t take long to put all that into a story on my computer screen.
I used the interview with her partner, Billy Renfro. The one from her former boyfriend, Charlie Sanders. The previous tragedy in the Walsh family of losing their son at an early age. I even threw in a few quotes I got from Mrs. Walsh (assuming Norman would let me use them) about her daughter dying too young at twenty-seven – and not getting a chance for a real life.
I ended it by writing:
More than three weeks after Maura Walsh’s murder, there are still many baffling questions about who took her life.
A life that had been filled with many exhilarating high moments as well as some tragic ones for her and the Walsh family.
A life that – as Maura Walsh’s mother said – ended far too soon at the age of twenty-seven.
Twenty-Four
“Now that was a pretty good story you came up with, Jessie,” Danny Knowlton said to me.
“Yeah, it worked out okay in the end.”
We were in a bar near the Tribune where a group of us had gone after closing up the paper with my front-page story about Maura Walsh. Michelle was there, Peter Ventura and Lorraine and maybe a dozen or so other reporters and editors.
“So what are you going to do for a follow-up tomorrow?” Danny asked me.
“I haven’t thought about it yet.”
“Start thinking about it.”
That’s the thing about being a newspaper reporter – you’re only as good as your last story.
No matter how many big stories you’ve written, a reporter – especially a woman reporter – has to prove herself over and over again each day on the job. People at newspapers have very short attention spans. By the time the paper is on the stands or your story is up on the website, everyone in the city room has already moved on to the next story.
The bottom line at any newspaper is what have you done for us lately.
Tonight I had a story on the front page.
Tomorrow I’d have to start all over again.
We talked about pursuing the corruption angle I’d unco
vered but hadn’t been able to write about; about the mysterious PI Frank Walosin who claimed he had information for sale about Maura Walsh; about Dominic Bennato, the mob boss who owned two of the businesses Maura had gone to on that last night; and even about the possibility of going back to try for an interview with Deputy Commissioner Walsh, although that one would be tricky because of his close relationship with the Tribune’s owner.
Peter had told me earlier what he’d found out about Walter Palumbo, the dead Saginaw Lake Police Chief, which wasn’t much. Yes, he’d joined the NYPD not long after the death of little Patrick Walsh in Saginaw Lake. He was assigned to a good job at the 22nd Precinct, where Mike Walsh had once been precinct commander. But he later resigned and went back to Saginaw Lake to be chief there again. “He wasn’t around long enough for anyone I talked with to get to know him too well,” Peter said. “But one of them said he was very unhappy at the 22nd and complained that working for the NYPD was not what he thought it would be. He regretted leaving Saginaw Lake.” It was interesting information to know, and it did seem likely that Palumbo had gotten the job as a result of the way he handled the investigation into the Walsh boy’s death back then. But I had no idea what any of it meant – if anything at all – for my Maura Walsh story now.
In the end, nothing got decided that night.
Danny eventually lost interest in me when a young waitress asked him to tell her about the newspaper business. She said she was taking a journalism courses at NYU, and she wanted to get a job in the media when she graduated. She said she’d really appreciate it if Danny could give her some career advice. Danny took her off into a quiet corner for some one-on-one guidance counseling.
I walked over to a table where the others were sitting. They were all laughing about Lorraine, who’d left in a panic a few minutes earlier after checking the time on her phone and seeing how late it was. Except it wasn’t really that late. Peter Ventura had set the time on her phone ahead an hour and a half when she left the phone on a table while she was in the ladies’ room. She would discover this later, of course, and she would be furious in the morning.
“Aren’t you afraid that one day Lorraine’s going to go postal on you?” I asked Peter. “Totally lose it, walk into the city room and shoot you.”
“It’s just a practical joke.”
“She carries a gun, Peter.”
“That’s a legend, not a fact.”
“You don’t think she’s packing heat?”
“No.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Well, not completely.”
“It’ll be a tough way to find out if you were wrong.”
Michelle had brought a date. I found out later the guy was a young doctor she’d met while trying to break a story about health care violations at a big city hospital. She didn’t get the story but she got the doctor. Michelle never did like to waste her time.
The two of them said they were leaving. So did Danny and the young waitress, whose shift was over. The others drifted away too, until finally it was just me and Peter Ventura and a few other hangers-on left at the table. Peter was holding court the way he did late at night whenever he’d had a few drinks, which was pretty much every night.
“My top five favorite newspaper movies of all time!” he announced to us. “Number one: Deadline – U.S.A. Humphrey Bogart is the city editor of a New York City newspaper that’s about to fold, but he wants to break one more big story before they go out of business. Simply the greatest newspaper movie ever. End of discussion.
“Number two: All the President’s Men. Okay, an obvious choice, but how can you go wrong with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein.
“Number three: His Girl Friday. The remake of The Front Page, starring Cary Grant as the managing editor and Rosalind Russell as his ace woman reporter. She and Lois Lane were journalism’s first true feminists. I’d give an honorable mention to the original of The Front Page, but forget the later version with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Go watch The Odd Couple instead.
“Number four: The Paper, which was directed by Ron Howard of Opie and Happy Days fame. Not a great movie in itself, but makes the list because of a terrific performance by Michael Keaton as the metropolitan editor of a New York City newspaper. Watch the scenes of him chugging Coca-Cola at eight in the morning to get himself going – he looks like he’s on a caffeine high for the whole movie.
“Number five – and this one may surprise you – is a movie called 30. It has Jack Webb – yes, that Jack Webb from Dragnet – as the city editor and David Nelson from the Ozzie and Harriet show as an eager young copyboy. Take my word for it, it’s a camp classic. Very underrated.
“My favorite moment in any newspaper movie? That’s easy. Humphrey Bogart talking to a journalism school graduate who comes to him looking for a job on the paper the day before it’s supposed to shut down forever.
“Bogart says to the kid: ‘So you want to be a newspaper reporter, huh? Well, let me tell you something about the newspaper business. It may not be the oldest profession in the world, but it’s the best.’” Peter shook his head in admiration. “God, I love that sort of stuff.”
At some point in the night, I’m not sure exactly when, Peter announced that he was going to another bar to continue his drinking. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. No thanks, I said. Bar hopping with Peter generally meant drinking until dawn. Never a good idea. The others went with him though.
So there I was alone in the bar, trying to figure out what to do.
I didn’t have any idea where to go next on the Maura Walsh story or how to pursue the angle of the troubled relationship she had with her father in the months before she died.
I didn’t have any idea what to do about my looking for my own father.
I didn’t have any idea what to do about much of anything.
So I left. I walked for a while. It was a nice summer night out, the first one we’d had in a while. The humidity was way down. The temperature was hovering around only eighty. Finally, I got on a subway. Only instead of going downtown toward my own neighborhood, I took an uptown train. I got off at the East 72nd Street station. Then I walked around some. I tried to pretend to myself that I was just walking aimlessly on a pleasant summer night. But I knew where I was headed.
Eventually, I found myself in front of The Hangout, the restaurant where Maura Walsh had gone the last night of her life.
I pushed the door open and walked in.
Twenty-Five
Sam Rawlings was sitting at the end of the bar, reading a newspaper. As I got closer, I realized it was an early edition of the Tribune with my article about Maura Walsh on Page 1. There was an empty seat next to him. I slipped onto it.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“You know a good-looking guy like you really shouldn’t be drinking alone.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well I got impetigo. Very contagious.”
“I can live with that,” I said.
Rawlings ordered drinks for us from the bartender. Wine for me, and a beer for himself. He pointed down to my article in the Tribune. He said he thought it was very good. But he pointed out that I hadn’t mentioned anything in it about her trip to The Hangout that last night or the money she took there. He seemed happy about this, but surprised.
“Not yet I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
“I need more information. She was the daughter of a high-ranking NYPD official and from a revered family in the department. I don’t understand why she’d be taking money under the table. I wondered at first if maybe she was working undercover or something for the force. But if that was the case, it would have come out by now. No, she was taking payoffs on her beat, no question about it. I believe what you told me and the other people she visited that last night too. But it still doesn’t make sense to me. I guess I’m looking for something that makes more sense before I put a story in the Tribune about it all. Not all reporters w
ould do that, but that’s the way I work.”
“You sound like a good reporter,” he said.
“I have my moments.”
Rawlings nodded.
“I checked up on you, Jessie – googled you.” He shrugged. “I was curious. There’s a lot of stuff – not just everything you’ve written, but everything that’s been written about you. You’ve been in the headlines a lot.”
“I almost died a couple times. I’m the poster girl for crime victims. Not the best way to become famous. I wouldn’t recommend that approach for fame to anyone.”
“Tell me more about yourself.”
“Like what?”
“Is there a ‘Mr. Tucker’?”
“Not yet.”
“Good to hear.”
He smiled.
I smiled back. Okay, this guy was flirting with me, but I was flirting with him too. Maybe I needed a bit of flirting at the moment. Maybe I needed someone who actually seemed interested in me.
“How about you?” I asked him. “Is there a Mrs. Rawlings in the picture?”
“Oh, there was a Mrs. Rawlings.”
“Past tense?”
“We got divorced.”
“When was that?”
“About two years ago? But the years before that weren’t so hot. We should have done it – gotten divorced, that is – a lot earlier.”
“What went wrong?”
“A lot of things. Mostly, she had very expensive tastes, and she pushed me into trying to do a lot of things with my life I didn’t really want to do – and wasn’t very good at – so she could indulge them. That’s why I went to law school and tried for a while to become a lawyer. Even though I realized early on I wasn’t that interested in the law. By the time I realized what I really wanted to do – write a novel – she was gone. So here I am working in a restaurant until I become the next John Grisham.”
Rawlings finished off the last of his beer and stared at me without saying anything for a few seconds.
“I didn’t offend you or something, did I?” I asked. “You’ve suddenly gone very quiet.”