Part 3 (1/2)
”Your talk was fascinating,” she said when she caught Tess's eye in the mirror. ”Completely opened up my mind to new ways of reporting.”
Tess wanted to take the compliment, but the gus.h.i.+ng was too rote.
”Please don't suck up. It makes me nervous.”
”That's refres.h.i.+ng,” the girl said, returning her gaze to her own face. ”The men around here can't get enough smoke blown up their b.u.t.ts. I tell you, it's exhausting.”
Tess laughed with relief. Here was the smart-aleck att.i.tude she remembered, the coa.r.s.e vocabulary she expected from journalists.
”I'm rotten with names. You're...”
”Marcy. Marcy Appleton.” Tess tried not to smile. It was such a hilariously all-American, blond-cheerleader name. The girl's accent was midwestern, too, with broad o's and a's. ”I cover federal courts.”
”You really want to do investigative stuff?”
”It's the most prestigious thing you can do here, now that they're consolidating the national bureaus throughout the chain. And everyone knows that the foreign bureaus will go next. Which sucks, because I came here banking on a post in Asia. I'm fluent in Mandarin, and I traveled throughout the region between college and grad school. Know who they sent to cover the tsunami? Thomas H. T. Melville III, who's barely mastered English.”
”He's...”
”The idiot who started to ask you what it felt like to kill someone.”
Marcy paused, took a pot of gloss from her purse, and rubbed it gently over her lips. Apparently she wanted to know, too, but was too polite to ask outright. Tess opened her own leather satchel and revealed the Beretta that she always kept at hand.
”I didn't always carry this. Now I do.”
The girl nodded. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Tess, but she seemed to be from another generation or perhaps even a different species, one characterized by boundless confidence and self-esteem. ”And I guess you don't use it as a figure of speech anymore. It would be impossible to say ”I want to kill so-and-so' once you've done it literally.”
”Yeah,” Tess said absently. ”Yeah.” She was thinking, Actually, I want to kill my boyfriend.
”There was one thing you said-about the Youssef case-that didn't exactly track for me.”
”Yes?” Tess suddenly didn't feel as kindly inclined toward the girl.
”The federal courthouse is my beat, although all the boys keep trying to bigfoot me on the story. Only nothing's coming out. It's not the most leak-happy place under any circ.u.mstances, but the discipline on the Youssef murder is remarkable. I can't get the feds to speak, even off the record, about what a p.i.s.s-poor job the Howard County cops are doing, and I can't get the Howard County cops to say anything about what the feds should or shouldn't be doing.”
”The old divide-and-conquer technique, huh?”
”Exactly. You were probably a good reporter in your day.”
”Merely adequate. But the closemouthed atmosphere you're describing-that only supports my theory, right?”
”I suppose so.” Marcy frowned. She really was lovely. With a face like that, she probably wasn't used to not getting what she wanted from men, and the federal bureaucracy was dominated by men, although the acting U.S. attorney was a woman. ”The thing is, Youssef was a flirt. I always thought he was kind of hitting on me. But, you know, it would have been unethical to act on it. He was a source.”
”And married.”
”Oh, yeah,” Marcy said, although this seemed a secondary concern to her. The paper's ethics policy probably didn't cover adultery, just s.e.x with sources. ”Still, he definitely had an eye for women.”
”Good cover for a closeted man, don't you think? They can be the worst Lotharios of all. Or maybe he was bi. Or his killer could have been a female prost.i.tute. His wife was eight months pregnant at the time. The particulars remain the same. It was vicious, it was personal-and no one wants to talk about it.”
”Maybe,” Marcy said. ”I don't know. In the end it's so hard to know what goes on in anyone's head.”
”Keep that kind of talk within these walls. Out there never admit that you don't know anything. They don't.”
Emerging from the sanctuary of the ladies' room, Tess almost tripped over a lurking man, a whey-faced middle-aged version of the young comers she had been instructing all day. Introduced to him that morning, Tess had already forgotten his name, but she retained his bio: a new a.s.sistant managing editor, imported from Dallas just a few months ago, according to Feeney. Rumor was that he had been installed by corporate with orders to gut the newsroom budget. When that was accomplished, he would be rewarded with the top job.
”Initial feedback on your presentation was very positive,” he said. He had that unfortunate bad breath that nothing can mask, so it ends up being bad breath with a minty, medicinal overlay. ”The reporters said you had lots of insight into out-of-the-box thinking.”
”I hope no one actually said ”out of the box.” Or if they did, they were promptly fired.”
”We're a union paper, we can't fire anyone,” the editor said, wringing his hands mournfully. Hector Callahan, that was his name. Hector-the-Nonprotector. Hector-the-Nonprotector-Complete-with-Pocket-Protector-Who-Liked-to-Talk-About-News-Vectors. Tess was training herself to use rhymes as mnemonic devices.
”I was joking.”
”Oh.” He looked puzzled, as if jokes were an archaic social custom. ”You know, I think that there could be a place for you here. On staff. Well, not on staff-we couldn't offer benefits-but on retainer, as a consultant.”
Here was the offer that Tess had dreaded, the one she must sidestep adroitly if she was going to turn this into a traveling gig throughout the chain's holdings.
”That would create all sorts of conflicts of interest for me. Few clients are going to feel comfortable working with a private investigator who also works for the local newspaper.”
”But if we did it on a case-by-case basis-the Youssef matter, for example. If you, as a private detective, fleshed out your theory-did some actual legwork to verify your...um, suppositions-and brought that report to the newspaper, then we could report your findings.”
”You mean, I could be the messenger that everyone wants to shoot and the paper could claim it was just reporting what someone else said. It would be an ingenious way of advancing a salacious story-and then the paper could promptly back off, throw me to the dogs if I made even the tiniest mistake. Have your dirt and make me eat it, too.”
”Being on retainer for the paper would be a steady source of income that would help you weather the...um, droughts endemic to small businesses such as yours.”
He said ”small businesses” as if the very concept were distasteful, as if it smelled as rotten as his breath.
”You sound almost as if you know something of my finances, Hector.” She managed, just, not to add the rest of the rhyme now bouncing in her head. Hector the Nonprotector / Likes to Talk about News Vectors / Does he have a brain, this Hector? / That is simply mere conjecture.
He smiled, expelling another puff of minty-bad breath.
”We do know how to do some basic investigative work. Just think about it, Miss Monaghan. Don't be so hasty. Don't make your decision now. Think about it, sleep on it.”
Somewhere in Tess's brain, a cautionary voice reminded her to count to ten, to wait before saying the words springing so automatically to her lips. But the voice was too faint, too weak. Sentences were already forming and heading out into the world, as impossible to marshal as the wind.
”You know, whenever anyone tells me to think about a proposition, he-and it's almost always a he, come to think of it-seems to disregard the fact that I have thought about it. Thought about it, considered it from every angle, and rejected it. So no, I'm not going to think about it. You don't need a PI on retainer. You need to devote more resources to hiring experienced reporters who can do the kind of investigative journalism you want, or else come to terms with the fact that you're putting out a piece-of-s.h.i.+t newspaper that's interested only in its bottom line.”
Hector backed away from Tess, then turned and, in his haste to escape from this Ca.s.sandra-like creature, caromed off the wall with a loud thud, righted himself, and limped into the newsroom, favoring his left hip.
”What was that noise?” Marcy asked, coming out of the bathroom, hands smoothing her silky brown hair.
”Me, derailing my own gravy train.”
4.
Gabe Dalesio debated whether he would need a coat to dash over to the courthouse for the 3:00 P.M. initial-appearances hearing, running through the pros and cons with the same swift a.n.a.lysis he brought to everything he did. Pro: There was snow on the ground. Con: The snow had pretty much stopped. Pro: It was still cold. Con: If he stopped at the smoking pad afterward, the men who smoked-the DEA agents, Customs, ATF, even IRS-almost never wore top-coats, no matter how bitter the day, and Gabe wouldn't want to look like a p.u.s.s.y. Six months in, he was still enough of a newbie to worry about the impression he made on the guys. If he could only impress them, maybe they would start bringing him cases and he wouldn't have to play second G.o.dd.a.m.n chair on other AUSA's cases. The smoking pad was usually a reliable place for nicotine freaks to bond, but he had yet to make a single real friend.