The Player Page 9
I live in a two-bedroom house in Bloomfield, one of those Jersey suburbs developed at a time when they still made houses small. Up until this point in my life—which had not been marked by dependency in the form of a tiny person—it had fit me just fine. My only roommate is a somnolent domestic shorthaired cat named Deadline, and his square-footage needs are not substantial. Food bowls and litter boxes take up only so much space.
As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if, nine months from now, I would begin to understand why child-infected families moved to farther-flung parts of the world where the acreage is plentiful and the housing stock comes only in sizes XL and beyond. And when my phone rang at nine o’clock the next morning—and the caller ID told me it was Tina—I thought perhaps I wasn’t the only one who had dozed off while doing the same kind of pondering.
“Hi,” I said, sounding barely alive.
“Good morning,” she said crisply. I thought her next words would pertain to having scouted out local Montessori schools—Tina is very proactive when it comes to things like that—but instead I heard: “Nice job on McAlister last night. None of the New York papers had a whiff of it. Their Web sites are all linking to ours. TV and radio have been giving us credit all morning and—”
“Tina did you seriously call to talk about work? Aren’t we going to talk about last night?”
There was a long pause, during which time I imagined molars were being forcibly driven against other molars. It ended with: “No.”
“Come on.”
“I wasn’t finished. I meant to say: no, not if you value your testicles. Because I swear I’m going to have them stuffed and mounted if you bring up that topic again.”
“Tina, that’s not fair. I have—”
“Drop it. Just drop it,” she said, and I immediately knew she really meant it. She was using her quiet voice—the scary one, the one that always made me wish she were screaming instead.
I briefly considered pushing further, but resisted. As a member of the bigger-but-dumber half of the species, I am not necessarily endowed with the greatest instincts when it comes to dealing with the smaller-but-smarter half. But I at least try to learn from past mistakes. And those many errors had taught me that when Tina used the quiet voice, it was best to table further discussion until a later time. I couldn’t imagine raging pregnancy hormones made this any less true.
“Okay. For now. But I reserve the right to talk about this at some later date. I’m not just going away, Tina. Whether you want to deny it or not, the fact remains that I am this child’s father. And there’s not going to be anything you can do to stop me from playing that role, so you might as well accept that I’m here to stay. I am fully committed to this baby.”
I could barely believe the words that had tumbled from my mouth. They sounded so … responsible. What’s more, Tina, in her silence, seemed to respect them. Not wanting to break this fragile win streak, I hopped off the field, concluding with: “But I understand that now might not be the right time. So let’s start over with: good morning, Tina, what can I do for you?”
There was another beat of silence. Then she said, “Good morning, Carter. As I was saying, terrific work on McAlister.”
“Thanks.”
“The only problem is, you might have done a little too good. Brodie was so delighted he called me at seven o’clock this morning to talk about it. And he was fully engorged.”
Brodie was Harold Brodie, our legendary executive editor. It had become part of Eagle-Examiner culture that his interest in a story was often described in terms of the intensity of the erection it gave him. This, of course, was all in very metaphoric terms.
Had it been actual, it would have made Brodie the most virile seventy-year-old on the planet.
“Okay, so what does he want?” I asked.
“He wants assurances that if anyone figures how and why Vaughn McAlister died, those details will appear in our newspaper, not someone else’s,” Tina said. “And therefore he wants his best reporter to dedicate all his time and talents to that task.”
“What does that mean for the Ridgewood Avenue story?”
“Those people will still be sick next week. This week, we’re full speed ahead on Vaughn McAlister.”
This, of course, was the way the news business often worked. It wasn’t necessarily the most important story that got covered. It was the most pressing.
“Okay,” I said. “Can I please have Tommy and Pigeon to help me?”
“Sure. But only because you said ‘please.’”
“Spoken like a true mother,” I said.
“Shut up, Carter,” she said, and ended the call.
As I shaved, showered, and generally made myself beautiful—and what was more pleasing to the eye than a solid white shirt, a muted-red tie, and charcoal pants made of some synthetic material that never wrinkled and may well have been bulletproof?—I kept thinking baby thoughts, until I realized that Harold Brodie probably wasn’t looking for a consumer-reports piece on the hottest new convertible strollers on the market.
So I engaged my brain’s moving company, put the baby thoughts in a box that I marked “OPEN LATER,” and made room for the story Brodie did want. Why would someone want to give Vaughn McAlister a premature trip to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s office? I went through our conversation from the preceding day and ransacked it for any hint of that kind of trouble.
By the end of a bowl of Lucky Charms—still magically delicious after all these years—I hadn’t come up with any more answers. McAlister had been full of well-groomed good cheer, well-mannered optimism, and well-intentioned exaggeration.
Which is not to say he was without problems. I just hadn’t found them yet. Toward that end, I placed my first phone call to Tommy Hernandez. He answered by saying, “I’m not sure I want to talk to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because yesterday you asked me about Vaughn McAlister and then last night he got all dead. That’s pretty creepy. What happened? He took one look at your shoes and got so mortified for you that he died of embarrassment?”
Tommy is constantly telling me that my shoes are out of style. This is one of the many ways in which I know I’m not gay: my workaday footwear consists of two pairs of dress shoes, black and brown, and for the life of me I have no clue what’s wrong with them.
“Too bad I wasn’t smart enough to sell short on McAlister Properties stock,” I said.
“Yeah, but you were smart enough to do something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Give me the name Harry Grant.”
“Oh?”
“Yesterday after we talked, I ended up chatting with one of my favorite city hall moles and the subject of the McAlisters came up. I guess all is not well with McAlister Arms. I said something offhanded like, ‘Well, it’s not like the McAlisters are going to be another Harry Grant.’ And the guy said, ‘I’m not so sure about that.’ I pursued it a little bit but he didn’t want to say any more. Maybe he’ll be more talkative today.”
“That sounds interesting,” I said.
“Almost as interesting as if you stopped shopping for your shoes at Thom McAn,” Tommy said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“What’s wrong with Thom McAn?” I asked, but I was already talking to a dead phone line.
* * *
On my way out the door, I gave Deadline a quick pet. I did this not because I am the world’s most loving cat owner but because he hadn’t moved off my bed all morning and I wanted to make sure he was still alive. Sure enough, after about three strokes, he started purring like a small outboard motor.
“See you, pal,” I said. “Don’t exhaust yourself, okay?”
I left him, still rattling, and began the drive to Newark. As I slalomed between some of Bloomfield’s most imposing potholes, I placed the call I didn’t feel like making: I had to cancel on Jackie Orr. Again.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Hey, Jackie, it’s Carter Ross.”
“Actually, Jackie, I’m really sorry about this,” I said, “but I’m not going to be able to make it this morning.”
“Oh. Are you still sick?”
“No. Unfortunately, there was a man killed in Newark last night and I’m probably going to be working on that story for at least the rest of the week.”
“The developer?” she asked. Obviously, she had either seen that day’s paper or read the Web site.
“That’s right,” I said.
There was a silence at the other end of the line. Jackie Orr was a thoughtful young woman, not a screamer. But I knew I had disappointed her.
“So all that ‘voice to the voiceless’ stuff,” she said. “That was just talk, huh? A rich white man gets killed and that matters more than poor black folk getting sick.”
“No, Jackie, it’s not like that,” I insisted. “It’s just … from a news standpoint, the story about McAlister is a little more urgent. It doesn’t make the story about your neighbors any less important. I’ll be able to get back to it in a week or two.”
“I understand,” she said. She added a hasty: “Thank you for your time, Mr. Ross,” then she hung up.
And I just found out I’m going to be a dad, and I had to work until really late, and I haven’t had enough bonding time with my cat, I wanted to add, just to garner what I felt was a little well-deserved sympathy. But, of course, she was already gone. And she wasn’t my therapist.
I tossed my phone onto the seat next to me and pouted, feeling guilty about having to jilt her but, at the same time, powerless to do much about it. I was still pouting—and still making my way through traffic toward Newark—when my phone rang. It was Pigeon.
“Hey, how are you feeling?” I asked.
“Better today. Yesterday was awful. I don’t know how you made it out of bed.”
“With my legs.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. I assume you’ve heard about Vaughn McAlister.”
“Yeah, Tina Thompson just called and told me all about it. Then she told me she wanted me to work with you on the story. Did you … did you really ask for me?”
“Yeah. Is there a problem with that?” I asked as I veered around a particularly aggressive-looking pothole. It was the kind the municipality was either going to have to patch or turn into a community swimming pool.
“No, I just … I mean, thank you,” she said. “That’s, like, the nicest thing anyone has done for me since I got here.”
Yet another sign Pigeon was for real: she defined being included on a story about a grisly homicide as “nice.”
“Yeah, I’m a regular prince,” I said.
“So, what do you want me to do? Can I make an FOIA request?”
FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act. It was a wonderful piece of legislation that gave citizens access to the documents being generated by their government. For voters, it was a means of keeping tabs on their elected officials. For reporters, it was sort of like unlimited access to a never-ending beer tap, because it kept the good times flowing. Still, I didn’t know what Pigeon was talking about.
“Uh, what exactly do you want to FOIA?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I learned in J-school that if I did an assignment that involved FOIA-ing something, I always got an A. There’s got to be something we can FOIA.”
That was when I made a hasty decision about what to do to keep Pigeon busy. “That’s all well and good. But if you want to get an A in real life, you’ve got to get real people to talk to you. And the person I want you to talk to is Barry McAlister.”
I heard her gulping over the phone. “You mean, the dead guy’s dad?”
“Yep, the dead guy’s dad,” I said. This was a calculated gamble on my part. I had no inkling of who had killed Vaughn McAlister or why. But if it wasn’t something in his personal life—a jealous wife, an angry mistress, a boyfriend who went all Andrew Cunanan on him—it was something in his business life. Barry McAlister was the only person who was positioned to be aware of both.
And all I really knew about Barry McAlister was that he must have been a pretty private guy. Why else would he have had his son act as the front man for the family business? So, chances were, if a seasoned reporter like me came at him, he would make like a shellfish and clam up. But maybe if a somewhat-naïve young intern approached him …
It was worth whatever slim chance of success it had. Sometimes reporting is about instinct. And sometimes it’s about getting lucky when you throw something sloppy against a wall and it sticks.
Pigeon did her share of whining and protesting, but I pep-talked her into it. What I didn’t tell her was that I was fully expecting whomever we sent to talk to Barry McAlister to strike out. And I’d rather waste her time than mine.
With Pigeon thus busied, I made a quick call to my best police source. Rodney Pritchard had floated around through various parts of the Newark Police Department during his years there, and I had written a few stories about him that had inclined him to be friendly to me. Currently he was in the Gang Unit, though he had been in Homicide recently enough that I knew he’d be up on their gossip. And a little gossip could go a long way just then.
“Hey, Pritch, what’s going on?”
“Uh-oh, here’s trouble,” he said. I heard street noise in the background, which meant he was not in the office. Sometimes, if he was at Newark Police headquarters—known informally as “Green Street,” because that was their location—he’d tell me I had the wrong number. Strictly speaking, Pritch wasn’t supposed to talk to me without several layers of authorization. It was understood our conversations were just between us girls.
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But when you’re calling, it’s always trouble somewhere.”
“Well, I’m sure you can guess what that is today.”
I heard a horn honking through his phone. “No, actually, I can’t.”
“The McAlister homicide?” I prompted.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“A major developer gets killed and dumped in a vacant lot within the boundaries of your fair city. I thought that would have all of Green Street jumping.”
“I’m sure the case has been assigned to someone,” Pritch said. “But I was in there this morning and it was pretty business-as-usual. I don’t think this one is getting any extra attention.”
“That’s weird.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Usually when we go big with a story, you guys follow suit.”
“Yeah, but a lot of times the only reason we do that is because when you guys get excited the mayor’s office gets excited. And then you-know-what flows downhill. I don’t think that happened this time.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask the mayor. Better yet, don’t ask the mayor. It’s sort of nice not having him up in our business.”
“Noted. If you hear anything, let me know, okay?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “Anyhow, I’m just a guy out on a corner, looking at fresh graffiti, worrying we’re about to have another war on our hands. So I gotta go.”
“All right,” I said. “Good luck with that.”
* * *
Upon arriving at the office, I had not even set down my briefcase when I realized there was someone sitting in the intern pod who shouldn’t have been there.
It was Pigeon. She was facing away from me, slightly stooped in her chair, in a failing attempt to make herself less noticeable. I walked toward her, thinking she
would turn around when she heard me. Then I cleared my throat to get her attention. But, like a puppy who had just missed the paper, she couldn’t look at me. She seemed incredibly interested in a small piece of the carpet opposite me and couldn’t tear her eyes away.
I walked around to the other side and stood on the spot that had transfixed her.
“Hey, Pigeon, what’s up?” I asked.
She lifted her gaze about halfway up but still couldn’t make eye contact. “Oh, hi,” she said.
“How did things go with Barry McAlister?” I asked.
“Imuddababa.”
“Excuse me?”
“Addinnaddda.”
“Pigeon, I’m getting to be an old man, so you’re going to have to speak up.”
Finally she said, “I couldn’t do it.”
“Pigeon!” I said, reproachfully, drawing out the second syllable.
“I just couldn’t!”
“Pigeon!” I said, this time emphasizing the first syllable. I’d never known how wonderfully adaptable the word “pigeon” was.
“I got his address and I was going to go over to his house and everything. But then, I don’t know, what was I going to say? ‘Hi, Mr. McAlister, I heard your son died last night. Care to tell me about it?’”
“Well, yeah, that’s about the size of it. What, you think you’re going over there to swap brioche recipes?”
She lowered her gaze again and said, “I feel so ashamed.”
This was one of the things I loved about interns. I have dim memories of a time in my career when talking to the relatives of dead people probably made me uncomfortable, too. It felt like a long time ago, but I forced myself back into the mind-set of what it was like to be a young reporter, filled with apprehension, scared to knock on a door.
“Oh, Pigeon,” I said, hefting a grandfatherly sigh and giving her a pat on the shoulder. “Sometimes as a reporter, you have to pretend that every morning you put on a suit of armor. And then you make believe that armor makes you impervious to social awkwardness. I mean, it’s like doing a man-on-the-street story. Would a normal human being charge up to a perfect stranger and say, ‘Gee it’s cold today. What do you think about it?’ No, of course not. But as reporters working on stupid weather stories assigned to us by our unimaginative editors, we do it all the time.”