Breakdown (23 page)

Salanter and I had been Photoshopped to appear arm in arm on the steps of the Parterre Club. How had Lawlor known we were there? I didn’t have time to worry about that little question; he was moving on to his main attack, his voice like syrup mixed with acid.

“Warshawski has a reputation as a private eye, just like the guy she found dead in a cemetery last Saturday night. I was celebrating my tenth anniversary of being able to bring the truth to you, my good friends and loyal listeners, and she was in a cemetery doing—what?

“I’ve looked into her record. She supports the ‘underdog,’ so-called. Well, I am sick and tired of bleeding hearts shoring up underdogs.”

He leaned forward into the camera, spit flecking his lips. “My own sister was murdered by one of those ‘underdogs’ when we were teenagers. Magda was seventeen, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

The camera gave us a close-up of the tears spilling out of the corners of Lawlor’s eyes, and then a photo insert of Magda Lawlor. Like Wade, she had thick black hair, cut in the style that Madonna made popular in the eighties.

“I was three years younger and I adored her. My wife knows however much I love her, I’ll never feel as close to any other woman as I did to Magda. They found my sister’s body in Tampier Lake. One of these underdogs, these mental incompetents that Warshawski bleeds all over, had murdered her, strangled her, and dumped her in the water, as if she were a used condom. I would have killed him myself if I’d known they wouldn’t give him the death penalty. I’ll never get over Magda’s death, but Warshawski is one of the people who protected her murderer.”

I felt as though my legs had turned to cement. Lawlor went on and on, and I stood there taking it.

When a smooth female voice finally said that “
Wade’s World
will return after these messages,” I couldn’t even lift my arms to remove the earphones.

Murray appeared behind me and took the headset away. His face was ashen. “Jesus Christ, V. I.—I had no idea that was on tap.”

23.

A REPORTER’S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE

T
HE TRIO OF SMOKERS HAD STAYED WITH US IN THE HALL,
and another fifteen or twenty people had drifted out of the newsroom to watch. Someone had turned on the sound so that everyone could hear it. At the commercial break, they turned to look at me with the same expression people have for plague victims: pity mixed with fear that it might be catching.

“He attacked Gabriella,” I said to Murray. “He is such a low and loathsome piece of bottom-feeding, scum-sucking garbage that he slandered my mother.”

Murray put an arm around me. “He attacked you way worse. Or doesn’t that count?”

I tried to smile. “I think it’s so shocking I can’t quite look at it head-on. This is what Sophy Durango deals with every day. And Chaim Salanter. There must be some way to stop him.”

“Second Amendment remedies,” someone in the news crowd said. Everyone laughed, that kind of raucous laugh you give as an antidote to shock.

I turned to face the group. “How many of you go to the huddle? Besides Murray, I mean.”

After looking around to see if anyone else would speak up, a woman in a miniskirt and leggings said, “There are several huddles. The big one is at Global One. Murray goes to that, and so do the assignment editors—me, Klaus Hellman, and Gavin Aikers. Then the assignment editors have our own huddles with the newsroom teams.”

“So what was the official line at Global One when they brought up Malina and Warshawski and so on?” I asked.

“There wasn’t a line about you,” Murray said. “Of course, Harold Weekes is obsessed by illegal immigrants, and he hates Chaim Salanter, or at any rate is targeting him. But no one said, ‘Go after the Warshawski family, including V.I.’s dead mother.’ ”

The woman in the miniskirt nodded. “They told us to do some digging on Malina, see if we could come up with the foundation’s policy on illegals, or find out who the girl with your—is that your daughter in the photo?”

“No. Petra is my cousin.” Lawlor’s assault had left me exhausted; the words came out slowly.

“They wanted us to find the girl who’s with your cousin in the photo,” the young woman said.

“And has anyone?” I asked.

The group in the hall exchanged glances, but there were head shakes all around.

“Do you know who she is?” someone else asked.

“Not a clue. But I’ll call Petra.” I speed-dialed my cousin. “Have you seen Julia? How did it go?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t fire me, but she chewed me out in a really scary way. I mean, she never raised her voice, or called me names, but she made me feel like I might have jeopardized the whole foundation. I did like you said, told her Murray was your friend and I didn’t know he would take what I said and turn it into a story. She called my boss and the two of them talked it over and decided I was just naive, which is better than being unemployed, but gosh, they made me feel like I was a puppy who’d messed on the Persian rug.”

“I can call Julia if you don’t think that would make things worse.” I described the drubbing I’d just taken.

“Just don’t say anything that’ll get me fired,” Petra fretted.

“I have talked to Murray,” I said. “We agreed that we all need to be more professional. But I can tell Julia that Harold Weekes, the head of GEN’s so-called news division, apparently put out a hit on the foundation in his infamous huddle.”

“Huddle?” Petra repeated doubtfully.

“Darling, they used to call them news conferences, but that was when journalists were journalists and looked for news, instead of going on air and in print to destroy people’s lives.”

Murray looked like another puppy caught on the Persian rug, and I smiled grimly but said to my cousin, “GEN seems to think you know who that kid was next to you in their picture, but I don’t think you’d ever seen her before, had you?”

“Vic! You remember Kira Du—”

“That’s right, babe. She was a complete stranger, whom you saw being attacked by the mob and pulled to safety. Isn’t that right?”

My cousin was silent for a second. “You mean if anyone calls to ask—”

“Is that what happened? You pulled her to safety, and then she ran off in the direction of the Green Line? You didn’t get her name?”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Petra said. “You’ll tell Julia about, well, what happened at the news thingy? How they decided to target me?”

“Yep,” I said. “And if anyone, either Julia or the press, tries to move you to the center of the story, we’ll be taking legal action.”

When I put my phone away, a man around forty, in a necktie and short-sleeved shirt, said, “That sounds as though you just coached your cousin to lie to the press.”

“And you would be?”

“Gavin Aikers,” Murray supplied. “He’s the city desk assignment editor.”

“Mr. Aikers, I don’t think anyone at GEN can get more hysterical and lie-filled than they already are, but by all means, call Harold Weekes and tell him to bring it up at the next cuddle.”

“Huddle,” Aikers corrected.

“I thought it was the meeting where you cuddled each other and said what a swell job of creating an alternate reality you were doing. Maybe it’s the muddle.”

Murray put a hand on my shoulder. “Vic, let’s go somewhere private before you actually slug someone. I don’t think you have enough liability insurance to cover the damages.”

I let him guide me out of the viewing area. Behind us I could hear Gavin Aikers telling his staff they had work to do, they couldn’t watch TV all day. Reporters began to trickle in behind us.

Murray took me to his cubicle, which wasn’t exactly private space, but no one was at any of the closest desks. “Vic, I’m sorry. The text in my story about Petra and the Malina Foundation got edited in rewrite. If you’d like to see the original as I posted it, I’ll show you.”

His face was still pale, making his freckles and blue eyes stand out as vivid splashes of color in his face. I noticed that his red hair was streaked with gray. So much time had passed since he and I worked on our first story together, corruption in the Knifegrinders union. We not only hadn’t cleaned up the city, we hadn’t even made a dent. Instead, fraud had spread along every corridor of American life and had infected the newsroom.

“I’ll take your word for it. But if you call Petra again, I want her to hang up on you. As soon as she says anything, it’ll go into Weekes’s distortion machine and come out as a claim that she caused the tsunami that hit Japan.”

“I won’t call her.” Murray held up three fingers, the scout salute.

The young woman in leggings came over to his cubicle with mugs. “Hot tea. It’s better than our machine coffee and maybe it’ll help calm you down.”

I accepted the mug meekly.

“I’m Luana Giorgini—in charge of froth. You know, books, music, comics, the stuff that the paper wants to edge out. Every now and then they turn movies or videos over to me.”

“Luana is my only spiritual ally on the editorial side,” Murray added.

“That’s why I’m in charge of froth.” Her small round face didn’t change expression, but Murray laughed.

“You can say anything to Luana that you say to me.”

“Which isn’t much right now,” I said, lips tight.

“Tell me about Wuchnik’s place being tossed,” Murray said.

“Someone had been through it with a sieve.” I described the condition of Wuchnik’s apartment. “They’d broken into his car, too. The one thing I found was his mileage log—whoever cleaned out his car must have dropped it in the dark. I got the log from a couple of kids.”

Murray recovered his color. “Let’s see it, Warshawski.”

“There’s nothing to see,” I said. “He tells where he’s going but not who he’s going to see, or who hired him.”

In the interest of restoring harmony, though, I pulled the photocopied log out of my briefcase and showed it to Luana and Murray. I didn’t point out my special interest in Ruhetal—Murray had a very deep hole to climb out of before I trusted him with much again.

Murray and Luana bent over the photocopies. I leaned back, sipping my tea and reading the cartoons and notices Murray had pinned to the corkboard on his cubicle walls. He had all the predictable
Dilbert
strips, along with
Doonesbury
’s Roland Hedley’s spurious reporting.

One wall was devoted to his scrapped series on mental illness,
Madness in the Midwest
. I leaned forward to read the proposal, which began with nineteenth-century farm women going mad from the isolation of their lives and burning down their farmhouses with themselves and their families locked inside.

He’d also posted the e-mail chain that ended with Weekes telling him that the series was “too narrow, too downbeat for our demographic.”

Murray looked up and saw what I was reading. “Oh, yes. My dead series. I can’t quite let it go.”

He ripped the e-mail from the corkboard and handed it to me. It looked like a good story to me, starting and ending with the veterans on the streets: in 2001, they included 150,000 survivors of Vietnam. In 2010, those numbers had been swelled by 9,000 vets from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In between, Murray had proposed a look at mental health institutions like Ruhetal. Who got treated, who got turned away, who paid the bills. And his segment on “not guilty by reason of mental impairment”: he’d suggested five names to Weekes, three at Ruhetal, two at Elgin. “All these people have been on locked wards for more than twenty years,” he’d written the head of GEN’s news division. “We’re looking at incarceration with no end date and no judicial oversight. Why isn’t this worth a story?”

And Weekes had written back, “Because everyone is glad to see these scum stay locked up. Too bad we can’t do that with the rest of our murderers.”

Murray had written, “Sounds like China. Or Iran.”

Not too surprising that Weekes had canceled the series.

“Did you figure out why he canceled?” I asked. “Was it because of your Iran comment?”

“Nah. He’d already made up his mind by then. He was never very interested, but it was either the segment on homeless Iraq vets—GEN is still pounding their war drums—or the forensic-wing stuff. He doesn’t think mentally ill criminals deserve a sympathetic hearing—he made that clear in the huddle.” Murray scowled in remembered resentment. “Lawlor added some choice sarcasm. It was like being back in eighth-grade gym, with the coach egging the rest of the guys on to bully kids like me who didn’t play football.”

I couldn’t believe I was feeling sorry for Murray, working in that poisonous environment, only half an hour after I’d been ready to kill him.

“By the way,” I said, “you told me on Sunday that Wuchnik did a lot of work for my ex’s firm. How did you know that?”

“Who’s your ex?” Luana demanded.

“Richard Yarborough, at Crawford, Mead.”

“Just think—if you’d stayed with him, you’d have the capital to start a newspaper, or an international security firm. You wouldn’t have to deal with people like us,” Murray said.

I smiled sourly. “I never thought there was an upside to my marriage, but you’re making it sound attractive. Anyway, how did you know about Wuchnik and Crawford, Mead?”

“It came up in Sunday’s extra-alarm huddle, I think,” Murray frowned in an effort to remember. “Weekes must have told us, because it’s not something I knew on my own. Luana?”

She shook her head. “I was out sailing with my brother and his partner on Sunday. I didn’t get the news until later and then all I was supposed to do was a feature on the
Carmilla
books and why tweens all over the world love them so much.”

“If it’s true, I can’t figure out why Crawford, Mead use him,” Murray said. “I’ve called around, and he was a two-bit kind of guy. Solo shop, but not the kind of sophisticated work you do, Warshawski. If you wanted private information on someone, he got it for you, sometimes by pretty—well, unorthodox methods is the charitable spin.”

“So if you were trying to undermine someone in court and you wanted the goods on their fetish for sleeping with goats, he’d find that out? That kind of thing?”