Charm City (11 page)

W
hen
Tess switched on her computer at the
Beacon-Light
Monday morning, she found three messages waiting: a perfunctory note
from Dorie Starnes about basic computer commands she might need,
another lunch invitation from Guy Whitman, and a polite, professional
welcome from Jack Sterling. "Welcome aboard," he
had written. "Let me know if I can do anything."
Sent on Friday afternoon. Did the offer still stand? And was there
anything personal to be gleaned from the impersonal words? Even as she
was deconstructing his first message, another notice from him flashed
across the top of her screen: "U there? 10:30 pre-meeting to
daily 11 o'clock in Colleen's second office. BE
THERE. But U didn't hear it from me."

Like all newspaper editors, the
Blight
bosses met constantly, in various sets and subsets. There were two news
meetings a day, one feature meeting, two metro meetings, a Page One
meeting, and a sports meeting. When the editors weren't in
formal meetings, they were in informal ones, dashing into offices and
shutting doors to whisper conspiratorially. The 11 o'clock
was the first news meeting of the day, mandatory for all department
heads. But what was a pre-meeting? And where was Colleen's
second office? Jack Sterling gave her too much credit, Tess thought,
dialing Whitney's extension.

"This is Whitney
Talbot." Tess waited a second, unsure if she had reached a
real person. Whitney was one of those people who sounded exactly like
her voice mail.

"Well, is someone
there?" Whitney snapped impatiently.

"Hey, it's Tess.
I'm here. But I'm not sure for how long.
I've just been summoned to Colleen Reganhart's
second office, whatever that is."

"Look, Reganhart might act as if
she has the authority to dump you, but she doesn't. Only
Lionel or Five-Four can terminate you. Don't let her bluff
you." Whitney actually sounded concerned, as if Tess were
still an under-employed bookstore clerk who needed the
Blight
's
fee to keep body and soul together.

"Don't worry, I have a
little advantage where that's concerned. But I'm
not sure what I can do for the
Blight
,
with the union on my back and Wink dead. Obviously, he's not
going to bring suit now, so what's the point?"

"You were hired to look into the
computer sabotage, remember? Wink's death doesn't
change the fact that someone, most likely Rosita, compromised the
paper's integrity. What would the paper look like if every
reporter greased the skids for her pet project?"

"Look, I'd better find
this meeting. Where can I find Reganhart?"

"On the fourth floor, behind the
door marked ‘Ladies,' an irony that quickly becomes
apparent in any prolonged discussion with Colleen Reganhart."

The fourth-floor women's bathroom
was a suite with a large anteroom separated from the facilities by the
kind of double doors usually associated with saloons. Tess, pushing her
way into the sitting area at 10:25, reflected that the size, placement,
and fixtures of such restrooms could give future archaeologists much to
ponder about the late twentieth-century workplace.

Upstairs, where men had dominated the news
pages throughout the
Blight
's
history, the women's bathroom was an afterthought, a cramped,
windowless room carved from a corner of the original men's
room, barely large enough for two stalls. But this bathroom near the
former Woman's Page was a two-room suite suitable for an
attack of the vapors. The lounge had a long sofa and two upholstered
chairs. It even had a vending machine, stocked with sanitary napkins
and pantyhose in formidably large sizes. The dispenser, dusty and
dented, didn't look as if it had been restocked since the
late 1960s, about the same time the
Blight
had stopped discriminating against black and Jewish brides on the
wedding page. Tess took her place on a banana-yellow vinyl chair and
waited.

At precisely 10:30, Colleen walked in,
lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag before the door swung shut
behind her.

"It's against the law to
smoke in Maryland offices," Tess said helpfully.

"If you have a problem with
cigarette smoke you can leave. In fact, you can leave even if you
don't have a problem with cigarette smoke."

Jack Sterling came through the swinging door
and did a not-bad job of feigning surprise to see Tess there.

"Given that Miss Monaghan was to
be the subject of our discussion here, don't you think she
should stay?" he asked.
Very cool
,
Tess thought.

"No, I don't. I think
she should go to her desk, clean it out, and get the fuck out of here.
We don't need her. We never needed her. This
weekend's story makes the first one look like a goddamn puff
piece. Who cares any more how it got in the paper? It led to the second
story, which is even better."

"What if—and
I'm just playing devil's advocate
here—what if his widow still tries to sue?"

"Let her. You can't
libel the dead.
Besides, we didn't
libel anyone
. Wink's suicide proves we
don't know how much shit he had to hide. This is a goddamn
fucking purple orgasm of a story, and it gets better every
day."

"A little self-examination
won't keep us from nailing the story, Colleen,"
Sterling said.

"It won't get us jack
shit."

"What are you so scared of? That
Tess's investigation will lead us straight to your
protégé, Rosita?"

Tess sat on the sofa, feeling as if she were
watching her parents bicker. Jack Sterling and Colleen Reganhart had an
odd chemistry. It wasn't sexual, not like one of those
television romances where hate turns to a clinch in mid-quarrel. This
tension was the kind one expected from romantic rivals or siblings. And
the object of their affection was the
Beacon-Light
,
as embodied by Lionel Mabry, dear old dad.

"We all have our
protégés
,"
Colleen told Sterling, exhaling smoke aggressively into his face. He
didn't flinch or cough. "We hired Miss Monaghan
because Lionel's would-be-proté, Whitney Talbot,
talked him into it. But that was last week, when Wink was alive and
Five-Four couldn't eat at the Center Club without someone
waggling a finger in his face for screwing up the basketball deal. Now
we look brilliant and Five-Four can pretend a great enthusiasm for the
fourth estate. Everybody's happy."

"Lionel's not. And
neither am I. We got lucky. It doesn't change the fact that
tampering with Page One isn't something to be taken lightly,
and the use of unnamed sources on this story has been far too liberal.
Wink Wynkowski died without knowing the names of his accusers. Do you
think that's right?"

"The bottom line is cash: this
investigator's salary comes out of my budget—our
budget, Sterling, the newsroom's budget—and
it's a waste of money."

Tess was tired of being discussed in the
third person. Sterling hadn't tipped her off about this
meeting for her to sit here meekly.

"Paying me is not a waste of
money,
Colleen
."
The name felt strange in her mouth, but Miss Reganhart, for a woman not
even ten years her senior, would have seemed stranger still.
"Besides, it's not something you can renege on.
This morning, I checked with my boss, Tyner Gray, and he confirmed he
had inserted language to that effect into our contract. You can play me
or trade me, but you still have to pay me.
Colleen
.
For at least two weeks' work."

Reganhart looked stunned, a poker player who
had plopped down a straight only to be confronted with a flush. Spike
always said arrogance was the worst thing you could bring to a wager.
"Math don't play favorites" was how he
put it.

"So you have a contract, too. And
the union has its contract," Colleen said at last.
"Me, I can be fired at Lionel's whim. If he
can't get the tee time he wants, or the counterman in the
company cafeteria forgets to put his salad dressing on the side,
I'm outta here. Whatever happened to the idea of a
meritocracy? Whatever happened to people doing their jobs without
counting on all these…gimmicks?"

"A contract's not a
gimmick. And the problem with meritocracies is they assume one or two
individuals have any clue about what merit is, uncolored by their own
biases."

Reganhart slumped on the orange plastic
sofa. She was neither as tall nor as large-boned as Tess had first
thought. Unlike most women, she dressed to maximize her
size—four-inch heels, seriously big hair, oversized and
out-of-fashion shoulder pads tucked into her pea-green wool jacket. On
the losing side of a battle, she seemed to shrink, like a Persian cat
caught in a rainstorm.

"Assuming that you're
telling the truth about your contract—and you can bet your
ass I will check—then you can go ahead as planned."
She turned to Sterling. "Now I'm actually going to
use this room for its intended purpose. Could you give us girls a
little privacy?"

As soon as he left, Colleen fixed a hard,
blue stare on Tess.

"Your contract also stipulates
thirty hours of work a week. I want you here six hours a day, Monday
through Friday. And you're to check in and out with my
secretary. If we pay you to work here, you work
here
."

"No problem."

"The problem will be how to fill
your days. You see, I've just decided I don't want
union representatives sitting in on your interviews with staff. The
union will, of course, file a grievance over my decision.
I'll fight it. I'll take it to arbitration.
I'll take it to the fucking Supreme Court. And
we'll end up putting the whole investigation on hold until
the matter can be resolved, which should be well after your contract
expires. So go ahead, collect your paycheck. Doing nothing is the
hardest work you'll ever do. If you don't believe
me, I can refer you to some reporters I've put in the same
position. In the end, they all quit."

"This isn't about
money," Tess said. "What's your problem
with me?"

"I don't trust you. I
don't trust any friend of Whitney Talbot's. Jack
Sterling's gunning for my job and she thinks she'll
get his job if he forces me out."

"Whitney doesn't want to
be an editor. She wants to go to Tokyo."

"I'm sure Whitney would
be willing to forgo three years in Japan if she could become a deputy
managing editor before she turns thirty. You may know your friend; I
know ambition. How do you think I went from city editor in Wilmington,
Delaware, to managing editor here in just five years?"

Reganhart dropped her cigarette to the floor
and crushed it beneath her pump. Deprived of a prop, her hands flopped
nervously at her sides, and she quickly lit another Merit. Tess had a
hunch the managing editor was a collection of barely controlled
tics—a reformed fingernail biter, a hair twister, a scab
picker, an earring fiddler. Chain smoking probably kept her from
tearing herself to bits.

Before Tess could make her exit, an excited
Marvin Hailey pushed his way into the room, followed by Jack Sterling.

"We've got a good murder
in Northwest," Hailey panted. "Really juicy. Two
carjackers tried to take a minivan from an Orthodox Jewish mother with
seven kids. She put up a fight and they shot her, right in front of the
kids. The kids were so freaked they wouldn't get out of the
van, so the carjackers left on foot, heading over to a fast food place
on Reisterstown Road for fried egg sandwiches. Cops arrested them while
they were still on line. One of the photographers heard the call on the
radio and managed to get to the scene before the police.
Great
stuff. Amazing. But we need to decide how to make it big, how to tell
people something tomorrow they won't see on the television
news tonight. TV is all over this."

"There are no good
murders." Sterling's voice was gentle in its
reproof. "But Marv's right, we do need to throw a
lot of bodies at this. Our readers will expect the definitive version
from us, something more than what they'll get on TV
tonight."

"I assume the art department is
already working on a map—where it happened, where the guys
were caught." Colleen dropped her fresh cigarette and rubbed
her palms together, as if the story were a rich meal or a pile of money
set before her. "I want Bunky Fontaine on the community
angle, rounding up the usual rabbis. And isn't Northwest the
police district where the community was bitching about the decision to
suspend foot patrols?"

She rushed from the room, Hailey hard on her
heels like a happy puppy. Sterling followed, moving more slowly, but
still following. Whatever their personal differences, Colleen and Jack
could work as a team when the situation demanded it.

"A good murder," Hailey
had said, and to Tess's sorrow, she knew exactly what he
meant. In her own newspaper days, she had done a brief rotation on the
night rewrite desk. There, at a safe remove from victims and grieving
relatives, one quickly learned that value system. Good murders, great
murders, wonderful murders, all determined on a sliding scale of
hometown, money, race, body count, and celebrity.

"
We've
got a good one
." How many times had
she said the same thing? How many times had her fingers flown with
delight over the details of someone's final moments on earth?
It was small consolation to remind herself that Colleen was the one who
had called Wink's death the ultimate orgasm, a climax
powerful enough to bring an entire newsroom to a collective shudder.