Charm City (8 page)

"I'm saying
they'll be sorry. Like you, honey." This time, he
ran his index finger along the inside of her arm. "You listen
to the Boss, or are you one of those younger kids who thinks
you're too cool?"

"Actually, I like
Springsteen."
I'm just not
queer enough to call him the Boss
.

"Well, the Boss may have been from
New Jersey, but he coulda been writing about Baltimore all these years.
This is a town full of losers, baby, people who are so scared of the
future, they end up talking about the past all the time.
There's more to life than getting Barry Levinson to make some
fucking movie about you. No one made a movie about me, but
I'm going to be bigger than any of 'em.
Don't believe everything you read in the papers."

A parting squeeze of her arm, then he
returned to his satellites, who had been lost without him, bumping into
each other and looking around. Relieved, they clapped him on the back,
although a little gingerly, in case there was any moisture left over
from his five minutes of activity. Paul Tucci glanced back at Tess
curiously, then limped out after them.

That night, Tess and Crow tried to watch the
6 o'clock news from bed, while trying to protect the
perimeter from Esskay, who circled them, intent on stealing their
Chinese food or curling up on their pillows, maybe both.

"What a hedonist," Tess
complained, rescuing a carton of General Tso's chicken from
the nightstand just as Esskay tried to clamp down on it. Thwarted, the
dog grabbed one of the pillows and carried it off into the corner,
where she appeared to be making a nest. So far, she had kidnapped an
old, stuffed bear of Tess's, placing it in the center of a
pile made from one of Crow's T-shirts, tissue salvaged from
the trash, and several pairs of Tess's underwear.

"Have a heart," Crow
admonished. "You'd need pillows, too, if you were
all bones."

"You're saying
I'm not?" Tess asked in mock outrage.
"Hey, turn up the sound. They're doing the piece on
Wink."

The TV showed several television crews
massed in front of Wink's fake Tudor mansion, an overdone
confection of turrets and stained glass. Stock footage, Tess realized,
shot the day before, when the
Blight's
story had run and all the TV reporters had camped out in front of
Wink's property, waiting in vain for him to comment.

"What's the point of a
new house designed to look old?" Crow wondered.

"I guess it's for people
who have to have wainscoting, ivy,
and
a subzero refrigerator. Louder, please. I still can't
hear."

The anchor's voice, so deep and
rich it vibrated on Tess's cheap set, filled the room:
"Channel Eight has learned tonight that Wink Wynkowski plans
a news conference Monday to respond to the charges against him in the
local press." The footage changed to shots from the
gym—Wink pedaling, Wink thumping the heavy bag, Wink flirting.

"That's your
arm!" Crow exulted. "I recognize the mole on your
elbow."

"And although he took time out to
sweat at Durban's gym today, Wink assured me, in an exclusive
interview, that he wasn't sweating the basketball
deal." So the reporter had stolen the line after all.

Cut to a shot of Wink outside
Durban's gym, breathing clouds of smoke in the wintry air as
he spoke into a microphone. Tess was thankful he had put a jogging suit
on over his singlet.

"All I want to tell my
supporters—and I know I have a lot of them—is to
rest easy. I always knew we'd have people fighting us on
this. I just didn't expect they'd be right here in
my hometown." He paused, as if he expected cheers or
applause, then remembered he was being taped for television.
"You know, maybe when I wrap this deal up, I ought to look at
starting a new newspaper, or convince one of the big chains to buy the
poor excuse for the one we got. You know what they say about Baltimore?
It's the biggest city in the country without a daily
newspaper."

"What about those charges in the
Beacon-Light
,
Wink?" the anchor asked, puffed up with pride at his daring.
"Any truth to them at all?"

Tess rolled her eyes.
"He's going to hit this one farther than the home
run Frank Robinson hit out of Memorial Stadium."

"I can't comment on that
now, but I expect to have a detailed response by Monday after talking
to my advisers. It's a complicated situation and I have to
keep my priorities straight, not get distracted. The game plan is,
number one, buy the team, number two, get it here, and then, number
three, I'll worry about those little dogs nipping at my
heels."

"But what about the information on
your, uh, youthful transgressions? Can you elaborate on that? Some
people have noted that three years is a long time to send a juvenile
away on robbery charges."

To Tess's surprise,
Wink's eyes began to tear up in what seemed to be a genuinely
spontaneous show of emotion. He started to speak, stopped, cleared his
throat, and continued, almost seething and crying at the same time.

"There's a reason they
keep your name confidential when you do things as a kid, you know. It
gives you a chance to start over, get things right. And I did pretty
well with the chance I got, better than most. Yet I get singled out. Is
that fair? You gonna open up the records of every guy in town who went
to Montrose? Because I'm not the only one, you know.
I'm not the only guy in this town who needed a fresh
start."

Tess and Crow were so mesmerized by this
performance that Esskay was able to make another lunge toward the
Chinese food, snaring a gnawed sparerib from Crow's plate.
Her victory was short-lived: she began retching, the bone lodged deep
in her throat.

"Try the Heimlich
maneuver," Tess cried, panicking. Unruffled, Crow reached his
hand down the dog's throat and extracted the rib, gooey with
drool and sauce. Esskay stared at the bone as if she had never seen it
before, then tried to snatch it back from him.

"Pavlov, indeed," Tess
snorted in disgust, but her heart was still beating a little fast.
"This stupid mutt can't learn anything. She
can't even remember she almost choked to death on that same
damn bone ten seconds ago."

"Oh, I don't
know," Crow said, forgiving as always. "We all have
things we desire even though we know they wouldn't be good
for us. Don't you have a few spareribs in your
life?"

A rhetorical question, one of
Crow's flights of fancy, nothing more. To Tess's
consternation, an image of Jack Sterling flashed through her
mind—his blue eyes, the strange little sensation she had felt
when they shook hands, as if he had caught a spark of static
electricity from the carpet in the conference room and passed it on to
her. Blushing, she hid her hot face in Esskay's hotter neck,
stroking the dog until she was sure the telltale color had subsided.

"I
can think of five other things I should be doing right now. I really
don't have time to be your tour guide."

It was Friday morning, and metro editor
Marvin Hailey was leading Tess through the newsroom, which looked more
like an insurance office gone to seed. Scurrying behind the reluctant
Hailey, Tess tried to keep tabs on where she was going in this maze of
cubicles, dented metal filing cabinets, and ancient computers rigged
with various accessories to make them slightly less lethal to the users
and their wrists. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around some desks,
creating makeshift walls, while old newspapers rose toward the ceiling
in shaky yellowing towers. Recycling was apparently too avant-garde for
the staid
Beacon-Light
.

"It looks like you're
running out of space," Tess said, trying to make conversation
with the unsmiling editor.

"We are," Hailey said,
glancing over his shoulder as if acknowledging even this obvious fact
was fraught with risk.

"Any chance of the whole operation
moving out to the 'burbs? I know you're already
printing the paper out there."

"We had to have new presses, and
it made sense for delivery purposes to be outside the Beltway. But the
other departments will remain here until Five—uh,
Pfieffer—can get a good price for the property."

"Forever, in other
words."

Hailey grunted, a safely neutral noise.

It was 9
A.M.
,
a rare quiet moment in the cycle of an all-day newspaper. Within an
hour, the skeleton crew of overnight editors would put to bed the
"evening" paper, a publication identical to the
morning paper except in layout and the updates on predawn carnage
provided by a lone police reporter. Most of the other reporters had yet
to arrive, with the exception of a dark-haired woman with her feet
propped on an open desk drawer, reading the morning paper while she
listened to a police scanner. A phone rang on the city desk, but no one
was there to answer it.

"So this is where you make the
magic happen," Tess said.

Marvin Hailey lunged for the still ringing
phone, succeeding only in knocking over an old mug of coffee. Tess
watched him try to stem the milky-brown spill with wadded-up
newspapers, only to spread the puddle over more of the desk top. Such a
dry husk of a man—shoulders speckled with dandruff, lips
whitish and cracked from constant, nervous licking. He looked as if he
might break up and blow away in a strong breeze.

"Oh, hell," he sighed.
The newspaper had finally absorbed the coffee, only to leave his hands
black with ink. Resignedly, he tossed the crumpled sheets into a nearby
trash can, wiped his palms on his pilled trousers, and sat down at his
computer.

"We've got you all set
up on our system. To sign on, you hit this button and type in
MONAGHAN," he said, doing just that. Even his typing had a
jumpy, paranoid rhythm, as if he expected someone to creep up behind
him and find fault in whatever he did. "Now the computer
wants a six-letter password. You want me to pick something out for you?
It's not as if you'll need a secret one."

"That's okay,
I'll do it." Tess slid the keyboard away from
Hailey and tapped in the first six-letter word that came to mind:
E-S-S-K-A-Y, which showed up on the computer only as a series of
asterisks. Who knew what secrets she might want to keep as this
progressed? "Now what?"

"Well, I assume you're
going to start interviewing people. I drew up a list of people we know
were here that night. Editors, reporters, custodial staff, the printer
who set the bogus—um, unofficial—story. You should
be able to get to most of them today, except for Feeney and Ruiz. They
flew to Georgia yesterday, aren't expected back until late
tonight."

"Georgia? For the Wink
story?"

"I guess so, but no
one's informed me officially." Hailey allowed
himself a small, bitter smile. "This is so hot only Colleen,
Mabry, and Sterling are in the loop. I guess I'll find out
when the Sunday paper comes out, like everyone else in
Baltimore."

"Don't be so bitter,
Marv. They haven't clued me in, either, and I'm the
sports editor. The story came out of my department, don't
forget that." A grinning, square-jawed man appeared out of
the warren of desks and cubicles to offer his arm to Tess, which she
declined to take. "Guy Whitman. I'm here to lead
you to the system manager, who will explain what happened
electronically Tuesday night. The computers are part of my
province."

"What do computers have to do with
the sports department?" Tess asked, as she began following
him along a new path through the newsroom labyrinth.

"I'm also in charge of
Beacon-Light
2000, a task force set up to examine the paper's information
services, what we'll need to go into the twenty-first
century."

"Aren't newspapers
already in the information services business?"

Guy looked as if he wanted to pat her on the
head. He was handsome, in a fluffy-hair kind of way rare in a newspaper
editor.
And didn't he know it
.
Too bad his taste in ties appeared to be terminally whimsical. Tess
tried not to make a sour face at the dancing lacrosse sticks.

"You sound like everyone else
around here, Theresa. Haven't you noticed the times, they are
a-changing? You can read virtually every major metropolitan newspaper
on the World Wide Web. The
Washington Post
has its own on-line service. But the
Beacon-Light
,
one of the last family-owned papers in the country, has only started
beta-testing its Web site, and they're doing it on the cheap.
They think they can continue to work primarily in paper." He
spat out the last word as if it were something caught in his teeth.

"Well, paper is awfully handy for
taking on a bus, or sharing at the breakfast table. By the way, my
grandmother on my mother's side is the only person who gets
away with calling me Theresa."

"I hope you're not one
of those types who's still hot for hot type,
Theresa." Whitman didn't seem to be deliberately
ignoring her, he had just lost the habit of listening to any voice
other than his own. "Dreaming of pneumatic
tubes—don't tell me that's not Freudian.
But things do change, and usually for the better, I think, although
that's not always a popular opinion these days. Do you think
football should be played in leather helmets? Should we use carrier
pigeons to cover breaking events? Would you have preferred to come here
today via streetcar? You're young, you're suppose
to embrace the future, while old farts like
myself—" he paused here, in case she wanted to
object to his characterization of himself. "Anyway, you make
a lovely Luddite."

For someone
who's so gung ho about the future, Guy Whitman was sure
behind the times when it came to the current thinking on what
constitutes sexual harassment
. Tess thought
about reprimanding him, but he had ducked through a narrow space
between two plastic dividers covered with soiled, once-blue
fabric—the systems manager's
"office."

Behind the dingy dividers, all was
order—a severe, meticulous order. The metal cabinets shone,
as did the desk, giving the alcove the high-tech, unused look of an
office in an Ikea catalog. With the exception of a Georgia
O'Keefe wall calendar and one Post-It note on the computer
terminal, there was not a single scrap of paper in this office. Not
even a newspaper, Tess noticed.

"So, where's the
computer geek who presides over this electronic kingdom?" she
asked Whitman.

A scratchy female voice came from somewhere
around their ankles. "The geek is under her desk, unplugging
a laptop whose batteries she was recharging because the prima donna
reporter who had it last couldn't be bothered with such a
mundane task."

A plump woman in her late thirties crawled
out and stood up, brushing off her jeans. Of medium height, with
flyaway brown hair that had long ago surrendered to a nest of cowlicks,
she was as soft and disarrayed as her office was hard and sleek.

Tess held out her hand. "Tess
Monaghan, vicious purveyor of stereotypes."

"Dorie Starnes. And I
don't mind being called a geek. It's a promotion
for someone who started in circulation. Who'da guessed I had
a natural gift for computers? Not the teachers at Merganthaler Vo-Tech,
that's for sure. They kept trying to steer me toward the
commercial baking classes."

Dorie was not someone to do one thing when
she could be doing two or three. As she spoke, she settled into her
ergonomically perfect chair, complete with tie-on backrest, and rolled
another chair to her side, patting it in invitation even as she began
to type a series of mysterious codes into the computer.

"Move on, Mr. Whitman.
You'll just be in the way. Go make a news decision, or
convene a focus group on box scores. Aren't you going to run
a reader's contest to name the new basketball team? Oh, I
forgot, that was a promotion marketing worked out with Wynkowski. Guess
that's no longer a go."

Whitman forced a hearty laugh.
"That's a good one. Of course, Dorie
doesn't even read the paper, do you, Dorie? Who's
the prime minister of Israel, Dorie? Is the state legislature currently
in session? Who's the President of the United States?
What's NAFTA stand for?"

"I try to read the newspaper, Mr.
Whitman, I really do. But all I see are the computer commands that make
it possible to put black stuff on white stuff. Sometimes the
arrangements turn into stories I want to read, but most of the time
they just look like those crazy paintings in that new wing at the
Baltimore Museum of Art. Black stuff on white stuff."

Dorie stared at her computer monitor as she
spoke, running her fingers rapidly across the keys like a pianist
warming up. As far as Tess could tell, she wasn't really
doing anything, but it looked impressive, blocks of copy appearing and
disappearing on her screen.

"Very clever, Dorie. When
you're through taking Ms. Monaghan through the system, ask my
secretary to take her to the office we've set up for her.
Jean also has a list of the workers you need to interview,
Terry."
Terry! That was worse than
Theresa
. "By the way, would you like
to have lunch with me today? I find myself unexpectedly without
plans."

"What happened?" Dorie
asked, all sweet innocence. "Was there a fire at your
favorite motel?"

This time, Whitman's fake chuckle
was not so robust.

"Now, Dorie, Miss Monaghan will
have the wrong impression of me if you keep this up."

"I'm afraid I
couldn't join you today, anyway. I have plans."
Dorie might have been kidding about the motel room, but Whitney had
warned her that the very married Whitman felt honor bound to make a
pass at virtually every woman who passed through the office.

Dorie kept her eyes trained on the monitor,
fingers tapping away. "NAFTA is the North American Free Trade
Agreement," she said softly to herself. "The
Maryland legislature convenes on the second Wednesday in January and
meets for exactly ninety days. Is he gone?"

"Yes," Tess said,
glancing over her shoulder. "Is he always such a
jerk?"

"Actually, he's
generally harmless, which is saying something around here. He was only
trying to impress you. But I don't
love
him. And Whitman needs to be loved, and not just in the boy-girl way.
He needs complete, unconditional adoration, something I reserve for
Johnny Unitas."

"Hey, I grew up in a house where
the Colts were the only theology my parents could agree on."

Dorie allowed a small, crooked smile at
that. She was typing rapidly again, with some purpose now. A copy of
Feeney and Rosita's Wink Wynkowski story appeared on the
screen.

"Okay, this is a story, or a
'take,' which is stored in a directory. The
Wynkowski piece was assigned to CITY HOLD, a directory for stories that
have been edited, but are waiting clearance, sort of like jets ready to
take off. Some are evergreens—stories that can run anytime
there's space, but it's not urgent. Others are hot
potatoes, designated WFP—Wait For Permission. The Wynkowski
piece had an WFP on it—Wait For Permission. Only three
people, Mabry, Reganhart, and Sterling, can move one of
those."

"Does an WFP have limited access,
then? I mean, can only those editors call it up?"

"Good question."
Dorie's tone suggested she had not expected Tess to ask good
questions. "WFP is a policy, not a program; the computer
doesn't make any distinctions. Anyone could pull a story out
of this directory and make changes, but they'd better not.
The computer keeps a history, and if Colleen found someone messing with
a WFP, that person would be history."

Tess studied the words on the screen.
"Is this
the
story, or a copy?

"It's the original. The
one in the paper was a copy of an earlier version, before Colleen had
edited it last. But there's still a trail. The computer tells
us someone sat down at computer number 637, the classical music
critic's terminal, a little before eleven-fifteen
P.M.
, the time the story
was sent to composing. Everyone in the building knows the critic never
remembers to shut his machine off. He's legendary for
it."

"So you can use his sign-on,
knowing you won't get caught."

"Yeah, but even with the
guaranteed anonymity of working under the critic's user name,
this person was real, real careful. Watch."

Dorie tapped another key and Tess saw a
form, which showed when the story had been created—almost six
weeks ago, by Rosita Ruiz—and who had made changes to the
story since: Ruiz, Feeney, Sterling, Reganhart, Hailey, Whitman, Mabry.
Too many cooks
, she
thought. No wonder Feeney's usually clean writing had broken
down into clichés and chest-thumping hyperbole.