Charm City (9 page)

"Here's my working
hypothesis." Dorie said the word as if it were two words,
hypo thesis. "He/she called up the old version on
‘Browse' and saved all of the
text—" Nimbly, Dorie demonstrated how to define a
large block of copy and store it with just three keystrokes.
"Then he/she went into the set directory and picked out a
Page One story already set into type. A tidal wetlands story in this
case, which the paper probably could live without. You see, the coding
is already there, so all our unofficial editor had to do was erase the
wetlands text and put the Wink text in its place."

"What about the
headline?"

"Wrote a new one—not a
very good one, but it was the same number of characters as the tidal
wetlands head, so it fit. Probably didn't want to take the
time to make it good. Now watch this." Dorie hit one key, and
the body of the Wink Wynkowski story appeared. "I hit
justify—" she stroked another key "and
the computer tells me I'm over by six lines. I cut from the
bottom—" She deleted the last graph with two
keystrokes. "I justify again. Perfect. Now all I have to do
is change the bylines and I'm ready to roll.

"Last step." She hit
another key and the type was now underlined as she wrote
"SUB, SUB, SUB FOR TIDAL" at the top.
"See, that's in a special format, the computer
can't ‘read' it, but the guys in the
composing room can. A final command—Command X, in fact, and
it's on its way. Vol-A."

"What's Vol-A? Computer
jargon for Volume A?"

"No, it's French. You
know, like a magician might say. Vol-A!" And she made a
large, sweeping gesture with her hand, as if pulling a rabbit out of
her computer.

"Oh,
voilà
,"
Tess said, hating herself for it when she saw Dorie's face.

"I saw it in some book. I
didn't know you said it that way."

"Hey, I'm the same way,
phonics screwed me up for life. I can't pronounce half the
words I see in print. But it's more important to know
something than to know how to pronounce it."

"Not around here," Dorie
said, looking unhappily at her keyboard. "I read a
lot—history, especially the Civil War, and I've
been listening to all these books on tape—full-length, not
abridged. It took me a month to get through
Great
Expectations
. But it doesn't matter.
Here, it's
how
you say things, not what you say. It's how you talk,
it's how you dress, and whether you went to some fancy
college. And if you're a woman, it's how you look,
too."

"But you have the real power,
Dorie. You could bring this place to its knees. They couldn't
put the paper out without you."

"Yet I'm still just a
computer geek, right?" Apparently, she had not forgiven
Tess's tactless opening line. "Lesson over.
You're on your own now. Let me tell you one more
thing—"

Tess looked up hopefully.

"If you spill soda or coffee on
one of my keyboards, your life won't be worth
living."

Although barely in his thirties, classical
music critic Leslie Brainerd wore voluminous khakis hiked up to his
sternum, belted so tightly they suggested an Empire ball gown. This
effect was heightened by his long-fallen pectoral muscles, bobbling
like voluptuous breasts in his knit polo shirt. Alone at his desk, he
appeared to be listening to music on his headphones, which looked like
a strange growth on his shiny bald head. But when Tess tapped him on
the shoulder, he jumped with a violent start, awakened from a covert
catnap.

"Small details are for small
minds," he sniffed, once he understood why this strange woman
had disturbed his sleep. "I have more important things on my
mind than turning off this machine every night."

"I'm sure you
do," Tess assured him, determined to ingratiate herself after
her rough start with Dorie.

"Tuesday night was very busy for
me," Brainerd continued fretfully. "I had to write
on
deadline
. A most
exquisite concert, featuring a young violinist." The name he
mentioned meant nothing to Tess, and her blank look must have given
this away.

"But you must know her!
She's
lovely
! To
see her in a black velvet gown, slit to the femur, is to experience
heaven. ‘
The curves of her body mirror
the curves of the violin, creating an almost sexual tension between the
performer and her instrument
.'
That's from my review."

She couldn't stop herself.
"When Pinchas Zukerman was in town, I don't
remember any details about
his
body."

"Oh, yes, my Zukerman piece.
Another exceptional piece of deadline writing. I received quite a few
compliments on that."

Good, Brainerd's hide was too
thick to pierce, armored as it was with self-importance. Tess would bet
that perhaps 5,000 of the
Blight's
400,000 readers actually slogged through his reviews, but they were the
right 5,000, the men and women likely to fraternize with the publisher
and the top editors.

"So you left here about
ten-thirty. Did you see anyone on your way out? Did you go straight
home, or did you stop somewhere along the way?"

Brainerd looked confused. "Where
would I go?"

"I don't know. A
restaurant, a gas station, a bar. I'm trying to figure out if
you can
prove
the time you
left here, or if someone else can establish the time frame. The
computer tells us when you filed, but because you didn't turn
it off and the security system was down, there's no record of
when you left the building. And your boss edited the piece from home,
so he doesn't know when you left, either."

"I was
not
happy with Harold's changes. He never gives me enough space.
Just slashes from the bottom, like some vandal, or that crazy Hungarian
who hammered Michelangelo's
Pièta
.
I asked him once if he thought Mozart could be edited, and he said,
‘He could if he wrote for me.'"

Tess mentally crossed Brainerd off the list
of possible accomplices. It was obvious to her now that Leslie Brainerd
was too egotistical to care about any story written by someone other
than Leslie Brainerd. If he had stumbled into the Watergate burglary,
he probably would have written about how sleek the Cubans looked in
their black pants.

The others on Tess's list of those
known to be in the building the evening of "unscheduled
publication" were night-side workers who wouldn't
arrive until 2 P.M. or later. She took a long lunch at Lexington
Market, opting for an all-peanut meal: fresh roasted nuts for her main
course, then brittle from Konstant Kandy for dessert. After a morning
at the
Beacon-Light
, with
its strange codes and conflicting agendas, the old market felt
refreshingly real.
You want an apple? Some
bananas, maybe
? Apple meant apple; banana meant
banana. No more, no less.

Back at the
Blight
a little after 2, she found custodian Irwin Spangler taking a cigarette
break on the loading dock. He shook his head mournfully at all her
questions. "The only thing I ever notice around Mr.
Brainerd's desk is how many cups of coffee he's
managed to spill in a day. Tuesday must have been a good day for him,
because I don't remember needing too much time up there. I
was off the floor by eleven."

Following the story's journey
through the paper, Tess went to the composing room, on the third floor.
Howard Nieman, the worker who had pasted the story in place and sent it
on its way, was starting his shift. A stoop-shouldered man with
thinning brown hair, he had a permanent squint from a lifetime of
working with agate type.

"Didn't anything seem
out of the ordinary to you that night?" Tess asked him, after
introducing herself. "Wasn't there something about
the story, or the way it arrived, that seemed unusual?"

"It fit and it didn't
make the paper late. Those are the only things I really care about,
miss."

It was a slow time for Nieman, the lull
between the advance Sunday editions, which would be followed by the
rest of the Sunday paper, and then the Saturday paper. He showed her
how the copy came in, on shiny rolls of paper with gummy backs. The
strips were sliced, then pasted on the pages. A camera shot a
photograph of the page, and this photo was used to make the printing
plate. Tess had known this once, albeit dimly.

"I'll tell you one funny
thing," Nieman said. "This kind of trick would be
difficult to pull off if the pagination system were in place.
That's where they design all the pages by computer. They do
some of them that way, but not page one, not yet. Ol'
Five-Four is always slow to put out money for the new stuff."

"What are you going to do when
they go to pagination company-wide? Would you take a buyout if they
offered it, like they have at some other papers?"

He smiled with only half of his mouth.
"Our contract calls for lifetime job security, so
they'll retrain us for some monkey work around here.
I'm fifty-two—too young to stop working, too old to
learn another trade. I gotta stick it out."

Tess stopped next to an easel where the Real
Estate section front was displayed. The standing
"sig" across the top—the
columnist's name, in this case—said Annie Heffner.
The photograph showed someone with a full, glossy beard. She pointed
this out to Nieman, who shrugged.

"We catch
most
of 'em. What's that thing about the forests and
trees? Well, we're the tree guys."

Tess understood. Howard Nieman, like Dorie
with her head full of computer commands, saw the paper differently than
the average reader, or even the average reporter. His version was a
modular collage, pieced together from strips of copy, photographs, and
standing features. Tidal wetlands or basketball, what did he care? As
long as he was off the floor on time and his paycheck came through for
another week, he was a happy man.

And another unlikely accomplice.

The editors had given Tess a small,
windowless office near the old, now unused presses. Tess consulted a
list of
Beacon-Light
employees and sent an e-mail message to Lionel Mabry's
secretary, asking to see the night rewrite, Chick Gorman, as soon as he
arrived for work.

Tess had assumed Chick was a man, but the
person who burst through her door minutes later was a small woman with
close-cropped dark hair, the same reporter she had seen that morning.
At first glance, the woman could have passed for a college intern. Then
one noticed the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the shadow of a
worry line between her eyebrows. Her poise finally gave her age away:
absolute self-confidence can't be faked at 22.

"I'm Emma
Barry," the woman said politely. Tess offered her hand, but
Emma ignored it. "We're shutting you
down."

"We?"

"The union. The Newspaper Guild.
I'm the shop steward for Metro." She folded her
arms across her chest, as if delivering a rehearsed speech.
"According to long established legal precedents, any
procedure that may result in disciplinary action entitles guild members
to representation. Since your findings may be used by management in
dismissal actions, reprimands, or suspensions, we've notified
management of our objections and instructed our members not to meet
with you without a union rep. Until management agrees to this, no one
under our jurisdiction is available to you."

"As someone who used to belong to
the Newspaper Guild, I think you're overreacting.
I'll probably do more to clear people than I will to
implicate anyone. What's the harm in that?"

"Where do I start? For all we
know, the bosses are using the Wynkowski story as an excuse to pry all
sorts of personal things out of employees. You asked Brainerd if he
went to a bar Tuesday night—are you suggesting he's
an alcoholic? If he had said yes, would that information have gone into
his personnel file? And you asked Nieman if he would take a buyout,
which is something that can be negotiated only by
his
union."

"It wasn't exactly like
that—"

"No more interviews with our
members without union representation, and I believe everyone you need
to interview is a guild member. See you Monday."

"See you Monday?" Tess
muttered to herself, after Emma had gone. "Who said I was
taking the weekend off?"

T
ess
began Saturday by visiting Spike at St. Agnes. Unfortunately, her
parents had the same idea. Not that she had anything against her
parents, but a little bit went a long way, and she had been over for
dinner just three weeks ago. Now here they were, chairs drawn up to the
foot of Spike's hospital bed as if it were a television set
and he was the host on the old
Dialing for Dollars
show.
The amount is $35 and the count is 4 from
the top
. They stared at him intently, not
speaking. A stranger might have concluded that Patrick and Judith
Monaghan were the kind of long-married couple comfortable with silence.
Their daughter knew they were merely resting between bouts.

"Hi, Mom. Pop."

"The hair," her mother
said.

"It's nice
hair," her father said.

"I didn't say it
wasn't nice. But she's too old to wear it hanging
like that, in a tail."

"It's very
neat."

"It's blah. And those
pants. Tess, if one's pants have belt loops, one should wear
a belt."

"These are blue jeans, Mom, and
belts are for people who don't have hips to keep their pants
up. Never been one of my problems. Besides, I dress differently when
I'm working. Honest."

"How would I know? It's
been
months
since
we've seen you." Judith was turned out with her
usual monochromatic perfection, in a dark mustard sweater with matching
tweed skirt and suede flats. Tess suspected her mother shopped with
paint samples from the hardware store, so flawlessly did she match
everything. Patrick wore his winter uniform: Sansabelt pants,
long-sleeved white shirt, and a plain red tie. Come Memorial Day, he
would vary the look by switching to a short-sleeved white shirt and
pale blue tie.

"What does the doctor say about
Spike?" Tess asked, hoping to divert her mother from such
loaded topics as grooming, wardrobe, and lack of attentiveness.

Judith shrugged. "A lot, but all
it means is they don't know why he's not doing
better. Maybe he'll wake up, maybe he won't. Maybe
there'll be permanent damage, maybe there
won't."

"Weinsteins are slow to
heal," her father observed slyly.

Although everyone agreed Spike was a
relative, neither side would claim him. Legend had it that
he'd appeared shortly after Tess's birth, working
his way through a sesame seed bagel with lox at one of Momma
Weinstein's Sunday brunches. But he seemed equally at home at
the Monaghans' gatherings, eating Easter ham and neatly
side-stepping any question attempting to pinpoint his origins.

Today, however, Tess's mother
chose to ignore her husband's invitation to this familiar
favorite argument. "You know, we saw him just two days before
this happened. It always feels strange, when someone you
don't see very often pops up, then the next thing you know,
they're… different."

Different. Her mother was given to such
euphemisms. Well, a coma sure was different, even for Spike.

"Did he say anything to either of
you about a greyhound?"

"Greyhound? No, he brought us two
cases of Old Milwaukee—he gets it for your father at cost.
And he brought me ten bags of mulch, which I asked him for last fall.
Ten bags! Two would have been plenty, I wanted them for the flower beds
along the front. But he was being thoughtful, in his own way.
I'll be able to use most of it when I put my vegetable garden
in this spring." She smiled triumphantly at Patrick.
"So maybe he
is
a Weinstein. The Monaghans are not given to thoughtfulness. I remember
when your mother—"

Spike seemed to stir slightly, and everyone
turned back to him expectantly. But it was nothing.

"I guess it doesn't do
much good for us to sit here and stare at him," Tess said.
"I think I'll go downtown and take advantage of the
Beacon-Light's
database, see if there's been a string of tavern robberies,
or anything about greyhounds in the news recently. It's a
long shot, but it's all I've got."

"You're going into work
dressed like that?" her mother murmured, as Tess bent down to
kiss her cheek.

"I like the way she
looks," her father insisted. And they started again, like
some museum exhibit with a tape-recorded loop.

It was almost 4 before Tess stopped to meet
Tyner for a late lunch at Roy Rogers, one of their shared guilty
pleasures along with gangster films and fried green pepper rings dipped
in powdered sugar. Tyner ordered what he insisted on calling the
Trigger special, the quarter-pound cheese-burger with a side of
macaroni salad, while Tess settled for the
"holster" of french fries. That was their term, not
hers.

"Happy trails," Tyner
said, as he always did, lifting his twenty-ounce Coca-Cola, another
shared vice.

"Same back at you. I'm
surprised some do-gooder group hasn't targeted the fries
packaging for extinction. Baltimore has always been good at symbols,
even if it sucks at doing anything about real problems."

"You're so crabby you
remind me of me. You know what you need?"

Tess gave him a dark look. "That
is not an issue in my life right now, thank you very much."

"I'm talking about
rowing. You need to get back on the water, the sooner the better. You
know, you can go out this early if you dress properly. Rock told
me—"

"Rock? I heard the Natural
Resources police pulled him off the water in February and threatened
him with charges if he didn't wait until it was
safe." Tess dredged a fry through her own mixture of barbecue
sauce, ketchup, and horseradish, another reason she loved
Roy's. "But you're right, I
am
in a mildly rotten mood. I spent most of the afternoon with the
Blight's
computer system, to no avail. It's a bitch to learn, and once
I finally got it up and running, it wasn't much
use."

"Did you find out anything you can
link to Spike's beating?"

"I found out there have been
several tavern robberies this winter, but no one was beaten in any of
those. And the only mention of greyhounds was a two-year-old story on
this annual picnic held by local people who had adopted the dogs.
Totally goofy. They hold contests for the dog with the longest tail and
best costume. Too bad there wasn't a halitosis prize, Esskay
could win that in a walk."

Tyner rolled over to the
"Fixin's bar" for a plate of free pickles
and onions, which he sprinkled with pepper and ate raw. The girl behind
the counter gave him a dark look—once one's
sandwich was gone, these extras were presumably
off-limits—but Tyner was a regular and the staff had learned
long ago it was easier to let him do what he wanted. Tess knew she
should learn the same lesson, but she couldn't help trying to
match him for sheer orneriness.

"What about your paying
job?" he asked, when he returned. "Made any
progress on that?"

"I skimmed the
Blight's
early Sunday edition. One of the sports columnists had an intriguing
rumor, says Paul Tucci might be willing to put together a new ownership
group if the NBA tried to block the basketball deal on the grounds Wink
wasn't morally elevated enough to join the ranks of NBA
owners."

"Tucci's probably
floating that rumor," Tyner said.

"Yeah, I thought the same thing.
You know what he said? ‘We shouldn't lose sight of
the fact that basketball would be good for the city under any local
ownership plan.' Isn't it strange how quickly this
has become the conventional wisdom, like an-apple-a-day, or
early-to-bed-early-to-rise? A sports franchise will make you healthy,
wealthy, and wise."

Tyner pointed a long finger at her nose.
"I'm going to give you some
advice—"

"Oh God, no, anything but
that." Tess pretended to cower, even as she finished off her
last fry.

"What did Deep Throat say in the
garage? Follow the money? Well, I have much older, much more universal
advice.
Cherchez la femme
,
Tess.
Cherchez la femme
."

"
La femme
?"
Tess needed a moment, then she smiled. "Good idea, Tyner. I
think I'll stop by the home of Rosita Ruiz on my way home
tonight."

"Giddyap," Tyner said,
then made a whinnying sound so accurate that the other Roy diners
looked around uneasily.

Nothing put Tess more in the mood to work
than strict injunctions against it. If she had been
Bluebeard's wife, she would have been in the secret room the
first night. Pandora's box? Opened before it was across her
doorstep. The editors had told her to conduct all interviews on-site,
the union had told her to stop the interviews entirely. She was
counting on Rosita, out of the newsroom for two days and on deadline
for most of today, not to know either of these injunctions.

Rosita lived in a high-rise north of Johns
Hopkins University's Homewood campus. The strip of apartment
buildings along University Parkway catered to every taste: struggling
students, well-to-do seniors, young professionals, even those rich
enough to pay $1 million for a view of Hopkins' lacrosse
field. Rosita's building fell in the lower part of the range.
A stark modern tower, its dingy lobby had the feel of a graduate
student dorm, while its balconies held the accessories of young adults
in transition from school to career: expensive bicycles, cheap
hibachis, plastic stacking chairs. There were two views: nostalgic
residents could face south, toward the campus they had left so
recently, while the strivers looked hopefully toward the stately homes
of Baltimore's north side.

In the foyer, the mailbox showed an R. Ruiz,
on the eighteenth floor. It was almost too easy for Tess to slip
through the security door, disappearing among the people lugging home
groceries and take-out food. No one seemed to know anyone here, nor
wanted to, judging from the way everyone stared at the
elevator's ceiling as it ascended.

A pink-cheeked Rosita answered the door in
bicycle pants and a T-shirt with a picture of a bare-breasted mermaid,
labeled
La Sirena
. Her
hair was slick and wet, her toes separated by wads of cotton,
apparently in preparation for the bottle of polish she held in her
hand, a very girly pink. Tess would have expected something darker,
bloodier.

"Feeney's
friend," Rosita said. "Bess."

"Tess. And I'm here as a
contractual employee of the
Beacon-Light
,
part of the paper's preliminary investigation into what is
being called the unscheduled publication of the article you wrote with
Kevin Feeney."

"You're the investigator
they hired?" Rosita asked incredulously. She had not dropped
her arm from the door, so Tess was still in the hall.

"Yes. I work for a local attorney
and have a little experience in the field."
Very
little
.

"I thought you were suppose to
conduct the interviews in the office, starting with the people who were
there that night."

"There are no hard-and-fast rules.
I happened to be in your neighborhood and thought I'd drop
by. I guess I'm kind of a workaholic." She smiled
at her lie, suspecting it might create a bond. "This
isn't about guilt, you know. It's a fact-finding,
cover-your-ass kind of thing, in case Wynkowski sues. That's
all."

Rosita gave her terrible imitation of a
smile. "Trust me, this is all about guilt. Luckily for me,
I'm not guilty."

"So why don't we sit
down and talk about this for a few minutes? Then I can put a little
check by your name, and everyone will be happy."
Except
the editors, the union, and you, when you realize you weren't
supposed to talk to me at all
.

"Okay, but you can't
stay long. I've got plans tonight and I just got home from
work—we have an amazing story running tomorrow.
It's going to blow the lid off this city."

"
Blow the lid
off this city
?" If Tess
hadn't been intent on charming Rosita, she might have
reminded this newcomer that Baltimore had managed to keep its lid
firmly in place through the great fire of 1904, the riots of 1968, the
Orioles' 21-game losing streak in 1988, several crooked city
officials, and a savings-and-loan scandal that had anticipated the
national S&L crisis by several years.

Instead, she widened her eyes in a
creditable imitation of amazement. "Wow, what's the
latest?"

"A guy down in Georgia was at
Montrose at the same time as Wink. He heard about our story from
relatives up here and called the paper. It seems Wink liked to brag he
was there because he killed a man."

"Maybe he was just a scrawny
little kid trying to survive by manufacturing a tough-guy
reputation."

"Maybe." Rosita smiled
serenely. "You can read all about it in tomorrow's
paper." She dropped her arm and let Tess into the apartment,
walking on her heels to protect her pearly toe polish. Her legs were
disproportionately short, with thick, curving calves. While not working
twelve hours a day, she obviously found time to run or use a
Stair-master.
Probably with a newspaper propped
in front of her and the all-news station on her Walkman
.

Rosita sat on a wooden chair that needed
refinishing, leaving Tess the full run of an ancient corduroy sofa that
looked as if it had been stolen from a state institution. The decor, at
least here in the living room, was Early Dorm: ratty furniture, an
orange crate full of CDs, a portable stereo. Rosita hadn't
even bothered to build bookcases out of cinderblock and boards, piling
her few books on the floor. The only grace note was a poster of a pale
pastel cowboy, literally disappearing into the landscape, and the view,
which was toward the north and its expensive homes.