Deadline (4 page)

Walker gave it his best shot. The afternoon of the funeral he stayed late in the newsroom, working and reworking the paragraphs for just the right effect. He was writing for one reader only: the lady or man who had brought a kid to see the circus, then disappeared as if the kid had never existed. That person was out there somewhere, watching the paper for his stuff. Walker was sure of that. One day about a week after the fire he had written a short piece, not really worth a byline, but they had given him one anyway. They were so anxious to get his name in the paper that they would have put it on the little girl’s obit if he had written that. As if anyone outside the news business gave a damn. But it served a purpose, got him established in
someone’s
mind as the guy covering the little girl thing. Late that afternoon a call came in for him through city desk. Kanin transferred it, but when Walker turned on his phone, no one answered. He was about to flip off the switch when he realized that someone was there. He heard breathing, then a squeaking noise like a phone booth door being opened. A car horn blew and the person hung up. He took off his headset and went over to the desk.

“That caller I just had. Did they say anything?”

“Just asked for you,” Kanin said.

“Didn’t give any name?”

“Just yours.”

“Was it a man or a woman?”

Kanin blinked as if, in the heat of a busy day, he was having trouble remembering a call that had come through less than three minutes ago. Finally he said, “Woman.”

“What’d she sound like? Young or old?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Was her voice soft or hard?”

“Jesus, Walker.” Kanin sat back in his swivel chair and studied him. “It was soft, I guess. Sounded young, but how can you tell from just two words? I mean, Christ, that’s all she said to me. Just your name.”

Late that night, he had gotten another call at home. It was a transfer from the
Tribune
switchboard, coming in about ten o’clock. This time there was no background noise at all, just a hint that someone was there, like the scent of old perfume on pages of a book. “Is this about the little girl in the fire?” he said. Immediately the phone went dead.

In all these weeks the caller hadn’t contacted him again, but he knew she was there, watching the paper. He had written two more little girl pieces, each briefer than the one before, each containing fewer facts and less hope. On both pieces, in what must have been taken up front as incredible arrogance and conceit, he had typed in his own byline, removing what was normally the editor’s prerogative. They had let them go through that way, though the last story had quickly become a newsroom joke. Containing a scant six graphs of copy, it looked top-heavy and ridiculous with his name perched above it. Some of the young turks had joked about it in the halls after work, and some of their words had reached his ears.
This is a prizewinner? Holy Christ, what a sham.
The newsroom hardass, a young defector from the
Daily News
named Grainger, had taken to calling him Hiram’s Folly. But he still had his admirers. One kid named Jerry Wayne still thought he was God warmed over.

And he had to admit it: he really hadn’t set the world on fire in his first few months. He had had a few good things, but nothing that anyone else couldn’t have done. The Radio City piece had been a waste of time; he simply didn’t have the stomach for it. Diana Yoder was a gem, a lovely creature who wanted nothing more than to dance and be left alone. Walker could dig that. But an ugly confrontation with Kanin had followed.

“The girl doesn’t want to do it, Joe. She can’t understand why you keep persecuting her. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t understand that either. You keep sending people after her and she keeps telling you no.”

“Shit,” Kanin said. “For this I send my top reporter. Tell me something I don’t know yet.”

Walker sat in the chair facing Kanin and ran his fingers through his hair. “Look,” he said. “We’ve been going around and around on this piece. I keep trying to sidestep it and you keep getting in my way. So let’s get our cards right on the table, okay? You will never get that story in your newspaper if you wait around for me to do it.”

“Like I said, tell me something I don’t know.”

“It’s not my meat.”

“So where does that leave us? I want that story.”

“Then send somebody else. Go yourself if it’s all that important.”

“Very funny, Walker.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

“There are ways of getting this story,” Kanin said. “Ways other than talking to the girl herself. But I never thought I’d have to tell you that. I mean, you’re the famous Dalton Walker, investigative reporter…”

“Oh, can the shit. This isn’t some goddamn labor union, it’s a sensitive, moving piece, or should be. It’s worth absolutely nothing without the girl’s cooperation. You can send any jack-off out on the streets to get the facts, but it takes somebody who gives a damn to write it. And I wouldn’t touch it the way you want it done.”

“We’ll see about that.” Kanin slammed his desk drawer, pushed back his chair and stalked away to Hiram Byrnes’ office.

Later that afternoon, Byrnes called Walker in for a chat. Briefly Walker ran through the facts of the dispute with Kanin. “Don’t worry,” Byrnes said. “I’ll get him off the Yoder girl’s back. But what about you? You got anything going yet?”

“A few things. Mostly renewing old ties.” He shrugged. “Sometimes these things take a while.”

“Don’t worry about it. I told you when you came here, you don’t have any deadlines on this paper.”

It sounded ideal. For a while he pretended it was, ignoring the talk floating around the office, ignoring Kanin’s deadly glare, which could freeze water across a crowded room. The hell with them. He worked into things at his own pace. Tidbits on the circus fire, all filed into a fattening folder in his cabinet. Lunch with Al Donovan, who had gotten slightly heavier and a little whiter of hair in the years since Walker had last seen him. Donovan took him to a classy joint in Brooklyn, but Walker paid the tab, knowing that the FBI never paid for lunches. Later he turned in an expense account, which Kanin scowled at for a long time before signing. The hell with them. Let the
Tribune
buy Donovan’s lunch.

Often, at night, he sat alone in the newsroom and thought about the little girl, and a tent burning, and a lady with a soft voice who wasn’t there.

But now, after all these weeks, he had it. He had something anyway. He stood at the edge of the tiny grave and watched the coffin being lowered, and he had a yarn that would tear their goddamn hearts out. Two men descended on the grave and filled it in with shovels and spades. The minister, one of six retired preachers who rotated on the coroner’s list, had said a few words over the grave, then went away with the caretaker of the cemetery, leaving only Walker, his photographer and the men with the shovels to stay to the end. When the men were finished, a bulldozer moved in and leveled off the earth, leaving not as much as a mound to show that someone was buried here. Walker sent the photog back to the paper alone. He wanted some time at graveside. He sat on the brown grass and watched the wind blow the clouds across the sky. He took note of that: what kind of day it was, how far down the hill the grave was placed, how far away the trees were. It would all go in, and woe to any editor who messed with it. This was one he would have to baby-sit all the way through the backshop and onto Page One.

There was never any doubt in his mind that it was front-page stuff. He put in everything he had learned in six interviews with the coroner. All the weeks of checking and hoping. The false leads, the one trail that had led to Cincinnati before petering out. The chemical analysis, the fingerprints taken from the unburned hand, the long waits between agencies while reports were compiled and sent back. All negative. Walker wrote it like a short story, beginning with a soft description of the graveyard, then backing into the eulogy by the minister. He flashed back from the graveyard to the coroner’s office, and told about the long fruitless search for the little girl’s identity. Then he moved back to the present, to graveside and the end of the minister’s speech. He finished up in four or five quick lines, giving it a hollow, haunting ending as the men moved in and covered up the hole. He typed in his byline and in big, bold letters wrote the words NO CUTS across the top of the first take. It would drive them crazy on the desk, but they wouldn’t touch it. They wouldn’t dare.

Kanin edited the piece. The words NO CUTS hit him like a slap. His eyes, reflecting anger and insult, held Walker’s for a long time before he began to read. Quite deliberately, he pushed aside his copy pencil. When he was finished, he hand-delivered the copy to the news desk and talked briefly with the news editor. When all that was done, he came to Walker’s desk.

“As long as you’re telling us how great you are, why not write Page One on it too?”

Walker smiled but Kanin’s face was cold.

“I’ve told them to banner it across the top of One, just above the main news lead. Does that satisfy you?”

“That’s fine, Joe.”

“It’s a hell of a reader.”

Walker didn’t say anything. He didn’t think Kanin expected thanks.

“No use pretending I like you, Walker. I think you’re undisciplined and arrogant and have no respect for anybody else. But I know good work when I get it. We’ll be putting a copyright on your piece and sending it along to the chain. See, Walker, I can do something right. Even for you.”

Walker went up to the cafeteria and sat unwinding over coffee. When he came back, there were two messages on his spike. Donovan had called, and Diana Yoder had left a New York number. The Yoder girl was a real surprise. But he couldn’t reach either Yoder or Donovan with return calls, so he settled in to await the paper’s arrival from the press room. When the proof came up, he read through every word in the story, chasing in a correction where the typesetter had typoed the coroner’s name.

It was done and on the street. But if his hunch was right, it was just bait for the real story. Walker put on his coat and stalked out of the newsroom. The day was just half finished, but he wouldn’t be back. Everyone watched him go. No one said a word.

He tried his calls again from his apartment. Donovan was still out, but Diana Yoder answered at once. “Yes, Mr. Walker, thank you for returning my call. This morning I got a call from a Mr. Hiram Byrnes, who I believe is one of your editors.”

“He is our editor.”

She paused, not understanding the difference. “Mr. Byrnes was very generous. He apologized for having that man harass me all these months. He said it wouldn’t happen again. He mentioned your name, so I feel I have you to thank for that.”

“You were right and we were wrong. It’s as simple as that.”

“I felt I had to call you. I was terrible to you when you came to see me.”

“Ah, the infamous thirty-second meeting.” He laughed, thinking about it. Thirty seconds of frustration, before she had slammed a door in his face. “I’m sorry if the
Tribune
caused you any embarrassment.”

“You’re very gracious, Mr. Walker.”

He had been called many things in his life, but never that. It brought out the worst in him. He asked her for a date.

She paused, actually considering it. Then she said, “I don’t think so. I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Okay, I won’t press you.”

“You are a gracious man. Not my image of reporters at all.”

“You’re not my image of Rockettes either.”

There was another moment of silence.

“Goodbye, Mr. Walker. And thanks again.”

He found himself thinking, as he always did when he had just been turned down by a woman he found especially interesting, it’s just as well. Women had a way of complicating his life, right when he needed it least. The Marilyn Jacksons of the world. Jesus, there was a name from the dim past. The Anne Rinkers. A girl named Lois Berman, whose parents fussed so much about her dating a non-Jew that they drove her crazy. And that crazy blond kid he had married a lifetime ago, her face now a pale white blur in his mind. Elena. The ghosts of a slow Thursday, spent as usual alone, with too much time on his hands.

Pushing Diana Yoder aside with the rest of them, he began to change his clothes. After he got into old jeans and a flannel shirt, he put on a heavy jacket against the cool night and walked to the cemetery. Black clouds formed over the sun as it settled in the west. In another hour it would be dark. He walked quickly, past paper racks displaying his morning’s work. It was letter-perfect, the story, the play, everything. Even the headline was perfect. Streamed across the top of the page, just above the political crap from Washington, it said,
IN THE COLD DARKNESS OF PLOT 33, A LITTLE GIRL SLEEPS
. He couldn’t have asked for a better shot.

Now, if this didn’t work, he faced two choices equally grim. He could abandon the story or keep checking school rosters as Donovan had suggested. At first that had seemed his best choice: check the schools in a given radius, find out how many little girls had suddenly dropped out for whatever reason, then go through them in a slow process of elimination. He had expected a big job, but even so he wasn’t prepared for what he got: 112 names, all kids between first and third grades, all attending schools in the densely populated Jersey suburbs, all transferred for one reason or another. He had worked through five names before understanding the full scope of the nightmare he had carved out for himself. One mother had remarried and moved to California, taking her kid with her. Another family had moved to Maine. A third little girl had had an accident, falling from a horse on a vacation in upstate New York. She was still in a coma. The fourth had transferred to Brooklyn. The fifth belonged to a State Department family, and the father was on his way to Belgium. It had taken Walker seven days to check out those five names to his own satisfaction. Then, as the funeral story came to a head, he formed his grand plan.

He walked through the cemetery gates, past the caretaker’s cottage and along the tree-lined road where the respectable people were buried. At the far end of the cemetery proper, he left the trees and came out along a barren hillside that dipped gradually toward the river. In the distance he could see New York. Lights were coming on and people were coming out to play. In the west, the sun was nothing more than a streaking white memory behind the clouds. Walker cursed as a light rain began falling.