Never Look Away (3 page)

But Ethan didn't say anything. He'd fallen back asleep.

ONE

"Yeah?"

"Mr. Reeves?" I said.

"Yeah?"

"This is David Harwood at the
Standard,"
I said.

"Yeah, David." This was the thing with politicians. You called them "Mister" and they called you by your first name. Didn't matter whether it was the president of the United States or some flunky on the utilities commission. You were always Bob or Tom or David. Never Mr. Harwood.

"How are you today?" I asked.

"What's on your mind?" he asked.

I decided to counter curt with charm. "Hope I didn't catch you at a bad time. I understand you just got back. What was it, just yesterday?"

"Yeah," Stan Reeves said.

"And this trip was a--what? A fact-finding mission?"

"That's right," he said.

"To England?"

"Yeah," he said. It was like pulling teeth, getting anything out of Reeves. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that he didn't like me very much. Didn't like the stories I'd been writing about what could end up being Promise Falls' newest industry.

"So what facts did you pick up?" I asked.

He sighed, as if resigned to answering a couple of questions, at least. "We found that for-profit prisons have been operating in the United Kingdom successfully for some time. Wolds Prison was set up to be run that way in the early nineties."

"Did Mr. Sebastian accompany you as you toured the prison facilities in England?" I asked. Elmont Sebastian was the president of Star Spangled Corrections, the multimillion-dollar company that wanted to build a private prison just outside Promise Falls.

"I believe he was there for part of the tour," Stan Reeves said. "He helped facilitate a few things for the delegation."

"Was there anyone else from the Promise Falls council who made up this delegation?" I asked.

"As I'm sure you already know, David, I was the council's appointee to go to England and see how their operations have been over there. There were a couple of people from Albany, of course, and a representative from the state prison system."

"Okay," I said. "So what did you take from the trip, bottom line?"

"It confirmed a lot of what we already know. That privately run correctional facilities are more efficient than state-run facilities."

"Isn't that largely because they pay their people far less than the state pays its unionized staff, and that they don't get nearly the same benefits as state employees?"

A tired sigh. "You're a broken record, David."

"That's not an opinion, Mr. Reeves," I said. "That's a well-documented fact."

"You know what else is a fact? It's a fact that wherever unions have their clutches in, they've been taking the state to the cleaners."

"It's also a fact," I said, "that privately run prisons have had higher rates of assaults on guards, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence, largely due to reduced staffing levels. Did you find this to be the case in England?"

"You're just like those do-gooders out at Thackeray who lose sleep when one inmate tears into another." Some of the faculty at Thackeray College had banded together to fight the establishment of a private prison in Promise Falls. It was becoming a cause celebre at the school. Reeves continued, "If one prisoner ends up sticking a shiv in another prisoner, you want to explain to me exactly how that hurts society?"

I scribbled down the quote. If Reeves ever denied it later, I had him on my digital recorder. The thing was, making this comment public would only boost his popularity.

"Well, it would hurt the operators of the prison," I countered, "since they get paid by the state per inmate. They start killing each other off, there goes your funding. Do you have any thoughts on Star Spangled Corrections' aggressive congressional lobbying for stiffer penalties, particularly longer sentences for a variety of crimes? Isn't that a bit self-serving?"

"I've got a meeting to get to," he said.

"Has Star Spangled Corrections settled on a site yet? I understand Mr. Sebastian is considering a few of them."

"No, nothing definite yet. There are a number of possible sites in the Promise Falls area. You know, David, this means a lot of jobs. You understand? Not just for the people who'd work there, but lots of local suppliers. Plus, there's a good chance a facility here would take in convicted criminals from outside our area, so that means family coming here to visit, staying in local hotels, buying from local merchants, eating in local restaurants. You get that, right?"

"So it'd be like a tourist attraction," I said. "Maybe they could put it next to our new roller-coaster park."

"Were you always a dick, or is it something they teach in journalism school?" Reeves asked.

I decided to get back on track. "Star Spangled's going to have to come before council for rezoning approval on whatever site they pick. How do you plan to vote on that?"

"I'll have to weigh the merits of the proposal and vote accordingly, and objectively," Reeves said.

"You're not worried about the perception that your vote may have already been decided?"

"Why would anyone perceive such a thing?" Reeves asked.

"Well, Florence for one."

"Florence? Florence
who
?"

"Your
trip
to Florence. You extended your trip. Instead of coming back directly from England, you went to Italy for several days."

"That was ... that was all part of my fact-finding mission."

"I didn't realize that," I said. "Can you tell me which correctional facilities you visited in Italy?"

"I'm sure I could have someone get that list to you."

"You can't tell me now? Can you at least tell me how many Italian prisons you visited?"

"Not offhand," he said.

"Was it more than five?"

"I don't think so."

"Less than five, then," I said. "Was it more than two?"

"I'm really not--"

"Did you visit a single correctional facility in Italy, Mr. Reeves?"

"Sometimes you can accomplish what you need to accomplish without actually going to these places. You set up meetings, meet off-site--"

"Which Italian prison officials did you meet with off-site?"

"I really don't have time for this."

"Where did you stay in Florence?" I asked, even though I already knew.

"The Maggio," Reeves said hesitantly.

"I guess you must have run into Elmont Sebastian while you were there."

"I think I did run into him in the lobby once or twice," he said.

"Weren't you, in fact, Mr. Sebastian's guest?"

"Guest? I was a guest of the hotel, David. You need to get your facts straight."

"But Mr. Sebastian--Star Spangled, Inc., to be more precise--paid for your airfare to Florence and your accommodation, isn't that correct? You flew out of Gatwick on--"

"What the fuck is this?" Reeves asked.

"Do you have a receipt for your Florence stay?" I asked.

"I'm sure I could put my hands on it if I had to, but who saves every single receipt?"

"You've only been home a day. I'm guessing if you have one it hasn't had a chance to get lost yet."

"Look, my receipts are none of your fucking business."

"So if I were to write a story that says Star Spangled Corrections paid for your Florence stay, you'd be able to produce that receipt to prove me wrong."

"You know, you got a hell of a lot of nerve tossing around accusations like this."

"My information is that your stay, including taxes and tickets to the Galleria dell'Accademia and anything out of your minibar, came to three thousand, five hundred and twenty-six euros. Does that sound about right?"

The councilman said nothing.

"Mr. Reeves?"

"I'm not sure," he said quietly. "It might have been about that. I'd have to check. But you're way off base, suggesting that Mr. Sebastian footed the bill for this."

"When I called the hotel to confirm that your bill was being looked after by Mr. Sebastian, they assured me that everything was covered."

"There must be some mistake."

"I have a copy of the bill. It was charged to Mr. Sebastian's account."

"How the hell did you get that?"

I wasn't about to say, but a woman who didn't like Reeves very much had phoned from a blocked number earlier in the day to tell me about the hotel bill. I was guessing she worked either at city hall or in Elmont Sebastian's office. I couldn't get a name out of her.

"Are you saying Mr. Sebastian didn't pay your bill?" I asked. "I've got his Visa number right here. Should we check it out?"

"You son of a bitch."

"Mr. Reeves, when this prison proposal comes before council, will you be declaring a conflict of interest, given that you've accepted what amounts to a gift from the prison company?"

"You're a piece of shit, you know that?" Reeves said. "A real piece of shit."

"Is that a no?"

"A goddamn piece of shit."

"I'll take that as a confirmation."

"You want to know what really gets me?"

"What's that, Mr. Reeves?"

"This high-and-mighty attitude from someone like you, working for a newspaper that's turned into a fucking joke. You and those eggheads from Thackeray and anyone else you got on your side getting your shorts in a knot because someone might outsource running a prison, when you outsource fucking reporting. I remember when the Promise Falls
Standard
was actually a paper people had some respect for. Of course, that was before its circulation started going to shit, when it actually had
journalists
reporting on local events, before the Russell family started farming out some of its reporting duties to offshore help, getting reporters in goddamn India for Christ's sake to watch committee meetings over the Internet and then write up what happened at them for a fraction of what it would cost to pay reporters here to do the job. Any paper that does something like that and still thinks it can call itself a newspaper is living in a fool's paradise, my friend."

He hung up.

I put down my pen, took off my headset, hit the stop button on my digital recorder. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, right up until the end there.

The phone had only been on the receiver for ten seconds when it rang.

I put the headset to my ear without hooking it on.
"Standard
. Harwood."

"Hey." It was Jan.

"Hey," I said. "How's it going?"

"Okay."

"You at work?"

"Yeah."

"What's going on?"

"Nothing." Jan paused. "I was just thinking of that movie. You know the one? With Jack Nicholson?"

"I need more," I said.

"Where he's a germaphobe, always takes plastic cutlery to the restaurant?"

"Okay, I know the one," I said. "You were thinking about that?"

"Remember that scene, where he goes to the shrink's office? And all those people are sitting there? And he says the line, the one from the title? He says, 'What if this is as good as it gets?'"

"Yeah," I said quietly. "I remember. That's what you're thinking about?"

She shifted gears. "So what about you? What's the scoop, Woodward?"

TWO

Maybe there were clues earlier that something was wrong and I'd just been too dumb to notice them. It's not like I'd be the first journalist who fancied himself a keen observer of current events, but didn't have a clue when it came to the home front. But still, it seemed as though Jan's mood had changed almost overnight.

She was tense, short-tempered. Minor irritants that would not have fazed her in the past now were major burdens. One evening, while we were getting ready to make up some lunches for the next day, she burst into tears upon discovering we were out of bread.

"It's all too much," she said to me that night. "I feel like I'm at the bottom of this well and I can't climb out."

At first, because I'm a man and don't really know--and don't really want to know--what the hell's going on with women in a physiological sense, I thought maybe it was some kind of hormonal thing. But I realized soon enough it was more than that. Jan was, and I realize this is not what you'd call a clinical diagnosis, down in the dumps. Depressed. But depressed did not necessarily mean depression.

"Is it work?" I asked her one night in bed, running my hand on her back. Jan, with one other woman, managed the office for Bertram's Heating and Cooling. "Has something happened there?" The latest economic slowdown meant fewer people were buying new air conditioners or furnaces, but that actually meant more repair work for Ernie Bertram. And sometimes, she and Leanne Kowalski, that other woman, didn't always see eye to eye.

"Work's fine," she said.

"Have I done something?" I asked. "If I have, tell me."

"You haven't done anything," she said. "It's just ... I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could make it all go away."

"Make what all go away?"

"Nothing," she said. "Go to sleep."

A couple of days later, I suggested maybe she should talk to someone. Starting with our family doctor.

"Maybe there's a prescription or something," I said.

"I don't want to take drugs," Jan said, then quickly added, "I don't want to be somebody I'm not."

After work on the day she called me at the paper, Jan and I drove up together to pick up Ethan at his grandparents' place.

My mother and father, Arlene and Don Harwood, lived in one of the older parts of Promise Falls in a two-story red-brick house that was built in the forties. They didn't buy until the fall of 1971, when my mother was pregnant with me, and they'd had the place ever since. Mom had made some noises about selling it after Dad retired from the city's building department four years ago, arguing that they didn't need all this space, a lawn to cut, a garden to maintain, that they could get along just fine in a condo or an apartment, but Dad wouldn't have any of it. He'd go mad cooped up in a condo. He had his workshop out back in a separate two-car garage, and spent more time in there than in the house, if you didn't count sleeping. He was a relentless putterer, always looking for something to fix or tear down and do all over again. A door or cupboard hinge never had a chance to squeak twice. Dad practically carried a can of WD-40 with him at all times. A stuck window, a dripping tap, a running toilet, a jiggly doorknob--none of them stood a chance in our house. Dad always knew exactly what tool he needed, and could have strolled into his garage blindfolded to lay his hands on it.

"He drives me nuts," Mom would say, "but in forty-two years of marriage I don't think we've had even one mosquito get through a hole in a screen."

Dad's problem was that he couldn't understand why everyone else wasn't as diligent about their duties as he was with his. He was intolerant of other people's mistakes. As a city building inspector, he was a major pain in the ass to every Promise Falls contractor and developer. Behind his back they called him Don Hardass. When he got wind of that, he had some business cards made up with his new nickname.

He found it difficult not to share his wisdom about how to make this a more perfect world, in every respect.

"When you leave the spoons to dry like this without turning them over, the water ends up leaving a mark," he'd say to my mother, holding up one of the offensive items of cutlery.

"Piss off," Arlene would say, and Don would grumble and go out to the garage.

Their squabbling masked a deep love for each other. Dad never forgot a birthday or anniversary or Valentine's Day.

Jan and I knew, when we left Ethan with his grandparents, as we did through the week when we both went to work, that he wasn't going to be exposed to any hazards. No frayed light cords, no poisonous chemicals left where he could get his hands on them, no upturned carpet edges he could run and trip on. And their rates just happened to be more reasonable than any nursery schools in the area.

"Mom called me after you," I said to Jan, who was driving in her Jetta wagon. It was nearly five-thirty. We'd rendezvoused at our house so we could pick up Ethan in one car, together.

Jan looked over, said nothing, figured I'd continue. "She said Dad's really done something over the top this time."

"She say what?"

"No. I guess she wanted to build the suspense. I got hold of Reeves today, asked him about his hotel bill in Florence."

Jan said, without actually sounding all that interested, "How's that story coming?"

"Some woman called me anonymously. She had some good stuff. What I need to know now is how many others on the council are taking bribes or gifts or trips or whatever from this private prison corporation so that they'll give them the nod when the rezoning comes up for a vote."

And you thought all the fun'd be over when Finley dropped out of politics." A reference to our former mayor, whose night with a teenage hooker didn't sit well with his constituents. Maybe, if you were Roman Polanski, you could screw someone a third your age and still win an Oscar, but if you were Randall Finley, it kind of played hell with your bid for Congress.

"Yeah, well, that's the thing about politics," I said. "When one dick-head leaves the scene, half a dozen others rush in to fill the vacancy."

"Even if you get the story," Jan said, "will they print it?"

I looked out my window. I made a fist and tapped it lightly on my knee. "I don't know," I said.

Things had changed at the
Standard
. It was still owned by the Russell family, and a Russell still sat in the publisher's chair, and there were various Russells scattered about the newsroom and other departments. But the family's commitment to keeping it a real newspaper had shifted in the last five years. The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who'd probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran "What Others Think," a sampling of editorials from across the country. We didn't think for ourselves more than three or four times a week.

We no longer had our own movie critic. Theater reviews were farmed out to freelancers. The courts bureau had been shut down, and only the most newsworthy trials got covered, provided we happened to know they were on.

But the most alarming indicator of our decline was sending reporting jobs offshore. I hadn't thought it was possible, but when the Russells heard about how a paper in Pasadena had pulled it off, they couldn't move quickly enough. They started with something as simple as entertainment listings. Why pay someone here fifteen to twenty bucks an hour to write up what's going on around town when you could email all the info to some guy in India who'd put the whole thing together for seven dollars an hour?

When the Russells found how well that worked, they stepped it up.

Various city committees had a live Internet video feed. Why send a reporter? Why even pay one to watch it from the office? Why not get some guy named Patel in Mumbai to watch it, write up what he sees, then email his story back to Promise Falls, New York?

The paper was looking to save money any way it could. Advertising revenue was in freefall. The classified section had all but disappeared, losing out to online services like Craigslist. Many of the paper's clients were becoming more selective, banking on fewer but costlier radio and TV spots instead of full- or even half-page ads. So what if you hired reporters to cover local events who'd never even set foot in your community? If it saved money, go for it.

While it wasn't surprising to find that kind of mentality among the paper's bean counters, it was pretty foreign in the newsroom. At least until now. As Brian Donnelly, the city editor and, more important, the publisher's nephew, had mentioned to me only the day before, "How hard can it be to write down what people say at a meeting? Are we going to do a better job of it just because we're sitting right there? Some of these guys in India, they take really good notes."

"Don't you ever get tired of this?" Jan asked, hitting the intermittent wipers to clear off some light rain.

"Yeah, sure, but I'm beating my head against the wall with Brian."

"I'm not talking about work," Jan said. "I'm talking about your parents. I mean, we see them every day. Your parents are nice enough and all, but there's a limit. It's like we're being smothered or something."

"Where's this coming from?"

"You know we can never just drop Ethan off or pick him up at the end of the day. You have to go through the interrogation. 'How was your day?' 'What's new at work?' 'What are you having for dinner?' If we'd just put him in day care, they wouldn't give a shit, they'd just kick him out the door and we could go home."

"Oh, that sounds better. A place where they don't actually have any interest in your kid."

"You know what I'm saying."

"Look," I said, not wanting to have a fight, because I wasn't sure what was going on here, "I know most days you get off work before I do, so you've been doing pickup duty, but in another month it won't even matter. Ethan'll be going to kindergarten, which means we won't be taking him to my parents' every day, which means you won't have to endure this daily interrogation you suddenly seem so concerned about." I shook my head. "It's not like we can take turns dropping him off at
your
parents' place."

Jan shot me a look. I regretted the comment instantly, wished I could take it back.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That was a cheap shot."

Jan said nothing.

"I'm sorry."

Jan put her blinker on, turned in to my parents' driveway. "Let's see what your dad's done now."

Ethan was in the living room, watching
Family Guy
. I walked in, turned off the set, called out to Mom, who was in the kitchen, "You can't let him watch that."

"It's just a cartoon," she said, loud enough to be heard over running water.

"Pack up your stuff," I told Ethan, and walked back into the kitchen, where Mom stood at the sink with her back to me. "In one episode the dog tries to have sex with the mother. In another, the baby takes a machine gun to her."

"Oh, come on," she said. "No one would make a cartoon like that. You're really turning into your father." I gave her a kiss on the cheek. "You're wound too tight."

"It's not
The Flintstones
anymore," I said. "Actually, cartoons now are better. But a lot of them are
not
for four-year-olds."

Ethan shuffled into the kitchen, looking tired and a little bewildered. I was surprised he wasn't asking about food. Mom had probably already given him something.

Jan, who had come in a few seconds after me, knelt down to Ethan. "Hey, little man," she said. She looked into his backpack. "You sure you have everything here?"

He nodded.

"Where's your Transformer?"

Ethan thought for a moment, then bolted back into the living room. "In the cushions!" he shouted.

"What's Dad done this time?" I asked.

"He's going to get himself killed," Mom said, taking a pot from the sink and setting it on the drying rack.

"What?"

"He's out in the garage. Get him to show you his latest project. So, Jan, how was work today? Things good?"

I walked through the light rain to the garage. The double-wide door was open, Dad's blue Crown Victoria, one of the last big sedans from Detroit, parked in there. My mother's fifteen-year-old Taurus sat in the driveway. Both cars had kid safety seats in the back for when they had Ethan.

Dad was tidying his workbench when I walked in. He's taller than me if he stands up straight, but he's spent most of his life looking down--inspecting things, trying to find tools--so that he's permanently round-shouldered. He still has a full head of hair, which is something of a comfort to me, even if his did start going gray when he was barely forty.

"Hey," he said.

"Mom said you have something to show me."