Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (21 page)

"Look at Lucas," Osborn said. "Right in there! Every time!"

A police officer walked up to Lucas and gently took his arm, saying, "Okay, that's enough," and pulled him away from the tight circle that had formed.

Lucas seemed satisfied, shooting off a few more frames as he backed away, bumping into Dr. Osborn.

"Did you see? Did you see?" he asked. "I'm the only one. No other stills around."

Osborn introduced me to Lucas, who didn't remember me. "He's with the
Independent.
That'll save you a phone call."

I told Lucas thanks but no thanks, that I didn't make those kinds of decisions. I gave him the number of the night city editor, whose name he already knew, whom he no doubt harassed on a regular basis.

As the paramedics lifted the teenager into the ambulance, someone laughed from across the circle. The crowd filled the space where the stretcher had been, and that's when I spotted Alicia. She was talking to a policeman who was smiling at something she'd said.

"Gordie!" She caught my eye. "You were here all the time!"

The doors of the ambulance closed, the
whop, whop
beginning again. The crowd parted as the ambulance crawled forward. Alicia put her arm around my waist, leading me away from Dr. Osborn and the rest of the group, half a block up to a church, where we sat on the steps.

"You wanted me to be on my own, didn't you?" she asked. Her face was lit up like a child's, glowing from the heat of the crowd. She was thrilled, intoxicated by the whole experience, looking at me as if I owned the night and had given her a part of it.

"What happened?" I asked.

She told me she had arrived at the liquor store as everyone was leaving and the yellow tape was going up. I had forgotten how fast she drove; she'd probably beaten me by a good ten minutes. Lucas had been there and another ghoul with a scanner and they had tipped her off to the shooting on Cole. She had left straightaway, arriving before the police did. By the time Holman showed up, she already had the whole story. She knew he was with the
Independent
by his ID, so she had taken him aside and briefed him, every detail confirmed when he checked with the officers.

Most amazing was how much the police had told her. They said the shooting was gang-related, that it was a payback all the way, that they knew the kid—he was a multiple felon. There were two likely suspects: a cousin of his girlfriend, from a rival gang, and another kid called Smoot. They told her the names of the gangs involved, said it started with a turf war on another side of town. They gave her more for a small police story than any reporter could have hoped for.

"You were watching me, weren't you?" she asked with a sly smile.

And I went along with it, because that's how it was with Alicia; that's what she wanted.

"You did great."

She was exhilarated. She couldn't stop talking. "Did you see all the blood? It was unbelievable, like his heart had blown up."

She described the teenager in detail, the sounds he was making, the gurgle in his chest, the way his eyes rolled back, the sparkle of his diamond earring, his white shirt painted red, the blood, until finally I interrupted, "I was there. I saw it. I know what you mean."

"My daddy owned guns," Alicia said, as if an afterthought, and for a moment I remembered Texas.

The Delta 88 was parked nearby, and when she turned to me, her eyes wide and grateful, I had the sense that I held the power, that despite her newfound success, I was in charge.

"I think that's enough for one night," I said. "Let's get a beer."

I was caught in a role, waiting to see how this drama would play itself out.

Blueberry Hill was a crowded bar in the middle of the U City loop, with photos and memorabilia from the seminal artists of rock and roll. They had Chuck Berry's guitar and Muddy Waters's harmonica, LPs signed by Fats Domino, every wall covered with the conks and pompadours of 1950s idols. Alicia found a booth near the window while I got a pitcher of Budweiser.

"Crime reporting isn't so hard," she was saying. "I'm catching on fast."

I drank the beer quickly.

"Where do you think they'll put the story?" she asked.

I told her Metro,
[>]
, if anywhere. "Someone gets shot every day. You only make the paper if you die."

We talked about what makes a story a story, how the better part of the daily is already reserved, for politics and business, for local interests, for national and foreign news dragged off the wires, for sections like Obituaries that follow the ebb and flow, how there's only so much space each day for fires and car wrecks and homicides, things that come up unexpectedly.

"Gang shootings happen all the time," I explained. "Like anything, it's how rare something is that makes it a story."

I ordered another pitcher. Alicia had stopped drinking.

I talked about the country's increasing obsession with grisly news, its appetite for shock and psychopathology, and gave her an example from that morning where a housewife in Arizona went crazy, thinking her children were possessed by the devil. She shot them one by one as they got off the school bus.

"That story made national news. Front page, because she was a woman."

"Why?" Alicia asked.

"Because women don't kill," I said. "When a woman kills, it's big news every time."

When the late news came on, we moved up to the bar to watch Channel 8. Alicia was fixated on the television. I drank another beer. The news anchors looked blurry.

After sports and the weather, they cut to the shooting on Cole Street. Alicia grabbed my shoulder. "There I am, that's me." The teenager was being lifted into the ambulance.

"Did you see me?" she asked, as Channel 8 cut to a fire in East St. Louis.

"You were great," I said.

On the Inner Belt Expressway, Alicia was driving far too fast on mostly empty road. She was switching lanes, something she liked to do even when she wasn't passing cars. I felt dizzy, out of focus. The "New Car in a Can" that she had recently sprayed in the interior was making my stomach turn. I was sitting in the middle of the front seat, with the armrest up, not sure how I had gotten there. I looked at the empty passenger seat, thought of rolling down the window, but instead leaned closer to Alicia. The radio was on. A country-and-western station.

"Where are we?"

"Guess," she said, veering off the expressway. A green sign appeared on the side of the road:
CITY OF ST. CHARLES.

"Home." And that's all I remember.

I woke up on the living room couch, startled by the cold emptiness of the room. The doorbell was ringing, amplified by the pounding in my head. The sun poured through the bay window. Alicia, in khakis and a white sweater, was standing at the front door.

"I'll call Clyde and tell him that you'll be over some time today," she was saying.

I couldn't see whom she was talking to, but the conversation had something to do with dogs. "He'll give you the updated records and everything. All you need is the pedigree folder, right?"

Alicia's back was turned and she was rummaging through a file box. I came up behind her and put my hands over her eyes. "Morning," I said.

She jumped. "Don't surprise me like that."

"Sorry." I stepped back. "What are you doing? Who's at the door?"

She was fingering the files, not looking up at me.

"That's the woman who's buying Gavin."

I hadn't seen the dog in almost a week. Alicia had sent him to Joe's farm the day before the painters arrived. I assumed he was still there.

"You sold him?"

"She paid five thousand dollars." Alicia sighed. "I don't have time for that kind of responsibility anymore, Gordie."

Alicia drove me downtown so I could pick up my car. I was already late for work. NPR was reporting from Bulgaria that Todor Zhivkov, the country's dictator for thirty-five years, had been replaced, his Stalinist government purged. She turned down the volume. "That's almost the end of it," she said. "Romania's next, then all the excitement in Eastern Europe should die down for a while.

"You know," she continued. "I have an idea for a story that'll make big news. I realized last night that I can become a reporter. It's all I ever wanted to be."

I was still groggy, thinking about the dog. I should have been pleased—Gavin was the last trace of Arthur—but the way that she'd just gotten rid of him made me uneasy. I thought of Joe scratching and nuzzling the dog and the Whitings' long history of champion wolfhounds, and I worried about how Margaret would take this last bit of news. She seemed already at a boiling point.

I was also beginning to wonder if there weren't some truth to Margaret's theories about Alicia—her cold method of discarding the past, her transformations. I thought I loved her, but I knew from my experience with Thea that once distrust sets in, it has a way of becoming absolute.

At Sixteenth and Shepard, Alicia stopped the car to let me out.

"Then you'll help me with the story?" she asked.

"Of course," I said as she pulled away.

I walked toward the liquor store. The Gremlin was gone.

It took me until noon to get the car out of an impoundment lot and an hour more to clean up and take a taxi to the office. In my fog, I had forgotten to call Ritger. When I signed on to the computer, he had sent me a message: "You're a piece of work," it read. "Consider this a last warning."

Somehow I didn't take it seriously. I had given them fifteen months as a model employee. A few rough weeks couldn't do me in. I was going to Dallas and nothing could keep me.

MY FIRST DISAPPOINTMENT
was flying into the international airport rather than Love Field. I hadn't realized that Dallas would need more than one airport, so when the travel agent said Dallas-Fort Worth, I had assumed I would have the same descent as President Kennedy had that clear November Friday, 1963.

Coming down the runway, I imagined my father packed behind the fence at gate 28, surrounded by cheerful Texans and members of the press. As the plane slowed, making its final turn, I thought of the questions he was hoping to ask when the door to Air Force One opened and the President descended the stairs.

I secretly hoped, even expected, to find myself at gate 28. There'd be an enormous glass window with a view of the apron where Kennedy's plane had sat, an exhibit nearby with the famous pictures—Jackie smiling in white gloves and her pink pillbox hat; children holding signs saying
ALL THE WAY WITH JFK;
the young handsome President, squint-eyed, waving to the crowd; the Lincoln Continental, top down, standing by to take him away.

I used to look for my father in these photographs: a corner of his face, his profile, an arm and shoulder, the top of his head standing among the press. It could have been he in a number of the pictures that I'd seen in
Life
and
Look
magazine and in a book called
Four Days to Remember,
which I'd kept on my desk at home.

I joined the midmorning traffic at gate 37 and stepped onto the moving walkway. That's when I noticed the sign for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. This wasn't Love Field. What's more, it was vast.

Instead of finding myself in the place I'd imagined, I was lost in a maze. I rode the walkway toward the rental car desk, ended up on the basement floor, and took the blue train, which left me at the Marriott Hotel. By the time I was finally out of the airport it was almost noon, and I had to be back for a six o'clock flight.

Sitting in my rental car near the corner of Elm and Houston, I looked across the street where the Book Depository used to be, now the Dallas County Administration Building. Horns blared, wide sedans hummed through the city. Even around noon, in the sweeping sprawl, Dallas was nothing but freeways and cars.

I had expected more. Because of what had happened here, I had thought it would remain a small city, intact, forever unchanged. A quiet memorial, a living reminder of what we had lost. That the city hadn't frozen in time, that it had grown bigger and newer and louder than anything I'd seen, unsettled me.

Weatherford, on the map, was clear across Fort Worth, an hour west. I would only have time to drive up Commerce Street, where my father's office used to be, before getting back on the highway to go see Jacqueline Steele. But when I spotted the sign for the museum, I couldn't resist stopping. It was spur of the moment, but I wanted to walk through and look at some of the pictures that landing at the wrong airport had denied me.

Many of the photographs I had never seen before, a whole series taken outside the Homicide and Robbery Bureau, office 317. My mother had often described this scene, the day after the shooting, when the ballistic tests were done and the case against Oswald was looking airtight. My father in his early articles had been one of the first reporters to voice doubt over the ballistic tests and the idea of miraculous marksmanship, suggesting the likelihood that more than one gunman must have been involved.

I scanned the crowd in the pictures: a corridor full of reporters and photographers gathered around Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas police. My father was a big man, six foot two and broad-shouldered, so he should have been easy to spot. But I couldn't find him amid the flashbulbs.

I approached the docent at the information desk, a woman around my mother's age with a friendly Texas accent.

"You must know the names of some of the journalists pictured over there," I began, then found myself hesitating. "Weren't there some famous ones who covered this case?"

"Yes, there were." She nodded. "Dan Rather and Jim Lehrer. A number of famous newspapermen got their starts here. What would you like to know?"

I stood there a moment, frozen.

"What would you like to know?" she repeated.

My mind was a blank. I wasn't sure exactly.

"We keep the archives in there." She pointed to a nearby room to be helpful.

I thanked her for her time and left the museum.

Jacqueline Steele's house in Weatherford was a brick rambler with Astroturf steps and a plastic birdbath on a recently cut lawn. The front door was open, so I called a hello through the screen. A woman appeared from the kitchen in a housedress and tennis shoes.