Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (25 page)

"Why?"

"I don't know. She just wanted to keep them," Alicia said. She took off her glasses and looked toward the ceiling, as if she were trying to think of something.

"But then her marriage goes flat. She realizes her husband loves someone else, that she will never be the primary woman in his life," Alicia continued. "She becomes angry. She tries to force her husband to love her, but he disappears into his work. The tension becomes so great that the husband threatens to leave. Now, let's say that the girl, the woman, loses her mind one day and grinds up the jequirity beans that she's been keeping. She puts them in his Gatorade. He always drinks Gatorade when he rides his exercise bike, and just like Phillip the husband dies."

She looked me in the eye. "Well?" she asked.

I said nothing.

"That would be a front-page story, wouldn't it?"

I couldn't stand the feeling of her eyes on me. "Yes," I said.

"Then you should type it in and move it to Print."

As we were getting ready to leave, Marshall Holman appeared at the conference room door. Behind him, the night editor was putting on his coat, making his way to the elevators.

"So you're here to take my job?" Holman said to Alicia.

She did not seem pleased to see him. "Why would I want your job?" she asked. "I have a story for the front page."

"Really?" Holman pulled up a chair.

It was a chance to excuse myself. "I'll be right back." I got up from the table and shut the conference room door, went to my desk, and looked up the home number of Margaret Whiting.

I felt compelled to call her. The news was too much to carry alone.

She picked up on the first ring.

"Margaret," I said.

"Yes." She seemed wide awake, though I knew it was getting late and she had work the next day.

"It's Gordon Hatch," I said quietly into the receiver. "I only have a second but I have to tell you something," and in the suspended moment that followed, I felt that she probably already knew.

"How did you find out?" she asked.

"She told me," I said.

"She told you?"

"She told me the whole story."

Margaret was quiet.

"I see," she said.

"My editors will have the story in the morning," I told her.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the conference room door open and Holman attempting to leave. "I'll call you again," I said, adding—and I'm glad I did—"I'm so sorry."

I passed Holman on my way to the conference room.

"Your girlfriend's crazy. You know that, right?" he asked with a nasal laugh.

I ignored him and walked on, opening the conference room door. I turned off the tape recorder and told Alicia that it was a terrific story. I had no doubt it would go front page.

"You're a great reporter." I pocketed the cassette. "Congratulations."

"Will it be in tomorrow's paper?" she asked.

"Probably not tomorrow," I said. "There are a few things left to do with it. Maybe Saturday's, if that's okay?"

Alicia was packing her things into my father's briefcase, and she suddenly stopped. "It has to be in tomorrow's paper!" She was glaring at me. "You said it was going on the front page, and it's got to be tomorrow's!" She closed the briefcase and left the conference room, heading for the elevators.

"Okay," I said, catching up to her in the lobby. "Give me a second to drop off the tape with Rewrite. I've got to talk with the copy desk to be sure that everything is all set. I promise the story will be in tomorrow's paper."

I walked back toward the middle of the metro area and stopped behind a pillar so Alicia wouldn't see me.

I had no idea what to do.

I considered calling St. John at home. It was past midnight and he had fired me earlier in the day, but I had this tape sitting in my pocket, ready to back up the story. The last edition rolled off the presses at two-thirty
A.M.
There was still a bit of time, maybe, to write something quickly, a stand-alone brief on the front page promising further coverage in the next day's paper. I felt a wave of hope, followed soon after by more dread. It was absurd. St. John would hang up on me. Moreover, Alicia had not yet identified herself as the source.

I wondered if I could call the police and have them meet me at my apartment. I had all they'd need: the tape, the contents of my briefcase, her journals in the boxes crowding my living room. And I had Alicia herself, her craziness clear as day.

As I stepped into the elevator, still wondering what to do, Alicia linked my arm with hers. "We're going out dancing," she said. "We need to celebrate our front-page story."

She took me to a place called Quest, a crowded disco a little north of Laclede's Landing, with low ceilings and black lights that lit up our shirts and made our teeth look rotten. Glow-in-the-dark skulls covered the walls, bright-colored planets orbited the bar. Alicia pushed ahead, ordering me a whiskey and water.

"Let's have a toast," she said, standing on tiptoe to talk in my ear.

The place was loud, too loud for conversation, and it smelled of smoke and new plastic. We were standing at the edge of the dance floor, caught in the strobe light, getting pushed toward the middle. Alicia was dancing, moving with the music, flashing at me in stills with the pulse of the strobe.

The music had an industrial sound, the same metallic beat over and over, one endless song interrupted by howls and screams and sound bites of radio-era propaganda, a futuristic kind of music, self-consciously anonymous.

Alicia brought me a second drink, another whiskey and water. I was sweating and thirsty. I drank it fast, the bourbon rushing to my head.

We were dancing close. She had one arm around my waist; her eyes were closed. In the heat, the flashing light, in my delirium, I turned her around, ran my hands over her shoulders and arms. Face to face, she looked into my eyes, then away—thoughtful, bored, intense, remote—still frames flashing in the darkness.

Her back against a steel column, she pulled me toward her, tucked her fingers under my belt. A warbled voice screamed over the giant speakers, three words in another language repeated a hundred times.

Alicia let go of me, and in the next still I saw the back of her head, her profile opening up in slow motion, then the faces of a stranger, each more remote than the last, strobe light flashes of Alicia turning cold.

"We have to go home," she said in my ear, and turned away.

We drove in silence, south along the river back toward my apartment. It was past two o'clock. We had been dancing for a couple of hours.

She was slouched in the driver's seat, speeding along, flying through yellow lights and through a red light at Market Street. At Busch Stadium she turned west, swinging by the
Independent,
where she pulled up to the curb and parked the car.

"Can we get a paper?" she asked.

I hedged. "Why would you want to do that?"

"We have to read my article," she said cheerfully.

"The paper won't be up for another hour," I said, hoping she wouldn't notice the distributors lined up in the alley loading the final edition into their trucks.

Alicia threw the car into drive and peeled away.

"The story is great," I said. "Don't worry, you can see it in the morning."

I tried to imagine what was going on in her head, whether it occurred to her that her taped confession would have repercussions beyond the printing of the story. She must have realized that something was going to happen out of this, something beyond a "breakthrough" in her "career" as a journalist. And then I thought that, like "the girl" in her story, she must have no sense of consequences.

We passed under I-64, minutes from my apartment.

"After this, we won't be doing any more stories together," she declared, staring over the wheel. "I'm on my own now. I have ambition."

She shot through another red light. I slid my arm over, unlocked the passenger door, turned my body so I could see the whole of her.

She pulled over and stopped in front of my building.

"They'll tow you if you park here," I said, as if that might change the course of events.

"I park where I want to," she said.

I followed her to the entrance of my building, where she pulled open the front door.

"It's unlocked," I said stupidly, and followed her into the lobby.

My last reserves of energy were pouring through me. The elevator doors closed and Alicia pressed 3. How would I call the police with Alicia in the apartment?

We were separated by three feet. I was trying to look casual, leaning in the opposite corner.

I thought about grabbing her, wrestling her to the ground, calling for help. I wondered if I could stay up another night, another eight hours, without drifting off, defenseless.

The elevator stopped on 3 with a jolt. Alicia got out first. I let her go ahead of me, watching her in the full-length hallway mirror.

What I saw, then, was not Alicia, but her reflection.

The first shot sent her sprawling backward.

The second, an instant later, hit her in the chest.

I froze, my head suddenly empty as the elevator doors began to close.

Instinctively, I pushed L.

But as soon as the doors closed, they opened again, and standing in front of me, in a black dress and wire-rimmed glasses, holding her hands at her sides with the handgun pointed safely down, was Margaret Whiting.

THEA'S FATHER DIED
two weeks later, and I went home to Columbia for his funeral. The funeral was on a Monday. St. John told me I could take as many days as I needed. At home, my mother had framed my clips, now hanging on the dining room wall—three front-page stories on Alicia and Arthur Whiting and two metro pieces as well as a brief mention in the
Washington Post
's "Around the Nation" box.

These days it was so rare for a woman to poison her husband that the story had an old-fashioned, gothic appeal. One reader had written in a letter to the editor that it's a shame we live in a society where women have become as brutish as men, using guns and knives, even blunt instruments to dispose of their mates. "Thank you, Alicia Whiting," the reader had concluded.

I'd had some local fame. A couple of people had stopped me on the sidewalk, called me by my name. I'd felt eyes on me in the checkout line at the grocery store, had seen my face on television. Channel 7 had done a feature, and my refusal to be interviewed only added to the interest in my story—Obituary Writer Trapped in Black Widow's Web.

In the confusion of days that followed Alicia's death and Margaret's arrest for second-degree murder, through my return to work and a week and a half of stories with my name on the byline, when everyone in the conference room actually cared about my opinions, there hadn't been a moment to step back and make sense of what had happened.

When I walked in the door at 102 La Grange, the first thing I did was take down my stories. My mother would throw a fit, but it didn't matter. I couldn't stand to look at them. Lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, an afternoon of Indian summer the day before Daniel Pierson's funeral, I was thinking of Alicia, as I had been every hour of every day since her shooting.

After the police had left, I had gone back through Alicia's belongings and found under my bed her envelopes containing newspaper clips, crime scene notes, and a journal that the police had somehow overlooked and that covered February through November, 1989. I took a good part of the afternoon mustering the courage to open the journal, knowing I would have to use it in the stories I was writing. I had already filed my third article in three days, and the journal confession would likely stand on its own as a final confirmation that "the girl" from the tape was, of course, Alicia.

But when I turned to the back, to Wednesday, October 2, expecting a long, detailed account of how she had ground up the poison beans and mixed them into her husband's Gatorade, I saw, in her child's scrawl, only these words: "Arthur died today. He was riding the exercise bike when his heart gave out on him."

Because there was nothing definitive about this or about the other journal entries she had written in the aftermath, I chose to ignore what their brevity, their omissions might have implied. I went ahead and filed my fourth story, detailing Alicia's past relationships and what I took to be my role in the narrative of her death: "Alicia had a particular gift," I wrote in the article, which ran on the front of the metro section. "Like a convex mirror, she was the augmented reflection of the man she was with. When I thought I was falling for her, I was falling all the more for my own journalistic dreams. Which is why this story does not belong to me. Finally, it belongs to Alicia."

My mother woke me for dinner.

"Why did you take the articles down?" she asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said.

"You're tired, I know." She patted me on the shoulder.

We ate our pasta without talking. I wasn't in the mood for conversation, and something was different about my mother. She was quiet, patient, deferential. I felt like the husband after a long day, sitting across the table from his agreeable wife. And it made me uncomfortable.

"When do you think you're going back?" she asked.

"I don't know."

The police had let me call Jackie Steele the night Alicia died. It had been my first thought when they brought me to the station for questioning.

She was groggy—it was three
A.M.
—and it took her a few seconds to make sense of who I was. I said I had terrible news.

"Alicia?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, and that was all she needed to know.

I told her I'd do anything; I could send home all the boxes, help her make funeral arrangements.

"I'd like to bring her home," she said.

Alicia was buried next to her father in the Weatherford Cemetery, under a three-by-five-foot headstone with "Alicia Steele, Our Darling Daughter" incised across it.

I visited Margaret at the St. Louis County Jail a week after the shooting. I had asked Joe to come along, but he'd told me no, he had already been to visit her; he would go only on Mondays.