Rough Justice (3 page)

I never did get to see the Mets last night. I never even got to read my mail. I sat at the desk in my apartment until three in the morning. I sipped liquor and smoked and wrote down what Frank D' Angelo had told me. Then I dug out some of my old clips on Tom Watts. I read through them, taking notes, sipping Scotch, smoking. Then, smoking and sipping Scotch, I wrote down the names of everyone I would want to call. Then I stumbled into the bedroom through a haze of cigarette smoke. Then I dropped facedown onto the unmade bed. Then I woke up, took off my clothes, put on some other clothes and came to work.

Now, I started typing up some of my notes. I also started to scream at the top of my lungs: “Fran!” I kept on typing.

A small voice called back at me: “What?”

I stopped typing. “
What
?” I said. I stood up, looked over my cubicle wall.

Fran was at her computer terminal at an open desk at the front of the city room. She was peering at the monitor. Her long black hair was tied back severely. Her monkey face was set and grim.

“Fran,” I explained—still at the top of my lungs. “Fran, not ‘What?' More like: ‘Here's your coffee, Mr. Wells. Black, just the way you like it. Mm mm.' And, Fran—try to sound subservient.” She let out an angry breath at her screen and started to stand. I sat back down. “
What
!” I muttered. I went on with my typing.

Two voices, male and female, started up behind me.

“Have you noticed,” said the man, “that ever since Cambridge was canned, there's been a certain—I don't know …”

“Spring in his step?”

“A lilt, I'd call it.”

“A lilt in his voice, you mean.”

“A lilt in his voice, a spring in his step.”

“A gleam in his eye.”

“A song in his heart.”

“A pain in my ass,” I said, swiveling around.

Lansing was sitting on the file cabinet to my left. She was eating a buttered hard roll. McKay was leaning against the partition to my right. He was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

“So what do we figure it's gonna be now?” McKay asked no one in particular. The fat cheeks of his baby face curled with a smile. “Likability. Predictability.”

I lit a fresh cigarette and leaned back in my chair. “With the new boss, you mean?”

McKay sipped his coffee. “Yeah, I mean, now that Cambridge is gone, and we don't have to be relatable anymore.” He sighed. “I'll miss that. The
Star
won't be the same without it. No more relatability. No more infotainment. You know, I think I'll miss infotainment most of all.”

“Don't count on it,” said Lansing. She tossed back her blond hair. Nibbled at her roll. “It's always something. It was something before Cambridge. Weren't we zingy once?”

“I was zingy,” I said. “You weren't born.”

“I hear you weren't that zingy.”

“Gimme a piece of your roll.”

“Here you are, Mr. Wells. Brown. Just the way you like it.”

“Mm mm,” I said. I took the roll, looking up into her face. Into the blue eyes in her porcelain oval of a face and then down over the long lean body in the trim white skirt suit, the long white legs crossed at the knee. I looked away. I ate the roll. She's too young for me. She's twelve. I'm a million.

“So,” McKay said. “I hear you're in Dutch with our new leader even before we have a new leader.”

“That's the word I get too.”

“Here's your coffee, Mr. Wells.” It was Fran. She was sneering. She jutted a Styro at me. “Enjoy it while you can.”

“Mm mm,” I said. “Black. Just the way I like it.”

She spun a bunch of plaid pleats at me and stomped away.

“What's wrong with her?” I said.

“What do they want from you anyway?” said Lansing. “You had us on top of the Abingdon story all through the election.”

“Right,” said McKay. “Exactly. That made Cambridge look so bad, we lost our last ounce of respect for him.”

“We had an ounce?” I said.

“So they fire him and now it looks like Wells is more powerful than the managing editor. So now they have to cut him down to size. Management Technique One-A.”

“You didn't happen to hear any specific points of this plan?” I asked. “Am I gonna be put on obits or something?”

He shook his head. “They don't tell me their secret thoughts. Something about opera reviews, though.”

“Great. How about the boss? What's the rundown?”

“Not good.”

“Tell all.”

“You won't like it.”

“Come on.”

“Advertising.”

“No, really.”

“Sorry, Wells.”

“Oh boy.”

“Rich. Father owns a chain of papers based in Texas. Ivy League. Princeton, I think. Columbia J school. Some kind of trainee job on a little paper up in Schoharie. Then—the hungry weeks of struggling over at last—on to Madison Avenue. Sheckner and Covey.”

“The guys who did the Gordon campaign.”

“And Dog Bits. ‘He'll thank you for 'em.'”

“Christ.”

Fran returned. She was not sneering. She was smiling. She curtsied at me. Her eyes gleamed.

“Your presence is requested in the managing editor's office, Mr. Wells.” And off she flounced.

“Uh—shit?” I said.

“Sounds about right to me,” said McKay.

I stood up. Lansing swallowed the last of her roll and slid down off the cabinet. Her fingers were long and white, too, like her legs. She fixed my tie with them. She smelled of lilacs.

“Think of me from time to time—and smile,” I told her.

“You're the best they've got,” she said. “What can they do to you?”

I patted her shoulder. “No matter what, we'll always have Paris.”

“We never had Paris.”

“Too bad. She's at her best in May.”

I saluted and started down the hall toward manager's row.

3

She had gray eyes and orders to break my back. Her name was Emma Walsh.

She was standing at her window when I came in. The window looked out over Vanderbilt Avenue. She turned to me when I closed the door. She stood framed against the silver of the Pan Am Building.

She smiled. “John Wells,” she said. Her lips were very full, her lipstick very red. She was about my age—forty-six—but the skin of her round face was smooth, and her gray eyes glittered. She wore her brown hair long down her back like a girl. She was compact and full-figured. Her breasts made her red sweater swell. Her hips pressed against her gray skirt.

She held her hand out and took a stride toward me. I met her, shook her hand. A small, soft hand.

“I wanted to meet you as soon as I could,” she said. “Seeing as I have a mandate to crush you.”

“So I hear.”

She smiled again. She had to draw her hand back to get it away from me. I managed to hold her eyes another second before she turned away. Then I watched her gray skirt sway as she walked behind her desk. She sat down, gestured me to the seat in front of her.

“You can smoke if you want.”

“Thanks.” I lit up.

“I understand that's been something of a sore point. Smoking.”

“Cambridge thought it was bad for my health. He was only thinking of me.”

She sat back in her swivel chair. It was the big kind with the high back, the executive kind. The office was the executive model, too. Spacious, with a solid oak desk. Two leather chairs in front of it. A sofa against the opposite wall. There were no pictures. Cambridge had never hung any. It sped things up when he cleaned the place out, anyway.

“I understand there've been a lot of sore points around here,” she said.

“A few.”

“Cambridge and you didn't get along.”

I waved my cigarette in the air. “We had some differences of opinion.”

“Like Hitler and Churchill?”

“That would be a fair comparison, yeah.”

“Okay.” She motioned at me. “What's your version?”

I let out a breath of smoke, sat back in the chair. I eyed her. She eyed me back, steadily.

“He wanted me to learn the computers,” I said after a while. “I like my typewriter. He didn't want me to put my feet on my desk. I wanted to.”

Emma Walsh pursed her red lips. She did not look happy. I tried again.

“Also, he wanted to save the front page for beauty pageants and rock stars, and I kept writing stuff about crooks on the public payroll, politicians with organized-crime connections, that kind of thing. He was a thirty-year-old executive. I'm forty-six, and still covering the street. He thought he must know something to be dressed so well. Finally, I turned down a chance to break a sex scandal on a Senate candidate, and we got scooped. He bet his reputation he could make me look bad for it.” I shrugged. “He lost.”

There was a long silence. She brushed her hair back with her hand. I watched her do it. Her hair looked very soft. “So why do they hate you?” she asked. “The People Upstairs.”

I shrugged again. “They hired an idiot. I made him look like an idiot.”

“And now they've hired someone from an advertising firm.”

“At least you've heard of Winston Churchill.”

She startled me with a laugh. It was a rich, high, musical sound. Her gray eyes grew even brighter. She nodded. “Poor Mr. Cambridge. I pity him. I do.” She had just the softest trace of a southern accent. You had to listen for it. “All right, let me tell you what I've been hearing this past week or so.”

I took a deep breath. “Go ahead.”

“You'll be relieved to know: I haven't been brought here like Cambridge was, to make the
Star
relatable.”

“Good.”

“Or zingy like Perelman.”

“Fine.”

“Or even to give it pizzazz …”

“Like Davis, yeah, I remember him.”

“They want me to make it perky,” said Emma Walsh.

“Uh …”

“Like my dog-food commercials.”

“They'll thank you for it.”

“That's the one.”

“Well, then, Miss Walsh,” I said after a moment, “I'm sure dog owners will soon be buying this paper, too.”

She twisted her mouth at me, nodded. Pointed a slick red fingernail at me. “And I was warned about you, my friend.”

“Me? No kidding. Little Jacky Wells?”

“‘The minute you get any trouble from
him
,' they told me. The very
instant
. You come down on him and come down hard. Bury his stuff if you have to. Reassign him. But …'” Now she held the finger in the air. “‘But …'”

“I can't stand the suspense.”

“‘But don't let him get away.' That's what they said to me. The People Upstairs. I'm quoting. ‘Don't let him quit and go to the
News
because then they'll beat everybody out on metro stuff instead of us.' So what I want to ask you is: How can I break your spirit without making you quit?”

“Drugs?”

“I thought of that. I don't have the budget line.”

She let out that laugh again. Lifting her chin, baring her throat. I used the moment to run my eyes down over her. Then she stopped laughing and I stopped looking. I put out my cigarette in the ashtray on her desk. Pulled a fresh one out of my pocket quickly.

“You know, you
are
going to hurt yourself with those one of … Okay, okay. I'm not saying anything.”

I lit the cigarette. When I glanced up at her through the smoke, she was studying me. She was not smiling anymore. I couldn't read her eyes.

“So who else have I got out there?” she asked me.

“You asking me to name troublemakers?”

“I'm asking you who else is good.”

I pretended to think it over while I tried to get her number. I still wasn't sure where she'd come down. But I said, “Lansing, definitely.”

“You helped bring her on here, right?”

“She's good, for all that. She'd walk into a fire to get you react from a dying child.”

“And you pal around with that boy McKay, don't you?”

“Yeah, but he's our Shakespeare.”

“Homeless Mother Gets Job? Sick Kid Finds Lost Dog?”

“Struggling Actor with AIDS, right. He's tops with that stuff.”

“Never a dry eye.”

“I think he even read a book once.”

“Okay,” she murmured. “Okay.” She sat back in her chair, considered all this awhile. Tapped a pencil against her bottom lip. Nodded to herself.

I rolled my cigarette in my fingers for something to do. Watched the ember turning. Told myself not to sweat. Sweat.

“My older brother was named Ned,” said Emma Walsh. “Edward. We called him Ned. One day, when he was sixteen, my daddy sent him out to the garage to start up the car. The car blew up and killed him.”

For a second, I just sat there. Looking at her. Wearing a face so stupid you could have bought it in a Times Square novelty shop. Finally, I managed to say, “Jeez. That's tough.”