Starvation Lake (20 page)

An old man sitting against the lockers turned to me as if I’d spoken to him. He was eating a Hostess Sno Ball wrapped in a wrinkled napkin. Pink flakes of coconut stuck to the front of his sweatshirt.

“What am I going to do with this?” I said.

“Up to you,” he said.

Of course I had no idea why V had just given me the codes. I tried to reach him, without success. I thought maybe he’d gone on vacation. At the time I was working on a story that was supposed to wrap the entire year of truck news into one long, dramatic narrative. The bosses had ordered it up as the capper of our Pulitzer entry. I already had plenty of strong material for the story, but I wanted something really fresh and juicy.

I thought the voice-mail transcripts were probably stolen goods, although I didn’t know for sure because V never broached the subject and I never asked. Reporters aren’t supposed to accept materials they know to be stolen. Of course we take stuff all the time that we suspect has been procured through illegal or at least questionable means. It isn’t quite like buying a car stereo from a fence, but when we suspect the stuff we’re getting is hot, we justify taking it by telling ourselves that we aren’t the thieves and the public is being served.

The rationalizations weren’t so easy, though, when it came to the voice-mail pass codes. I hadn’t stolen the codes, of course. And I didn’t even know for certain that V had stolen them. But if I used them to listen to voice mails, and if listening to voice mails was theft, then, perhaps, I would be a thief. But would that be worse than knowingly allowing people to burn to death?

I didn’t think about it too hard. I used the codes twice. After midnight. From a phone booth outside the bus station. A few didn’t work; their owners had probably changed them. Others did work. The editors cleared space for my last great story to run on the front page on the last Sunday of the year.

Three days before, I attended an annual holiday get-together hosted by Superior. About twenty reporters, half a dozen flacks, and a few execs gathered at a restaurant in downtown Detroit for too many drinks, a dried-out dinner, and some phony laughs. Over the years I’d come to loathe the dinner, but I always worried that if I didn’t go, my competitors might beat me to a story. I was waiting at the bar when I overheard two midlevel execs talking about a “purge.” I hoped I’d misunderstood. At dinner I dropped a casual question. There had indeed been a round of early retirement buyouts the company hadn’t publicized. Certain execs—V’s name came up—had declined the buyout, but their bosses had leaned on them to resign.

I excused myself from the table and went to the men’s room and locked myself in a stall. I hoped no one had seen my face go pale or the cold sweat bead up on my forehead. V had been gone from Superior for nearly eight months. He’d left weeks before he started giving me the transcripts. Now I knew, without having to ask anyone, that every single thing V had supplied me with was stolen, that he’d had an ax to grind and a reason—a bad one—to use me. So the motivations trumped the facts, after all. There was nothing I could do about the stories that had already been published. But as I sat there staring at the muddy shoeprints on the floor, I contemplated the bitter knowledge that there was time to spike my last great story—and along with it, my chance at a Pulitzer.

I was shivering at a pay phone when I finally reached V at home just after 1:00 a.m.

“You got fired and you don’t tell me?” I said.

“You woke me up.” V yawned. “I didn’t get fired. I took a buyout.”

“I needed to know.”

“Why? You wouldn’t have taken the transcripts then? You would’ve just told me to keep them?”

My temper was rising. “If I’d known you stole them and was trying to screw the company, goddamn right I would’ve told you to keep them.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“So just forget it then,” V said. “You didn’t know they were stolen—and I’m not saying they were—but you didn’t know, so you’re fine. You can plead ignorance. Just take my last little gift and throw it away.”

He was taunting me. “OK, Ernest,” I said. Then I pronounced his full name.

V chuckled. “What are you going to do, get me fired? Remember, my friend, we were off the record. Blowing my cover would get you in more trouble than me.”

He was right, of course. Many of the rules of journalism are dressed in shades of gray, but this one is black and white: If you promise a source anonymity, you never reveal his or her identity. You keep your mouth shut. You go to jail before you unmask an anonymous source. A reporter who ratted out a source might as well leave the profession for good.

I hung up the phone without saying another word.

Pellets of sleet pricked my cheeks as I walked home. I’m screwed, I thought. It wasn’t V’s fault, either. Sure, he hadn’t told me the whole truth, but I had never sought it; hell, I’d avoided it. I’d worried less about his angle than I did about cops at the bus station suspecting me of drug dealing. And now, yes, technically I could plead ignorance about everything V had given me except that last little gift, the pass codes. On that count, I was dead. I’d used the codes to write my final masterpiece. The only way to absolve myself of that sin would be to go in that morning and confess to my editors.

Instead, I called in sick. I phoned in the final changes to my story. It ran that Sunday at the top of the front page and jumped inside to an entire page of copy dressed up with photographs and charts. The next week, I helped my bosses draft a letter nominating me for a Pulitzer Prize. All along, I kept telling myself that that last story—and every single story I had written about Superior’s pickup trucks—was true, that none of what I had reported would ever have come out if I had not used the voice mails, that no one ever would have known how Superior had tried to cover up its deadly mistakes. The stories were right, I told myself, and that’s all that matters.

   Six months later, I was summoned to the office of Wendy Grimm, executive editor of the
Times.

She sat behind a massive oak desk in a charcoal suit embellished by a bloodred silk scarf, her gray eyes fixed on a stapler she was fiddling with. A
Times
attorney named Ferris, whom I’d met once when he had reviewed and praised one of my Superior truck stories, sat glumly beside the desk. Grimm took her eyes off the stapler long enough to motion me into a chair. Her secretary closed the door behind me, shutting out the clatter of the newsroom.

“Gus,” Grimm said. She set the stapler down. “We have an issue.”

Wendy Grimm was a rising star in All-Media Corporation, the agglomeration of newspapers, TV and radio stations, and quick-copy companies that owned the
Times.
She’d come to the
Times,
her fifth newspaper in eleven years, only two years before and was expected to advance to the corporate offices in Dallas once she’d made her mark in Detroit. She’d had me in her office just a few months earlier to congratulate me on having my Superior truck stories selected as one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. That day she’d stood beaming at the framed certificates on the wall bearing witness to Pulitzers won by the
Times
in 1931 and 1954. “You’re next, Gus,” she’d said, knowing full well that my Pulitzer would be regarded by the corporate bosses as
her
Pulitzer.

After the
Washington Post
won the prize for a six-part series on the Congressional Budget Office, I’d actually felt relieved, because I had grown secretly terrified that winning the biggest prize might draw closer scrutiny of my reporting methods. Although I had continued to write an occasional story about Superior’s trucks, I’d cut off contact with V, rid myself of the bus station locker, and successfully resisted calling the voice mails again. I thought I’d put the previous year’s stories far enough behind me.

All of that changed when Wendy Grimm opened a desk drawer, took something out, and laid it on the desk in front of me. I immediately recognized the key to my old bus station locker, with “927” engraved on its bright orange fob. I felt Grimm and Ferris gauging my eyes and tried to stay calm through the sudden feeling that the bottom of my stomach was about to drop out.

“Tell us, Gus,” Wendy Grimm said. “Just how did you go about accessing Superior’s voice-mail system?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Only a couple of times.”

“Enough to get caught. Superior set up a trace.”

Yes, I thought. But the stories were true.

We sat there for a moment in silence. Wendy Grimm broke it.

“So who was your source?”

“The stories were true,” I said.

She picked up the stapler and slammed it down on her blotter. “Is that your rationalization for stealing property that wasn’t yours?” she said. “Who was your source?”

I looked at Ferris, then back at Wendy Grimm. “My source was anonymous,” I said.

“That isn’t what I asked,” she said. “Did you tell any of your editors about this person?”

“No one asked and, anyway, I didn’t need to tell anyone because I didn’t quote the voice mails.”

Wendy Grimm pressed her lips together and leaned forward over her hands, which were now folded together so tightly that her knuckles were white. “Gus, Superior is threatening lawsuits and some rather unflattering publicity. If we knew who your source was, we might be more comfortable in trying to deter them. If it was someone at Superior, I want his or her name. You will give it to me. Now.”

Normally a reporter would reveal an anonymous source’s name to an editor, who would then be bound by the same oath of confidentiality. At most papers, including the
Times,
refusing to do so was an offense that could get you fired. But it was clear by then that I was a goner anyway, and that this wasn’t about me or Superior or the trucks or even the
Times.
A fire was raging in Wendy Grimm’s building and she had to extinguish it before it spread to All-Media Corporation.

“I’m no longer in touch with the source,” I said. “He stays anonymous. That was my deal.”

“
Your
deal, Gus?
Your
deal? Who do you think you work for? Do you realize how much shit you’ve brought down on me—on us, the
Times,
all of your colleagues?”

“Those trucks are burning people to death and Superior knows it. Every word I wrote was true.”

She smiled the brittle smile of a climber who could feel the rungs of the ladder snapping off beneath her feet. “We’re in a place now where that has become irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.” She turned to Ferris. “Phil?”

Ferris unfolded his praying mantis arms and outlined the lawsuits Superior was threatening: libel, slander, invasion of privacy, theft. One way or the other, he said, my methods would become known. The paper, my colleagues, Wendy Grimm, All-Media, all would be disgraced. Further, a libel jury might well have to disregard any evidence I’d collected with the help of the voice mails, because they were stolen property.

“Libel my butt,” I said. “Truth is a defense, as you told us over and over in your little newsroom seminars.”

Ferris looked annoyed. “Truth is not a defense,” he said, “until you’ve established what the truth is, until you’ve proven the truth.”

Wendy Grimm’s phone burbled electronically; she started to pick it up, then decided against it.

“Unfortunately,” Ferris continued, “without the aid of your purloined voice mails, we can’t prove very much, which means we’d be liable to lose a libel action.”

“These people are killers.”

“And we’d lose big,” Wendy Grimm said. Her phone rang again; again she ignored it. “We’re in discussions with Superior. The long and short of it is, we need you to resign, effective immediately.” She placed in front of me a single sheet of paper. At the bottom I saw my full name, “Augustus J. Carpenter,” typed where I was supposed to sign away my job. Until that morning, I had told myself that even if I did get caught with the voice mails, I’d only have to endure a beat change or maybe a suspension. They’d never fire me for writing stories that were true. Certainly not at Superior’s behest, and not without a fight. But sitting there, with my name in capital letters staring up at me, I knew I was dead.

Ferris withdrew an expensive-looking pen from inside his jacket. “Sign, please,” he said, “or we will be forced to terminate you.”

“They’re killing people.”

Wendy Grimm’s secretary ducked her head into the office. “It’s Al on four,” she said. “Better pick up.” I could hear computer keys clacking in the newsroom outside. Grimm held up one finger to hold the call.

“I don’t have time for this, Gus,” she said. “Just sign the damn letter. Or don’t sign, and you can get yourself into even more trouble.” She pressed a button on her phone. “Security, please.”

My brain stopped working then. I felt like I felt when we’d lost a hockey game in sudden-death overtime. When you lose like that, it happens so fast that at first you can’t believe it. But then you see the refs leaving and the other team celebrating and you look up at the zeroed-out clock and the certainty of your failure tears through you like a tumbling bullet. Losing in regulation time doesn’t hurt as much. The clock runs down. You prepare. In overtime, you just die.

I took the pen.

Soon, I was back in Starvation Lake. With my first
Pilot
paycheck I made part of a down payment on a used Ford pickup truck.

   Two days before Christmas, my lawyer called. I had never met Scott Trenton, having hired him over the phone on the recommendation of another
Times
reporter who had used him for her divorce.

“The news isn’t too frigging favorable,” he said. I was in my kitchen, wrapping gifts for Mom. A robe, a fancy cribbage board, a gift certificate for dinner at a restaurant in Ellsworth. Freezing rain had coated my window with ice. For months I had heard nothing about my situation as the
Times
and Superior tried to negotiate a settlement that would avert a libel suit. Superior’s lawyers would have loved to stick the paper for a front-page apology, but the company’s executives weren’t eager for anything that would draw more attention to their death-trap trucks.