The Cantaloupe Thief (2 page)

Branigan grabbed her battered construction worker's Thermos and Christmas coffee cup, and followed. Christmas was seven months away, and the mug with its sinister elves was truly ugly to boot. But because she had a habit of breaking ceramic mugs, she carried the one she'd miss least.

Julie was already seated at the head of the table when Branigan slid into one of the many empty seats. Settling back with a steaming cup of coffee, she squeezed her eyes into a squint and let Julie's monochromatic attire blend into a Spandex bodysuit.

It always worked. With her blond ponytail, twenty-six-year-old complexion and unremitting color coordination, Julie Ames metamorphosed into the aerobics instructor from Helstrom — Helstrom being the chain that was gobbling up newspapers from Virginia to Florida and remaking them in the relentlessly cheery style favored by the attention-deficit crowd. The chain didn't have
The Grambling Rambler
yet, but its reporters knew enough about the state of the industry to know it wouldn't be long.

They were the dance band on the
Titanic,
playing feverishly to keep from thinking about the freezing water just inches away. Chirpy Julie was the publisher's way of lowering a lifeboat to see if the chain's methods had anything to offer before abandoning ship.

“I've been talking to Tan,” Julie began with a bright smile, “and we read some interesting statistics in Sunday's paper. The story on mobile home safety said that Georgia is one of the four leading states in manufactured housing.”

She looked around as if waiting for the reporters to acknowledge this fact as ground-shaking.

“Along with Texas, Florida and Alabama.” Her smile lost a shade of its luster. “Sooooo... we want to incorporate those people into
Living!
”

Living!
— the exclamation mark was an official part of the name — was the weekend arts/dining/recreation/decorating tabloid that had replaced the old
Trends!
section, that had replaced the old
Home!
section, that had replaced the old
Georgia Homes
section, back when two less excited words were allowed. All reporters had to contribute to the section, regardless of what actual news they might be covering.

There was a sound of choking as someone's coffee got caught mid-slurp. Marjorie, sixty-ish, raspy-voiced and very un-Helstrom, was the first to speak. “Tanenbaum Grambling IV wants us to write about trailer decor? Like he's ever been inside one!”

“Well, that's not exactly the point,” said Julie, who got a little flustered when confronted by Marjorie. “The point is we've been doing a lot of rich people's homes and historic homes and renovated farmhouses. And that's fine. But those people already take the paper. We're trying to reach non-subscribers and we may find them in our... um... mobile home... ah... subdivisions.

“Now, I don't mean go out and find just any trai... mobile home,” she continued hastily. “We'll want to find just the right one to show what can be done with the proper décor and color sense.”

She was nodding now, trying to get agreement through sheer motion.

Lou Ann turned a saccharine smile Julie's way. “Oh, like a doublewide.”

“Yes!” Julie pounced on Lou Ann with relief. “A nice spacious one that's done in lake cottage or minimalist or something else real cute. Now, who wants to do the first one?”

Six pairs of eyes studied the conference table. Hard.

“Harley, what about you?”

Harley, the only one at the table even close to Julie's age, looked up, startled.

“Me? Well, I wouldn't mind, but um... I'm working on that lake house and the Main Street apartment.” He was rolling now. “And I figured you would want me to finish up that teen dating story.”

A faint crease appeared between Julie's impeccably plucked brows. “I guess you're right.”

Branigan looked at Harley in admiration. She caught his eye and raised an eyebrow in salute. He tried not to smile.

Undaunted, Julie pressed on. “Branigan, how about you?”

“Gee, decorating trends in trailers,” she answered. “Good as that sounds, I'm up to my ears in a story Tan asked me to look into.”

An overworked excuse, but safe. The rest of the newsroom was a black hole to Julie, and the evocation of publisher Tan's name was a bona fide “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Marjorie and Lou Ann rolled their eyes.

Julie glanced briefly at police/court/political reporter Jody Manson, then thought better of it: he was apt to get called to something more urgent at any time. Her eyes flicked to arts writer Gerald Dubois, engrossed in his latest
Art in America
magazine. Few people on the staff remembered when Gerald was Jerry Dubert from neighboring South Carolina, the unhappy oldest son of a clan of hunters and fishermen. Here, in northeast Georgia, within driving distance of Atlanta, Jerry had bloomed into an imaginative if overbearing arts critic. And if, as Gerald Dubois, he had reinvented his identity, few people knew. Or cared.

Certainly not Julie, brought in eight months before by Tan-4, as the staff called him behind his back, to see if a shake-up in the newsroom might staunch the bleeding in his family-owned newspaper. It was a route traveled by all the chains as they squeezed American papers for profits. Readers had neither the time nor the attention spans for long, in-depth articles, or so the reasoning went. Give them short. Give them lively. Give them perky.

It was enough to make Branigan wish she were sixty-five and at the end of her career. Instead, she was forty-one, and had some decisions to make.

Julie started to talk trailers to the perfectly coiffed Gerald, then retreated. She clamped her lips into a hot pink line.

“Very well,” she said tightly. “You all think it over and I'll expect a volunteer by next Monday.”

Marjorie caught Branigan in the bathroom moments later, her heavy-lidded eyes meeting Branigan's vivid green ones in the mirror. Without a word, the women burst into laughter.

“Friggin' trailers!” Marjorie growled. “Maybe we'll start with mine!

Branigan laughed harder. Marjorie's mobile home was a firetrap. Books and papers and magazines were piled from the tiny kitchenette at one end to the single bedroom at the other. Her nod to decorating was one poster of Tommy Lee Jones and another of Harrison Ford, a kind of geriatric dorm motif.

Marjorie was not the kind of writer newspaper chains would hire today. She was decidedly un-perky, rude to callers, and downright contemptuous of editors. But she could ferret out information and she could write — two skills that even a management fighting for its life had to respect. She represented the best of old-time newspapering. Marjorie and reporters like her were the reason the folks of Grambling had fought the trends and stuck with their
Rambler
when every other newspaper in the country was in freefall. To a point, at least. Young readers were not signing on, of course. Delivery men could bring them a newspaper and coffee in bed, and they wouldn't read it. They got their news from TV or the internet like their counterparts nationwide.

But older readers hadn't deserted
The Rambler
as they had many other papers in the South. The Grambling family, for whom the town was named, knew those readers would die out eventually. But they clung to a vision of integrity and purpose — with the occasional toe in the water that was behind Julie's hiring.

The upshot was that Marjorie was pretty much left alone.

“So how is the ‘story for Tan' going?”

“Actually, I wasn't making that up,” Branigan said, flipping her honey blond hair behind her ears. “He wants a ten-year anniversary piece on the Alberta Resnick murder. It's the only unsolved murder in the city.”

“Ah, good story. Anything new on it?”

“Not exactly. But I had an idea I mentioned to him. He bit.”

“And it was...?”

“You remember Liam Delaney who used to work here?”

“Sure.”

“He's pastor of a homeless mission. Homeless guys. Transients.” Branigan waited for the light to dawn in Marjorie's eyes.

“Oh, my gosh, yes. Why didn't we think of that before?”

Branigan washed her hands and didn't answer. She didn't want to go into the reason the homeless were never far from her mind.

CHAPTER TWO

She was jolted awake by a mouse scurrying over her foot, its sharp-clawed feet piercing her thin sock, its naked tail flicking at a bare spot below her pant leg.

In another time, another life, she would have screamed. Now she merely grunted, flipped her foot feebly. What was a furry rodent compared to last night? Three men, two of them paying enough for four rocks of crack, one paying with a punch to the head. She raised her head gingerly and felt the left side with dirty fingers. Yeah, there was a bump. She hadn't dreamed it. Damon. No, Damien. No, Demetrius, that was it. Demetrius.

“Wha's a white boy doin' wi' a name like De-ME-trius?” she'd slurred, sliding her malt liquor bottle under her backpack, away from his greedy hands. Come to think of it, the question was what had brought on the fist.

He'd talked non-stop during the act. She wasn't expecting love — that hope was long dead — but it didn't even feel like sex, really. More like meanness. He'd talked about leaving the
hos-pi-tality
of South Carolina for Hot 'Lanta. But the fool didn't make it to Atlanta. Got off the Greyhound about five towns too early.

Too bad for her.

She sat up, head aching, and peered at the empty bottle of King Cobra. For a moment, she couldn't figure out where she was. Then the light piercing the leaves of a river birch sank into her alcohol-sodden brain. The coolness of the packed red mud registered beneath her aching body. She glanced around at the familiar tents. Those snores belonged to Slim, Malachi and Pete.

She risked a protest from her head by looking up at the girders rising steeply to a slim ledge under the bridge. That's where her paying customers were sleeping off their crack. She had slept where she fell, on the hardened clay beside the railroad track, a new low even for her. She sobbed once, but it was hoarse and dry. She had no tears left.

No tears, no dignity, no life.

If only she could end it without pain.

If only she could tell what she knew. Maybe someone would pay for that information.

And then as some want, some need, some primal longing stirred deep inside her brain — the
rep-til-ian
part of her brain, an addiction counselor once told her — her thoughts shifted. If only, if only ... if only, she could find one more rock. One more glorious high, then she would quit.

Once she quit, she would tell everything.

CHAPTER THREE

Malachi Ezekiel Martin finished the grits, scrambled eggs, toast and sausage at St James African Methodist Episcopal Church, a stately brick building on the block behind the
Rambler
offices. He threw his paper plate and empty coffee cup into a fifty-gallon rubber can. Then, without being asked, he tied up the full trash bag and carried it to the parking lot dumpster.

He returned to the church dining hall, grabbed a broom and began sweeping as other homeless men shrugged into their backpacks and walked out. They were engrossed in their own problems, but it was a point of pride for Malachi to “pay” for his meal by cleaning up afterward.

This morning's breakfast manager, a solemn-faced black man with a limp, nodded his thanks. When all the chairs were turned upside down on the tables and the linoleum floor swept and mopped, Malachi shouldered his knapsack and walked into the early June sunshine.

Within moments, he was in front of
The Grambling Rambler
's three-story brick and glass building facing South Main Street. He rounded the building and walked through a side alley to the loading dock. A barrel held newspapers discarded because of a bad print — too faint, bleeding colors, shadowy pictures. He could almost always find the day's edition, and sure enough, there it was: Monday, June 1.

He looked around to make sure no one was watching. The papers were discarded, but still... A man unloading a truck glanced at Malachi, then continued his work, uninterested in what was going on at the recycling barrel.

Malachi wanted to see if the paper had anything further on the hit-and-run of his friend, Vesuvius, five nights before. He'd heard talk in the encampment under the bridge, plenty of talk.
Vesuvius was drunk. Vesuvius had angered some teenagers who tried to roll him.
And his personal favorite:
Some artists in Atlanta were afraid Vesuvius was encroaching on their territory.

Malachi shook his head. You had to be careful what you believed out here. More than once he'd heard that one of Grambling's street dudes was dead, only to see him walk into St James for breakfast a week later. Malachi seriously doubted a resurrection had occurred.

For all the drug-fueled silliness that went on out here, there was an undercurrent of violence too.
Casual violence,
Pastor Liam at Jericho Road called it.
Casual death,
Malachi silently added.

The newspaper had run three inches the day after Vesuvius's death. Three measly paragraphs. Malachi had seen nothing since. Nothing about an arrest. Nothing about an investigation.

A story that would've made the front page if an upstanding citizen had been the victim was banished to the inside when the victim was a homeless man. Even if, as Malachi suspected, it was something more than Vesuvius being drunk, Vesuvius angering teenagers.

He folded the paper carefully under his arm and walked back up the alley, looking forward to an hour on a shaded bench, keeping to himself, keeping informed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Branigan punched the familiar number into her desk phone, smiling as he answered.

“Is this Liam Delaney, the pope of Jaw-ja?” she asked.