The Girl Next Door (16 page)

Courtney was now appraising me as if the bird had stopped singing and simply loosened its bowels on my face. Yet just when I thought things were going quite poorly enough, they got worse: Gary Jackman walked out of his office. He hadn’t gone home, after all. He was just working with the lights off.

Looking at him as a potential murderer for the first time, I had to admit there was a certain fit to it. Who else would have benefited more from the death of an uncompromising shop steward than the man locked in a stalemate with her union? And who would have had access to the addresses on her paper route and known when she’d be delivering? All signs continued to point to Jackman.

Meanwhile, he was regarding me with his usual mild disgust.

“Are you here for that interview about, I’m sorry, what was her name?” he asked.

So that’s how he was going to play it: like he couldn’t even remember the name of the woman he had killed.

“Nancy Marino,” I prompted, and watched him carefully to see if the mention of her would change something in him. But he was far too cool for that.

“Right, right. Nancy Marino,” he said. “I really don’t have time right now. But maybe Courtney can schedule you for first thing tomorrow?”

“Why, does it make you uncomfortable talking about her?” I challenged him, trying to give him a good stare down, only to be interrupted by Courtney.

“He told me his name was Ted and he was from accounting,” she said.

Jackman tilted his head. “Is that true? Why would you do that?” he demanded.

I was so intent on staring down Jackman it took me a moment to realize I had been totally and completely busted. It was time to sound the retreat. This wasn’t the right moment to confront Jackman anyway, not when I still had so many gaps in my story. So I started backtracking as best I could.

“Yeah, uh … Ted,” I said, forcing out a laugh. “Just a little reporter’s humor for you.”

Jackman pursed his thin lips, crossed his arms, and looked at me condescendingly—a well-practiced posture for him.

“But how would that be funny, a reporter misrepresenting himself?” he asked. “I would call that unethical, not funny.”

Oh great, the man who wouldn’t know an inverted pyramid lede from an inverted nipple was suddenly a journalism expert.

“Yeah, I … uhh…” I said, groping for something that felt like an emergency exit. “Look, to be honest, I was just trying to hit on Courtney here, and I thought if I made her laugh, it would help my cause.”

I turned to Courtney and said, “I’m sorry. I’m such a clod. Please accept my apology.”

I expected Courtney might send a paperweight flying in the direction of the bird on my head. Instead, her face flushed and she looked down at the translucent floor mat under her chair.

“Oh, that’s … that’s okay, really,” she stammered. “Maybe we could … grab some coffee sometime.”

Jackman looked distinctly uncomfortable, like he had come to the television studio to be a guest on
Hardball with Chris Matthews
and stumbled onto the set of
The Dating Game with Chuck Woolery
by mistake. My previously wounded male ego experienced a moment of pure triumph—Mom was right after all!—then I decided to make my getaway while the situation was at the peak of confusion.

“That would be great,” I said. “Anyhow, I’ll just be moving on now.”

I turned and walked briskly away before either of them had a chance to comprehend the strangeness of it all.

*   *   *

Back on the second floor, I made it off the elevator about five steps when I was accosted by Lester Palenski, who was waving a photo printout above his head. In addition to his fondness for bikinis, Lester was known to run a little hot. If one of his photographers failed to get the shot he needed—and it happens to even the best photographers on occasion—Lester took it personally, as if everyone was conspiring to thwart him.

“There you are!” he seethed. “You want to explain
this
to me?”

Lester handed me the piece of paper he had been brandishing. It was a picture of Lunky, our hulking intern, with his arms wrapped around a bear, which appeared to be dead. It had this vaguely Paleolithic feel about it—Lunky, with his latter-day Neanderthal eyebrow ridge and bushy hair, lugging his kill with him, wearing a goofy grin all the while.

“Brodie wants this story for A1,” Lester said. “But
this
is the
only picture
I have of that damn bear.”

And, of course, our newspaper couldn’t very well run a picture of its own intern, especially when he was engaged in an act that didn’t look much like journalism.

“My shooter told me the scene was roped off and the animal control truck was blocking his view. So
this
was all he could get,” Lester said.

I looked at the photo some more, because I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It was our bear, all right, all two hundred pounds of it. Yet Lunky had the thing cradled in his arms like a massive, furry infant, and appeared not to be exerting himself at all as he carried it.

“I see” is all I could say, still staring at the printout.

“Your intern
ruined
my picture,” Lester said, spicing the accusation with a pair of unrepeatable adjectives before the words “intern” and “picture.”

“I, uh, wow,” I replied.

The veins on either side of Lester’s neck were starting to bulge. “A bear wanders into Newark for the first time since the dawn of industrialization and
your intern
ends up carrying it. You want to explain that to me?”

I couldn’t, of course. When I left, that stupid bear was fifteen feet up a tree, and it looked like it would take a cherry picker to get him out. I couldn’t begin to fathom the circumstances that would have ended with Lunky cradling the thing in his arms. But I would have to figure it out, and fast. Lester had likely lodged his complaint with everyone in the newsroom—everyone who had functioning eardrums, anyway—and as the adult assigned to babysit Lunky this afternoon, I would be expected to account for what happened. I started inching my way around Lester, who was standing between me and any hope I had of mitigating this disaster.

“I’m, uh, going to have to, uh … I have to take a leak,” I began, then, as soon as I had clearance, elongated my strides. “I’ll get back to you, Lester.”

I could sense Lester was gathering himself to begin some serious caterwauling, but I scooted away before he could gain too much volume. I made a straight line for Lunky, who was seated in the intern pod, happily typing away. He dwarfed everything in his workstation—the chair was made for someone roughly half his size—yet he seemed quite content, unaware of the calamity he had caused.

“Hi, Kevin,” I said, gently. “How are things going?”

He looked up from his screen and studied me with his usual detached, academic manner.

“Oh, hello, Mister Ross,” he said, and before I could correct him on the “Mister” part, he added, “I’m doing real well with the first draft.”

Apparently, no one had explained to him that in this business, all we get is a first draft.

“That’s great,” I said, then slid the photo onto the desk so he could look at it. “You, uhh … want to tell me about this?”

I thought I’d get an apology, or at least an embarrassed explanation. Instead, he smiled at it. “Oh, cool picture! Can I keep it?”

“Kevin, you … uhh … you picked up the bear,” I said, as if the problem with this should be self-evident.

But Lunky didn’t get it. “It’s okay, he wasn’t that heavy. It was basically like doing a power clean, and I can power-clean a lot more than that.”

I wanted to be mad at him but somehow couldn’t summon the anger. It would be like getting ticked off at a two-year-old for wetting the bed.

“It’s not … It’s not about the weight,” I said. “It’s … I’m sorry,
how
did you end up carrying a dead bear?”

“He wasn’t dead, just tranquilized,” Lunky corrected me. “Animal control arrived after you left, and the officer decided the only way to get Ben out of the tree—”

“I’m sorry, Ben? Who’s Ben?”

“Well, the bear, of course. The animal control guy told me I could pick a name for the bear. So I said ‘Ben,’ because my favorite book as a child was
Gentle Ben
by Walt Morey.”

I was rendered speechless, which Lunky took as a cue to continue.

“Anyhow, the animal control guy had to shoot Ben with one of those darts. That got Ben out of the tree, all right, but then he was just lying there on the sidewalk. The guy from animal control couldn’t lift him, so he asked me to help. But I knew it’d be easier if I just did it myself. So that’s what I did.”

“Did you tell the animal control guy you were a reporter?” I asked, when I finally found my voice.

“Why would that matter?”

Mindful of the fact that we are given only so much enamel in this life, I made a concerted effort not to grind my teeth. “Kevin, has anyone ever told you that reporters aren’t supposed to become part of the story they’re covering?”

Lunky pondered this for a moment.

“So I shouldn’t have named him?” he asked.

“Actually, you shouldn’t have picked him up to begin with.”

“Hmm. Sorry about that. I won’t let it happen again.”

“That’d be peachy,” I said and, as usual, Lunky missed my sarcasm.

I was about to continue my little journalism lecture when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tina Thompson closing in on me.

“You,” she said, pointing one finger at me, her eyes narrowed, her voice quietly dripping poison. “Yoooouuuu. My office. Now.”

*   *   *

While I would never consider myself an expert on the speech patterns of the adult female
Homo sapiens
, it is my general experience that when they lose the capacity of articulating in full sentences, it’s an indication they might possibly be angry.

Either that, or they’re having a stroke. In Tina’s case, it could have gone either way. But since she was still walking upright—and was puffing out her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie reincarnated—I took it that she was fairly incensed.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Lunky, who was typically oblivious.

I made the force march to her office, where she gestured for me to enter. She followed me inside, then slammed the door loud enough that half the heads in the newsroom jerked our way.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to one of the two chairs in front of her desk.

I thought she would go behind her desk, like she usually did. Instead, she selected the chair next to mine. I was alarmed by the choice. Not only did it increase our physical proximity—and the chance she’d wind up cuffing me on the ear—it made me feel more vulnerable to what was about to come. I’ve been subjected to what feels like a lifetime of editors yelling at me face-to-face, to the point where I’ve become inured to it. Sal Szanto, my previous editor, was particularly instrumental in increasing this tolerance.

But side to side? That’s not something I had ever been conditioned against. My defenses were much lower from that direction. And even if I twisted my body toward her as much as the seat allowed, she still had a clear flank attack.

“I’m not sure where to start with you right now,” Tina said, her voice alarmingly hushed. I definitely would have preferred yelling.

“Would you like me to get you something to drink while you think about it?” I asked, sounding much more flip than I intended.

She answered not with a word but with a soul-withering glower.

“Okay, so that’s a ‘no,’” I said, and hunkered down to wait for the coming storm.

She paused for ten seconds—it felt longer—then said, “When we last spoke, I was of the understanding that you would be working on a story with Kevin Lungford about the bear that was traipsing through Newark. Am I correct that was also your understanding?”

This was clearly one of those situations where it would be advantageous to say as little as possible, lest my mouth get me in any more trouble. So I just nodded.

“Well, in that case, it would be great if you could explain to me why you were talking with”—she interrupted herself to lean forward and grab a scrap of paper off her desk—“Nikki Papadopolous. She called here looking for you but didn’t want to leave a message on your voice mail, because she wasn’t sure if you checked it. She was explicit that she talk to someone who could get you a message. So the call got forwarded to me because, well, it seems I’m your boss. You
do
remember I’m your boss, right?”

I nodded again, though a bit more meekly this time.

“Well, good ol’ Nikki said she was from the State Street Grill in Bloomfield and said she had spoken to you earlier in the day but had forgotten to get your phone number,” Tina continued. “So you can imagine my curiosity as to how you ended up in Bloomfield when I thought I had sent you to Newark. You can imagine that, right?”

Another nod. Even smaller.

“And do you know what she told me?”

Head shake.

“Well, first she told me she thought you were an excellent reporter, and very cute on top of that, so kudos to you there, stud. Then she told me you had been asking questions about Nancy Marino. Now, I’m sorry, is the bear I asked you to track down named Nancy Marino?”

“No, his name is Ben,” I said, immediately regretting it.

“Really? Really. Ben, huh? Well, so you know
something
about the bear after all,” she said, her volume rising for a brief moment.

She stopped herself, did some strange breathing thing—yoga stuff, I imagined—then continued in her softer, scarier voice.

“Well, then perhaps you can explain this,” she said, reaching for another piece of paper on her desk and producing a printout of the dreaded Lunky-and-the-bear photo.

“The, uh, animal control guy asked Lunky, to, uh…” I started, and realized it was sounding lamer the more I talked, so I finished with: “He was just trying to be helpful.”

“Helpful? Really? And where were you, his supposed mentor, while he was being so helpful?”

I looked out Tina’s window, which offered a panoramic view of a brick wall, like the right answer might be written in the grout. Alas, there was nothing but graffiti.