Deadline (6 page)

Not exactly Pulitzer material, but not bad reading.

And read it was. Three page-one stories and an editorial, accusing the mill of extortion, more or less, and telling the town to tell the mill to take a hike. Curry was on the phone at eight that morning, along with a few readers who had told us what we could do with our muckraking paper.

Nice to be appreciated.

Curry tried the same approach, but I told him to stuff it and hung up. He called back in an hour, apologizing, fearing for his job and begging for a meeting so that I would “be apprised of all the information.”

That had been three weeks before and now we were buddies. The
Review
hadn't backed off, but we'd published the reaction of town officials, which had been indignant. We'd had a slew of letters to the editor on the issue. They ran three to one in favor of St. Amand, with the only support coming from a few militant union people, some regular crackpots, and a woman who had run for town council the year before and lost because people thought she was a hippie.

I was damned by faint praise.

“So, hey,” Curry said, presumptuously pulling up a chair near my desk. “I think I'm gonna be able to do something to clear this thing up.”

“The drowning?”

“No, no. I mean the tax thing. I'd like to put this issue to bed, and I'm sure you would, too.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I said.

Curry tried to laugh but it came out a snort or a cough. “No, really. I think I'm gonna be able to do something that will save us both a hell of a lot of trouble, and this town, too.”

He said
hell
. That meant we were really talking man to man.

“So are you going to tell me or do I have to trick it out of you?” I said.

Another snort.

“No, Jack,” Curry said. “I can tell you, but you've got to understand that it isn't a hundred percent confirmed. But I think I can get you Haze Gavin.”

“How do I get rid of it once I've got it?”

“Come on, Jack. Haze Gavin. T. Hazelwood Gavin. He's the CEO of Quinn-Hillson. The parent company of St. Amand. Calls the shots. And baby, believe me, Gavin doesn't sit down and talk with just anybody.”

“Must be nice,” I said. “What's he want to come here for?”

“Well, he wouldn't come here. But I can get you an interview with him by phone. Maybe a conference call with a couple of the executive VPs. Everything out in the open. The abatement. The Georgia mills. Our long-term plans for Androscoggin. The whole goddamn thing laid right out.”

“The gospel according to St. Amand Paper.”

“No. This isn't a press release. Ask the tough questions. Dish it out. Do a Q and A. Print the entire interview. If the company isn't forthcoming, the town will know it. But we've got nothing to hide. If we did, we wouldn't be coming to you like this.”

“I think you're worried you might lose this one, and you figure twenty minutes of Gavin's time is worth half a million bucks.”

“Jack, you are one cynical newsman,” Curry said.

Snort.

“No, David, I'm just pulling your leg a little. If T. Hazelwood Gavin wants to chat, I'd be glad to chew the fat with him. But no preconditions.”

“Nope. What I've told you is what he wants. You'll like him, Jack. Haze Gavin is a straight shooter. Hell of a good guy.”

And doesn't know you from a rat's ass, I was thinking, when Cindy came around the corner.

“Jack, there's a Mrs. Morrison on the phone. From the middle school? She said you were supposed to be there ten minutes ago to talk to the sixth grade?”

“Hey, let me get out of your way, Jack,” Curry said, grabbing his coat.

Damn, I thought. I loved journalism.

“Tell her I'm on my way,” I said, and I was.

“I'll call you,” Curry said.

“No doubt,” I muttered as I went out the door.

Mrs. Morrison wasn't pleased. She was a big, tanned cross-country skier type who didn't appear to take anything from anybody, and
that included newspaper editors who stood her kids up. I smiled and apologized but she still gave me the chill as we walked down the yellow-tiled halls with the construction-paper pictures taped on them. I knew we were close to the class in question when the pictures had progressed from kindergarten-primitive to fifth-grade postimpressionist. Some of the stuff was pretty good and some of it wasn't.

But all of it was honest.

No, you couldn't bullshit a kid. Not one. Not thirty, which was roughly the number of faces staring up at me as I stood in front of the class. Behind them was a diorama kind of thing with dinosaurs and big, green plants with lots of fronds. I had barely glanced at it when the teacher, a bearded guy about my age, wearing jeans and a western shirt, finished my three-second introduction. I didn't catch his name but I did catch something about milk break being at some particular time.

Belly up to the bar, boys. And girls.

And then I was up there and they were all waiting.

The first thing I did was tell them they could interrupt me at any time with questions. Fifteen hands shot up, which was fine with me. Over the years, I'd learned that the best way to talk to kids was on their terms, in their language, about what they thought was interesting.

“How much do you get paid?” a small boy asked from the front row. He wore big sneakers and a faded Boston Bruins sweatshirt.

“Not enough,” I said, and then caught myself. If the kid wanted to know, I'd tell him.

“About five hundred dollars a week,” I said.

Somebody out there said, “Wow.”

A little girl with big glasses read her questions off a piece of yellow lined paper.

“Do you like your job? What other newspapers have you worked for? Do you write your stories on a computer?”

I said I did like my job. I said I got to meet people like them, that every day was different. That was true at all the papers where I had worked, I said. Did they want me to name all those papers?

“Sure,” the bearded teacher said, from his post leaning against the bookshelf under the window.

Who asked him?

So I did. I told them I'd been doing this kind of work for almost fifteen years, longer than they'd been alive. They looked at me like I was Methuselah. I told them I'd worked at the Quincy
Patriot Ledger
. A boy asked me what a ledger was, and I told him it was a book that you used to keep track of things. Then I went on. The
Providence Journal
. The
Warwick Beacon
, which was also in Rhode Island. I started there writing sports. The
Hartford Courant
, I said. And then the
New York Times
in New York City. I was something called a metro reporter there, I told them. I covered police stuff, which there was a lot of in New York. After that, I wrote about borough politics.

“Do people in New York live in burrows?” a rambunctious boy in the back said.

The class tittered and I said no.

“Did you ever go to a murder?” a girl asked.

I said yes, I did. There were a lot of murders in New York.

“Did anybody ever shoot at you?” a boy asked.

“Yeah, did you ever get shot at, like with an Uzi?” his buddy asked.

I said no and saw my approval rating plummet. Reporters didn't usually get shot at, I said. No more than anybody else. I didn't tell them it was criminals and poor people who usually got shot at, that the punishment for being poor in the city sometimes was death.

A girl in the front, small and sort of pale, asked, “Do you like it here better than New York?”

Hey, these kids had a future. As therapists.

“This is a better place in a lot of ways,” I said. “You get to know people easier and they know you. It's safer, and in New York you can't go skiing as much. You can't go hiking in the woods, except in Central Park, and that isn't really woods. It's more like paths and ponds and places to ride bikes.”

“Why did you work for so many papers?” the Uzi kid asked. “Did you get fired a lot?”

The kids snickered. I smiled.

This wasn't analysis. This was primal-scream therapy.

“Well, you don't really get fired in the newspaper business,” I said. “Not usually. But people like to sort of move up to bigger papers. It's sort of like in sports. Baseball. Who likes baseball?”

Most of the hands went up.

“Well, it's sort of like in baseball where you're on a high-school or college team. Then Single A. Then Double A. Then Triple A and the majors. If you're good enough. Newspapers are like that for a lot of people. They want to keep moving up from little papers to bigger and bigger ones until they get to places like the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
or maybe a magazine.
Time
or
Newsweek
or one of those. But it takes a few years to get that far. And some people never do.”

The same kid raised his hand, the little brat. I glanced at the teacher to see if he would tell the kid to let somebody else ask a
question, a nice simple question, but the teacher looked like he was enjoying himself.

Why teach long division when you can see the newspaper guy interrogated by the KGB?

“So why did you go from the—what is it?—the
New York Times
to the
Review?
” my nemesis asked, looking me straight in the eye. “Isn't that, like, sort of going backwards?”

The little bugger.

“Who is this guy?” I asked, giving him a big grin and biding for time as the real answer raced through my head.

I left because I wasn't the best. I could tell him that. I could tell him about the younger reporters getting the choice stuff, the investigative stuff, the foreign stuff, the bureau chief jobs. But I didn't.

“I needed a change,” I said, as the teacher seemed to listen more closely. “New York can wear you out. And I like the people here. When I came up to do a story on the paper here, the people were so nice I decided to come back.”

There was a moment's pause, then another question, this time from one of two smirking dark-haired girls.

“Are you married?” one blurted out.

“She thinks you're cute,” the other one said.

“Crystal!” the first girl said, and everybody whooped. I waited for the teacher to step in and referee but he still hung back. Not somebody you wanted with you in a foxhole.

“Am I married? You sure you guys haven't been reporters? I'm gonna hire you to work for me. No, I'm not married. Never have been.”

“You have a girlfriend?” Crystal asked, while her friend giggled.

“Do I have a girlfriend? Boy, you don't give up, do you. Well, I do have someone that is sort of my girlfriend. Sort of.”

“Is she pretty?”

God, man, I thought. You gonna let these kids dissect me or what?

“Yeah, she's pretty,” I said. “Sort of like you.”

More whoops, boys snorting.

“What's your girlfriend's name?” Crystal called out over the din.

They quieted down to listen, the little buggers.

“Roxanne,” I said. “She lives in Portland. Only she might not be my girlfriend. Not like you think. We've only gone on a couple dates.”

Both of which ended in bed, I thought.

I tried not to think about it, not up there in front of the kids. Roxanne smiling at me and shaking my hand, when we met at a party at the home of a guy I had known back in Providence who had moved to Portland and the
Press Herald
. The guy was a photographer who liked sailing the Maine coast and filled his house with beautiful kids and, on that night, beautiful people. One was Roxanne, and I could still see that look she gave me as we met, a look that went right through me, warm and open, as if she'd known me for years, as if she knew everything about me.

We'd talked and gone out late for a drink and more talk and then we'd climbed in her little yellow Subaru and gone to her apartment in an old brick building on the chic Western Promenade, where we did not talk much at all.

So I could tell the kids that. I could say she was a social worker who worked with kids like some of them, that she was young and bright and great-looking, with long dark hair, and that making love with her was the most fun I'd had in ten years.

But I didn't. Instead, I looked at my watch, which had reached the witching hour of 11:43 a.m. I said I had to get back to the paper to make
some phone calls and write some stories. They clapped to thank me, with boys in the back stomping on the floor until the teacher told them to stop.

Where was he when I needed him?

I had a blank yellow legal pad in front of me on the desk. The number of the medical examiner's office was ringing and Vern was shouting to a coach over the phone. I covered my right ear with my hand and waited.

A woman answered. I asked for the medical examiner, Dr. Richard Ritano. She paused, as if I was trying to peddle him some embalming fluid, then asked my name.

“Jack McMorrow,” I said. “I'm with the
Androscoggin Review
, the weekly paper in Androscoggin, and I have a question about the Arthur Bertin case.”

Nothing.

I waited, wondering if she'd hung up on me very quietly. Then there was a click, then another silence, then more clicks and a guy who said, “Yeah?”

I identified myself again, identified the paper.

“Have you issued a finding on the cause of death?”

“Haven't issued anything.”

“You mean you haven't come up with anything yet?”

“Did I say that? No, I said I hadn't issued a finding yet.”

“So you have come up with something?”

“Like what?”

“A cause of death. Accidental or homicide or whatever.”

“What paper did you say you were from?”

I told him again, told him I'd seen him testify in a murder trial about two weeks after I came to Maine. A guy had been shot by his wife and left in a closed car in a garage for a month. In the summer. Ritano had related all of the grisly details about the advanced state of decomposition. He was cool. Arrogant. Condescending.