A Confidential Source (23 page)

From the kitchen, I heard her banging around, opening drawers. Water ran as she filled the carafe from the sink. She switched
on the radio and I heard the cutting off of songs as she flipped stations. Finally, she settled on something that sounded
like news.

After a couple of minutes, she came back with two mugs of coffee. She’d left the radio on and the volume increased as it shifted
from news to a commercial. I heard the familiar jingle of the lottery advertisement first, and then a promotion for Leonard’s
show. I’d let myself be used. Used by a man who cared more about ratings than the truth. And worse than that, I’d let Barry
down. I put my hands over my ears.

“You all right?” Carolyn asked.

I dropped my hands to the desk. “Fine.”

She put the coffee on my desk. “You might need some extra caffeine today. Final round of the middle school spelling bee starts
at three-fifteen. Marcy wants a full feature for Thursday’s regional education roundup. I’ll need you to cover.”

I was afraid that if I said anything, my voice would crack, so I just nodded an okay. Carolyn couldn’t bear to meet my eyes
but moved quickly past me to her own desk. “It shouldn’t go much past four-thirty or five o’clock,” she said, in an apologetic
tone, as she picked up the pile of mail from the keyboard and began typing the photo assignment into the computer.

Something about the keystrokes got to me. The throbbing in my head started again, and I had to force the tears back into my
eyes with the heel of my palm. It was no good. Carolyn looked up. “You sure you can do this?”

“Sure.”

Carolyn opened her mouth to say something, but sensing that sympathy would just make the moment worse, she stopped herself.
Soon she began typing again, the pink acrylic nails clicking on the keyboard, officiating the assignment on the day’s news
budget: “Spelling Bee at the Middle School.” My life had come to that.

I don’t know why exactly, but I drove to the casino right after the spelling bee. It might have been the word that tripped
up the last of the finalists:
catastrophe.
Misspelled with an
f.
instead of a
ph.
I sat in the front row of the auditorium spelling it correctly over and over in my head, knowing that seventh-grader Jocelyn
Rascher had the bee in the bag. That she would, with complete confidence, spell catastrophe with the
ph,
and that the headline for the story would have to read: “Seventh-Grader Wins by Catastrophe!”

Somewhere in the middle of all that spelling, it came to me: I couldn’t go home alone. I couldn’t face the emptiness of my
apartment, the failure of my furniture, or the radio that I wanted to throw across the room. There was only one way to avoid
the reality of my own personal catastrophe. A win at the casino. Even a small win would help turn my mood. And a big win,
say, a $50,000 win—and I’ve heard that it happens—would let me pay off my mother’s loan and quit the bureau. I could say
fuck you
to all the editors at the
Chronicle
and tell Nathan that I never really wanted a spot on his stupid investigative team.

But I think, mainly, I wanted to forget about Barry, about the swiftness of the gunshot and the feeling in my gut that told
me that his murder
had
been a hit. That despite Leonard’s other lies, there was some truth at the core of it all, some truth that would never come
out because of my own screwups.

Where better to get away from yourself than inside a casino? I wanted to be inside that atmosphere of opportunity. I wanted
to feel that promise as a tingle in my skin, an excitement that traveled upward from the pit of my stomach. I wanted to concentrate
on the numbers. I wanted to concentrate so hard that I couldn’t think of anything but how many face cards had been dealt and
how many were left in the shoe.

I avoided Foxwoods and the bad luck I’d had there and drove the extra twenty minutes or so to the Mohegan Sun, where I’d had
my good fortune. I borrowed $500 on my MasterCard and went to the exact same blackjack table where I’d learned to play the
game and had won $450.

There were two older women who both looked like grandmothers playing against the dealer. I decided that grandmothers were
good luck and sat beside the one in the white cardigan sweater who was cradling a quilted handbag. She did not smile at me
indulgently, in grandmotherly fashion, or even look up from her cards. “Hit me,” she said to the dealer, who complied.

I had to wait until the new shoe was being dealt; I began cautiously with a ten-dollar bet. I won my first hand with seventeen.
The dealer broke at twenty-five. I considered this the best possible omen.

Neither grandmother looked at me. One was preoccupied by the vodka and sodas she kept ordering. The other, the one with the
handbag, was on a losing streak, and by the way she kept her shoulder angled to me, I guessed she blamed me for the turn of
her luck.

But I didn’t care because I stayed hot for the first dozen hands, winning twice as much as I lost. A middle-aged man who said
he was from New Jersey joined us. He drank Manhattans, smoked small black cigars, and kept licking the tips of his fingers
before he touched the cards. At first, I thought he might bring the table bad luck, but I won three hands in a row after he
sat down and so did the grandmother with the quilted handbag. She even smiled, first at the man with the cigars, then at me.
When he left, about an hour later, she got up to go. I worried that my luck would change. I was up almost $350 and determined
not to get carried away by my euphoria. But God, it felt good to feel good. To feel competent.

The dealer at the table, a woman with a bored expression who kept looking beyond the table as if searching for more exciting
players, was not big on offering advice, but I remembered what my very first dealer had told me: Quit while you’re ahead.
I decided I needed a break, a moment to come down from my winning high and think strategically. I grabbed the hamburger-plate
special at the food court for dinner, found an empty table, and made myself chew slowly instead of gobble.

I washed my hands thoroughly in the bathroom in case chopped meat and fried potatoes was too pedestrian to bring fortune.
I had this contented feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with just having eaten. My destiny was before me. This was
going to be a good night in my new life.

I took one walk around the four seasons of the main hall and scouted several high-stakes tables. When I spotted Will sitting
at one, eyes narrowed, chin lifted, back straight in his chair, I considered it another omen. He looked confident, decisive,
street-smart. And when I noticed that he was wearing the same lucky silver pendant around his neck, I took the empty seat
beside him and began emptying chips out of my knapsack.

“Hey,” he said, with a smile. “Barry’s friend.”

“Hallie,” I said, reminding him of my name.

He smiled again, but in a distracted way. He had a big pile of chips beside him and bet $50 on his hand. I took a breath and
followed suit.

I won my first two hands and was convinced I’d read the table right: Will was clearly a source of good luck. But then I lost
five hands in a row and gave back $150. Still, I knew that the trick was to wait out a run of bad luck. Will ordered a club
soda with lemon that he sipped during my next round of losses. I was now down $200 and thinking about going home.

But what was at home? An empty apartment? I couldn’t even listen to late-night radio anymore. If I heard Leonard’s sanctimonious
call for statewide morality, I thought I might smash the radio into bits. So, even after I’d lost the whole $500, I decided
to go back to the ATM machine and borrow another $500 from a different credit card.

It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Will was down $3,000, but confident that if he stuck it out, his luck would turn. “Basic
strategy,” he kept saying to me. “You just have to wait it out and play basic strategy.”

It occurred to me that if Leonard and Barry had gambled together, Will might know Leonard.

“How many years ago?” he asked.

“Two or three.”

He shook his head. “I’ve only been coming here for maybe two years. It’s all fuzzy of course, but I think Barry was usually
alone.”

It occurred to me that Leonard could even be making up the part about his own gambling, and suddenly the reality of my idiocy
was back upon me. How I’d been so touched that Leonard had trusted me with tapes from his show. How he’d counted on that.
How I’d let Barry down.

I couldn’t go home a loser. Not tonight.

The dealer, a twenty-something guy named Henry who had his already thinning hair shaved into a whiffle, didn’t reply when
I said I’d be right back. An Asian man at the other end of the table suggested I might want to take a dinner break.

“I already ate,” I said.

When I got back to the table with the cash, I won three hands in a row and the euphoria returned. I won $200 and had $700
in chips at my side when I noticed that Will, too, had a growing pile of chips.

“Sometimes all you need is a little patience,” he said.

That line became my refrain, especially when I lost the entire $700.

The young, balding dealer began to shuffle a new shoe of cards. It was almost midnight and I was exhausted, but I couldn’t
go home down $1,000, with the feeling of loss in my stomach. So I took $500 more from another credit card that had just extended
my credit line. Sometime after one o’clock in the morning, I grabbed another $500 from the machine.

I was down to my last $50 when I saw Will yawn. I looked over and noticed that all his chips were gone. He shook himself off
and got up from the table. “You’re not leaving, are you?” I asked.

He looked at his watch and then at me. “It’s almost two
A.M
.; don’t you have to work?”

“I’m trying to be patient,” I said.

He let out a low, sarcastic chuckle, and I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at me or at himself. “Go home,” he said. “Don’t
chase bad luck.”

“What about being patient?”

“Nobody can be patient at two in the morning. It’s too late to think straight anymore. Call it a day.”

Collecting the spent cards in front of me, the dealer met my eye and nodded sagely. The air smelled of stale smoke, but the
glass ashtray at my elbow had been wiped clean. It was then when I realized that everyone else had gone home.

M
ORE THAN JUST
about anything in the world, I wanted to stay in bed, sleep until noon, facedown, with the pillow over my head. But my mind
clicked awake at six
A.M
. with a rush of worries that felt like insects in the mattress. I kicked off the covers and sat up. An eerie, early-morning
light reminded me that it was Halloween. October 31. Rent was due tomorrow.

I wished this hangover were from alcohol so that I could throw up. I wanted to empty my stomach, my entire life, into a toilet,
watch it swirl away into a sewer somewhere. But vomiting into the toilet was too small a penalty. And I wasn’t likely to feel
better afterward. Because afterward, I still would have lost $2,000.

Standing, I felt as shaky as if I
were
hung over—$2,000. That wasn’t even counting the $450 I’d lost at Foxwoods. What the hell was I going to do? Even if I didn’t
spend a single cent from my next two paychecks, I wouldn’t be able to make rent.

I’d cleaned out my checking account and maxed all my credit cards. I had a strange, hot feeling in my stomach, along with
a case of the chills. Even in my darkest days, when I’d been fired from bartending, I’d always been able to make rent.

I stumbled over my running shoes on the way to the kitchen counter. I couldn’t run this morning, couldn’t risk seeing Matt
Cavanaugh. Not today. He’d look at me with those sincere brown eyes and I’d feel his judgment like something sticky that wouldn’t
scrape off. Even if he didn’t say a word about the front-page retraction, I’d hear it all too clearly:
I tried to tell you, Hallie, but you wouldn’t listen.

I dropped to a stool at the bar, put my head on the counter, and stared at the little flecks in the Formica, like stars in
a very small, very limited universe. I thought of the spelling-bee story I had to write today. A low moan escaped.

When I finally lifted my head, I saw that the light was blinking on the answering machine. It occurred to me that I’d never
gotten back to my mother about the stuffed cabbage.

I didn’t want to think about my mother—my frugal mother—and what she would say. Two thousand dollars. The same amount she’d
taken from her savings account and loaned to me, trusting me to pay her back, like a responsible adult. I winced in a way
that included my entire body. After a while, I decided that I couldn’t afford take-out coffee and rose to make myself a cup
of the despised instant. Staring at the swirl of sludge-colored liquid, I listened to my messages. There were three: one from
my mother wondering if my heat was back on, one from Walter telling me he had a gig playing in Newport on Thursday and needed
to crash at my apartment, and one from Leonard.

The one from Leonard must have come late last night because his voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been screaming for many segments.
“Pick up,” he said. A pause. “I know you’re there, and I know you must have listened to the show. Pick up! Pick up! I need
to talk to you.”

And just hearing Walter’s New York accent made me feel guilty all over again. He’d managed to pull
his
life together after losing a girlfriend to a drug overdose without veering back to the dark side. Not in almost five years.
What was wrong with me? Had I not listened to one word he’d said?

Knowing my mother would be out, I quickly called and left her an upbeat-sounding message about how warm my apartment was now
and how I’d try to come see her next week. Then I forced myself to swallow half the cup of instant coffee before flinging
it into the sink. I don’t know how long I stood there before the burning in the back of my throat finally stopped. Before
I stopped hearing Marcy Kittner’s voice repeat like a mantra in my head:
He tries to lure in new reporters. He tries to lure in new reporters. He tries to lure in new reporters.