Deadline (4 page)

But here it was.

“Jack,” Cindy said.

“I know,” I said.

She came around the counter and walked toward me, her eyes dark with mascara but pink from crying. A couple of feet in front of me she stopped and fingered the gold chain that disappeared inside her blouse somewhere around the unbuttoned third button. There were times when I wouldn't have minded Cindy throwing her arms around me, but this wasn't one of them. I sidestepped and headed for my desk, leaving her in mid-scene.

I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to come out and say a few words, maybe make them feel better, but more likely to give everybody a chance to savor the excitement of this event, to speculate and hear everyone else's speculations about what had happened to Arthur.

They waited out front. Cindy and Marion and Paul and Vern and Martin, whom I could hear talking to nobody but everybody as I took off my parka.

“Awful thing. Awful.”

Martin came around the partition and stood five feet away. When I looked over at him, he continued.

“Awful thing. Awful.”

I nodded.

“I can't believe it,” Martin said, hands in the pockets of his wool car coat, his galoshes doing a little shuffle on the carpet. He took his right hand out of his pocket and pushed his glasses back on his nose. They slid back down.

“I can't believe it,” he said.

“You knew him a long time, didn't you?”

“Oh, Godfrey, yes. For … I don't know how many years. Way back. I can't believe it.”

“Nope,” I said.

“You get over there?”

“Yeah. For a while.”

“Much to see?”

“Not much. A body and a bunch of firemen. You know what those scenes are like. A little different when it's somebody you know.”

“Well, I would imagine, yes,” Martin said. He fiddled with the zipper on his coat. “You get an obit yet?” he asked.

“Not that I've seen. Beauceville's doing it, I guess. But Arthur's still down in Augusta. Autopsy.”

“Oh, yes. They'd have to do that. Find out what happened, I mean. What will they try to see? If he was … if he died before he was in the water, that kind of thing?”

“That kind of thing,” I said.

I could hear the others still talking out front and I didn't want to say all this twice. But Martin was still standing there. Martin Wiggins, the retired editor, probably wishing he was back at the big desk, feeling the adrenaline run, that pumped-up, surging feeling you get when you have a big breaking story.

And then he came to.

“Well, I'm sorry,” Martin said. “If you need any help fleshing out the obit, let me know. I'll be home. You know, just little things the funeral home might not know. He didn't have any family, you know.”

“Why don't you call them, then,” I said.

“Maybe I will. Might save everybody some time. Hey, don't mean to talk business at a time like this, but you got any problems with my column? Want to look it over while I'm still here? They really were quite a team. Lost by two points in overtime. Quite a game. Would have been New England champs of nineteen fifty-one. That Waterville team was tough, though. Fast? My goodness, they had some speed. But you got to go. I'll be home, Jack.”

Even Martin. Business as usual.

“Okay, Martin. Thanks,” I said, and he walked out, saying, “Carry on, troops” to the group that was still waiting for me to come and deliver a eulogy for Arthur Bertin.

“I'm not sure what to say,” I said. They still waited.

“What can you say? Arthur's gone. We don't know what happened, but we know we'll miss him and his contribution to this paper. You guys know even better than me. You worked with him for what—ten years?”

“More like twenty,” Marion said, hands wrapped around her
I (HEART) MOM
coffee mug. “He did pictures for Martin forever.”

“We've got sports stuff in the files that goes back twenty-five years,” Vern said. “Photograph for the
Review
by Arthur T. Bertin. Must've been when he was in high school.”

“Maybe we could run three or four pages of his best stuff,” I said. “A kind of tribute to the guy.”

“The collected works?” Vern asked.

“That'd be fun to sell,” Paul said. “Jesus. Right before Christmas.”

“Who could say no?” I said. “Without seeming like a real dink?”

“You got time? I'll make a list,” Paul said.

“We wouldn't make money on it,” I said. “We could take the proceeds, which would be what? A couple hundred bucks? So you could take the money and use it for something in Arthur's memory. Something for the high school. A trophy case or something. They have a darkroom up there?”

“Yeah, they do,” Vern said.

He was leaning against the counter next to Cindy, who still looked upset. Once in character, she found it hard to come back out.

“Well, I don't know, but I don't think it's right,” she said.

“What?” Vern said. “Selling Arthur's pictures? Using his untimely end as a vehicle for commerce? Hey, look what they do with George Washington.”

“No. Being open like this. We should be closed in honor of his memory.”

Paul rolled his eyes and blew smoke toward the window.

“But you didn't even like the guy,” he said.

“That's not true, and it's got nothing to do with it, whether I or you or anybody else liked him. It's respect, for God's sake. What do you think? We should just say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Smith, or whatever.
Yes, it's too bad that Arthur is dead, drowned or whatever, but that will be seven-fifty plus tax, running for three weeks, Autos for Sale.' ”

“This is a newspaper,” Paul said, exasperated. “It isn't a friggin' jewelry store, Cynthia. It's a public institution, you know? They don't close the hospital 'cause some doctor's mother-in-law kicks off.”

“A business is still—”

“All right, all right,” I shouted over them. “Here's the way it's gonna work. Business department. Cindy. Marion. Paul if you want. Put a sign on the door. ‘Due to the death of Arthur Bertin, the
Review
business office will be closed until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 13. It will reopen at eighty-thirty a.m. Thank you for your consideration.' Or something like that.”

“Well, I'm working,” Paul said, mashing his cigarette in an ashtray. “I've got about forty accounts to hit—”

“Well, don't make it sound like I just want the day off because—”

“Cindy!” I said. “It's okay. You're right. We should do something. Show our respect. But you better do it quick before you get people in here wanting to know what happened.”

“What did happen?” Cindy said.

I started to answer. Stopped.

Even in the throes of grief, they were all ears.

I told the story, trying to ease past the details about Arthur's postmortem appearance, but Marion, of all people, wanted to know how he looked. The maternal side of her coming through.

But Cindy and Marion closed up in no time, flying out the door to go and spend the day shopping or hanging around at home or any other way they could show their respect for Arthur. I set to the job of
throwing the mail away, filling my wastebasket with important press releases. On the other side of the room, Vern was on the phone, his big sack of a body slouched in his chair. When I put on my jacket to go to the police station he put his hand over the receiver.

“Cops?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “See what they know.”

“How long does it take to do an autopsy?”

“I don't know. Couple of hours. I suppose it depends on what they find.”

He started talking, calling somebody “Coach.”

I went back and got the medical examiner's number off the Rolodex, where it had been since an old man had shot his wife over on Oxford Street, last Christmas.

Dialed and waited.

“Hello,” I said. “This is Jack McMorrow at the
Androscoggin Review
, the newspaper. I wonder if you could tell me when the Arthur Bertin autopsy results will be available. Right.
Androscoggin Review
. Yup. In Androscoggin. His name? His name is Bertin. Was Bertin. Arthur. You got him last night. The guy that drowned. He was found in the water. Bertin. Right. My name is McMorrow. Jack McMorrow.
Androscoggin Review
. Yeah, it's a newspaper. Well, could you ask him to call me when the information is available? No, I know you don't know when that will be, but I'd appreciate it.”

God, I thought. That wasn't a receptionist, that was a guard dog. If she ever broke her chain, she'd be dangerous. But then I supposed somebody had to man the phones so that down the cool halls and through the swinging doors, where the only sound was the whine of bone saws and the clatter of instruments in steel sinks, the good doctors could carve their stiffs in peace.

3

T
he hardest thing about working for a weekly was sitting on the sidelines while the dailies beat you to your own story.

That morning, the
Sun
had its couple of grafs on Arthur's death. The next day they might have an obit, some stuff from the cops. And the
Review
would still be two days from hitting the streets.

I was used to working in terms of hours, not days. Forty lines by eight p.m., make the upcountry editions. Make some more calls, update it for suburban, make the one a.m. deadline for the metro. That was the routine at the
Times
. The Quincy
Patriot Ledger
in Massachusetts. The
Providence Journal
. The
Hartford Courant
. The
Androscoggin Review
.

Not what you would call your typical career path. And part of me still wondered if I'd done the right thing, stepping out by the side of the tracks and letting the express roar off on its way.

It still happened, usually when I sat still for too long. First the list of papers, the vita with the twist at the end. Then the face of that fat jerk, the words undressing me as I stood in front of the Androscoggin Valley Rotarians, the new guy in town, the guy from New York who had come to run their paper.

Six months later, I could still hear him. I could hear the background noise, mumbling and glasses clinking, and then this silence as his boozy, arrogant, fat-gut, cigar-stink voice echoed around the restaurant.

“Well, I've been listening to this. And it's all very interesting. But I still have a question, which is this: If you're such a distinguished journalistic fellow, and you seem to be, working in New York and all these places, what the hell are you doing here?”

Why didn't he just come out and say it?

Even worse than the question was the answer, a stumbling ramble about changing priorities and the fast and slow lanes and other platitudes that these small-town students of human nature knew were a crock. I knew they were a crock, too, but what could I say?

“Well, guys, I was pretty good at this, but you know the younger guys were better, these twenty-eight-year-old hotshots from the
Miami Herald
, the
Seattle Times
, coming into New York, into Manhattan, even, like they owned the place, writing stories on their try-outs that were pretty good, and then in the first month on the job, coming back from the Bronx, from some godforsaken hellhole in East Brooklyn, with some knock-your-socks-off story on a kid hustling for his crack-addict mother, or with some tidbit that they'd gotten from city hall, having wormed their way in with some aide in the mayor's office and they'd just gotten to the city, the bastards.

“So guys, everybody else is pushed back in line, which is fine unless you're the one who is being pushed, and you get assigned the second-rate stuff, not total crap, because the
Times
didn't do total crap, but just the inside-the-metro-section stuff, borough politics and education policy, and you know that you are on the bench, or at least not leading off, and it's gonna get worse and never get better.”

No, I didn't say that; I didn't even like to think it. And when I did, when it snuck up on me, like it was doing right then, I got up and moved. Which I did.

I told Cindy I'd be back and walked up the block to the police station, inside the back door of the big stone municipal building. The dispatcher, Charlotte, was on the phone behind the glass so I waited, glancing at myself in the wide-angle security mirror beside the door, looking at the missing kids on the posters on the bulletin board. They were from California. Chula Vista and Long Beach, a boy, three, and a girl, nine, smiling in the black-and-white pictures. For months I had been saying I would call to see whatever had happened to them, but I hadn't yet.

Charlotte hung up and reached over to turn up the volume on her television, then looked to me and smiled hello. I asked for Vigue and she said he was out and she didn't know when he would be back. She asked if I wanted to leave a message and I said no, I'd come back later on, and she smiled again, and turned back to her soap opera.