Deadline (10 page)

The story was still full of holes and Walker knew it. He knew too that going with it now would give all the other papers a shot at what might be an even better story, still hidden just under the surface. But he had clearly run out of time. The thing wouldn’t hold even through one more edition. Sometime between now and dawn, maybe he could get Donovan or somebody to plug some of the holes; maybe then the thing would start to fit together. Now he had to write.

He began.

The strange death of a little girl in a circus fire three months ago took yet another bizarre turn late Friday night when two close friends of the girl’s mother were killed, in what officials are terming a murder-suicide.

The most unusual aspect of the case is that the little girl’s body was never identified by the mother. The
Tribune
has learned that the mother was Mrs. Melinda Baker, who lived at 4435 Orange Street, in the township of Stanley.

The Baker woman was being sought by FBI agents Saturday as a link in a “federal case” that Special Agent Roland Simon wouldn’t reveal. He indicated that he might have more to say on Monday.

Mrs. Baker was known to be close friends with Hal and Barbara Gunther, whose deaths Friday night brought FBI agents from as far away as Brooklyn, Mrs. Baker and the Gunthers all worked at the Bristol-Myers plant

He made a note to check that in the morning.

and were known to have used the same car on many occasions.

Unknown Saturday was Mrs. Baker’s motivation in keeping secret her daughter’s identity after the little girl lost her life in the tent fire last July. No one ever claimed the body, and the girl was buried in a pauper’s grave at state expense many weeks later.

The
Tribune
learned that the girl was Robin Baker, age 8, who had been in the third grade at Robert F. Kennedy Grammar School. Her final day of school was the day before the fire. The following morning the Baker woman notified school officials that she and the girl were moving to California.

Mrs. Baker and the Gunthers lived in houses of similar construction and age. The Gunthers, who lived around the corner from Mrs. Baker’s brown bungalow, were killed at about nine o’clock Friday night.

He shuffled through Jerry Wayne’s notes, looking for some description. Wayne got up and came over, trying to see what Walker was writing. Walker turned the page down and said, “Take a walk, Jerry. But come back when people start getting here in the morning. I may need you.”

Alone again, he turned back to his job. So far, it was rough but the facts as he knew them were in the right place.

The phone rang, and his story was changed for all time.

“Walker?”

He recognized Donovan’s voice.

“Walker,” Donovan said again. “Was that you trying to call me a while ago?”

“Sure it was. You at the office?”

“That’s right. I thought you might have some things on your mind.”

“Sounds like you’re the one with problems,” Walker said.

Donovan gave a mirthless little laugh. “You might say that.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You mean for print? Ah, I don’t think so, Walker. Not today.”

“Come on, Al, don’t you whip that Monday morning bullshit on me too.”

“That’s the way it’s got to be. Simon’s hoping something will break on it before then.”

“And if it does, I’m screwed against the wall.”

“Walker…” Donovan’s voice trailed away. “Walker,” he said again a moment later. “Listen to me, Walker.”

Walker listened.

“Why don’t you try looking under that big investigative nose you get paid so much for having?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Uh-uh, Walker. I’m not leading you around by the hand.”

“So we talk in riddles, right?”

“If you want to. Isn’t that what you got your big Pulitzer Prize for? Solving riddles?”

“Look, Al…”

“You look. Look in your own backyard. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve said too much already. I can’t afford to get burned on this.”

“Hey, wait a minute!”

“You’ve got it all now, Walker, all you’re getting. Figure it out yourself. See you around.”

Walker was holding a dead telephone.

W
ALKER SLAMMED DOWN THE
headset and kicked the back of his desk in anger. Then, carefully, methodically, he retraced Donovan’s words. Jesus, it had all seemed like such small talk. He went through it again, piece by piece. What the hell had they said? They had fenced through most of it.
Why don’t you try looking under that big investigative nose you get paid so much for having?
What the hell did that tell him? What in God’s name had he overlooked? He sifted through the elements of the story again, and got nowhere. In none of his notes, in none of his encounters with Melinda Baker or the Gunthers were there any major threads that he could develop now. Maybe Donovan meant something else.

Look in your own backyard.
Look under your nose, in the physical sense.

His desk? His telephone? The newsroom.

The newspaper itself.

The
Tribune
was a resource.

The clips.

He got the library key from the spike under Kanin’s desk and went up the winding steps that led out of the newsroom. The library, like the rest of the buildings, was closed for the night. Walker let himself in through a back door and turned on the lights. The library had two major resources, the clips and the index. The paper employed twelve clerks who did nothing but cross-index on filing cards every story that appeared in the newspaper every day. These cards were stored in alphabetical order along a far wall, in a row of steel filing cabinets.

Walker checked the obvious listings first. Gunther, Hal; Gunther, Barbara.

Nothing.

Baker, Melinda.

Zero.

He sat at the librarian’s desk to think some more. He would have to go into the massive file on the FBI, and check each story, going back God only knew how many years, in the hope of finding just the right one. If there even was a right one. If goddamn Donovan hadn’t led him on a wild-goose chase with his cryptic bullshit.

Maybe there was more.

What else had Donovan said? Something about not leading him by the hand. Nothing there. Or was there? Was there something in that, something to do with hands? He thought for a long time, and came up dry.

There wasn’t much more. Donovan had said something about his Pulitzer. Possibly, then, the Pulitzer tied in somehow. The only way it could, in time.

He had won it ten years ago this year. Donovan might remember that, because Walker, in the throes of becoming a Great Big Name, had bought a bottle of very expensive wine and they had celebrated together. He got up and crossed the room to the vault, where the clips were kept. He pulled the file on U.S. Government—Federal Bureau of Investigation for that year, took the clips back to his table and began going through them.

He found it at once. It had been splashed everywhere, in papers from coast to coast. There were pictures of all of them, only they weren’t going by the names Gunther or Baker then. Walker unfolded a lead piece and began to read.

Gunther was George Lewis. He hadn’t had the beard then, but there was no mistaking those eyes. Barbara was his wife, and her name was Michelle Lewis then. Melinda Baker was Joanne Sayers. They were all products of the revolutionary spirit of the late Sixties: underground types, hardened and rabid. Walker went to the vault and pulled the clips on George and Michelle Lewis, and on Joanne Sayers. All were an inch thick or more.

In the personal files he found stories that hadn’t made it into the larger FBI folders. A UPI interview with Joanne Sayers, done eighteen months before she had become a fugitive. Young and pretty, spouting ideals and philosophies and politics. Those were the things they talked about then. Six months later, their first criminal act. They had helped an FBI file clerk named Robert Ordway steal some documents from the Bureau’s field office in Philadelphia. There was a lot of flap in the Bureau file about that one, and some of the stories overlapped. The Lewises and Joanne Sayers dropped from sight. They went far underground, joining the revolutionary People’s Army in their vow to fight the fascist pigs of America, and to take their fight into the streets if necessary.

They had robbed a bank.

They had shot some people.

One guard had died.

Three years later, the FBI had tracked some of them to ground, in a tiny mountain cabin in upstate New York. There had been what Walker could only describe as one godawful hell of a battle. Usually he remembered big stories like that, but he didn’t remember this one. It had happened while he was out of the country, covering Vietnam for
Life
magazine.

Six of the radicals had died in the cabin. The Lewises weren’t among them. Nor was Joanne Sayers.

He sat back and took a deep breath. The clock on the wall said quarter to four. Deadline for the Saturday afternoon edition was nine o’clock. He had five hours to absorb all this, draw the links and get the goddamn thing together.

In the newsroom, he read all the clips, making notes from some. By the time he had finished that, a streak of pale light was seeping in through the windows facing east, and the telegraph editor had come in to clip the wires. Jerry Wayne came in and sat in his corner, waiting for word from Walker that he was needed.

Walker worked fast. He threw away the pages he had written and started over, two hours before his first deadline. He slugged the story “death,” and typed in the double byline.

By Dalton Walker and Jerry Wayne
Tribune
Staff Writers

What the hell? It didn’t cost him anything, and for the kid it would be a coup. Even Walker could remember the hunger of the very young.

The man was tall, with streaks of premature gray in the beard something about his eyes

He played with that for a while, trying to capture what Gunther had been in one easy, smooth-flowing sentence. He knew before he put down a word that this wasn’t going to work as a feature, even with a quick change-of-pace lead that moved right into the hard news. Still, he fiddled with it for fifteen minutes, and finally abandoned it for the traditional approach.

A late-night shooting in a New Jersey suburb opened a Pandora’s box of personal tragedy and federal intrigue Friday, and when it was over FBI agents had eliminated two of America’s most elusive fugitives from their list of most wanted criminals.

Dead were George and Michelle Lewis, both 34, who had been living at 5023 Nelson Street, in the township of Stanley. The Lewises, wanted on a warrant charging murder and bank robbery, were living under the names Harold and Barbara Gunther, and had been employed in the Bristol-Myers plant near here.

Police said evidence indicated that Mrs. Lewis had been shot once at close range. Her husband was killed with the same gun, which was found in his hand when police arrived.

But FBI agents, who arrived at the scene on the heels of local police, took charge of the case and imposed a mantle of secrecy around it. Roland Simon, Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office, said he hoped to have further word for the press on Monday.

It was thought that agents were buying time in an effort to capture Joanne Sayers, a third longtime fugitive, and an intimate friend of the Lewises. Sayers had been living just around the corner, in a house of similar construction and age, and had also been employed at Bristol-Myers under the name Melinda Baker.

As Mrs. Baker, Joanne Sayers had been living a quiet life in Stanley, with a young girl believed to be her daughter. It was Robin Baker, 8, who perished last July in an accident, when the main tent of Circus Ralston caught fire during a performance and burned to the ground.

Speculation then centered on the identity of the little girl, which investigators at the coroner’s office were unable to establish. But the
Tribune
learned that Joanne Sayers paid at least one visit to the unmarked grave where the girl was buried, leaving flowers there in a midnight vigil.

Though the FBI wouldn’t comment on the case, or on Joanne Sayers’ link to the Baker girl, it now seems certain that her reluctance to identify the child is the result of her long life as a fugitive. Sayers…

He broke off briefly. He didn’t like phrases like “believed to be” and “it now seems certain” in his stories. He thought about it and decided to leave it for now.

The newsroom was filling for the morning grind. Kanin had come in and was taking off his coat.

Walker began to type again. Kanin saw him and recognized the look of a news story. He came over.

“You got something going?”

Walker gave him the first two takes.

Kanin read through it quickly. “Has anybody else got this?”

“As far as I know, everybody else still thinks the dead people were named Gunther.”

“Sweet Jesus.” Kanin took the first two pages with him. He stopped at the news desk and spoke with the editor there, then sat at city desk and read through it again. In a moment he got up and came back to Walker.

“I don’t like the phrase ‘FBI eliminated’ in the first graph. You make it sound like the FBI killed them.”

“Two graphs later I explain that.”

“I know, but…”

“Okay, you’re right. Can you fix it?”

Kanin nodded. “How much of this did Wayne do? Do we need his name…”

“He did plenty,” Walker said. “Leave Jerry alone, Joe.”

Kanin went away and Walker motioned Jerry Wayne over. Might as well make him work for his share of the glory.

“Get the pink dupes from Kanin and make some checks for me,” Walker said. “Call the FBI office in New York. There should be some number where they can be reached on Saturday. Ask for Roland Simon and read him what we’ve got here, see if he’ll comment in light of this stuff. If you can’t get Simon, call Al Donovan at this number.” He scratched both of Donovan’s numbers on a pad. “Tell Donovan what we’ve got and ask him to call Simon. Tell them we go to press in less than an hour.”