Ecstasy (14 page)

“I’m quoting the guy in tomorrow’s paper, so no. His name’s Axel Robinette. Also his buddy”—I looked down at my notebook—“Robert
Sturdivant.”

Lenny gave a horsey laugh. “Sturdivant?
Huh.
Reliable source you got there.”

“You know him?”

He looked down at his unlaced Docksides. “Kinda.”

“From the anti–Deep Lake thing?”

“Look, I gotta get back to work. I’m supposed to be handling the media.”

“Hey, I’m the media. Handle me.”

He looked me up and down, then made a snorting sound. “Cute.”

“Come on, Lenny, what’s the big deal? Just tell me how you know them and I’ll free you up for Katie Couric.”

His eyes lit up for a millisecond. “Is she…Oh. You’re kidding.”

“Come on, don’t keep me in suspense. How do you know them?”

“You know, there’s something I always wanted to say to you.”

“What’s that?”

He started to walk away. Then he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and smiled his bucktoothed smile.

“No comment,” he said.

I
was in the newsroom the next day, supposedly writing a profile of a Benson freshman but really contemplating what I was going
to wear to dinner with Cody that night, when my worst nightmare walked up the newsroom stairs.

Okay, to be more specific… it wasn’t my own
personal
worst nightmare; rather, it was the worst nightmare of journalists in general.

And that would be: grieving relatives.

Because, you see, when somebody dies—particularly when they die suddenly and young—it’s all but inevitable that the media
is going to piss off the family and friends, or at least dissatisfy them. These people have lost something precious, and there’s
no way on earth that anything can make them happy, at least in the short term.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing them at all. Their reaction is only natural—and when someone I loved died a few years
ago, I felt exactly the same way.

No obituary is long or worshipful enough. Media attention is intrusive; a
lack
of media attention is insulting. Reporters ask the wrong questions, or they ask the right questions too many times. When
the death is covered on the front page, the family is tortured every time they pass a newsstand; when it’s shunted to the
inside, it’s as though the paper is saying their loved one doesn’t matter. Asking people to describe what the victim was like
is downright cruel—almost as cruel as
not
asking.

You get the idea.

So you can understand why, when Tom Giamotti’s parents walked into the newsroom, I tried to slouch behind my terminal and
hide. And when I realized that the three people with them were Billy Halpern’s parents and Shaun Kirtz’s mother, it was all
I could do not to crawl under the desk.

They were greeted by the newsroom secretary, who—merciful God—had just come back from a cigarette break. Mr. Giamotti said
they were there to see Marilyn, and when Kathie asked him if they had an appointment, he said they didn’t. She told him she’d
check, but that Marilyn was a very busy person and the odds that she could see them weren’t good. I slunk down even farther.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“I’m Vince Giamotti. This is my wife, Nancy. These people are Bill and Janice Halpern and Marsha Kirtz.”

“Okay, I’ll just—” Then the names clicked. “Oh.
Oh.
Let me see if she can see you.” I caught the top of her head bobbing as she sprinted into the office, emerging seconds later.
“Please come right in,” she said, smiling way too broadly.

She showed them into the office, and when she emerged, she went hunting for two more chairs, which she pinched from behind
Lillian and Ochoa’s desks. After she delivered them, she shut the door behind her and sat down at her desk with a dodged-that-bullet
sort of whistle. I retained my defensive perch for a couple of minutes, and was just sitting up and breathing my own little
sigh of relief when Marilyn’s door opened a foot.

“Alex?”

Damn.
“Um…yeah?”

“Would you come in here and join us, please?”

She sounded extremely polite, which put me on guard for something truly awful. As I walked toward the office, Mad whistled
the Darth Vader death march under his breath. I was just about to mutter some choice obscenities when Marilyn called out again
in the same scary-nice voice.

“Jake? Would you come in here too, please?”

“Jake?”
I stage-whispered to him. “We are
so
screwed.…”

Mad let me go first, which I in no way mistook for chivalry. When we got in there, we had to stand in the corner next to the
door, since Marilyn’s already-compact office was packed solid.

“Alex Bernier, Jake Madison,” she said. “These are the Giamottis, the Halperns, and Marsha Kirtz.” They acknowledged us with
nods and hellos, none of them warm. “Jake is the science writer I was telling you about. And Alex”—their attention shifted
to me en masse—“is the reporter who covered Melting Rock.”

The sentence hung there in the air for a while, laden with all sorts of unspoken ickyness.

Alex is the reporter who covered Melting Rock. Alex was there when your sons died. Alex snuck a peek at their corpses, then
skipped over to the media tent to write about it. Then she went dancing and had some curly fries.

Okay, so I was feeling a little defensive. But it was hard not to, pinioned as I was by five pairs of grieving eyes.

“You wrote about our son’s funeral,” Janice Halpern said in a voice so blank I wasn’t sure if she was pissed about it. “I
recognize your name.”

“Um…Actually, I covered all three funerals.”

More silence. For the second time in as many weeks, I longed to pitch myself through Marilyn’s office window. Finally, the
boss took pity on me and said something.

“The Giamottis and the Halperns and”—I caught her glancing down at the notebook on her desk, though I doubt anyone else noticed—“Ms.
Kirtz came in to talk about the coverage of their sons’ deaths. They feel that—”

“We feel that you people are being incredibly irresponsible.”

This from Vince Giamotti, who sounded equal parts angry and exhausted. I girded myself for the standard lecture about how
we were exploiting their pain to sell papers—how if another reporter bothered them or their friends, they were going to call
their lawyer, yadda-yadda-yadda. Why Marilyn had dragged us in here for this was beyond me.

“As we’ve been telling Ms. Zapinsky,” Giamotti went on, “there’s a vitally important story that you’re not telling. Now, I
don’t know why you’re not telling it. None of us really want to get into who pulls the strings around here. But the purpose
of a community newspaper is to serve the community, and I’ll tell you right now that the
Gabriel Monitor
is doing the community a disservice.”

I still had no idea what he was talking about; in fact, he seemed in imminent danger of losing it. His words were running
together, and the tightness in his jaw said he was trying not to cry.

“The point is,” he continued, “there’s got to be more of those drugs out there—more of that garbage that killed our boys.
Now, I don’t know why you don’t consider this to be newsworthy, but I can tell you the rest of the community doesn’t agree
with you.”

He was starting to get choked up, and his wife put a hand on his arm. The other hand stayed in a white-knuckle clench around
her handbag.

“We’re not trying to blame anyone,” she said, though nobody in the room believed her. “All we’re saying is that we don’t want
this to…to happen to another family. We don’t want anyone else to go through what we’ve been going through.”

“We need you to help us get the word out,” Marsha Kirtz said in a matter-of-fact way that seemed to come out of nowhere. On
second thought, though, it fit; with her graying braids and aging hippie manner, she was a breed apart from the Giamottis
and the Halperns. “We can’t afford to let people’s interest in this wane. We need to have parents talking to their kids about
it. Do you understand?” The three of us nodded. “Good. So what do you plan to do about it?”

Marilyn gave her own longing look, at the set of nunchakus hanging on the wall. “As I told you, our coverage has been driven
in part by local law enforcement. If they aren’t actively—”

“Please don’t pass the buck,” Kirtz said. “We’ve all heard of freedom of the press. You don’t need the police to give you
permission to write about something.”

Marilyn was managing to keep her temper in check, which for her constituted front-page news. “I didn’t say that we did. All
I’m trying to tell you is that if the story isn’t there, we can’t cover it.”

Janice Halpern drew in a sharp breath. “Isn’t
there?
How can you say that …? Our children are
dead.
Don’t you dare even presume to tell us that—”

Her husband put an arm around her and made shushing sounds, though I got the feeling he was more embarrassed than anything
else.

“I’m sorry,” Marilyn said. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded. Of course this is an important story. It’s an extremely important
story. And as I’m sure you’ve seen, it’s had a presence in the paper almost every day since it happened.”

“But the stories are getting shorter and shorter,” Tom Giamotti’s mother said.

Her voice cracked at the end of the sentence; since I couldn’t bear to look at her, I stared down at my sandals. If Marilyn
gave the poor woman a lecture on the structure of the news cycle, I was going to slit my wrists with her Japanese throwing
star.

“In your opinion,” Marilyn said, “are the police doing an adequate job with the investigation?”

They looked to each other, and I saw Marsha Kirtz give Vince Giamotti some sort of unspoken go-ahead.

“Chief Stilwell is a good man,” he said, “and we all appreciate his desire to solve this case himself. All of us…I’m sure
any one of us would love to get our hands on the person who sold our sons those drugs. And we’re all very fond of his daughter,
Trish. But we feel as though …We’re concerned that he’s in over his head.”

“You think he should ask for help from other law-enforcement agencies?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you spoken to Chief Stilwell about your concerns?”

“We have, but…it doesn’t seem to have done a lot of good. He was very nice, but he obviously thinks he can handle this. We
disagree.”

“And would you be willing to say that on the record?”

“I suppose so….Why?”

“Because,” Marilyn said, “that’s a story.”

•   •   •

T
HERE WERE
, in fact, quite a few stories that came out of that excruciating Thursday morning. Ochoa, who’d missed the meeting by the
dumb luck of being out on an interview, came back in time to do the piece that would run the next day under the headline
FAMILIES PRESS FOR WIDER INVESTIGATION
. Marilyn pushed the drug deaths back up to the top of the story budget, either because she was suddenly intrigued by the
subject or (more likely) worried that the grieving relatives were going to take their sob story downstairs to the publisher’s
office.

As for me and Mad: We got pulled off the pieces we were working on and assigned to put together a huge package on LSD—as the
rack cards advertised, “Its science, its culture, its possible dangers.”

We spent most of Thursday doing research and setting up interviews. It was around five in the afternoon that the police scanner
went off, and the day officially tilted toward the absurd.

Emergency control to Gabriel monitors. Report of a suspicious substance at the Deep Lake Cooling facility on East Shore Drive.
Two G.F.D. units with paramedics are requested to respond to the scene with haz-mat gear. Repeat, haz-mat gear is required.…

“Haz-mat gear?” Ochoa said. “What do you think is going down over there?”

I looked to the scanner, which provided zip in the way of further information. “Maybe something went
ker-bloowie.
”

Mad shook his head. “That’s not supposed to happen. Whole system’s set up to be …What do they always say? ‘Passive and benign.’
”

“Yo,” Ochoa said with a grin. “I likes my cooling like I likes my women.”

I cast about for something to throw at him. “You people are appalling.”

Bill came out of his office then, having caught wind of something interesting. “And which one of you appalling people wants
to tell me what the hell’s going on?”

We filled him in, and he pondered which one of us was going to have the joy of going over to the cooling facility. Since I’d
covered the Deep Lake open house—and since I didn’t have a story to file for the next day’s paper—I was the lucky winner.
But at least I didn’t have to go alone; Bill’s parting shot was for me to get Melissa out of the darkroom and drag her along.

We got into my wee Beetle and wiggled our way out of the
Monitor
’s minuscule parking lot. By the time we got where we were going, the place was clogged with fire trucks, so we had to park
a few hundred yards down the road where there was enough of a shoulder to keep the car from toppling into the lake.

We hiked back, and when we got to the top of the curvy driveway, we saw a trio of firemen in protective suits, their heads
encased in oversize helmets with thick glass faceplates. It may sound futuristic, but frankly they looked like they ought
to be shilling tires for Michelin. There were also two ambulances and a pair of cop cars, Gabriel’s finest never liking to
be left out of the party. There were no other reporters in sight, which was no surprise. The local TV news goes on the air
live at six, and they’re not a big enough operation to deal with a story that breaks at five-fifteen.

At fire scenes, at least in this town, you can usually tell from the gear who’s in charge. Regular firefighters wear yellow,
while lieutenants and other muckety-mucks wear white. I saw plenty of guys in normal yellow coats, but I couldn’t find whoever
was supposed to be the commander on the scene.