“I told you before. Rosie likes guys.”
“Something you know from experience?”
You could say that. In first grade, I pushed her on the swings. In junior high, she bent down to cry on my shoulder when some boy she liked called her “Stilts.” In high school, I took her to the prom. And the summer before college we made love, but we’d been pals for so long that it was like sleeping with my sister. Every straight man I knew would think me a fool, but Rosie and I never twisted the sheets again.
“Know where that rumor comes from?” I said. “Male recruits in her class at the Providence Fire Academy started it after she dusted them in every fitness test. She put up with it as long as she could, but when a fellow firefighter called her a dyke in the firehouse a few years back, she kissed him on the lips and then dropped him with a right cross. Six weeks later a beam fell on the jerk, and she threw him over her shoulder and lugged him out of a burning building. Today she’s the Providence Fire Department’s first woman battalion chief. Nobody calls her names anymore.”
“So,” McCracken said, “does that mean I’ve got a shot?”
“Sure. All you’ve got to do is grow another six inches and stop being an asshole.”
“For her, I’d get lifts. But she’s your friend, so I figure she must be okay with assholes.”
“When I said you needed to grow six inches, I wasn’t talking about your height.”
McCracken’s eyes narrowed. Then he grinned and fired a carefully placed left jab that whizzed past my right ear.
We called the testosterone contest a draw and got back to business.
“Look,” McCracken said. “You always think arson-for-hire first because pyromania is rare. Some psychiatrists aren’t sure it even exists. But it’s the only thing that fits the facts here. My guess is we’re dealing with a psycho who sets houses on fire and gets a hard-on watching them burn. Most likely someone who lives in the neighborhood.”
“You asked Polecki for his pictures of the spectators at the fires?”
“Of course.”
“And of course there aren’t any.”
“Oh, but there are!” he said. “Not for the first six arsons. It took that long for Polecki and Roselli to figure out what they should be doing. But there are forty shots from the seventh. Want to see them? Twenty-eight bad exposures and twelve artsy close-ups of Roselli’s left thumb.”
5
Next morning, my eyes were among two dozen pairs trained on Veronica. It was hard to know what the women were thinking. The men, not so much.
She stood in the middle of the newsroom, an unlit Virginia Slim dangling from plum-tinged lips. She had taken to chewing on the filters since the publisher’s no-smoking edict. Now that I was fond enough of Veronica to care about her health, I had to concede the ban was a good thing, even though it kicked me to the curb for my daily Cuban.
Still, it rankled. The ban was another of those incremental changes that had turned our traditional newsroom into an urban-renewal project gone bad. Gone were the overflowing ashtrays, the banks of dented metal desks, the ink-stained tile floor, and the harsh fluorescent lights that forced copy editors to wear green eyeshades. The clacking typewriters had disappeared during my first year on the job, and I still missed their staccato beat. Now we had recessed lighting, a maroon carpet, and computers humming on fake butcher-block desks. The desks were walled off with four-foot-high dividers so you had to stand up to ask your neighbor how to spell
It took somebody like Veronica to do that. This morning, her story on the federal labor-racketeering grand jury, with direct quotes from the clever perjury of Giuseppe “the Cheeseman” Arena, was stripped across page one. Even the managing editor had ventured out of his office to join in the attaboys. If he hadn’t blown so much on carpeting and room dividers, maybe he could have given her a raise.
This made the third time this year that Veronica had gotten big hunks of secret grand-jury testimony into a story. Each time, the U.S. attorney demanded to know how she had done it. Each time, she politely told him to stuff it. When I asked her how she was managing it, she just Mona Lisa smiled. The smile made me forget what I’d asked.
I forced myself to stop leering, logged on, and found a message from Lomax:
SEE ME.
As I sauntered to his desk, he shot me that opportunities-in-retailing look.
“Listen, boss …”
“No, you listen. The dog story wasn’t in the paper yesterday. It wasn’t in the paper today. It had better be in the paper tomorrow.”
“Why not give it to Hardcastle? He’s got a touch with the fluff.”
“I gave it to you, Mulligan. I know you think you’ve got better things to do, but let me explain something to you. Circulation has been falling sixty papers a month for the past five years. The most common reason people give for dropping the paper is that they don’t have time to read. Know what the second most common reason is?”
“CNN?
“No, but you can bet those are some of the reasons they don’t have time for the paper anymore. The second reason is they think we print too much bad news.”
“I know how they feel,” I said, but Lomax was still talking, running over my words like a snowplow flattening a paperboy.
“We need good-news stories like a gangbanger needs bullets. It’s hard to find good news. It’s not every day that a scientist finds a cure for cancer or a Good Samaritan opens fire at a Democratic fund-raiser. So when good news smacks you in the face, you’ve got to write it. And the dog story is a genuine, honest-to-God good-news story.”
“But …”
“No buts. I’m not crazy about fluff, either, but we’ve got to give readers what they want if we’re going to be able to keep giving them what they need. The Internet and the twenty-four-hour cable news channels are killing us, and we’ve got to do everything we can to fight back. Folks want to read about something besides organized crime, political corruption, and burned-up babies. You’re overspecialized, Mulligan. I’m trying to help you out here.”
“People are dying, boss.”
“And you think you can stop it? You’ve got an inflated opinion of yourself. Investigating fires is the arson squad’s job. After they solve this thing, you can write about it.”
“Let me tell you about the arson squad,” I said, and gave Lomax a quick rundown on the Polecki-Roselli vaudeville act.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Why the hell don’t you write
“Yeah. Okay. How about for Sunday?”
“First the dog story. Today, Mulligan. Don’t make me talk to you about this again.”
He dropped his hands to his keyboard, a signal that our talk was over. I’d never heard Lomax put so many words together. Maybe nobody had. I figured I better do as I was told.
* * *
Dorcas didn’t like the dog, but she kept him for the same reason she wouldn’t let me have my turntable, my blues LPs, my collection of
