“You don’t need to quote. You can read the lawyers’ minds.”
“But what good is it to read their minds about stuff that’s”-I looked at one of the date notations-“two weeks old? That doesn’t-”
“There’s more.”
“Like from when?”
“Like, for instance,” he said, taking a dainty sip of his Michelob, “you called about that government study.”
I had called that very morning about federal regulators preparing a new study of deaths in the trucks. “Jesus,” I said.
A briefcase sat next to V. He snapped it open and drew out a manila envelope stuffed with paper. “Here,” he said, handing me the envelope. “No quoting. Read, understand, use them to figure out what’s going on. Better to fish where you know the fish are, am I right?”
I couldn’t disagree. “Is this it?”
“Until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I tried not to show my excitement. “How are you getting these?”
“You don’t need to know. Use them productively. Or don’t.”
“Then why? Why are you doing this?”
V shrugged. “It’s the right thing to do? You’d never buy that. Let’s just say the truck people have it coming.”
At Superior, there were car people, like V, and there were truck people. The car people had grown considerably less glamorous-and got less and less of the company’s money-as pickups and sport-utilities had caught the public’s fancy. But was it enough to turn V against his own company? Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t care.
It worked like this: I’d open a line of questioning with Superior about some aspect of the trucks. Every Thursday after six, I’d walk to the bus station on Michigan Avenue, where I had rented a locker. I’d put a key in locker number 927, and remove three or four unmarked manila envelopes bulging with transcripts. I’d hustle them home and read what Superior lawyers and safety engineers and the occasional executive had said to one another about my questions. Then I knew exactly what to ask in my next round. I took care to word my queries generally enough so that the flacks wouldn’t make connections I didn’t want them to make. It wasn’t quite like I was sitting on the nineteenth floor at Superior headquarters, but it was close.
The voice-mail transcripts helped me write some of my biggest stories, several of which found their way into the Hanover trial. When the verdict came down, Detroit Times editors started preparing to nominate my stories for a Pulitzer. None of the editors knew about the voice mails. Because I’d never quoted from them, I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone about them. I told myself that this further assured that my source’s anonymity would be protected. And why should it matter anyway, I thought, so long as the stories were right?
One Thursday in late November, I opened locker 927 and saw no envelopes. Damn, I thought. I’d assumed that V eventually would decide that the truck guys had had enough bad press and my gravy train would end. But way in the back of the locker I saw a single sheet of paper. I had to get up on my toes to pull it out. The paper looked to be a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. The Superior letterhead was smeared black. A column of barely readable surnames, each matched with a six-digit number, ran down the page. I recognized the names of Superior lawyers and flacks. “No way,” I said. The numbers had to be their voice-mail pass codes.
An old man sitting against the lockers turned to me as if I’d spoken to him. He was eating a Hostess Sno Ball wrapped in a wrinkled napkin. Pink flakes of coconut stuck to the front of his sweatshirt.
“What am I going to do with this?” I said.
“Up to you,” he said.
Of course I had no idea why V had just given me the codes. I tried to reach him, without success. I thought maybe he’d gone on vacation. At the time I was working on a story that was supposed to wrap the entire year of truck news into one long, dramatic narrative. The bosses had ordered it up as the capper of our Pulitzer entry. I already had plenty of strong material for the story, but I wanted something really fresh and juicy.
I thought the voice-mail transcripts were probably stolen goods, although I didn’t know for sure because V never broached the subject and I never asked. Reporters aren’t supposed to accept materials they know to be stolen. Of course we take stuff all the time that we suspect has been procured through illegal or at least questionable means. It isn’t quite like buying a car stereo from a fence, but when we suspect the stuff we’re getting is hot, we justify taking it by telling ourselves that we aren’t the thieves and the public is being served.
The rationalizations weren’t so easy, though, when it came to the voice-mail pass codes. I hadn’t stolen the codes, of course. And I didn’t even know for certain that V had stolen them. But if I used them to listen to voice mails, and if listening to voice mails was theft, then, perhaps, I would be a thief. But would that be worse than knowingly allowing people to burn to death?
I didn’t think about it too hard. I used the codes twice. After midnight. From a phone booth outside the bus station. A few didn’t work; their owners had probably changed them. Others did work. The editors cleared space for my last great story to run on the front page on the last Sunday of the year.
Three days before, I attended an annual holiday get-together hosted by Superior. About twenty reporters, half a dozen flacks, and a few execs gathered at a restaurant in downtown Detroit for too many drinks, a dried-out dinner, and some phony laughs. Over the years I’d come to loathe the dinner, but I always worried that if I didn’t go, my competitors might beat me to a story. I was waiting at the bar when I overheard two midlevel execs talking about a “purge.” I hoped I’d misunderstood. At dinner I dropped a casual question. There had indeed been a round of early retirement buyouts the company hadn’t publicized. Certain execs-V’s name came up-had declined the buyout, but their bosses had leaned on them to resign.
I excused myself from the table and went to the men’s room and locked myself in a stall. I hoped no one had seen my face go pale or the cold sweat bead up on my forehead. V had been gone from Superior for nearly eight months. He’d left weeks before he started giving me the transcripts. Now I knew, without having to ask anyone, that every single thing V had supplied me with was stolen, that he’d had an ax to grind and a reason-a bad one-to use me. So the motivations trumped the facts, after all. There was nothing I could do about the stories that had already been published. But as I sat there staring at the muddy shoeprints on the floor, I contemplated the bitter knowledge that there was time to spike my last great story-and along with it, my chance at a Pulitzer.
I was shivering at a pay phone when I finally reached V at home just after 1:00 a.m.
“You got fired and you don’t tell me?” I said.
“You woke me up.” V yawned. “I didn’t get fired. I took a buyout.”
“I needed to know.”
“Why? You wouldn’t have taken the transcripts then? You would’ve just told me to keep them?”
My temper was rising. “If I’d known you stole them and was trying to screw the company, goddamn right I would’ve told you to keep them.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
“So just forget it then,” V said. “You didn’t know they were stolen-and I’m not saying they were-but you didn’t know, so you’re fine. You can plead ignorance. Just take my last little gift and throw it away.”
He was taunting me. “OK, Ernest,” I said. Then I pronounced his full name.
V chuckled. “What are you going to do, get me fired? Remember, my friend, we were off the record. Blowing my cover would get you in more trouble than me.”
He was right, of course. Many of the rules of journalism are dressed in shades of gray, but this one is black and white: If you promise a source anonymity, you never reveal his or her identity. You keep your mouth shut. You go to jail before you unmask an anonymous source. A reporter who ratted out a source might as well leave the profession for good.
I hung up the phone without saying another word.
Pellets of sleet pricked my cheeks as I walked home. I’m screwed, I thought. It wasn’t V’s fault, either. Sure, he hadn’t told me the whole truth, but I had never sought it; hell, I’d avoided it. I’d worried less about his angle than I did about cops at the bus station suspecting me of drug dealing. And now, yes, technically I could plead ignorance about everything V had given me except that last little gift, the pass codes. On that count, I was dead. I’d used the codes to write my final masterpiece. The only way to absolve myself of that sin would be to go in that morning and confess to my editors.
Instead, I called in sick. I phoned in the final changes to my story. It ran that Sunday at the top of the front page and jumped inside to an entire page of copy dressed up with photographs and charts. The next week, I helped
