my bosses draft a letter nominating me for a Pulitzer Prize. All along, I kept telling myself that that last story-and every single story I had written about Superior’s pickup trucks-was true, that none of what I had reported would ever have come out if I had not used the voice mails, that no one ever would have known how Superior had tried to cover up its deadly mistakes. The stories were right, I told myself, and that’s all that matters.
Six months later, I was summoned to the office of Wendy Grimm, executive editor of the Times.
She sat behind a massive oak desk in a charcoal suit embellished by a bloodred silk scarf, her gray eyes fixed on a stapler she was fiddling with. A Times attorney named Ferris, whom I’d met once when he had reviewed and praised one of my Superior truck stories, sat glumly beside the desk. Grimm took her eyes off the stapler long enough to motion me into a chair. Her secretary closed the door behind me, shutting out the clatter of the newsroom.
“Gus,” Grimm said. She set the stapler down. “We have an issue.”
Wendy Grimm was a rising star in All-Media Corporation, the agglomeration of newspapers, TV and radio stations, and quick-copy companies that owned the Times. She’d come to the Times, her fifth newspaper in eleven years, only two years before and was expected to advance to the corporate offices in Dallas once she’d made her mark in Detroit. She’d had me in her office just a few months earlier to congratulate me on having my Superior truck stories selected as one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. That day she’d stood beaming at the framed certificates on the wall bearing witness to Pulitzers won by the Times in 1931 and 1954. “You’re next, Gus,” she’d said, knowing full well that my Pulitzer would be regarded by the corporate bosses as her Pulitzer.
After the Washington Post won the prize for a six-part series on the Congressional Budget Office, I’d actually felt relieved, because I had grown secretly terrified that winning the biggest prize might draw closer scrutiny of my reporting methods. Although I had continued to write an occasional story about Superior’s trucks, I’d cut off contact with V, rid myself of the bus station locker, and successfully resisted calling the voice mails again. I thought I’d put the previous year’s stories far enough behind me.
All of that changed when Wendy Grimm opened a desk drawer, took something out, and laid it on the desk in front of me. I immediately recognized the key to my old bus station locker, with “927” engraved on its bright orange fob. I felt Grimm and Ferris gauging my eyes and tried to stay calm through the sudden feeling that the bottom of my stomach was about to drop out.
“Tell us, Gus,” Wendy Grimm said. “Just how did you go about accessing Superior’s voice-mail system?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Only a couple of times.”
“Enough to get caught. Superior set up a trace.”
Yes, I thought. But the stories were true.
We sat there for a moment in silence. Wendy Grimm broke it.
“So who was your source?”
“The stories were true,” I said.
She picked up the stapler and slammed it down on her blotter. “Is that your rationalization for stealing property that wasn’t yours?” she said. “Who was your source?”
I looked at Ferris, then back at Wendy Grimm. “My source was anonymous,” I said.
“That isn’t what I asked,” she said. “Did you tell any of your editors about this person?”
“No one asked and, anyway, I didn’t need to tell anyone because I didn’t quote the voice mails.”
Wendy Grimm pressed her lips together and leaned forward over her hands, which were now folded together so tightly that her knuckles were white. “Gus, Superior is threatening lawsuits and some rather unflattering publicity. If we knew who your source was, we might be more comfortable in trying to deter them. If it was someone at Superior, I want his or her name. You will give it to me. Now.”
Normally a reporter would reveal an anonymous source’s name to an editor, who would then be bound by the same oath of confidentiality. At most papers, including the Times, refusing to do so was an offense that could get you fired. But it was clear by then that I was a goner anyway, and that this wasn’t about me or Superior or the trucks or even the Times. A fire was raging in Wendy Grimm’s building and she had to extinguish it before it spread to All-Media Corporation.
“I’m no longer in touch with the source,” I said. “He stays anonymous. That was my deal.”
“ Your deal, Gus? Your deal? Who do you think you work for? Do you realize how much shit you’ve brought down on me-on us, the Times, all of your colleagues?”
“Those trucks are burning people to death and Superior knows it. Every word I wrote was true.”
She smiled the brittle smile of a climber who could feel the rungs of the ladder snapping off beneath her feet. “We’re in a place now where that has become irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.” She turned to Ferris. “Phil?”
Ferris unfolded his praying mantis arms and outlined the lawsuits Superior was threatening: libel, slander, invasion of privacy, theft. One way or the other, he said, my methods would become known. The paper, my colleagues, Wendy Grimm, All-Media, all would be disgraced. Further, a libel jury might well have to disregard any evidence I’d collected with the help of the voice mails, because they were stolen property.
“Libel my butt,” I said. “Truth is a defense, as you told us over and over in your little newsroom seminars.”
Ferris looked annoyed. “Truth is not a defense,” he said, “until you’ve established what the truth is, until you’ve proven the truth.”
Wendy Grimm’s phone burbled electronically; she started to pick it up, then decided against it.
“Unfortunately,” Ferris continued, “without the aid of your purloined voice mails, we can’t prove very much, which means we’d be liable to lose a libel action.”
“These people are killers.”
“And we’d lose big,” Wendy Grimm said. Her phone rang again; again she ignored it. “We’re in discussions with Superior. The long and short of it is, we need you to resign, effective immediately.” She placed in front of me a single sheet of paper. At the bottom I saw my full name, “Augustus J. Carpenter,” typed where I was supposed to sign away my job. Until that morning, I had told myself that even if I did get caught with the voice mails, I’d only have to endure a beat change or maybe a suspension. They’d never fire me for writing stories that were true. Certainly not at Superior’s behest, and not without a fight. But sitting there, with my name in capital letters staring up at me, I knew I was dead.
Ferris withdrew an expensive-looking pen from inside his jacket. “Sign, please,” he said, “or we will be forced to terminate you.”
“They’re killing people.”
Wendy Grimm’s secretary ducked her head into the office. “It’s Al on four,” she said. “Better pick up.” I could hear computer keys clacking in the newsroom outside. Grimm held up one finger to hold the call.
“I don’t have time for this, Gus,” she said. “Just sign the damn letter. Or don’t sign, and you can get yourself into even more trouble.” She pressed a button on her phone. “Security, please.”
My brain stopped working then. I felt like I felt when we’d lost a hockey game in sudden-death overtime. When you lose like that, it happens so fast that at first you can’t believe it. But then you see the refs leaving and the other team celebrating and you look up at the zeroed-out clock and the certainty of your failure tears through you like a tumbling bullet. Losing in regulation time doesn’t hurt as much. The clock runs down. You prepare. In overtime, you just die.
I took the pen.
Soon, I was back in Starvation Lake. With my first Pilot paycheck I made part of a down payment on a used Ford pickup truck.
Two days before Christmas, my lawyer called. I had never met Scott Trenton, having hired him over the phone on the recommendation of another Times reporter who had used him for her divorce.
“The news isn’t too frigging favorable,” he said. I was in my kitchen, wrapping gifts for Mom. A robe, a fancy cribbage board, a gift certificate for dinner at a restaurant in Ellsworth. Freezing rain had coated my window with ice. For months I had heard nothing about my situation as the Times and Superior tried to negotiate a settlement that would avert a libel suit. Superior’s lawyers would have loved to stick the paper for a front-page apology, but the company’s executives weren’t eager for anything that would draw more attention to their death-trap trucks.
Trenton explained that Superior was seeking the Times ’s cooperation in the Hanover litigation. The Hanovers were the Indiana family who had lost their son Justin in a flaming truck and later won the $354 million verdict against Superior, based in part on my stories. Superior had appealed. Now it wanted the Times to file an affidavit with the court stating that my stories were less than accurate, which might in turn nudge the court to throw the
