“I don’t have boyfriends.”
“Really? Does he work for the Times?”
“Sort of. Not really.”
“Meaning?”
“He used to work there. The Free Press, too. Now he does a little of this and a little of that. Kind of a freelancer.”
“Ah. One of those guys.”
I knew a few. They hopped back and forth between the Times and the Free Press, playing the papers and their editors off of one another, getting raises and more raises until one day an editor who’d hired them at one paper had a drink with one who’d hired them at the other and halted that little gravy train. Guys like Frenchy wound up hanging out at the Anchor and the Post and the Money Tree, picking up dollar-a-word assignments and pretending they were loving the freelance life while leaving $10 bills on $120 tabs.
“He says the past is the past,” Joanie said, and I thought, Were it only so. She inched her stool closer. I caught a whiff of her body wash. Almond. “He’s good at computer stuff. You’ll see. How are you?”
I told her without telling her anything she didn’t need to know. She listened, her chin in one hand, her eyes intent on my face. She asked about Dingus, about the Pilot, about my mother. She had gotten to know Mom, and Mom her, while she was in Starvation. When she asked about Darlene, I changed the subject and asked her how she had wound up on the cop beat in Detroit, at the Times, after leaving the Pilot for the Chicago Tribune.
Joanie stirred her whiskey with a forefinger, licked the finger. I remembered how she once had surprised me by chugging a can of Blue Ribbon in the Pilot newsroom. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was more money.”
“The way I heard it, the Times came after you big-time after you broke some highway construction scam.”
“L trains, actually,” she said. “But, yeah, I guess. Whatever. The new editor at the Times used to be at the Trib. ”
She had been in a hurry since the day I had hired her at the Pilot. In a hurry for bigger stories, bigger audiences, bigger prizes. Lots of young reporters were in a hurry, but most were prone to tripping over their own feet. I had once been in a hurry and wound up stumbling all the way back to the small time.
“Don’t apologize for success, Joanie.”
“Don’t be a wimp, Gus.”
“What does that mean?”
“You could be back here now. All the people who sold you out are long gone. All you have to do is pick up the phone and you’d be kicking the auto companies’ butts again.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Look what you did in Starvation. You got the bad guy.”
“We both did. But I should’ve gotten him twenty years ago.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s what you do that matters.”
I took a drink of my Bud. Warm again. “No complaints here. My mom needs me. I like my life OK. Got a new reporter.”
“You mean old reporter, don’t you?”
“You know him?”
“Lucas B. Whistler? Are you kidding? The youngest Detroit reporter ever to be a Pulitzer finalist? Prizewinning basher of computer screens?”
“He already smashed one at the Pilot, ” I said. “Sounds like you got Pulitzer envy.”
“I have another year to beat him,” she said, holding her glass up in a toast, then sipping from it. “And after I actually win, I plan to keep my job longer, too.”
“You have a ways to go.”
“How did you get stuck with him?”
“Stuck with him? I’m glad to have him. The guy’s a pro.”
“OK.”
“What does that mean?”
She pulled her hair back on her head. “Rumors. I don’t know.”
“Come on. Anything in particular? Or just beer blather at the Anchor?”
“Evidently he’s quite the wheeler-dealer.”
That was no surprise. I decided not to tell Joanie about Whistler and Tawny Jane Reese. During her Pilot days, Joanie had called T.J. “Twitchy-Butt.”
“Well, his clips looked great.”
“Yeah?” Joanie said. “How many had solo bylines?”
“There were some JVs in there. The guy was getting ready to retire.”
“He’s not that old.”
“Hell, I’m all for retiring at fifty-six. Anyway, he said he was mentoring the youngsters, letting them have bylines.”
“Huh. He might’ve had it backward. I think he smashed more computers in the last few years than he wrote stories.”
“This isn’t just a Times thing, is it?” I said. “You know-he’s a Freep reporter, therefore he sucks?”
She grinned. “Of course. You want me to ask around about him?”
“Knock yourself out. Did you get me that appointment?”
“I got us the appointment.”
“Ah.” I’d expected that. She wasn’t letting me have anything to myself.
“Nine a.m. At a golf course in Redford.”
“Redford. Why a golf course?”
“That’s what the flack wanted.”
“What flack? What do they need a PR guy for?”
“Got me. That’s who called me back.”
She stood and walked across the room to the nail where her jacket hung. She came back wrapping herself in black leather to her knees. She kept coming until she was standing so close that I could smell the almond wash again. She pointed a fingernail shellacked in scarlet at the half-moon scar on her chin.
“You know how I got this?” she said.
“Nope.”
The music, Creedence now, ended abruptly in the middle of “Lodi,” the 3:15 silence as sudden as a shriek.
“A puck.”
“At a Wings game?”
“My center throws me a cross-ice pass.” She took a step back and positioned her hands as if they were holding a hockey stick. My center throws me a cross-ice pass? When Joanie was in Starvation, she’d had no use whatsoever for the game I loved.
“I’m about to catch it on my backhand when this idiot from the other team shoves his stick in the way and the puck flies up and catches me.”
“Get out of here. You’re playing hockey?”
“Novice. Lots of leaners out there.”
“Benders,” I corrected her.
“Right.”
“And tripods.”
She pushed her face in close to mine, and for half a second I thought she might kiss me. Joanie McCarthy, who had called me a coward to my face when she had worked for me. Now she was sending me weekly e-mails about my coming to Detroit for a visit. And she was one of only a handful of Pilot subscribers who had the paper mailed to her in Detroit. “I’m not a tripod,” she said.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“See. You really did teach me things.” She looked at my beer. “You going to take that with you?”
“I’d rather drink Freon.”
