Head Wounds

I wanted to bring Eddie with me into the Village but assumed where I was going they’d frown on dogs. Made no sense to me. In Europe you bring dogs everywhere, including restaurants and bars, and never once have I heard of a dogborne pandemic. If I had the money, I’d bring him to Paris. Stuff his face full of petit gateau.

The Southampton Chronicle building sat on a hill that overlooked the backside of the Village center, which made it look both watchful and appropriately aloof. It was on the way to the big new library—my next stop if the foray into local journalism proved unfruitful.

I didn’t know what to expect and had only the roughest plan of attack, knowing nothing about the inner workings of a newspaper. I was surprised to see a reception desk inside the front door, just like any old office anywhere.

“I’m here to see a reporter,” I told the pert, round-faced receptionist.

“Certainly,” she said brightly. “Any one in particular?”

“How about an old one?”

She pulled out a plastic-covered list of names.

“Let’s see. I don’t know everybody perfectly well, but I can think of a few gray heads. I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added, looking at the gray head standing before her.

“I didn’t think you did.”

“Some people think gray hair means wisdom. I do.”

“Wise decision. So what do you think?”

“Roberta is like my mother’s age. Or there’s Kyle who’s like been here forever. Not sure if he’s here now. We’re a weekly,” she added, as if that explained everything.

“But you’re sure about Roberta?”

“She gave me half her bagel this morning on the way in. I didn’t eat it, though. It had cream cheese. Bad for the tummy tone.”

She put both hands flat across her midriff to illustrate the value of restraint.

“Let’s give Roberta a call,” I suggested.

“Sure. And who may I say is calling?”

“My name’s Sam Acquillo, but she won’t know me. Just see if she’ll give me a few minutes to ask some questions.”

“Okay.”

While she called I had a chance to admire the blank opacity of the reception area. There were no clues it belonged to a newspaper. If I’d been transported there in a blindfold I’d think I was in a machine-tool factory. I expected to walk directly into a buzzy newsroom filled with hard-charging cynics who looked like Edward R. Murrow and spoke like Cary Grant. What I got was Roberta Camacho, a late-middle-aged woman shaped like a red delicious apple on a pair of sticks. She had a head of hair you’d call mousey, but only if the mouse had been dead for a while. She was, however, hard-charging, coming through the access door with hand thrust forward and eyes staring intently over a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses.

“Roberta Camacho, and I know exactly who the hell you are,” she said to me as I shook her hand.

“You do?”

“You’re the guy from North Sea accused of murdering Robbie Milhouser with a hammer stapler. You here to confess? Give me the scoop? What a prince.”

“I’m just looking for some information,” I said, as the heartsickening realization hit me.

“Sure. I tell you, then you tell me.”

“I’m an idiot,” I told her. “Of course you’d want to ask me a bunch of questions. And here I am delivering myself to you.

“That’s brave of you to say. Most guys wouldn’t admit that in public,” she said, pulling a small steno pad out from under her ample arm and flipping it open.

I sat down on one of the innocuous leather and chrome chairs in the waiting area. She sat in the other one.

“What I know so far is the police have fingered you as their only suspect, but the grand jury has yet to hand up an indictment. Though people close to the case feel that’s forthcoming. They’re just dotting i’s and crossing t’s. What’s your opinion on that?”

“My opinion is that the clarity of my thinking has eroded somewhat recently, for a variety of reasons.”

She didn’t write that down.

“What about off the record? You have something to tell me? Is that what you’re here for?”

As punishment for my stupidity, I made myself listen to what Jackie Swaitkowski would have said if I’d told her I was going to the Southampton Chronicle to do a little digging around. I played it as a lot of loud words ending with “what the hell were you thinking?”

“No. I honestly just wanted to get some information. I guess I never thought beyond that.”

She flipped her steno book closed and sat back in her chair.

“Are those cigarettes in your shirt pocket?”

“Camels.”

“If you let me have one I’ll let you use our special smoking area on the side of the building.”

“As long as we don’t have to talk,” I said, following her through the access door, down a dreary connecting hallway to a side door, and out to a picnic table around which clung the bitter residue of banished smokers. We sat down and shared an ashtray.

“Tell you what,” she said. “Let’s really just talk off the record. I have no problem with that.”

I remember back at the company being warned in the sternest terms to never speak to anyone from the press under any circumstances without our PR people’s prior approval and involvement in the interview. It was one of the few direct commands I submitted to with unqualified obedience. So much so that the head of corporate affairs complained I was undermining our credibility by stonewalling the media.

“You told me not to talk to them,” I’d said to the PR guy.

“Not not talk. Just not talk without our involvement.”

“So I don’t talk about the wrong things?”

“I don’t like the characterization, but I accept the gist of it. We need to control our message.”

“You do, I know,” I said sincerely. “And you’re good at it. I’m a lot better at controlling product quality. Let’s stick to our strengths, what do you say?”

We eventually reached a compromise where the PR people would send over questions or requests for information from the media—which usually meant industry magazines, but sometimes the general press—and I’d write back an answer. I never saw anything in print attributed to me that resembled anything I ever wrote down, which proved the wisdom of our strategy.

Roberta and I stared at each other and smoked in silence for a few minutes. Then my curiosity got the best of me.

“What’s that mean, exactly, off the record?” I asked her.

“You tell me anything you want and I promise not to print any of it. Except those things that will win me a Pulitzer Prize or get me fired for letting some other paper get a scoop on something I should’ve had.”

“Pretty airtight deal.”

We quietly smoked some more, then I put out my cigarette and tossed her an extra from my pack.

“Sorry to bother you,” I told her, standing up. “You don’t have to escort me through the building. I can walk around.”

Which I started to do when she called me back.

“What if I answer your questions first and then you decide if you’ll answer some of mine.”

I walked back to her.

“I can’t afford to mess up here,” I said to her. “It’s not my life being at stake. It’s the crap I’ll have to take from my lawyer.”

Her face, heavily jowled and marred with the antique vestiges of acne, looked amused.

“I spent almost twenty years as a reporter at the Boston Globe before marrying a guy I didn’t know at the time was about to inherit a place on Gin Lane. You want to check out if my word is good, call anybody there who knew me. I have no reason to break a trust with you. I don’t care that much about your