The Big Law

She cocked her head, furrowed her brow, pursed her tiny lips. This was the first time she had seen her dad’s face go tight with surprise.

The woman’s voice was clenched, almost wrung dry of personality. But he knew her immediately. Only one woman called him “Phil.” They’d been married a long time ago, before he had grown into “Broker.”

“Phil, Keith’s got himself in a lot of trouble and I need your help.”

The single, cryptic sentence seemed to exhaust her. Caren, his ex-wife, mumbled her number and hung up.

3

Tom James had faithfully reported the news for twenty years and was forty-one when he started craving sugar in the morning. It was right after his wife left him, not long after he was demoted to the East Neighborhoods Bureau of the St. Paul paper.

He ripped the wrapper off his second Snickers and washed it down with black coffee.

Tom read a lot. Because he was a writer he was skeptical of what he read-unless he wrote it, in which case he never tired of reading it. But he was quick to see where a descriptive scenario could be applied broadly to enhance his copy.

Looking out over the newsroom this morning, he had the unsettling experience of applying a descriptive scenario to his own life. Last night he’d read a Newsweek article about serotonin, the neurotransmitter your body produced or didn’t produce-according to the article-depending on your relative social status. If you were on top of the heap, looking down, you had high levels of serotonin in your system and all the zillions of little chemical tabs and slots aligned and inserted just fine. You were therefore calm, alert and easy to get along with. Like he was, last year, when he was a general assignment reporter.

But if a general assignment reporter’s fortunes went down in the world-if he were exiled to a suburban beat of endless school board meetings-his serotonin levels would crash and he would suffer depression, aggression and surges of impulse. And in-say-the smug eyes of the twenty-four-year-old Hispanic female-type person who now sat at his old desk in GA, he would be a loser. He’d have to get his serotonin levels adjusted, in prescription drug form. With Prozac.

Tom looked around. He figured that half the over-forty newsroom staff was sucking down Prozac.

Tom finished his Snickers and gulped his coffee. No Prozac for him. Male Prozac users paid for the chemical illusion of well-being with impotence. And that was just about the only part of his life that still worked.

One newspaper era had ended. Another had begun. In between yawned a tough-luck chasm into which he was slipping inch by inch.

When he started at the paper in 1978, the slot man on the copy desk wore a green visor and smoked a cigar and nobody had heard of serotonin. Depression was an economic condition best cured by the unconditional surrender of Germany.

Back then, more than one desk drawer contained eighty-proof refreshment, and some of the women still wore slips, nylons, and two-inch heels. Deadline sex was banged out standing up in the stairwells.

Now the office was carpeted, smoke free, sexless, and passive as a monastery staffed by eunuchs. People over forty, especially white male people over forty, were feeling like endangered species. More specifically, Tom James was feeling especially vulnerable.

Yesterday, because he was still on probation, he had not been allowed to work the bomb scare story. While everyone else ran around the federal building, he had been sent out to suburban Cottage Grove to interview a man who had strung ten thousand lights on his home for his Christmas display.

“Oh, oh,” cautioned gray-haired, forty-five-ish Barb Luct, the reporter who occupied the next desk. “Here she comes.”

She was Molly Korne, from Georgia-aka Cottage Cheese Knees-the new managing editor. Korne was single and childless. A dedicated corporate nun. Also loud and egg-shaped, with a bizarre predilection for miniskirts that showed off her triple canopy dimples.

Barb leaned over and whispered behind her hand. “Kim heard her bragging in the elevator to some guy in Advertising, how she’s going to fire someone, just to show who’s boss.”

Howie Norell, at the desk on the other side of Tom, piped in. “I heard she ordered all the supervisors to rank their staffs in order of who’s the most productive.”

“Story quotas are next,” Barb warned darkly.

Tom nodded. But his eyes swept along the floor, locked on the open bottom drawer of Barb’s desk and saw her purse in the shadows. Open. And amid the cosmetic clutter his eyes fixed on the plump luster of worn leather. A succulent green ripple of bills sprouted from the wallet like new lettuce.

Barb got up and went to the LaserJet to retrieve the story she had just printed. Tom leaned forward, swept his right hand over the drawer and lifted two twenties. As his eyes came up level, he saw Korne rolling her folds toward Neighborhoods, like a predatory ball of suet.

He tucked the two bills in his jacket pocket-something he would have never done a year ago, but he’d had a bad night at the casino, and he was in between paychecks, hurting for gas and lunch money. He didn’t approve of petty theft and was furious that he had been reduced to it. But what really filled him with self-loathing was the realization that the only way he could reliably support himself was to show up in this office every day and do what he was told.

By someone named Molly Korne.

Tom watched her coming and felt a powerful nostalgia for the days when descriptive adjectives like fat and ugly were still vital engines of the language. She swatted her accent at the aging Neighborhoods reporters. “Wasn’t for the Newspaper Guild y’all wouldn’t be here.” She grinned, waited for a reaction and then said, “Just kidding.”

Tom removed his horn-rims and cleaned the lenses on his tie to avoid her judging eyes. The new corporate style was subtle, couched in team rhetoric. It barely masked Korne’s need to manipulate, control and dominate. According to a book Tom had just read by the leading FBI profiler, these were the same impulses that motivated serial killers.

Korne moved on, to the Metro desk, and Tom watched a group of young reporters chirp around her, their smiles so wide and needy that Tom half expected to see a worm appear between her curved teeth, which she would plunge down the nearest gullet. There was an African American, an Asian, one Native American and one Hispanic. Only the Asian was a male. All were in their twenties. Look at them grin. Tanked with serotonin.

Then his sugar binge flamed out and left his mouth coated with a lumpy metallic taste-like discovering a well-worn bit between his teeth. Dig in. Hunker down. He had twenty years at the paper. Ten more would fully vest his retirement.

That would still leave fourteen years until he could collect a pension. He looked around. Twenty-four more years of this?

The phone rang.

He picked it up. “Tom James.”

“You know the bomb thing? It was an inside job,” stated an electronically distorted voice. “Guess who the FBI is looking at?”

“Huh? Who?”

“Keith Angland.”

The line went dead. Tom immediately punched in *69.

The phone company tape informed him his last call was from an unlisted number.

He didn’t move for a full minute. Angland. The infamous Narcotics lieutenant who was rumored to have called the new liberal St. Paul police chief “nigger lover.”

And who refused to deny it when confronted by the press.

Tom had met him. He’d done a feature story about Angland’s wife last August. He glanced over his shoulder. His supervisor, Ida Rain, was away from her computer.

The tip was off his beat, but-Wow.