Dreyfus wanted to see Harmon’s notes on that story. With twenty years in the business, Malik was certain he knew what would happen next.
Dreyfus’s story ran in the Chicago Reader and included a dozen or more cheap shots at Malik’s expense from anonymous discontents in the Tribune newsroom, each accusing him of trying to undermine the objectivity of his reporters by injecting news stories with his own political and personal agendas. By that time, Scott Harmon had been fired for fabricating quotes, but that had only made him disgruntled, and he spoke on the record with Dreyfus. “I felt pressured to get certain points of view, certain liberal points of view, in my stories,” Harmon said. “Malik never complained if the conservative side wasn’t represented.”
Others suggested to the Reader (anonymously, of course) that Malik’s aggressive attempts to create “diversity” by hiring reporters without a solid background in journalism had forced unqualified people into prominent assignments at the paper. The implication (the way Malik read it) was that the Harmon incident was an example of this, even though Scott Harmon was a white kid with a degree in film, the son of a wealthy advertiser, in fact, whose hiring had been imposed upon Malik from higher up. In fact, Malik was proud of many new writers he’d managed to lure into the ranks.
Sally Barwick was an example. Bright. Hardworking. African-American. Her prose was efficient and almost entirely free of cliche. If there was anything he would change about her, it would be her insistence on working the police beat. As a matter of philosophy Malik didn’t think any reporter, especially one with such promise, should stay in the same department for more than twelve months at a time. Sally, however, a former private eye, had convinced him of her passion for cops and crime scenes and courtrooms. Also, as a matter of smart management, Malik believed in keeping his best writers happy.
He had heard about her hobby. There had been snickers about it in editorial meetings practically since the day she was hired, and Dreyfus even made a snide allusion to it in his Reader story, although he didn’t mention her name. Malik thought it was ridiculous. Tens of millions of people played Shadow World, and yet there was still this crazy stigma attached to it. The Tribune had done countless stories about the phenomenon, and he remembered one citing studies in which one in five people who said they weren’t gamers actually were, and more than half of those who admitted to playing lied about how much time they spent inside the game. If it didn’t affect her work (and as far as he could tell, it never had), then why the hell should he care what she did in her spare time? They had a sportswriter who was a snake handler; that was a lot weirder than playing some video game.
“You wanted to see me, Stephen?” Barwick asked.
Malik waved her into his office and motioned for her to shut the door.
“What’s going on?”
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I don’t know how long I’m going to be at this paper.”
“You’re quitting?”
Malik knew her shock was feigned – Barwick was aware of newsroom politics. She heard the talk in the hallways and across the street at the Billy Goat and from gossipy colleagues at other papers. He appreciated the gesture, though. “Not exactly.”
“They’re forcing you out? Over this Dreyfus bullshit?”
His head drifted unconvincingly to the left and right. “Not yet. I might even survive this one, but I’ve learned something from it. Next year it will be something else. And the year after that, there’ll be another ‘Dreyfus affair.’ One of them will have my number on it. They won’t back me up indefinitely.”
Sally sat in a green chair with upholstery that felt more like scratchy carpet. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I’ll back you all the way.”
“I know,” he said, not smiling where another man might. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. One day, they might ask you to choose sides. When they do that, I want you to look after yourself.”
“Not a chance,” Barwick said. “I owe my career to you. If you hadn’t put me on the murder beat, I’d still be transcribing obits over the phone.”
“Just trust me on this. Save your job. This is a good paper. I’ll land on my feet somewhere. And wherever that is, if you’re interested, you’ll have a job. No matter what. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe it’ll be a city with even more sicko murders than this one.”
“One can hope,” she said darkly.
“But the rest of this crap doesn’t have anything to do with you. And I don’t want it to. That’s an order, or whatever.”
“An order, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, maybe it won’t come to that.”
“Maybe not,” he allowed. “Things change. Before it all comes down, maybe you’ll break open the Wicker Man case and win a Pulitzer. Make me look good.” He didn’t smile this time, either.
She left without making any promises. Malik tapped his computer keyboard to retrieve a dozen e-mails, all received while Barwick was sitting in his office. She could be a lot of things in this business, he thought to himself, a columnist or an editor. When she first came to the Tribune she said she wanted to be a journalist because she liked having an audience but hated crowds. That made Malik laugh. She could be anything she wanted to be.
He wondered what kind of person she was in the game.
– 60 -
Davis sat in a big leather chair by the front window in the big house on Stone Avenue, reading a paperback called Time of Death. It was about a convicted murderer named Hughes whose appeals have been exhausted. His execution date is set. At midnight. He knows the precise second at which he is going to die and he finds the burden of that knowledge unbearable. Through another prisoner, Hughes hires a third con, one whose identity is unknown to him, to kill Hughes at some random date before his execution. This uncertainty makes Hughes happy – so happy he can no longer accept dying. So he tries to foil his own exercise-yard assassination.
It was a silly book and Davis was hypnotized by it, reading the first two hundred pages in just a few hours. Improbable novels like this – sci-fi, thrillers, mysteries – had been his weakness as a teenager, when he read two or three of them a week. He always kept a book with him back then and never let a minute of idle time pass without bending back the shiny cover and holding it with one hand in front of his face. He read at breakfast, on the bus, between periods, at lunch, during his breaks at the hardware store, and even while riding his bike.
He read less and less for pleasure as he got older and various obsessions held his dwindling free time hostage. In med school it was fly-fishing, although he did more practice casting in a park near his apartment than he did wading in Wisconsin streams. In his early thirties he took up track driving – with an inheritance check he paid off his student loans and purchased a BMW coupe – and he rented time on the raceway in Joliet. As AK grew older and Jackie grew sicker, he sold the Beamer and immersed himself in genealogy, trying to define himself with the sum of his ancestors, tunneling for hours through birth and death records in the windowless blue room. Genealogy was shunted in the search for AK’s killer, and the search for AK’s killer was abandoned for fear of going to prison.
The obsessions, one after another, had been a symptom of depression. He understood that now. A happy person looks forward to a few moments of boredom now and then, but for an unhappy person, idle time is intolerable. The unhappy mind is congested with regrets and guilt and situations out of its control and the unstoppable unfolding of worst-case scenarios. Fly rods and race cars and note cards covered with family history became occupying forces in his head, dispersing unpleasant thoughts, outlawing unwanted concerns.
Since he and Joan married, the old stresses had largely disappeared. Potential disasters and subconscious dreads were still players in the politics of his imagination, but only as disorganized, discredited third parties. The files in the blue room, both older ones relating to his family and the more recent boxes filled with leads in AK’s murder, hadn’t been opened in more than four years, and Joan talked about converting the space into a studio so they could take up painting together when she retired. With more free time to enjoy than at any other time in his life, idleness had now become its own reward. He treasured hours that passed with no deadlines or duties or responsibilities. Time to sit by the big window on Stone and read all the terrible and exciting books he’d missed in the last forty years. AK’s memory was with him at all times, but it no longer haunted him, and he felt so removed
