Jericho Iteration

The offices of the Big Muddy Inquirer were spread across a large room occupying the second floor of the building, its various departments separated from each other only by cheap plastic partitions. The place resembled a lab maze for down-on-their-luck mice: computer terminals on battered gray metal desks, fluorescent lights hung from pipes and ductwork along the cobwebbed ceiling, checkerwork brick walls plastered with old posters for rock concerts. Near the stairwell leading to the front door was the personals desk, where a steady parade of lonely people visited to place their ads for other lonely people; at the opposite end of the room was the layout department, where a handful of bohemian graphic artists pasted up the pages within a perpetual haze of marijuana fumes, vented only by a half-open window. Radical chic long after it was chic to be radical and Tom Wolfe had gone to the great word processor in the sky.

Somewhere in the middle of the room was the editorial department: four desks shoved together in a small cubicle, with Horace-the paper’s unofficial mascot, a trophy-mounted moose head decked out in oversized sunglasses and a Cardinals baseball cap-standing watch over the proceedings. The two other staff writers were out on assignment, allowing John Tiernan and me a chance to have our own little staff meeting regarding the events of the previous night.

John was the oddest person working for the Big Muddy in that he was the only staffer who closely resembled a normal human being. At a paper where everyone drank or smoked dope or experimented with various bathtub hallucinogens, John’s only apparent vice was chewing gum. While most people reported to work in jeans, T-shirts, and football jerseys, and our arts editor frequently sported an opera cape and a pince-nez, John came in wearing a business suit, a button-down Oxford shirt, and a plain tie. Sometimes he wore sneakers, but that was as informal as he got. He wore his hair neither too short nor too long, shaved every day, and probably couldn’t say “shit” even if his mouth was full of it. He had a wife and a kid and two cats, lived in a small house in the western ’burbs, attended Catholic mass every Sunday morning, and probably gave the most boring confessions a priest had ever heard.

No one at the Big Muddy ever gave him flak about his straitlaced ways. John was not only tolerant of all the bent personalities around him, he was also the best investigative reporter in the city. Earl would have sold his own son into slavery before giving up John Tiernan to another paper.

“Did you get her name?” he asked once I had given him the rundown of the Muny raid.

“Uh-uh,” I replied. “I didn’t even get that good of a look at her, beyond what I just told you. But she didn’t belong there, man. She was no squatter.”

“Yeah. Okay.” John’s face was pensive. He had his feet up on his desktop next to his computer terminal; he opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “But you say she knew me-”

“She knew your name, but not your face. How else could she have mistaken me for you?” John offered me a stick of Dentyne; I shook my head and he unwrapped the stick for himself. “Does she sound familiar?”

“I dunno. Could be anyone, I guess.” He shrugged as he wadded up the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he used the computer’s trackball to save the story he had been working on. “And she said she wants me to meet her at Clancy’s tonight at eight?”

“Right, and not to believe any other messages you happen to receive from Dingbat …”

John grinned from one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right. I suppose I’m not to believe anything I hear on the phone, either. Weird.” He shook his head, then dropped his feet from the desk and swiveled around in his chair to face the screen. “Well, I gotta finish this thing, then I’ve got a press conference to cover at noon …”

I snapped my fingers as another thought suddenly occurred to me. Chalk it up to my hangover that I buried the lead. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “one more thing. When I asked her what this was all about, she told me two words … um, ‘ruby fulcrum.’”

John’s hands froze above the keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I could see from the change in his expression that he was no longer concentrating on the minor news item he had been writing.

“Come again?” he said quietly.

“Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated. “I checked it out with Joker, but it couldn’t tell me anything. Why, does that ring a bell?”

He dropped his hands from the keyboard and turned back around in his chair. “Tell me everything one more time,” he said. “Slowly.”

Let me tell you a little more about John Tiernan.

John and I were old friends since our college days in the nineties, when we had met at j-school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. We were both St. Louis natives, which meant something in a class full of out-of- staters, and we worked together on the city desk at the campus daily, chasing fire engines and writing bits. After we had received our sheepskins, I went north to work as a staff writer for an alternative paper in Massachusetts, while John remained in Missouri to accept a job as a general assignments reporter for the Post- Dispatch, but we had stayed in touch. We married our respective college girlfriends at nearly the same time; I tied the knot with Marianne two months after John got hitched to Sandy. Even our kids, Jamie and Charles, were born in the same year. Things go like that sometimes.

About the same time that I bailed out of journalism, John moved into investigative reporting for the Post-Dispatch. When I began to seriously consider getting Marianne and Jamie out of the northeast, John had urged me to return to St. Louis, saying that he could put in a good word for me at the Post-Dispatch. I went halfway with him; my family moved back to Missouri, but I decided that I had had enough with journalism. A New York publisher was interested in my novel-in-progress, and Marianne had agreed to support us during the period it took for me to get the book finished. John made the same offer again after he left the Post to go to work for Pearl, but I still wasn’t interested. The novel was going well, and I didn’t have any desire to go back to being a reporter.

And then there was the quake, and Jamie’s death, and my separation from Marianne, and suddenly I found myself living in a cheap motel near the airport with only a few dollars in my wallet. I did as well as I could for a while, doing odd jobs for under-the-table slave wages, until one morning I found myself on a pay phone, calling John at his office to ask if his offer was still valid and, by the way, did he know of any apartments I could rent? John came through on both accounts, and he probably saved my sanity by doing so.

This all goes to show that John Tiernan was my best friend and that there was little which was secret between us.

Yet there were secrets; John was a consummate professional, and good investigative reporters don’t discuss their work even with close buddies. I knew that John played his cards close to his chest and accepted that fact as a given, and so I wasn’t terrifically upset when he wouldn’t disclose everything he knew.

“This ruby fulcrum biz … it’s important, isn’t it?”

He slowly nodded his head as he rubbed his chin between his fingertips. “Yeah, it means something.” He gazed out the window at the gothic steeple of St. Vincent de Paul, rising above the flat rooftops a few blocks away. “It’s part of the story I’m working on right now … and I think I know the person you met last night.”

“A source?” I reached across him to the pack of gum and pulled out a stick. “I take it you haven’t met her.”

John shook his head. “Just a couple of anonymous tips that were e-mailed to me a few weeks ago. I can see how she might have confused you with me last night, since you were obviously waiting for someone at the gate, but …”

He shrugged. “Darned if I know how you got sent an IM meant for me on your PT. The prefixes aren’t identical. That’s never happened before.”

“Some kind of screw-up in the net. I dunno. I received a message meant for you by accident, and …”

We looked at each other and slowly shook our heads. Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy was my mother-in-law. The odds of a random occurrence like this were as likely as trying to call your mother-in-law and reaching an emergency hot line between the White House and the Kremlin instead. Yeah, it could happen … oh, and by the way, you’ve just won the Illinois State Lottery and you’re now a millionaire, all because you happened to pick up a lottery ticket somebody had dropped on the sidewalk.

Coincidence, my ass … and neither of us believed in the Tooth Fairy.

“Let me ask you,” John said after a moment. “If you saw this woman again, would you recognize her? I mean, you said it was dark and rainy and all that, but-”

“If we had gotten any closer, I would have had to ask her for a date. Yeah, I’d recognize her.” I unwrapped a