“Maybe something changed since Monday . . .”
“No, dammit, Walker! Sue wouldn’t kill herself!” Dare yelled.
She started to tear up again and turned her chair away from me. Dare was tough. Rory had two brothers, but they had both let her run the family empire.
I addressed the back of her leather chair. “How about her health? Was she having seizures?”
Dare stayed facing the window. One of the sailboats had tacked wrong, and its sail flapped, begging for the captain to recapture the breeze.
She said, “She hadn’t had a seizure in over a year. She may have had one martini too many at our lunch, but that wasn’t unusual for Sue, especially since your article.”
I said nothing, ordering myself not to get defensive.
She continued, “Sue and I were planning a long weekend to the Keys. We would stay at my house on Duck Key. She wanted to do some deep-sea fishing, and I wanted to catch up on my reading. Sue couldn’t wait to try the new tapas at Santiago’s Bodega.”
The sailboat caught a breeze and headed toward the Pensacola Naval Air Station.
I said, “People are going to blame me for her death.”
Dare swung her chair around to face me. “Dammit, Walker, everything isn’t about you and your goddamn newspaper. You always want to make it about you.”
I said, “Because this is about me and my paper. Bo Hines stole that money. If Sue killed herself because of the trial, her death is on him, not me.”
Dare clenched her fists. Her jaw tightened. She said, “I sure as hell hope you find out what happened.”
Then she turned her chair away from me again. I had been dismissed.
4
“You are killing us with this Bo Hines crap,” Roxie Hendricks said as she slapped her sales reports onto the conference table. “Three more ad cancellations this morning since Sue Hines’ death hit social media. I’m losing more advertisers than I’m signing up.”
Our sales director and part-time copy editor on Mondays and Tuesdays, Roxie helped the paper survive hurricanes, recessions, and an assortment of protests, all without a hair out of place. Bright, determined, and opinionated, she spoke her mind on the paper’s news coverage and fought for themed issues to help her clients and attract new ones.
Her boyfriend had proposed last Christmas. I had approved her trading advertising in the Insider in exchange for a venue, DJ, photographer, and caterer for her wedding reception in two months. Roxie needed to maintain her sales commissions to pay for their upcoming honeymoon.
Roxie and I had more invested in the wedding than the boyfriend did. The bargains kept her motivated, and she didn’t mind playing the devil’s advocate in our staff meetings.
An Insider staff meeting was always a battle—few casualties, but lots of alliances, attacks, retreats, and regroupings of forces. My staff was younger than me, and the age difference gave them a safe distance from whatever trouble I caused. They lobbed flaming arrows at me from behind a nice, neat, generational barrier.
Well, they never played Atari, saw The Clash, or marched in an apartheid protest, so whatever I did was my own thing.
“It’s your paper,” Roxie added as she sat down with Teddy and Mal Taulbert, the married couple who were my art director and production manager respectively, A&E writer Jeremy Holt, and news reporter Doug Yoste. “I hope you know what you’re doing because it won’t be long before my church bulletin has more ads than this paper.”
Our resident pessimist, Mal smiled while she looked down at her notes that listed the problems encountered publishing that week’s issue, which she would run down with the group during the meeting. Smart enough to wait before she interjected herself into office battles, Mal hadn’t picked a side yet.
Most of the kids who applied to work at the Insider came from the University of West Florida where they studied things like communications theory while munching on bagels, drinking expressos, and playing hacky sack. Mal and Teddy were notable exceptions.
Mal had gone away to Loyola University in New Orleans where she studied political science and philosophy, fought for AIDS research, campaigned for Al Gore and John Kerry, and saw some decent bands. Her approval meant a little more because it was worth a little more.
She met her husband Teddy when he joined the newspaper in 2005 after Hurricane Dennis, which was our second storm in less than a year. The other was Hurricane Ivan.
My art director at the time had walked into the office and told me he was tired of cleaning up after storms and was moving to Atlanta. He introduced Teddy and said that the Air Force veteran, who had an associate degree in graphic design and deejayed at local clubs, would be his replacement.
During his one-month probationary period, Teddy learned how to lay out the newspaper. His skills as a photographer and artist took the paper’s look to a new level. Within six months, Teddy and Mal moved in together.
Teddy seldom voiced his opinion. He never talked about his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he had great cover design ideas that he worked out with Mal. Teddy drank his coffee in an Incredible Hulk mug, played with the ring that pierced his bottom lip, and waited to hear the story ideas for the next issue.
A cab had dropped Jeremy off at the office at nine-thirty. He had been slamming down Starbucks between cigarette breaks and was on such a caffeine high that he could barely contain himself. He had to jump into the discussion about the paper’s future, and he took Roxie’s side. He always did, bravely going where she had gone before.
“I can’t get anyone to return my calls,” he said. “Even the art galleries don’t seem interested in getting a story in our paper. They all worry about their donors pulling funding if they appear in the Insider. Now this news of Sue Hines’ death—.”
I cut him off. “This whole thing started because Bo Hines stole grant money
