Chapter 7
Sunday, April 2
The next day I worked on my tomato and pepper plants. It’s an annual ritual that always leaves me hating myself. The process actually starts in September when I take four or five of my best-looking green peppers and a couple of my fatter tomatoes and rip them open for the seeds. I spread the seeds out on pieces of newspaper and let them dry. Then I roll the papers up and put a rubber bands around them and write TOMATOES on one and PEPPERS on the other.
Then the first week of April I plant the seeds in a tray and put them on a card table by the window in my bedroom that faces south, so they get a full day of sun. I keep the trays watered and watch the tiny sprouts pop through the potting soil. They come in thick as grass. When they get so big, I pluck out the scrawny ones, so the healthier ones have plenty of elbow room. I water them and talk to them and when they’re three or four inches high they shrivel up and die. Then Memorial Day weekend, I drive to Biliczky’s Garden Center and buy a half-flat of tomato plants and a half-flat of pepper plants, and plant the damn things in my garden. The rabbits whittle the leaves off three-quarters of them, but the rest survive. I get enough peppers to cut into my summer salads and enough tomatoes to get my fill of BLTs. Right after Labor Day I pick a few of each and rip them open for the seeds. Spread them out on newspaper to dry.
Monday, April 3
Monday morning I got on the elevator with Nanette Beane, the religion editor. She was cradling another cactus for her desk. She already had a dozen of them, some of them two feet tall. The newsroom joke is that they thrive on Nanette’s dry prose. Instead of making my usual beeline to the morgue, I meandered through metro to Aubrey’s desk.
Aubrey was busy putting a human face on the half-naked female corpse found over the weekend in the parking lot of an abandoned factory on Morrow Street. Morrow runs parallel with the interstate, in the southern end of the 3rd District. There are lots of abandoned factory buildings there. They find lots of bodies there.
“Prostitute?” I asked. The female bodies were almost always prostitutes, the male bodies almost always drug dealers.
She gave me an of-course-she-was shrug while looking for her coffee mug among the clutter. “Mother with three little kids, too. She had their pictures in her purse. Among the needles and condoms, and the wad of lottery tickets.”
“You want me to pull any files for you?” I asked.
“Eric’s already on it,” she said. She took a gulp from her mug-I could tell from her expression that the coffee was cold. “Just stay on him, Maddy. He’s got the attention span of a snowflake in Honolulu.”
I squinted toward the morgue. Eric was at his computer, eyes six inches from the screen, arched hands attacking his keyboard like tap-dancing tarantulas. “He looks sufficiently motivated,” I said.
She knew what I meant. “Don’t even go there-he’s the world’s biggest geek.”
“A geek in heat,” I said.
She dismissed me with a long “Puh-leeze” and another gulp of cold coffee.
I circled through the morgue to hang up my coat and get my mug, and then went to the cafeteria to fix my first dose of Darjeeling tea. When I returned Doreen Poole was waiting for me at my desk. “I need some stuff on the mayors’ wives,” she said.
“The mayor has more than one wife? Now that’s a story.”
Doreen started nibbling at her lower lip. I love to piss her off. And it’s not just because she’s the one who started the Morgue Mama thing. It’s the way she floats through her day like a soggy cloud, oblivious to all the parades she’s raining on. “The wives of past mayors,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing a story about how their role has changed over the years.”
“Thinking of doing a story?” I asked. This is the part of my job I’ve always hated. Reporters are always thinking of doing a story on something. What it means is that they don’t have anything important to write about at the moment, so they try to pull some flimsy feature story out of thin air. They’ll have Eric or me work for hours finding stuff about the story they’re thinking of writing. Then something important does happen on their beat and they’re off on that and all our work was for nothing. “Let me guess, Doreen,” I said. “You saw that documentary on A amp;E last night about the presidents’ wives and you thought it might be interesting to localize it.”
“I think it would be interesting.”
I fished the tea bag out of my mug. At home I always add a couple squirts of skimmed milk and honey to my Darjeeling tea. At work I drink it straight. Darjeeling is one of the famous black teas from northern India, grown in the shadows of Mt. Everest, which has always been my favorite mountain. When reporters come to the morgue begging for my files on this or that, I want them to go away feeling they’ve just climbed Everest. “My guess is that the lives of mayors’ wives haven’t changed much over the years,” I said. “They slowly turn into alcoholics waiting for their husbands to come home at night.”
I told Doreen to make me a list of some specific mayors’ wives and I’d see what I could find. After she threw back her head and stormed off, I threw my teabag in the trash and went to work finding everything we had on Tim Bandicoot, his wife Annie, and his rival, Guthrie Gates.
Friday, April 7
Aubrey’s story on the dead prostitute was terrific. It turned out she’d been an outstanding basketball player in high school. The sports department had even run a feature on her. “For all her physical gifts it’s her heart that puts her head and shoulders above the rest,” her coach said at the time. Aubrey re-ran that old quote from the coach and added this new one: “If she hadn’t gotten pregnant and dropped out, she could have gotten a full-ride from any number of colleges. Now she’s just another dead girl from the inner city.”
The rest of the week Aubrey concentrated on her investigation of the 3rd District. She got several officers, some retired and some still on the job, to talk off the record about Commander Lionel Percy. She compiled all kinds of crime figures, contrasting the 3rd to other districts in the city. Eric and I pulled together all the old stories on past corruption we could find. By Thursday she’d interviewed Chief Polceznec and Mayor Flynn-neither of whom had much of anything to say-as well as several members of City Council and a number of self-appointed community leaders-all of whom had plenty to say.
By Friday afternoon, Aubrey’s story was pretty much finished except for an interview with Lionel Percy himself. He called her back at six-thirty and told her she had exactly one minute to ask her “worthless questions.” So she started rattling off various facts and accusations. He answered, “Same old tired shit” to every one of them. Before hanging up he said this: “If those dumbfucks on City Council think they can do a better job cleaning up the 3rd, let them gather up their shit shovels and come on down.”
Aubrey put the quotes in her story and sent it to the desk, knowing they’d never get past Dale Marabout.
Which they didn’t. Quotes like that wouldn’t get by any copy editor on any newspaper. So Dale told her to kill the quotes and paraphrase, the tried-and-true trick for circumventing profanity. When Aubrey refused to paraphrase, Dale rewrote the story himself, which sent Aubrey straight to Tinker.
People in the newsroom still debate whether Aubrey intentionally set up a confrontation between Tinker and Dale. I can go either way. One thing was sure, Aubrey knew Tinker’s mind better than the rest of us. Tinker told Dale to put the quotes back in and dash the bad words, s-t, dumbf--s.
Dale shouted, “You’ve got to be kidding!”
Tinker shouted back that he wasn’t: “Lionel Percy had the opportunity to answer our questions any way he chose. Readers have a right to know how he chose.”
Dale filibustered about the Herald-Union being a family paper, about our never using language like that before, not even with the appropriate dashes.
Tinker threw back his head and shared his disbelief with the fluorescent lights. “This is the twenty-first
