“Yes. I don’t think I need too many guesses about who it was. He failed twice and knew better than to enter it a third time. If I had entered the new one this morning, there never would have been a sign of anything wrong.”
“How’d he get the old one?”
“Sits right across from me. He could have easily watched me log on dozens of times without my noticing it.”
Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We stood there in silence. After a while, Mark said, “He could be fired.”
“Not any time soon. He’s such an ass-kisser, if Wrigley turns a corner, that kid’s nose will break.”
“You’ve got that right. He’s trying to suck up to me now, too. I think he realized yesterday that I didn’t buy his version of events. And getting caught at your desk this morning scared him.”
“Mark, you know I don’t like newsroom gossip, but-let’s just say I’ve heard some things that make me think we need to keep an eye on him.”
“I wouldn’t need to hear any gossip to know that.”
“Why?”
“Call it intuition. I think he’s a phony. He’s got some kind of problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s come to work hung over more than once. You haven’t noticed?”
“This is a horrible thing to admit, but I guess I expect young men his age to do that once in a while.”
Mark shook his head. “This isn’t once in a while, Irene.”
“I’ll pay more attention.”
He laughed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scold-or to make it sound as if you are supposed to be the kid’s mama while he’s here. You aren’t even his editor.”
I hesitated, then said, “I think the biggest problem is going to be Lydia.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “To be honest, I’m glad to hear you say that. I was worried I was going to have to be the one to mention it.”
Back at my desk, I got a call from the computer services department and learned that I could log on again with a password the technician gave me. “But change it again to one of your own right away,” he said.
I followed these instructions. Ethan was schmoozing with the executive news editor, John Walters, at that moment, so I wasn’t worried that he’d be spying on me. He hadn’t had as much success with John as he had had with Lydia and Wrigley. I was fairly sure that if Ethan did manage to ingratiate himself with John, it wouldn’t last long.
Lydia was another story.
By choice, our careers had taken separate paths. I chose to stay with reporting and writing, she moved into editorial work.
Not all reporters get a reputation for being writers. You can be invaluable to the paper because you have the persistence to ferret out the facts, the ability to get people to confide in you, and other news-gathering skills. There are reporters who can do all of that, but are then unable to express what they’ve learned in clear terms.
Conversely, there are those who can’t figure out what question to ask next, but can take the dullest, most completely jumbled story you’ve ever seen and rework it into something clear and exciting to read.
Lydia was both reporter and writer, but she excelled at writing. Before she had worked on the news side for very long, the paper put her to work in rewrite, then as a copy editor, and soon after that, an assistant city editor- the first woman to have that job on the Express.
She was now the city editor, and her skills in that job were unquestioned. All hell could break loose, she’d stay calm and divvy up the crises of the moment to those most capable of handling them. She was good at assigning stories, and although there would always be someone who thought he or she would have been the better reporter for this story or that, no one thought Lydia was arbitrary or showed favoritism. She not only knew which reporter would best handle a story, she knew how to get the best out of each reporter.
She was known for her loyalty to the reporters, for sticking up for them with the bosses-she might tell someone off (in her quiet way) in private, but she’d take on John Walters or Wrigley III in defense of that same reporter. She had won both the trust of the veterans and the respect of the newer reporters.
The problem was, when it came to seeing a guy like Ethan for what he was, I wasn’t so sure of her abilities. If you’re working on the street as a reporter, you usually spend time around a wider variety of people than editors do. You start to learn what most liars look like when they’re lying to you-not all, by any means, but the garden variety becomes readily apparent, and eventually some of the most expert find it harder to get past you. You figure out who’s uncomfortable with attention just because they’re a little shy, and who is hoping you will not ask a dreaded question. You don’t always find what’s hidden, but you almost always sense when something important is being kept out of view.
I had no doubt that Lydia could tell if something in a story didn’t ring true. But I wondered now if she had lost some of that ability to read people as well as she read stories.
Then I remembered Mark’s comments about how often Ethan showed up hungover, and also that I had failed to notice that the little twerp had watched me enter my password. I decided I should worry about my own inability to keep my BS detector working.
Even if Ethan had managed to log on to my computer before now, I wasn’t too worried about him looking at my notes. I was, you might say, a third-generation cryptographer.
O’Connor had been trained in newspaper work by Jack Corrigan, who had worked for the paper at a time when the morning News was the rival of the evening Express. Reporters spied on one another all the time. Corrigan wrote his notes in an oddball code-a mixture of a kind of shorthand, initials, and ways of referring to things that might not be readily apparent. RCC, for example, was not the Roman Catholic Church, but “the rubber chicken circuit,” or political fund-raising banquets.
O’Connor learned it and added his own layer of code to it, and once he decided I was worth the trouble, taught it to me. Even though there was only one paper by then, the code helped. If you’re in a room full of professionally nosy, often competitive people, sooner or later a slow news day will lead them to be curious about one another. It’s frowned upon. It happens anyway.
So the code remained useful. Maybe one day I’d pass it along to a younger reporter-but Ethan was not going to be a candidate to inherit.
I had just thought this when Ethan came over to his desk, smiling. He logged off his computer and gathered his notebook and jacket. He looked over at me and his smile widened to a grin. “See you in a few days,” he said.
“A few days?”
“I’m flying out this afternoon. Mr. Wrigley wants me to go up to Folsom and interview Bennie Lee Harmon.”
55
“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT ABOUT O’CONNOR’S SISTER,” MAX SAID.
We were sitting together in the living room after dinner, during which we had heard about Max’s fiancee, courtship, and future plans. They hadn’t known each other long, about three months now, but he had apparently fallen for her almost on sight. Her family was wealthy, so she didn’t seem to be after his money. He had shown us a photo of a lovely, almost ethereal-looking blonde. If she had given him the smile she wore in the photo-no mystery in why he had pursued her.
Frank had made it back in plenty of time. Harmon was ill, he said, and not able to talk for long. Frank told Max about Harmon’s two-out-of-three confessions on the old cases.
“O’Connor rarely let anyone know about Maureen,” I said.
“It explains so much, though,” Max said. “I remember how he used to speak about the missing.” He turned to
