It was a head and shoulders shot, taken at the morgue. They’d done a pretty nice job. No injuries were visible, and the face appeared peaceful and indifferent.
“That’s him,” the girl said with a lift in her voice that wrenched at Charlie Freeman’s heart. “Where is he? What happened? Is he bad off?”
ROSA MORRISON WAS working on a lead article about racial integration in inner-city high schools when the call came through.
The piece was fascinating but an absolute bitch to sub: high-profile, extremely sensitive and site-specific. The two reporters who had researched and written it had done a good job, but the fine-tuning was down to her as assistant city editor. If she got the balance wrong, the various pressure groups involved would get on the case and the shit would hit the fan. On the other hand, if she watered it down into a feel-good McArticle, readers would complain that the paper was dodging the issues.
To make matters worse, this wasn’t just a think piece. These were local schools. People whose kids went to them were bound to have their own opinions which they would feel outraged to find ignored or contradicted. Plus the whole thing had to be written as an inverted pyramid in case it got picked up by another paper and needed to be cut to fit around an ad for pantyhose or something.
So when the phone went with some gofer saying he had a guy on the line who wanted to check on a news item, Rosa’s first impulse was to push the thing off on one of the other ACEs, only neither of them were at their desks. Bill was over by the water fountain flirting with Lesha Roberts, while Jodie was probably outside on the fire escape sneaking a cigarette. There were sometimes more people hanging out on that metal staircase than there were in the office. One of these days someone would drop a smoldering butt into one of the garbage Dumpsters below and start the biggest blaze since Sherman torched the city.
Rosa sighed and said to put the caller through.
“I wanted to check on a news story?”
The caller was male, youngish, with a Yankee accent. Midwest maybe, Rosa couldn’t exactly place it.
“Uh huh,” she said noncommittally.
“See, I live out of state. Arizona? There was like a report in the paper here about a shooting at a house on Carson Street. I have relatives there, like on the same street, and they haven’t been answering the phone and I’ve been kinda worried, you know? I was wondering if you like had any more details.”
Rosa tapped a few keys, calling up a window with the library screen. She typed FIND “SHOOTING.”
“What did you say the street was called?” she asked.
“Carson-322’s where my folks live.”
Rosa typed CARSON STREET and hit ENTER. Short high-pitched cries punctuated the fuzzy silence on the telephone line. They made her think of summer holidays at Palm Beach, all those years ago, before her father backed the wrong investment and pissed away the family fortune. She could still feel the hot squishy sand between her toes and see the vast indolence of the Atlantic stretching away before her like her own future.
The blue display flickered as the database responded, SHOOTING: 1047. CARSON STREET: 2. TOTAL: 0.
“We don’t seem to have anything,” she told the caller. “When did this happen?”
“Pretty recently. Last couple days.”
“I’m showing two mentions for Carson Street, but nothing involving a shooting.”
“Really? Well, I guess I …”
Jodie’s head had appeared over the divider between their desks.
“Hold on a minute,” Rosa said, twisting the microphone of her headset aside.
“Was that something about a shooting on Carson Street?” Jodie asked.
“That’s right.”
“I just subbed the story Bottom of D2.”
Pecking away at the keyboard, Rosa killed the library window and got back into tomorrow’s edition. There it was, a short news item tucked away in the local section.
“I’ve got it,” she told her caller, scanning the text. “Correct, there was an incident last night in Carson Street. Not at a house, though. Two men killed, another in critical condition. One of the victims named as Vernon Kemp, fifteen, of 611 Garibaldi Street. The other two victims not yet identified. That’s about it. We got it off the police blotter, didn’t send a reporter out.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Hello?” said Rosa.
“The other two guys,” said the voice at last. “You know anything about them?”
“Hold on a second.”
She leaned over to Jodie.
“Have you got the blotter report on this?”
Jodie hunted around amongst the papers on her desk, coming up with a stapled sheaf of fax pages which she passed to Rosa over the divider.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
Rosa shrugged.
“Some guy”
She quickly found the police report of the incident, which Jodie had highlighted in fluorescent pink.
“OK, let’s see. Blah, blah, blah. ‘The unidentified white victim was in his late twenties, five eleven, one hundred eighty pounds, light brown hair cut short, scar on left cheek.’ Looks like he was packing a.22-caliber revolver. The guy they took to Emergency was also white. Nothing more on him. ‘A suitcase recovered at the scene was found to contain some pairs of handcuffs, a roll of tape and a video camera.’ That’s it. Hello? Hello?”
The phone had gone dead.
“Well, thanks a whole heap!” Rosa said savagely, cutting off the phone. “Asshole!”
“He hang up on you?” Jodie murmured sympathetically.
Rosa dragged her school story back on to the screen. An African-American honors student was quoted as saying race was not an issue for her. Her best friends were Japanese and Jewish and they related on the basis of personality, not skin color. That had to be balanced against a male student who supported segregated schools, claiming that students stuck to their own racial cliques and that talk of pride in diversity was just window-dressing designed to perpetuate white domination.
Rosa stared up at the suspended ceiling, inset with frosted glass panels diffusing a subdued, generalized light. There must have been forty people at work in the huge open-plan office, but the only sound was the hush of the air-conditioning and the occasional burr of a phone.
“How the hell did he know?” she said aloud.
“How’s that, honey?” asked Jodie.
“If that story hasn’t even run
“Maybe he lives around there.”
Rosa shook her head.
“He said he was phoning from out of state.”
She highlighted a paragraph and dragged it down the page, then froze again, staring sightlessly at the screen.
“Sea gulls,” she murmured.
That was the sound she had heard in the background, the strident, mewing shrieks which had made her think of summer vacations at the beach.
“Do they have sea gulls in Arizona?” she asked.
Jodie gave a raucous laugh which turned into an attack of smoker’s cough.
“If they do, honey,” she said when the fit subsided, “those birds sure as hell got off at the wrong exit!”
Rosa laughed, shrugged and returned to her work.
“I guess it’s just one of those things,” she said.
