Charm City (21 page)

Tess folded her arms across her chest,
chastened and defensive. So much for the pat on the head she thought
was her due. "Rosita had some problems in San Antonio.
Someone down there suggested if I followed in her footsteps, I would
find the same pattern here. I did, and I did. Wink never hit his wife,
Jack, she hit
him
. Rosita
paid someone for her information, and she didn't begin to try
to check it out. I mean, she got a no comment, but she even twisted
that to make it sound as if Linda Wynkowski was scared to confirm the
story—"

Sterling held up a hand. "Slow
down, Tess. Take a deep breath, start over, and tell me everything in
straight chronological order, okay?"

And so Tess did—almost. She still
held back the detail about the envelope she'd found on her
car. Perhaps because it seemed a little sleazy, as if she'd
been manipulated by an unknown source whose agenda was still unclear.

"I know I wasn't asked
to do any of this," she finished. "But sometimes my
curiosity gets the better of me. You were the one who asked me what I
thought about that story, on a gut level, and I really didn't
have an answer at the time. Now I think it was the combination of solid
reporting and sordid gossip that made it seem slightly off.
Rosita's work undermined Feeney's at every
turn."

"Feeney is a friend of yours,
isn't he, Tess?"

Uh-oh. "Baltimore is a small town
of 650,000 people. Everyone knows everyone here."

"Do you know him the same way you
knew Jonathan Ross?"

"No!" Shit, she was
blushing. "I mean, we're friends. We have a drink
from time to time, that's all."

"Don't you think it was
an ethical breach for you to take this job, given your relationship
with him?"

"Well, yes." Something
in Sterling's gentle manner tempted her to tell the
truth—it would feel so good to get some of those lies off her
ledger. Besides, she no longer felt a need to protect Feeney, not after
his behavior yesterday. Still, if she veered from the official version,
things would get tricky.

"I was told he had an ironclad
alibi for the night, so it wasn't an issue."

"
You were told
.
Nice little wiggle phrase, there."

"What does it matter
now?" she said, feeling a little desperate under
Sterling's questions. She suddenly realized what a good
reporter he must have been in his day. "Doesn't
what I've learned today make it pretty obvious Rosita slipped
the story into the paper? She's ruthless as hell."

Sterling stood up, crumpled his pretzel bag
in his hand, and flicked it at the trash can for a clean two-pointer.
"Your information doesn't suggest or confirm
anything about the original incident. But I want you to come with me
now and talk to Lionel about it."

"Why?"

"Because I think Rosita
Ruiz's days at the
Beacon-Light
are coming to an end."

I
t
snowed on Friday morning, a heavy, wet snow with fat flakes that stuck
only to the grass, but it was enough to throw the morning commute into
complete chaos, as cars spun out in anticipation of spinning out and
the local schools announced they would start one hour late, two hours
late, then not at all. Tess had tried to take the bus to the
Beacon-Light
,
thinking it might be marginally faster, but the bus had been
sideswiped, which was seen as a kind of open lottery in most city
neighborhoods, and pedestrians began climbing on until it was
standing-room only. Finally, a young security guard got on and held the
doors shut, as thwarted plaintiffs surrounded the bus and pounded on
its sides. Tess squeezed out the back door, letting a few more
potential plaintiffs on in the process, and hailed a taxi. In fact, her
neck and shoulders were sore, but she had a hunch it was the
Blight
,
not the transit system, that was at fault.

Although she was twenty minutes late, the
meeting in the publisher's conference room had yet to start.
Five-Four and Lionel Mabry, who lived far out in the suburbs, were
still en route, and Sterling was sequestered with Rosita. Colleen
Reganhart sat glumly at the table with Guy Whitman, whose face
brightened when Tess walked in.

"Snow, and this weekend is Palm
Sunday. It's certainly been a strange winter,"
Whitman said, making conversation. "Now, is Friday the good
day for firing, or the bad day? Or is it neither? I always get
confused. What do you think, Tess?"

Tess, who had been laid off on a Wednesday,
thought every day was a bad day to lose one's job. How
unexpected it had been, how ill prepared they all had been, when the
Star's
publisher had asked the staff to gather in the newsroom soon after
their afternoon paper had gone to bed. As a coup de grâce,
the
Star's
corporate owners had not even allowed its workers the catharsis of
putting out a final edition about their paper's demise.
Tess's last piece of journalism had been a four-paragraph
story about a water main break downtown.

Whitman answered his own question.
"Actually, there are several schools of thought about
terminating employees. If you worry that an employee is prone to, uh,
severe emotional responses, a Friday might be ill advised, as the
employee could harm himself over the weekend. Others hold that Monday
is the best day for firing from the management point of view;
otherwise, the task would hang over the manager's head
throughout the week, providing an unwarranted distraction. Violence
cannot be discounted as a possibility. When the
Los
Angeles Times
had to down-size by reducing its
staff by more than a hundred people in a single afternoon, the company
issued a directive stating—"

"Oh, shut the fuck up,
Guy," snapped Colleen, who had gotten up and started pacing
the room with a lighted cigarette.

"You know, you're not
suppose to smoke in here," he countered.

"For now, I outrank everyone in
here."

"For
now
."

It all began here
,
Tess thought,
and now it's going to end
here
. Sterling had promised her the
Blight
would buy out the rest of her contract, as long as she agreed to appear
here today, and, if necessary, present her notes about
Rosita's reporting methods. Although they couldn't
prove Rosita had slipped her story into the paper, Lionel and Five-Four
were convinced she was the culprit. But she would go down for paying
Bertie. It seemed highly unorthodox, perhaps even illegal, but Tess was
so anxious to be free of the
Beacon-Light
at this point, she would have agreed to almost anything.

Five-Four's secretary opened the
door and announced: "They're on their
way." Colleen sucked down every drop of nicotine she could
extract from the butt-end of her cigarette, then opened the window and
tossed it to the street below. She had just slammed the window shut
when Five-Four arrived, trailed by a chipper Lionel Mabry,
absentmindedly whistling a pretty tune. It took Tess a few bars to
identify it: "There Is a Rose in Spanish Harlem."
Now, that seemed in dubious taste. He seemed to realize this, too, and
the song stopped abruptly as Sterling and Rosita entered.

"Have a seat, Rosita."
Sterling's voice was disarmingly gentle, but Tess suspected
he was probably the angriest of all those assembled. Rosita took the
chair at the far end of the table, opposite from Five-Four. The big
chair seemed to swallow her and Tess was moved to something almost like
pity—until she saw Rosita's hard, defiant face. The
little reporter had waived her right to bring a union representative to
the meeting. She had, in fact, forbidden the shop steward from
accompanying her. She was so sure she didn't need anyone. She
didn't think she needed Feeney to get the story, she
didn't think she needed the union to keep her job.

Sterling looked down at a blank legal pad as
he spoke. "I briefed you earlier on the evidence Tess
Monaghan has gathered about your, uh, methods. We also have a signed
statement from Bertie Athol that she was paid for information on the
Wynkowski story, information that turned out to be exaggerated and
false. And we can get photocopies of the papers Tess saw yesterday, the
ones that establish Wink Wynkowski was the victim in his marriage, not
the aggressor. We believe the cumulative result of these findings
warrants your immediate dismissal. However, we are prepared to give you
six months' severance—you'd only be
entitled to two, normally—and assistance in finding another
job. Some of us feel—I feel—we failed you here.
Perhaps at a smaller paper, where the pressures to perform would not be
so great, you could concentrate on some of the basics you appear to
have skipped over in your career to date."

Rosita wasn't mollified by this
offer of help, nor cowed by Sterling's talk of a generous
severance package. "Those papers, assuming they're
not forged, may prove Wink suffered injuries, but you can't
prove he never hit Linda," she said coolly. "For
all we know, there are other hospital records, and she chose not to
show them to Tess. I stand by my story."

"Can the shit, Rosita."
Colleen shook a cigarette from her pack, began to light it, then
crumpled it in her shaking fingers, as if she hoped to absorb the
nicotine through her sweaty palms. Tess couldn't figure out
why she was so upset.
Because she had been
Rosita's champion, because Rosita was a woman? Or was it
because Colleen would have to take the fall for Rosita's
failings
?

"This isn't some fucking
high school debating society, you're not going to win any
points here with this goddamn nitpicking. You made shit up. For your
own glory, yet, because the story was good enough as it was. You just
wanted a piece of it. Were you scared we wouldn't put your
name on it if you came up dry? Or did you need a sexy clip for your
next job?"

"I made an honest
mistake," Rosita insisted.

Tess couldn't help being impressed
at her self-assurance. Then again, if Rosita really was a pathological
liar, she had been doing this all her life.

"Yes, I gave Bertie Athol fifty
dollars—she's on a fixed income, she could use a
little money. But I did it after the fact, to pay her for her time, not
to encourage her to exaggerate. How is that any different from taking a
source to Tio Pepe's or the Maryland Inn? We do that all the
time and no one squawks. What I didn't do is tell Mrs. Athol
to lie, to pretend to know more than she did. She told me the
Wynkowskis fought tooth and nail, that Linda had been taken away in an
ambulance on several occasions. Okay, I made a mistake, but not a huge
one. This is a lynching party. You're using this to get rid
of me because I'm close to my biggest break yet on the story,
something much bigger than anything that's happened so far,
and you want to hand it off to another reporter. Well, if I go,
I'm taking my story and my sources with me."

Sterling's curiosity got the
better of him. "What are you talking about, Rosita? Do you
know something you haven't told us? There's nothing
on the budget line about a new development."

"I don't tell you
everything," Rosita taunted him. "But yes, I have
it on good authority that Wink didn't commit suicide. He was
murdered, probably by someone who had even more to lose than Wink did
if the basketball deal didn't go through."

"Who's your
source?" Whitman broke in impatiently. "The autopsy
isn't official yet, and no one at the cops or the M.E. have
indicated they think it was anything but suicide."

"She's still making shit
up." Colleen's voice was shrill, almost hysterical
in its fury. "Wink's death hurt the prospects of
landing a basketball team, so why would someone kill him over it? I
wouldn't believe anything she said now unless it was on
fucking videotape. Even then I'm not sure I'd
believe it."

Rosita just shook her head back and forth,
like a head-strong two-year-old. "I'm not saying
anything else unless you guarantee my job. That's the deal.
Let me stay—I'll take probation, I'll
even go home for a few days without pay—and you get the
story. I go, and the story goes with me."

Everyone, even Five-Four, turned to Lionel
then. The decision would be his to make. He looked at Rosita with
large, sorrowful eyes, then stood, unfolding slowly. It was if someone
new had entered the room, replacing the shambling Lionel Tess knew, the
Lionel who seemed so stooped and blurry, his bones a collection of bent
wire hangers holding up his clothes. Now he stood straight and tall,
head thrown back.
So this was the Lion King
.

"You are not in a position to make
demands, Miss Ruiz," Mabry said, his voice stern yet
regretful, as if she were a daughter who had disappointed him.
"At every turn, you have demonstrated a complete absence of
ethics, judgment, and professionalism. It is one thing to risk your
credibility, but you risked my paper's credibility as well.
Don't you understand that Rosita Ruiz, by herself, is
insignificant? It is Rosita Ruiz,
Beacon-Light
reporter, who gets officials on the phone, who convinces private
citizens to share their confidences. You care nothing for this
institution, you care only for yourself, but you are nothing without
the institution. You used your computer skills to slide your story into
the paper because you knew it could never withstand the scrutiny that
Jack Sterling and I had brought to the process. In your conceit and
your egotism, you embody everything wrong with journalism
today."

"I'm what's
wrong with journalism?" Rosita jumped to her feet, and
although it wasn't quite as dramatic as Mabry's
performance, she did manage a stumpy kind of dignity. "What
about you, you relic, you dinosaur? What was the last story you ever
reported, the influenza epidemic of 1908? All you do is sit in your
corner office and tell your war stories and hope the paper lurches into
a Pulitzer by sheer luck. Well, when I walk out this door,
I'm not only going to take my prize-winning story with me,
I'm going to take some other stories as well. Stories about
this godforsaken place, with its sexual harassment, rampant
mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, editors who sleep with
reporters—"

"Whitman, you crotch-sniffing
dog!" Colleen turned on him and he shrank back as if he
thought she might strike him. "Couldn't you keep it
fucking zipped for once in your life?"

"I swear, I don't know
what she's talking about," he whimpered
unconvincingly. "Haven't a clue."

Lionel did not allow this ancillary drama to
distract him. "Tell me, Miss Ruiz, where will this story of
yours appear? What responsible news organization will listen to a
dismissed employee without calling to check your allegations?
It's my fervent hope there aren't too many
reporters whose morals and standards are as lax as your own."

Before Rosita could retort, two security
guards entered the room, one carrying a cardboard box filled with
notebooks, files, dictionary, AP style book, and one not-quite-clean
coffee mug. The detritus of a reporter's desk, Tess realized.
But did they really need two beefy men to escort one small woman from
the premises, even one as angry as Rosita?

"We've taken the liberty
of cleaning out your work space while you were in here, Miss
Ruiz," Mabry said. "We have decided to let you keep
all your notes and files, although we could claim them as the
paper's property. I hope your big story is in one of those
notebooks. Alas, I suspect it's mainly in your
imagination."

Tess had to admire Rosita for not bursting
into tears, begging for one more chance, or groveling to regain
Sterling's offer of help in finding another job. Instead, she
grabbed the box from one of the security guards and left the room so
quickly the guards had to break into a trot to keep up with her.

No, it was Colleen who had tears in her
eyes, while Whitman continued to stammer general denials. Sterling
stared at the long table, his face ashen, and even Five-Four seemed
discomfited. Only Lionel was flush with victory, his piss-yellow locks
flying around his head, his yellowish teeth bright in his face.

"Back to work," he said.
"We still have a paper to put out. Jack, please find Feeney
and tell him about Miss Ruiz's babblings, on the remote
chance there's even a grain of truth in them. Whitman, call
human resources and tell them to prepare a final check for Miss Ruiz.
And Colleen, I'd like to see you in my office
now
,
to discuss your taste in protégés."