Queen of the Underworld (7 page)

“How do you do?” I said. Her eyes were barely discernible behind the smoky whorls of glass. “You’ll probably be seeing a lot of me in here.”

“Don’t hesitate to ask for help.” She spoke in a carefully articulated monotone, as though to a foreigner or simpleton. “That’s what I’m here for. The files are organized alphabetically. I ask that you take out only one envelope at a time and replace it before taking another. You’ll find tables and chairs behind those shelves. If you need to take an envelope to the newsroom, you sign it out in this book, but it’s never to go out of the building.”

“I got in big trouble with Moira my first day at the
Star
when she caught me heading out of here with sixteen envelopes,” Norbright roguishly confessed.

Moira gave no sign of having heard him. I could picture him gliding out with his hoard of envelopes. It would have been fun to see how she stopped him. Whose trail had he been onto? Which career-promoting story had come out of it?

“Don’t hesitate to ask for help,” Moira Parks repeated in her remote monotone, and went back to her scissoring.

The city editor, Rod Reynolds, a blond, apple-cheeked man with carelessly pushed-up sleeves, assigned me the desk directly to his left. “That way if you need help I’m in shouting distance. Also, ha, ha, I can keep an eye on you.” He was a former Chapel Hill graduate, so we played “Do you know?” for the first few minutes as Norbright, smiling at our repartee, faded from the scene, though leaving behind his gleaming afterimage.

“Old Doc Speers, does he still drop hot ash down the front of his shirt while he’s lecturing?”

“He burned two holes during my semester of Feature Writing with him,” I was happy to report.

“Lordy, Lordy, the good old J-school days.”

He then handed me a list of funeral-home phone numbers to call and showed me the
Star
’s format for standard obituaries. “Anything out of the ordinary, run it past me. I’m not here, look into it yourself, if you think it rates a story.”

“Out of the ordinary in what way?”

“Human interest angle, anything bizarre. Switched to an earlier plane and it crashed. Freak accident in the home. Child drowns in half an inch of water. Anything at all to do with a child.”

“Will the funeral home tell me these things?”

“Come on, Emma, you know better than that.” He ripped a sheet out of his typewriter, slammed it down on the metal spike holding stories ready for the copydesk without looking out for his hand—which made me wince—and retrieved a smouldering cigarette from the ashtray. “Anybody under forty, you ask for the cause of death, even if we don’t print it in our routine obits. If it sounds unusual or has pathos, you call the family. And get a picture. Especially if it’s a kid, you want to get a picture.”

“Like that little boy who drowned at Y camp last week?”

“Good girl. Lou said you’d been studying the paper to see how we do things. It wouldn’t go over in Dean Ligon’s famous Senior Seminar, but the
Star
is not the good gray
Times
or—what were his other standards of excellence?”

“The Louisville
Courier-Journal
and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
?”

“Lordy, yes. Well, our readership isn’t the
Courier-Journal
’s or the
Post-Dispatch
’s, either. Miami is not like anywhere else on earth. That’s why I love it, it’s surreal.”

The cutline under the child’s photo had read:

Eric’s first day at camp . . . and last.

If we seniors in Dean Ligon’s Ethics and Responsibilities of the Press Seminar had been discussing that cutline last spring, the dean would have crimped his lips and grumbled, “This isn’t as
blatant
as Joe Pulitzer’s famous headline, ‘How Babies Are Baked,’ that ran in the New York
World
after 392 children died in a heat wave, but it has the same yellow tinge. As responsible journalists, you’ll want to avoid the yellow tinge as you would want to avoid hepatitis.”

S
EVERAL HOURS
later, I had produced eleven triple-spaced biographies of unmemorable Dade County residents who were on record as having expired in the last twenty-four hours. My first morning’s labors had been scribbled over by Rod and slammed down on the spike to await the copyboy’s pickup for their trip across to the copydesk and then up to the composing room. I felt distracted and intrigued and excluded by all that was going on around me. What was in the printout that the copyboy tore off the teletype machine and rushed into Feeney’s office?

“Did they jail those two witnesses up in Tallahassee yet?” I heard Gabe Truro’s bass voice speaking into a telephone somewhere behind me—followed by a burst of remarkably fast typing.

(Since when were
witnesses
jailed?)

Rod Reynolds had introduced me to the
Star
’s suave middle-aged crime reporter while I was doing my obits. Being a gent, Truro had paused long enough to welcome me properly before turning aside to Rod to murmur, “Well, the indictment finally came through.”
Whose
indictment? Would I have to wait until it was in the newspaper to find out?

I was aware that others around me were taking lunch breaks, and that I was eligible to do the same, but a lassitude seemed to emanate directly out of the fluorescent ceiling lights and keep me rooted to the swivel chair in front of my typewriter pit.

After finishing each obit, I had jotted down the age and gender of its protagonist, thinking I might come up with some clever quip to show Rod Reynolds how I could investigate beyond the ordinary. (“Interestingly enough, Rod, all the deaths under sixty in today’s count were women, whereas all those who made it into their eighties were men. That reverses the usual statistics, doesn’t it?”)

But only a few moments before, Rod had shoved down his shirtsleeves, snatched up his rumpled cotton-cord jacket, and, with neither a word nor a look my way, bolted off in his toed-out Southern-boy swagger.

Although I had known from the movies and from the simulated newsroom set up for us in the basement of the journalism school that my place of work was going to be one big noisy arena jammed with desks at which scores of reporters clattered away, I still must have held out in my imagination for some kind of enclosure affording a sense of privacy between me and my typewriter. To know that I could be observed by others, in all my flattering and unflattering angles, from the front, back, and sides, as I hunched over my machine, pecking away, not to mention spied on from behind management glass by eel-eyed Norbright himself, had produced an unusually concentrated amount of work on my part, but had left me with a tension headache and a sense of unreality.

I sat on in my stupor, adding up the ages of my dead in the new spiral-bound notepad Rod had issued me. Surely there must have been at least one bizarre human-interest story buried in those 909 accumulated years, but if so, I had failed to unearth it.

“You don’t get brownie points for skipping lunch around here,” said an insolent male voice above me. “Especially when all the brass are into their second martini over at the Yacht Club and can’t even see you. I’d be honored if you’d join me for a quick bite at
my
club. It has the best tuna sandwich in town.”

I looked up and saw Dave Bisbee with his uncombed hair and crooked red bow tie. What kind of club would let him in? The surprising thing was, he seemed to read my thought and not hold it against me.

“Walgreens,” he good-naturedly explained. “It’s just down the block. Come on, you need a break. You’ve worked nonstop since you got here. I’ll give you my famous Walgreens Tutorial. Fill you in on who’s who and what to watch out for. I gave it to Lou Norbright on his first day, too.”

4.

A
S WE WALKED DOWN
Flagler Street, I assessed my tutor. The trousers of his summer suit were too short; they made his skinny ankles in their black socks look comic and vulnerable. As he bounced along beside me, he kept up a steady banter, gesturing constantly with his hands—I noted he wore a wedding ring—so that even before we were settled in our booth at Walgreens he had dispensed much salient information, ranging from how to tell Miami’s streets from its avenues to who had just been fired—the previous occupant of my desk, a reporter named Kirk. “He was always half crocked, but the real reason was he was trying to bring in the union. ‘Union’ is a no-no word in the
Star
newsroom.”

By the time our order came, grilled cheese and a Coke for me, tuna sandwich and black coffee for him, I had Dave Bisbee securely tucked away into side-by-side pigeonholes of potential buddy and useful stepping-stone. Though he came across as a bit of a fool, he was an avid observer, listener, and questioner. He wanted to know why I had chosen to work in Miami. Did I know anyone here? I smoothly offered up “Aunt Tess” as my single Miami contact, and modestly went on to confide that, though I had been pretty much the star of my journalism class
and
had my own column on the
Daily Tar Heel,
if my dean and Mr. Feeney had not been Nieman Fellows together, I might not have gotten my Christmas interview at the
Miami Star.

“Still. It was enterprising of you to come all the way down here for an interview. Not cheap, either, in high season. Even if you could stay with your aunt.”

I took an earnest bite of grilled cheese sandwich and chewed thoughtfully, recalling my oceanfront room at the Kenilworth last Christmas, and Paul’s rolls of bills passing constantly from his wallet to mine, and Bev calling up on the house phone that afternoon when we were naked under the covers: “Come, child, I want to take you shopping.”

After I had washed everything down with a long sip of Coke, I said to Bisbee, “Tell me about Lou Norbright on
his
first day.”

“It was like Lucifer in the garden. One morning I looked up from my desk and there he was at the edge of the newsroom. All of a sudden he’d
materialized
there, taking in the lay of the land with that shit-eating grin of his. I was fairly new down here myself, I’d wooed old Feeney for a solid year, sending him my award-winning stories from the
Tampa Tribune.
Soon after that, Feeney brings him over to my desk and says, ‘Dave, please take Lou here under your wing and show him the ropes, if you’ll forgive my corny mixed metaphors.’

“So Lou and I have lunch his first day, right here in this same booth, and I’m telling him everything I know about how the
Star
operates, who’s good and who’s not making the grade, who you can trust and who’ll stab you in the back—and he’s just sitting there smiling, not saying much but drawing it out of me like a suction pump. The first month he was here, we made an effective team. He didn’t have a car yet, his wife needed it to get them settled, so I’d call in the stories and he’d write them up and we’d share the byline. He was a speed demon at rewrites; back in North Platte he’d done twenty or thirty stories a day, everything from sports to disasters, whatever came in. What’s the big deal, he said. He thought our
Star
reporters were prima donnas, polishing up their one or two precious stories per day.

“By the time he did get his car, he took over the Beach beat while that reporter was on vacation, and within a matter of days he’d uncovered a perfect gem of a swindle, this creep had retirees working a bank of phones, calling people with Italian or Irish names to sell them religious relics, vials of healing water from Lourdes, medals and little figures from the Vatican, blessed by the Pope. There’s nothing the
Star
loves more than the human-interest angle, and Lou milked it for all it was worth, all these senior citizens, some of them in pretty desperate shape, willing to fork over their last dollar for these fakes some toy factory in New Jersey was knocking off by the truckload. Lou also interviewed the retirees who had needed the extra income but didn’t know they were involved in a federal crime—because the stuff went through the U.S. mails, you know. It didn’t hurt, either, that the swindler was photographically loathsome. With his handcuffs on, he looked like a beetle walking upright in a Hawaiian shirt.”

“How did Norbright happen to uncover it?”

“Exactly the right question, Emma. If you were assigned the Beach beat to fill in for a colleague, what’s the first thing you’d do? Come on, now, remember your News Gathering 101.”

“I’d probably check in with the police station, first.”

“Which you can be sure Lucifer did. Hi, Sergeant, I’m Lou, filling in for Bernie who’s on vacation, what’s been happening over here on the Beach? Hmmm, Lou, let’s see, a geezer dropped his pipe over the railing and we had to fish him and it out of the bay. Oh, yeah, and this tourist lady reported her wallet stolen, but then she found it in her other purse. Maybe check back later, Lou.

“Where does Lucifer go next? To and fro upon the beach, up and down Collins Avenue on foot, passing the time with nut-brown oldies who have plenty of time to pass. He befriends a group of yentas—you know what a yenta is?”

“An old lady who gossips?” Thank you, Bev.

“Good girl. Yiddish is Miami’s second language and Spanish is gonna be its first if these Cubans keep pouring in. How’s your Spanish?”

“I had two years in high school and two in college. But except for one conversation course it’s the book kind.”

“I’d brush up, if I were you. Maybe even find a tutor. It’ll get you brownie points at the
Star.
Anyway, here’s Lucifer passing the time on the hotel veranda with these old girls playing mah-jongg but not missing a thing going on, and one of them happens to mention her friend’s taken this phone soliciting job to supplement her social security check, but is thinking of quitting because something’s unsavory about the whole operation—and bingo, Lucifer is off and running.”

I slurped the dregs of my Coke through the straw. The jealousy animal had begun to stir inside me. I realized I would not have thought it worth my time to cultivate the yentas on the veranda.

“How about some dessert? I always have the key lime pie. I never knew key lime pie existed till we came to South Florida. My wife tries to make it at least once a week, she knows I’m mad for it, but Walgreens’ is better.”