Never Look Away: A Thriller Page 4
I took it pretty hard when she dumped me.
“This is too fast,” she told me. “This is how I fucked things up last time. Moving too quickly, not thinking things through. You’re a great guy, but …”
I went into a funk I don’t think I really came out of until I met Jan. And now, all these years later, things were okay between Sam and me. But she was still a single mother, and things had never stopped being a struggle.
She lived paycheck to paycheck. Some weeks, she didn’t make it. She’d had the labor beat for years, but the paper could no longer afford to devote reporters to specific issues, so now she reported to general assignment, and couldn’t predict the hours she’d be working. It played hell with her babysitting. She was always scrambling to find someone to watch her daughter when a last-minute night assignment landed on her desk.
I didn’t have Sam’s week-to-week financial worries, but Jan and I talked often about what else I could do if I found myself without a job. Unemployment insurance only lasted so long. I—and Jan for that matter—was worth more dead since we signed up for life insurance a few weeks back. If the paper folded, I wondered if I should just step in front of a train so Jan would be up $300,000.
“David, you got a sec?”
I whirled around in my chair. It was Brian Donnelly, the city editor. “What’s up?”
He nodded his head in the direction of his office, so I got up and followed him. The way he made me trail after him, without turning or chatting along the way, made me feel like a puppy being dragged along by an invisible leash. I wasn’t even forty yet, but I saw Brian was part of the new breed around here. At twenty-six, he was management, having impressed the bosses not with journalistic credentials but with business savvy. Everything was “marketing” and “trends,” “presentation” and “synergy.” Every once in a while, he dropped “zeitgeist” into a sentence, which invariably prompted me to say “Bless you.” The sports and entertainment editors were both under thirty, and there was this sense, at least among those of us who had been at the paper for ten or more years, that the place was gradually being taken over by children.
Brian slipped in behind his desk and asked me to close the door before I sat down.
“So, this prison thing,” he said. “What have you really got?”
“The company gave Reeves an all-expenses-paid vacation in Italy after the UK junket,” I said. “Presumably, when Star Spangled’s proposal comes up before council, he’ll be voting on it.”
“Presumably. So he’s not actually in a conflict of interest yet, is he? If it hasn’t come up for a vote. If he abstains or something, then what do we really have here?”
“What are you saying, Brian? If a cop takes a payoff from a holdup gang to look the other way, it’s not a conflict until the bank actually gets robbed?”
“Huh?” said Brian. “We’re not talking about a bank holdup here, David.”
Brian wasn’t good with metaphors. “I’m trying to make a point.”
Brian shook his head, like he was trying to rid his brain of the last ten seconds of conversation. “Specifically about the hotel bill,” he said, “do we have it a hundred percent that Reeves didn’t pay for it? Or that he isn’t paying back Elmont Sebastian? Because in your story,” and now he was looking at his computer screen, tapping the scroll key, “you don’t actually have him denying it.”
“He called me a piece of shit instead.”
“Because we really need to give him a chance to explain himself before we run with this,” Donnelly said. “If we don’t, we could get our asses sued off.”
“I gave him a chance,” I said. “Where’s this coming from?”
“What? Where’s what coming from?”
I smiled. “It’s okay, I get it. You’re getting leaned on by She Who Must Be Obeyed.”
“You shouldn’t refer to the publisher that way,” Brian said.
“Because she’s your aunt?”
He had the decency to blush. “That has no bearing on this.”
“But I’m right about where this is coming from. Ms. Plimpton sent the word down,” I said.
While born a Russell, Madeline Plimpton had been married to Geoffrey Plimpton, a well-known Promise Falls realtor who’d died two years ago, at thirty-eight, of an aneurysm.
Madeline Plimpton, at thirty-nine, was the youngest publisher in the paper’s history. Brian was the son of her much older sister Margaret, who’d never had any interest in newspapers, and had instead pursued her dream of having a property worthy of the annual Promise Falls Home and Garden Tour. She managed to be on it every year, which I would never suggest, not for a moment, was because she was tour president.
Brian had never actually worked as a reporter, so you almost couldn’t blame him for not understanding the thrill of nailing a weasel like Reeves to the wall. But Madeline, when she was still a Russell, had worked as a general assignment reporter alongside me more than a decade ago. Not for long, of course. It was part of her crash course in learning the family business, and in no time she was moving up the ranks. Entertainment editor, then assistant managing editor, then M.E., all designed to get her ready to be publisher once her father, Arnett Russell, packed it in, which he had done four years ago. The fact that Madeline had, however briefly, worked in the trenches made her willingness to turn her back on journalism—to tiptoe around the Reeves story—all the more disheartening.
When Brian didn’t deny that his aunt was pulling the strings here, I said, “Maybe I should go talk to her.”
Brian held up his hands. “That’d be a very bad idea.”
“Why? Maybe I can make a better case for this story than you can.”
“David, listen, trust me here, that’s not a good plan. She’s this close to—”
“To what?”
“Forget it.”
“No. She’s this close to what?”
“Look, it’s a new era around here, okay? A newspaper is more than just a provider of news. We’re an … an … entity.”
“An entity. Like in Star Trek?”
He ignored that. “And entities have to survive. It’s not all about saving the world here, David. We’re trying to get out a paper. A paper that makes money, a paper that has a shot at being around a year from now, or a year after that. Because if we’re not making money, there’s not going to be anyplace to run your stories, no matter how important they may be. We can’t afford to run anything that’s not airtight, not these days. We’ve got to be sure before we go ahead with something, that’s all I’m telling you.”
“She’s this close to what, Brian? Firing me?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no, she couldn’t do that. She’d need some sort of cause.” He sighed. “How would you feel about a move to Style?”
I settled back in my chair, absorbed the implications. Before I could say anything, Brian added, “It’s a lateral move. You’d still be reporting, except it would be on the latest trends, health issues, the importance of flossing, that kind of shit. It wouldn’t be something you could file a grievance over.”
I breathed in and out a few times. “Why’s Madeline so worked up about the prison story? If I was writing about another Walmart coming into town, I could see her freaking out over lost ad dollars, but I kind of doubt Star Spangled Corrections is going to be running a bunch of full-page ads about weekly specials. ‘License plates fifty percent off!’ Or maybe, ‘Need your rocks split? Call the Promise Falls Pen.’ Come on, Brian, what’s she upset about? She buying the argument that this is going to mean jobs? More local jobs means more subscribers?”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Brian said.
“There’s something else?”
Now Brian took a few slow breaths. There was something he was debating whether to tell me.
“David, look, you didn’t hear this from me, but the thing is, if this prison sets up here, the Standard could wipe all its debts, have a fresh start. We’d all be able to feel a lot more secure about our jobs.”
“Nothing like that,” Brian said. “But if the paper sold Star Spangled Corrections the land to build their prison, that would help the bottom line.”
My mouth was open for a good ten seconds. I’d been a total moron.
Why had this never occurred to me? The twenty acres the Russell family owned on the south side of Promise Falls had for years been the rumored site of a new building for the Standard. But that talk stopped about five years ago when earnings began to fall.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Brian said. “And if you go out there and breathe a word of this to anyone, we’re both fucked. Do you understand? Do you understand why anything we run has to be nailed down, I mean really nailed down? If you find something good, really good, she won’t have any choice but to run it because if she doesn’t, the TV station’ll find out and they’ll go with it, or the Times Union in Albany will get wind of it.”
I got up from my chair.
“What are you going to do, David? Tell me you’re not going to do anything stupid.”
I surveyed his office, like I was sizing it up for redecorating. “I’m not sure this room meets the cat-swinging code, Brian. You might want to look into that.”
I sat at my desk and stewed for half an hour. Samantha Henry asked me five times what had happened in Brian’s office, but I waved her off. I was too angry to talk. Despite Brian’s warning not to, I was seriously considering walking into the publisher’s office, asking her if this was what she really wanted, that if we had to abandon our principles to save the paper, was the paper really worth saving?
In the end, I did nothing.
Maybe this was how it was going to be. You came in, you churned out enough copy to fill the space, didn’t matter what it was, you took your paycheck, you went home. I’d worked at a paper like that—in Pennsylvania—before coming back to the hometown rag. There’d always been papers like that. I’d been naïve enough to think the Standard would never turn into one of them.
But we were hardly unique. What was happening to us was happening to countless other papers across the country. What might buy us some time was the Russell family’s ace in the hole—a huge tract of land it hoped to sell to one of the country’s biggest private prison conglomerates.
If things didn’t work out here, maybe I could get a job as a bull. Wasn’t that what inmates called guards?
I picked up the phone, hit the speed dial for Bertram Heating and Cooling. If I couldn’t save the state of journalism, maybe I could put a bit of effort into my marriage, which had been showing signs of wear lately.
A voice that was not Jan’s said, “Bertram’s.” It was Leanne Kowalski. She had the perfect voice for someone working at an air-conditioning firm. Icy.
“Hey, Leanne,” I said. “It’s David. Jan there?”
“Hang on.” Leanne wasn’t big on small talk.
The line seemed to go dead, then Jan picked up and said, “Hey.”
“Leanne seems cheery today.”
“No kidding.”
“Why don’t we see if my parents can hang on to Ethan for a couple of extra hours, we’ll go out for a bite to eat. Just the two of us. Rent a movie for later.” I paused. “I could get into Body Heat.” Jan’s favorite film. And I never got tired of the steamy love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.
“I guess,” she said.
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“Actually, yeah,” said Jan, warming to the idea. “Where were you thinking for dinner?”
“I don’t know. Preston’s?” A steakhouse. “Or the Clover?” A bit on the pricey side, but if the newspaper business was going into the dumper, maybe we should go while we could still afford it.
“What about Gina’s?” Jan asked.
Our favorite Italian place. “Perfect. If we go around six, we probably won’t need a reservation, but I’ll check just to be sure.”
“Okay.”
“I could pick you up at work, we’ll go back for your car later.”
“What if you get me drunk so you can take advantage of me?”
That sounded more like the Jan I knew.
“Then I’ll drive you to work in the morning.”
Taking a shortcut through the pressroom on the way to the parking lot, I spotted Madeline Plimpton.
It was the pressroom that most made this building feel like a real newspaper. It was the engine room of a battleship. And if the Standard ever ceased to be a paper, these monstrous presses—which moved newsprint through at roughly fifty feet per second and could pump out sixty thousand copies in an hour—would be the last thing standing, the final thing to be moved out of here. We’d already lost the composing room, where the paper’s pages had been, literally, pasted up. It had vanished once editors started laying out their own pages on a computer screen.
I saw Madeline up on the “boards,” which was pressman-speak for the catwalks that ran along the sides, and through, the presses, which were not actually massive rollers, but dozens upon dozens of smaller ones that led the never-ending sheets of newsprint on a circuitous route up and down and over and under until they miraculously appeared at the end of the line as a perfectly collated newspaper. The machinery had been undergoing some maintenance, and a coverall-clad pressman was directing Madeline’s attention to the guts of one part of the presses, which ran from one end of the hundred-foot room to the other.
I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity to speak to her directly, but I knew better than to clamber up the metal steps. The pressmen could be a bit sensitive about that sort of thing. They weren’t as hard-line as they used to be, but the men—and handful of women—who ran and maintained the presses were staunch unionists. If someone from anywhere else in the paper got up on the boards without their permission—especially management—it suddenly got a lot easier to carry on a conversation. The presses would stop dead. And they wouldn’t start running again until the trespassers left.
But the pressmen, while still a force to be reckoned with, had softened with the times. They knew newspapers were in a tough period from which they might never recover. And the people who worked in this room found it difficult to dislike Madeline Plimpton. She’d always been able to connect with the average working guy, and knew the names of everyone who worked in here.
Madeline was in her publisher’s outfit: a navy knee-length skirt and matching jacket that was not only impervious to printer’s ink, but set off her silver-blonde hair. She was a curiosity in some ways. Designer duds, but down here on the boards, I wondered if, in her heart, she wouldn’t have been more comfortable in the tight jeans she’d worn as a reporter. She’d look just as good in them today as she did then. I’d only seen Madeline age in the time since her husband had died, and even after that she’d managed to keep any new lines in her face to a minimum.
I managed to catch her eye when she glanced down.
“David,” she said. It was normally deafening in here, but the presses weren’t currently in operation, so I could hear her.
“Madeline,” I said. Considering that we’d come through the newsroom together, years earlier, it had never occurred to me to call her by anything other than her first name. “You got a minute?”
She nodded, said something to the pressman, and descended the metal staircase. She knew better than to ask me to join her up there. The boards were not a place to hang out.
Once she was on the floor, I said, “This Reeves story is solid.”
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“Please,” I said. “I get what’s going on. We like this new prison. We don’t want to make waves. We act real nice and play down local opposition to this thing and we get to sell them the land they need to build.”
Something f
lickered in Madeline’s eyes. Maybe she’d figure out Brian had told me. Fuck him.
“But this will end up biting us in the ass later, Madeline. Readers, they may not get it right away, but over time, they’ll start figuring out that we don’t care about news anymore, that we’re just a press release delivery system, something that keeps the Target flyer from getting wet, a place where the mayor can see a picture of himself handing out a check to the Boy Scouts. We’ll still carry car crashes and three-alarm fires and we’ll do the annual pieces on the most popular Halloween costumes and what New Year’s resolutions prominent locals are making, but we won’t be a fucking newspaper. What’s the point in doing all this if we don’t care what we are anymore?”
Madeline looked me in the eye and managed a rueful smile. “How are things, David? How’s Jan?”
She had that way about her. You could blow your stack at her and she’d come back with a question about the weather.
“Madeline, just let us do our jobs,” I said.
The smile faded. “What’s happened to you, David?” she asked.
“I think a better question would be, what’s happened to you?” I said. “Remember the time you and I were covering that hostage taking, the one where the guy was holding his wife and kid, said he was going to kill them if the police didn’t back off?”
She didn’t say anything, but I knew she remembered.
“And we got in between the police and the house, and we saw everything that went down, the cops storming the place, beating the shit out of that guy, even after they’d found out he didn’t have a gun. Just about killed him. And the story we put together after, laying it all out just like it happened, even though we knew it was going to cause a shit storm with the police, which it sure as hell did when it ran. You remember the feeling?”
Her eyes went soft at the memory. “I remember.” She paused. “I miss it.”
“Some of us still care about that feeling. We don’t want to lose it.”
“And I don’t want to lose this paper,” Madeline Plimpton said. “You go to bed at night worried about whether your story will run. I go to bed worried about whether there’s going to be a paper to run it in. I may not sit in the newsroom anymore but I’m still on the front line.”