Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  If the day outside was heavily overcast as it often was in the fall, the newsroom, hemmed by peeling walls and sooty windows, would seem by contrast to glow hot and overbright like a burning coal. If the day was also drenched with rain, and reporters stomped in with dripping coats and umbrellas, the newsroom would soon steam and smell as though the drops had burst and spurted against the hot coal. Wet wool would hang in the air with the cigarette smoke and the ancient dust. Such days made the staff as cranky as wet cats. On such days staff preferred that routine remain undisturbed.

  When Leo came into the newsroom, and hung his wet jacket on a dilapidated coat tree, and threw into a wastebasket the soaking newspaper he had used as a head cover, and finally turned around to take his seat, he saw immediately there had been a great disturbance in the morning routine. Instead of reporters with their heads in the first edition, or with Styrofoam coffee cups planted on their lips, or with telephone receivers growing out of their ears, there were reporters standing in knots of two or three whispering heatedly, reporters in clusters leaning over their desks muttering intensely, and individual reporters circulating from knot to cluster like malevolent bees while telephones went unanswered, newspapers went unread, and coffee turned cold.

  A few desks away, Liz was standing talking to Doug Whiteway, careful not to blow smoke into his face. She saw Leo after a moment, gestured across the room, while mouthing to him slowly: “Go to the bulletin board.”

  With foreboding, Leo did as instructed.

  On the board, amid notices for journalism scholarships to faraway places and yellowing reminders that dress standards in the newsroom were deteriorating, was pinned a fresh pink piece of paper with a curt message.

  “Beginning Monday, October 3,” it read, “Guy Clark will assume duties as city editor. Ray Alcock will become columnist-at-large. Bob Pastuk will become Go! editor, pro tem.” The notice was signed, “Martin Kingdon, managing editor.”

  “Crap,” said Leo.

  “How’s your back?” Liz joined him at the board.

  “Bit tender, but okay.” He tapped the notice with his finger. “I’m fucked. I can’t work under that asshole.” He looked across the newsroom at the asshole in question. Clark was hunched over his desk in studied concentration over some section of the day’s paper. A fringe of limp yellow hair hanging over his face made it impossible to read any expression. “And where’s the managing asshole?” he asked.

  “Rumour has it Martin came in around 7:00, pinned the notice to the board, then left. Or fled, depending on who’s telling it.” Liz averted her head to release a plume of smoke. “Ray apparently came in half an hour later and went apoplectic. He broke down the door to Martin’s office and proceeded to urinate on his desk.”

  Leo raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed.”

  “He’ll probably be looking for job openings at the Examiner.”

  “I may be joining him. This change is okay for you, though.”

  “Sure. Bob’s easing into retirement. He doesn’t care, so life won’t be complete hell. At least pro tem—”

  “As arty-farty-Marty would put it.” He looked at her. “Do you want the job?”

  “Guy would block it anyway. I’m on his shit list. And he seems to have Martin wrapped around his skinny little finger.”

  “Roger?”

  “Doubt it. Too much of a foodie. Maybe you should alert Axel, now that Winnipeg Life is defunct. He can come back.”

  “Mr. Ego’s resurrecting WL if it’s the last thing he does. Besides, he has no love for Guy. He’s sure Guy killed the distribution deal he was making with the Zit. And…”

  “And what?”

  Leo hesitated. What did he know for sure? Oh, what the hell: “I think Axel and Merritt are an item.”

  Liz snickered. “Another love triangle.”

  “Another?”

  “Generally, I mean. They abound.”

  Leo glanced at her. “Do you know if Merritt and Dale Hawerchuk were ever an item?”

  “For about thirty seconds.” She waved her cigarette in Guy’s direction. “She must have been slumming when she picked up with him. She really does have odd taste in men. The only thing I can think Hawerchuk and Guy and Axel have in common is that they all have a certain aggressive streak. Type A’s, in their way.”

  “Stevie thinks Merritt has RADD.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Romantic Attention Deficit Disorder.”

  Liz laughed. “Might explain her two-week marriage, too. Not to mention her writing style. Gushy, but with sentence fragments and lots of ellipses.”

  “Merritt and Guy didn’t last long.”

  “No. But he still drools when she deigns to come into the newsroom. Which hasn’t been often lately.”

  Leo considered one of the benefactions of death to survivors. “Ten bucks says we don’t see her in this dump again.”

  A prompting from Audrey sent Liz scurrying to her desk to answer her telephone. Leo wandered to his and picked up a dry copy of the Zit to read rather than use as a rainhat. Speculation about Mulroney’s imminent election call dominated the front page. The Kushniryk trial was below the fold. The Rossiter murder had fallen to page three. It was without byline, its contents little more than “investigation continuing” claptrap. One measly paragraph contained Leo’s phone-in contribution—a bit about smart thieves and art theft. Damned if he hadn’t had to honour his off-the-record agreement with Frank, otherwise he would have phoned in a police-have-a-new-lead-in-the-Rossiter-slaying-type story. Worse, Stevie had leapt to Merritt’s defence by pulling out the running-Axel photograph. But Frank had burst her balloon by pointing out that Merritt’s car had been sighted at Michael’s a good hour before an ardent and sweaty Axel had jogged up Merritt’s driveway.

  He ran his eyes over the text again. What piss-poor coverage! Was this any way to sell newspapers? And god knows what would happen next week. “Recently Appointed City Editor’s Former Squeeze Questioned in ‘Angel’ Slaying”? “Managing Editor’s Niece Wanted for Questioning in Crescentwood Death”? Not likely. What happens if reporters become suspects? Some Journalism Ethics seminar at Red River Community College would dole out the without-fear-or-favour bullshit.

  But then there was the real world.

  Leo peered over the paper’s edge, avoiding Julie’s scornful glance, and scanned the real world and its occupants. With Guy at the helm, he was basically screwed. Who knew what crap assignments would be his? Nasty, British, and Short seemed a treat in comparison. But NB&S was gone. Leo turned his gaze toward the crescent-shaped desk around which copy editors sat like fat Buddhas, staring at their computer screens, occasionally sending a finger darting across the keyboard to lop off an offending “s” the way a frog’s tongue annihilates a fly. Newsroom machinations meant nothing to them. The stage of being anxious and neurotic reporters has passed. All they had to do was hack and trim verbiage to fit it between advertisements. And then they left, carrying nothing more of the newsroom home with them than a copy of the paper, the way a butcher might carry home a nicely trimmed piece of meat. There was a bovine satisfaction to it. And the pay was better.

  Or maybe he could return to Go!?

  Ugh. All the lifestyle crap.

  The business section?

  He’d have to wear a suit.

  Sports?

  That happy playground had a waiting list as long as the queue for Tory patronage.

  Well, he thought, I’ve got one more day to do what I want. Kingdon has fled. Alcock has walked. Clark is not on board yet. The assistant managing editor is in Japan on a journalism scholarship. The op-ed page team, with its Olympian view of newsroom machinations, rarely descends from the clouds. The Zit is in its fifth month without a publisher. And the two assistant city editors are as irresolute and fat as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whom they resemble.

  It’s anarchy.

  Yippee.

  He quickly rooted out Dave, one of the Guys Named Dave in the newsroom, w
ho had been assigned police stories, and wrested the Rossiter story from him. He was a beardless youth and easily vanquished.

  Leo intended to begin where he had ended on Wednesday, bent double in the Zit’s library. He had gone to look in the vertical file for Tom Rossiter, to see how the paper had handled a previous Rossiter death, one not as spectacular as a murder, but a violent end nonetheless—a car accident. Had the Zit been as prissy and circumspect then? Or had the coverage been even thinner gruel, given that Tom Rossiter had been the owner and publisher when he’d snuffed it?

  He zigzagged through the cluster of desks to the back of the newsroom to fetch the notebook he’d left in his jacket pocket. Mellish was sitting glassy-eyed at a computer terminal, head bent, oblivious to the passing scene. As he fished in the inside pocket of his jacket, Leo glanced over and noted that Roger had Julie’s directory up on his screen. Even though he was an editor of a department of one, Roger was an editor nonetheless, and had access to reporters’ computers. Still, Leo thought, he was pretty much trawling in private waters, even if the waters were those of Ms Grumpy’s.

  He leaned over, ignored the twinge in his back, and whispered innocently: “Did you give the Wajan a good review?”

  Roger jerked up in his chair. “Jesus, Leo!”

  “Sorry.”

  Roger switched off his terminal. “Yes,” he snapped, turning to regard Leo. “It was excellent, though I think I did tell you that the other night.”

  Leo yanked out the notebook. “So you did.”

  “Indeed,” Roger continued more calmly, “I thought it was good enough to go into Taste of Winnipeg.”

  “Too late, I guess.”

  “Apparently so. I talked to Bunny yesterday. Friesens has it scheduled for printing in three weeks, and there’s pictures Michael took last Saturday that are undeveloped. He hadn’t sent the film out to be processed and, of course, his house is still sealed. And my glasses are still inside,” he added as an afterthought.

  “What are those things on your nose?”

  “I do have two pairs,” Roger said witheringly.

  En route to the library, Leo recalled a conversation he had had with Stevie at his house one Sunday in July, not many weeks after their first date, if you could call going for coffee a date. She had been helping him cut some wood sheeting for kitchen cupboards but a fuse blew with the saw and a window air conditioner running at the same time. Since he was out of fresh fuses, they’d retreated to the shade of the big elm in his backyard with glasses of iced tea. Somehow—part of the usual feints of inquiry in early-stage relationships—Leo found himself talking about his father’s sudden death in the Fort Rouge railyards, crushed by a boxcar, leaving him the only kid on the block without a father, practically the only kid with a mother who worked outside the home, in the fur department at Eaton’s, one of the original latchkey kids in his Riverview neighbourhood. He recalled it as a blur, a flurry of visits and casseroles and pats on his little head. He mostly remembered the toy soldiers an aunt had sent him from England. The loss of his father, he thought, had affected him less than it had his sister. He’d often wondered if that was why she’d married Frank so young, just to have the kind of masculine presence in her life that a kid brother couldn’t supply. And, of course, his mother had been most affected. It was only in later years that he’d realized the extent of her struggles, and what an asshole teenager he’d been.

  Like a movie segue, the conversation had slipped to Michael Rossiter, one of the signs, he realized afterwards, that Michael was on Stevie’s mind. Leo had been vaguely aware that Tom Rossiter, once the publisher of the paper he worked for, had died in a car crash, but as it had happened before he worked for the Zit, he’d given it little thought.

  Stevie said Michael had abandoned his private ambitions, his desire to be a solo artist, in the wake of his parents’ death. He had completed his master of music degree in violin performance in Philadelphia, but the Rossiter financial holdings needed attention, and Merritt was getting beyond even Kathleen’s resourcefulness, particularly when she turned eighteen and became a full-fledged rich brat. Even if he hadn’t been able to carve out a solo career—and how difficult it was—Michael wouldn’t, Stevie was sure, have returned to Winnipeg if his parents hadn’t lost their lives so abruptly. He had said as much during one of their darkroom catch-up sessions. He would have toured, taught, written music; lived in New York, California, England, Italy. But a solo career demanded a monomaniacal devotion to art and an obedience to itinerancy, and he had let his attention be diverted. Well, it couldn’t be helped, he had said. Shit happens. He had intended only a brief pause to sort out things, but there are no pauses in the smilingly vicious world of the arts, and the pause stretched forth like a prairie road to become his life.

  “Do I detect guilt?” Leo had asked.

  “It was the Christmas holidays. His parents had dropped him off at the airport. The accident happened shortly after, on their way out of the airport. If Michael had taken a taxi—”

  “They’d still be alive,” Leo filled in. “What happened?”

  “Ice patch, I think. Or mechanical failure. I think that was the official story. My parents are pretty sure booze was involved,” Stevie shrugged, looked away. “I’m not really sure. I wasn’t here. I was in Baltimore.”

  “I thought you’d gone to school in Rhode Island?”

  “I spent the Christmas holidays with my aunt and uncle in Baltimore.”

  She’d sounded strangely defensive on that point. Of course, now he knew why. Christmas had been the mere punctuation of a nine-month stay in the Maryland capital.

  In days of yore, newspaper libraries were called morgues. It was a word Leo never found pertinent to the Zit’s library, which he always felt was more life-giving. As soon as he stepped over the threshold from newsroom to library, he felt he had stepped into a haven of calm and order and goodwill. The library was staffed entirely by women, most of them middle-aged, with the occasional young nun-like novice being inculcated to the arcana of bibliology.

  In the mornings, the women organized history. With practised hands, a sharp ruler and a pot of glue, each took a section of the Citizen, cut it into column lengths, sealed the lengths together (sometimes they were as long as a man is tall) and then folded them in an almost undecipherable system of folds into little brown envelopes which were, in turn, tucked away in rows of ancient filing cabinets. Loath to disturb their liturgy, Leo went right for the cabinet marked ROB—RUT, which was at floor level. This time he carefully bent at the knee to pull out the drawer. He found the file marked Rossiter, Tom, and started shuffling through the clippings, which dated back to the late 1950s. There seemed to be nothing from late 1976-early 1977. Damn. Maybe Vera Macklin, chief librarian and fount of knowledge, had a clue.

  She looked up at him as he approached the desk and released a barely perceptible sigh. “Yes, dear,” she said, putting down the silver letter-opener she’d been tapping against the palm of her hand and readjusting her glasses.

  “There seems to be some stuff missing from a file.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  He told her.

  “Then you’ll have to try the microfilm.”

  Leo groaned. The microfilm machine was ancient and he hated all the scrolling you had to do.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” she said, rising from her chair and moving purposefully to the relevant filing cabinet at the back of the room. She opened a drawer, ran practised fingers along rows of white boxes, frowned, then repeated her action.

  “December 1976 and January 1977, did you say?”

  “Yup.”

  “Odd.” She drummed the cardboard box top with her nail.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s not here. You haven’t had those rolls out before, have you?”

  “No. Don’t often have to go back that many years for a story.”

  Leo followed Vera’s eyes as they ran over the tops of filing cabinets and libr
ary tables in the vicinity of the microfilm machine. Then she lifted the grey plastic cover of the microfilm machine and glanced at the spool, disappointingly empty.

  “Perhaps it’s been misfiled,” Leo offered.

  Vera’s frown grew deeper. “Well, possibly, though it’s not like my girls to misfile things.” She sighed. “It’s got to be around here somewhere. Is it important?”

  “I just wanted to see how Tom Rossiter’s death was covered.”

  “With circumspection,” Vera said dryly. Curiosity flickered in her eyes but she asked no questions. Reporters’ whims were beyond her worry. “Well, then, grab a drawer and start looking.”

  Leo took one end of the rank of cabinets, Vera the other, and they began a chorus of banging and slamming until they met in the middle.

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know.” Vera said testily, her hands on her hips. “Perhaps someone in the newsroom has it, though what good it does out there—”

  “Is it the only copy?”

  “No.”

  Leo grinned at her hopefully.

  “I keep a second set in an old walk-in vault in the sub-basement.”

  “Long way down.”

  “Well, it looks like I’m going to have to send it out for duplicating anyway, so I might as well go get it. It had better not be missing, too.”

  “Then it’ll be easy to find the culprit. How many people have the combination?”

  “No one. The combination’s lost to time. The door’s always kept open.”

  “Not the most secure vault in the world.”

  “Other than the men who bring in the barrels of trichloroethylene to clean the presses, hardly anyone goes down there any more, at least since—odd you should mention him—Tom Rossiter was alive.”

  “How so?”

  “When I went looking for some extra storage space several years ago, I found a quite a few empty Scotch bottles lining the shelves—quite a few.”

  “Maybe they belonged to the press men.”

  Vera laughed. “It was single malt from some very exclusive distillery in the Highlands. I did ask at the liquor commission once, out of curiosity, and they looked it up. Had to be specially imported, and it cost nearly a hundred dollars a bottle then. Scotch was Mr. Rossiter’s preferred tipple.”