Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “You told me. You were the one sitting on the shitter at Clear Lake and overheard those dealers.”

  “You bought a newspaper on a whim. I still don’t know where you got the money. The dope wasn’t worth that much.”

  “Well, you worked for me.”

  “You quit the Zit to bankrupt yourself starting some stupid magazine. And you’re the one so determined to start it again. So it’s not completely beyond the call of reason that you might have bonked Rossiter on the head because he wouldn’t hand you some loot—”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “—and then try to pin it on Guy.”

  “That prick deserves it. He fucked up WL’s future, and he…never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Leo snatched a baby quiche from a passing sprite, and gave a passing thought to its calorie content. “Are you here with Merritt?”

  “Sort of,” Axel replied irritably.

  “Where is she?”

  “She just went downstairs.”

  Suddenly, the fountain, which had been burbling politely below them, sent a huge plume of water high into the air. It surged past Leo’s face to almost lap the glass canopy reflecting darkly another storey above their heads. The crowd on two floors, as if observing a miracle, groaned with pleasure.

  “Which reminds me,” Leo said, feeling a waft of damp air as the column of water crashed back down to the pool, “I finally did the deed with Stevie.”

  “Congrats. I was beginning to think she was a lesbian. I mean, that name—”

  “It’s Stephanie, for chrissake. I’ve told you. Stephanie was too sucky. She’s been calling herself Stevie since she was four.”

  “All right, already. I forgot.” Axel turned and looked sourly over the scene below. “Isn’t that her over there—beside this pond, or whatever it’s supposed to be.” He pointed. “Who’s the blonde she’s with?”

  “Caitlin Clark.”

  “Oh, that’s her. Merritt is really pissed about this will or trust or whatever it is of Michael’s. Why would he give money to a scumbag like Guy Clark and his sister, of all people?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You know?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Well, tell me. Merritt hasn’t a clue.”

  But Leo was alerted to activity below. Merritt was visible elbowing her way through the gridlock around the miraculous fountain toward Stevie and Caitlin. Even from on high he could see a look of concentrated fury on her face.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, transfixed.

  “What?”

  “Merritt.” Leo pointed toward the moving figure in the green dress. Stevie and Caitlin had seen her too. Stevie seemed to lean backward as if impelled by a force of nature.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Axel said.

  Neither of them moved.

  “I can’t hear a thing,” Leo said, leaning over, watching the furious opening and closing of Merritt’s mouth while Caitlin backed away from her.

  “Fucking noisy water.”

  “Looks like we might have a major hair-pull here,” Leo said, not undelighted. The argument continued. The crowd slowly edged away. “Hey, this is better than Krystle and Alexis. Where’s the volume control?”

  “Fuck off, Fabian.” Axel stared anxiously at the scene. “I’d better get down there.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Leo said with gleeful insincerity, watching the Manitoba tartan race toward the stairs.

  Too late. Caitlin had backed toward the pool under the relentless onslaught. The result was as inevitable as Mulroney’s re-election. You could run it in slo-mo like a hockey replay. Caitlin pitched backward, appeared to recover her balance, then teetered anew at the edge of the pool, arms flailing. Seeing her advantage, Merritt thrust both hands against Caitlin’s shoulders. Caitlin’s daintily shod feet seemed to lift off the tile like it was a banana skin, and she flew backward just as the fountain once again began its preposterous ejaculation. This time there were two crashes of water.

  New lede, thought Leo.

  The preview opening of Galleries Portáge Saturday evening was marked by a skirmish between two women that ended in near-drowning in one of the mall’s ponds.

  Okay, the “near-drowning” was a little over the top.

  29

  The Famous Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Guy Clark sat rigid in his chair glowering at the few lines of type running across the top of his computer screen. The characters burned garish and neon-bright, the cursor throbbed at the end of the last word typed, impatient and demanding. Rage flared suddenly and he jabbed the justify button hard, cursing as the words reordered themselves into paragraphs along the left side of the screen. His exertions had yielded barely four inches of copy.

  He had once overheard a couple of reporters in the library sniggering that his byline file contained only six stories while their files were stuffed, and how ridiculous that he, Guy, was an editor when he had hardly ever written a goddamn news story, much less a feature. Rage had flared then, too, and the rejoinder had been on his lips: if you guys are so fucking brilliant, how come I’m an editor and you’re just a couple of dumb beat reporters? But he had kept his control. Knowledge of other people—their opinions, their ambitions, their weaknesses—was always useful in the long run. Even the avails of library gossip. He recognized the voices, knew the reporters. Now that he was city editor, they would sidle up to him, try to humour him, appease him, entice him into certain kinds of stories, or try to avoid certain assignments or shifts, whining, cajoling, arguing. He would reward or punish as he saw fit.

  The fact was, advancement in a newsroom had little to do with ability or talent or education—those were the givens and those he had. No, to advance you needed to be able to seize opportunities. It was a matter of the useful application of knowledge. That was it, he thought with a surge of self-congratulation that swept away his earlier anger: the useful application of knowledge.

  How useful, for instance, had been his knowledge about Kingdon. He remembered well the day Caitlin told him their parents had not died haplessly as the result of some road condition or mechanical failure in a car, but that they had been killed—yes, killed as surely as if they had been shot with a gun—by a rich drunk, a stupid, over-privileged, rich drunk, and that that truth had been manipulated and obscured until it was turned on its head, the victims banished to oblivion, the killer exalted as a fallen hero. He had been teenaged then but still young enough to believe that what poured from newspapers or radio or television was not only true but truth itself. That notion had gone out the window in that moment. He began to study newspapers, to examine the ways they handled information, to read between the lines, alert to their biases, their presumptions. He enrolled in journalism at Red River Community College. Though that snob Martin tended to discount community college diplomas, Guy had been able to impress him as pugnacious and ravenous for the fray of daily newspapering. How Martin—who had achieved his position simply by marrying well and who favoured reporters with university degrees—loved to surround himself at the higher levels with ambitious proles. And he had played it to the hilt, rising with extraordinary speed, first to the desk, then to the editorship of the Go! section, which gave him access to editorial conferences and a warmer relationship with the man who was destined, whether he knew it or not, to be his benefactor. Martin liked him, or at least was amused by him—it didn’t matter which—and began to take him into his confidence, master condescending to pupil. But lately, Martin had seemed to cool toward him. Oh, yes, there had been problems—high staff turnover in Go!, reporters going over his head and whining to Martin about unfair treatment, complaints from the arts community perennially unsatisfied with the coverage of their narcissistic busywork—but none of it was of any consequence. He wasn’t challenged in his job, he explained to Martin one day. And he wasn’t. Go!, with its horoscopes and recycled Hollywood gossip and recipes and reviews of fruitcake dance groups, was marginal to the lif
e of the Citizen. He wanted something meatier, where his abilities might truly be tested. Something like city desk. Martin had dismissed the notion.

  Poor Martin. Of course, it was well known he had long been the aggrieved bridesmaid, never the bride, when it came to the publisher’s chair. Tom Rossiter had advanced Martin’s career when he married his wife’s sister, but that career had stalled in the wake of Tom’s death. He was pushing sixty. With the last publisher retired with Hayward’s sale of the Citizen, his number had come up again, and it was the last time it would. The Mack purchase in the summer had laid the groundwork. A zealous right-wing Christian Albertan—a frightening combination, but what the fuck—Harry Mack demanded the publishers of his newspapers be impeccable. Harmac investigated backgrounds thoroughly and held upper management to a standard that would make the Pope tremble. So Guy had told Martin the story of his life that day in the sanctuary of Martin’s office, the oddly bare office that suggested only a temporary encampment en route to the rooms of dark wood and old leather in a more secluded part of the building. He told Martin precisely why he had become interested in newspapers. And Martin had become most accommodating. Closets rarely contained one skeleton, after all. And he had only had to suggest that they did. Mack, of course, would never tolerate corruption at the highest level of his organization. They were the purest of the pure. Harry Mack and his big-Texas-haired wife Blanche made Quakers seemed debauched. Or at least they liked to present themselves as such.

  Yes, he had made a useful application of knowledge that day. And now there was something else that would be useful. Some material had appeared on his desk Friday as if by magic. At first he had been dubious about the truth of its contents. The information was so astonishing as to be almost absurd and he wondered if some bastard in the newsroom weren’t playing a complex trick on him. But all the papers, though they were photocopies, bore the unmistakable signs of authority: insignia, stamps, numbers, signatures. As a trick it would have been too elaborate for the meagre minds of the newsroom slugs.

  His first thought had been: Scoop! Saturday edition! But then he reconsidered. He needed to be absolutely sure. The paper’s lawyers would probably have to vet it. There wasn’t enough time. And, besides, the story could screw up the Galleries Portáge opening. Since the Citizen had thrown its weight behind this downtown renewal bullshit, that wouldn’t be a wise move. Guy let his fingers dance along the computer keys. No, Monday would be fine. Better, even. He would write the story himself over the weekend and present it as a fait accompli on the first day of his assumption of city desk. It would start his stewardship with a story that would turn the city on its ear. He would show the whole newsroom what a good story was, and how to handle it. And once that was done…

  He swivelled in his chair. One bank of fluorescent lights illuminated his desk, but the rest of the newsroom was in shadow. The remaining desks, the computer terminals, the piles of old newspapers, books and other detritus of the business lay soft and amorphous like slumbering animals in a darkened forest. Only the glow of one distant computer screen, carelessly left on, broke the shapeless gloom. Its thin light seemed to agitate the dust around it into a sympathetic phosphorescence, giving definition to a Styrofoam coffee cup, a glass ashtray precariously balanced on a stack of white papers, a dog-eared dictionary. The only sound was the faint whine of the fans cooling the computer system.

  On these rare Saturday evenings when he came to work, when the newsroom was devoid of people, when it was quiet and dark, and he was sitting in his corner looking outward across the plain of empty desks, he felt almost at peace. There was no need for the Monday-to-Friday vigilance. Nothing in the environment could thwart him or contradict him. There were no other editors plotting his humiliation, no reporters frowning and gossiping, no superiors expecting his obeisance. The room was his. He could do what he liked.

  Well, not quite, he thought and snorted out loud, the sound strangely amplified. He was indulging a fantasy of power a little bit. The room was empty, after all. But soon, starting Monday, he would move to that desk right over there, the one at the top of the room that all other desks faced like sunflowers bent towards the sun. He would have much more authority. He would be able to shape events in ways he couldn’t before. A kind of glee seemed to run through him, almost like the irrepressible glee he’d felt as a child when Christmas approached, those long-ago Christmases when his parents were still alive. He would be good. He would use this new power beneficently. Now that he had reached this stage he could. Before, there were always others continually, continually undermining him. But on Monday…

  He turned back to his screen and the moment of pleasure dissolved. The four inches of copy stared back at him. He muttered another curse. This story should just write itself. That’s what he told his staff. Of course stories just wrote themselves! How could they not if they were good stories? But the morons he had inherited when he was appointed Go! editor always seemed to bristle when he offered such wisdom. Most of them thought of themselves not as reporters, but as writers, real writers distinguishable from the mere hacks in the paper’s other departments. But he had news for them: they were hacks, too; only they had more column inches in which to display their putrid prose—prose that he always had to repair and rework, of course, and with no thanks. Liz was the worst offender, forever contradicting him. Axel had been bad, too, but he was gone. He had taken great pleasure in fucking up his controlled-circ plans with the Citizen.

  Hadn’t Liz been surprised when he had said he knew about her affair with Richter? It had started with a simple observation. One day he had noted her walking to her car, then veer off suddenly toward the condos facing Central Park where the Richters kept an in-town apartment. There had been something furtive about her as she’d rounded the corner, the quick glancings around, that had piqued his curiosity. He had heard that her marriage was strained. All it took was a little detective work, a friendly and remunerative conversation with the condo superintendent. And the way she looked at Richter at the Kingdons’ dinner party. Was everyone else stupid? Was he the only one with any perception? Wouldn’t it be interesting if her husband found out, just when he was planning to run for political office? It wouldn’t look good, a messy separation in the middle of a campaign.

  He had enjoyed dangling the Go! editorship in front of her at the party. She had wanted the position once. But he had beat her to it. Now he had to admit that in some ways he was sorry she hadn’t been named in his place in Friday’s announcement. Even if she was always challenging him, she at least had more brains than that idiot Pastuk who had replaced him. Maybe he should lean on Martin to give her the position permanently. With what he knew about her now, perhaps he could continue to exercise some control in the Go! department. On the other hand, those insinuations of hers about his activities Tuesday night before arriving at Kingdon’s…

  He thought back to that night. He had left the Citizen diligently late, but a little early for his appointment with Michael. Debating whether to drive home first, drop off his briefcase and change, he passed Merritt’s Miata parked on Assiniboine Avenue outside Jane’s Boutique. He’d parked a discreet distance away, and then, when she came out of Jane’s, he followed her. The crazy bitch spent half an hour driving all over the place, down Wellington to Assiniboine Park, then back along Corydon. When she turned onto Stafford he figured she was going to her brother’s. Was it to be a meeting with the two of them?

  He didn’t know what the meeting was supposed to be about anyway. Michael hadn’t said, but it had the effect of a royal command. Besides, he was curious. He had glimpsed Michael only once, when he allowed himself to be lured by a very persistent publicist into accepting an invitation to an opening of some weird photographs at the Floating Gallery. Michael was supposed to be Mr. Nice Guy. Hell, he looked like Mr. Nice Guy. Merritt, however, dripped acid about her brother when they’d been together. Michael Rossiter was controlling, judgmental, and miserly—ego masquerading as altruism. Among other things
.

  He parked on the north side of Michael’s property, grabbed his case, and quickly got out of the car. Since she had turned the street before, she would be parked on the south.

  God, he was obsessed with her. Watching her cross the newsroom sometimes, he wanted to jerk off under his desk. He could hardly believe she had gone out with him in the first place. He had to get rid of her. Get her fired. He couldn’t stand it much longer. That episode in his apartment…

  Was that what it was supposed to be about? Was Michael doing some protective big-brother routine?

  But he didn’t see her in the yard. Shadows stretched across the lawn. The house was still: No figures in the windows, no lights switching on against the early evening. There had been only the sound of a few car doors slamming on the street, and some sort of to-ing and fro-ing next door at Kingdons’. He almost turned and walked away. But then he decided, hell, he was here. He wasn’t going to take any shit from Michael Rossiter…

  Guy looked at his watch. He needed to make an appearance at the mall opening, make sure to praise the Lord and pass the hors d’oeuvres with Harry Mack and his lieutenants. The Mack empire seemed bent on media acquisition. He needed to be remembered. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in this burg in the middle of nowhere. And model-thin Julie Olsen would be there, too. After work Friday, he had gone to Pantages bar. Julie had been there. Funny, she had never paid him any attention before. Funny, she should find him interesting on the very day of his big promotion. Oh well, one of the perks of the job. And it helped him keep his mind off Merritt for a few hours. He hadn’t got back to his own apartment until late afternoon, and then only to change before going to the Citizen to get a start on his big story before hopping over to the mall. She hadn’t been anxious for him to go. And he was looking forward to spending another night with her. This night. Tonight.

  The phone had been ringing when he turned the key to his apartment. The caller insisted on talking with him.