Alex used the bathroom by the door and got a glass of water from the kitchen. He lived in a four-hundred square foot studio apartment about sixty blocks north and he wanted to revel in the luxury. He walked a slow loop around the living area, admiring the twinkling lights of midtown through the large windows. He ran a hand along the soft leather couch, curled his toes in a thick rug, and finally sat in a mesh ergonomic chair behind the desk.
He also wanted to think about what was going on. Technically, there was nothing wrong with sleeping with a prosecutor. It wasn’t a crime. But since she was someone he was supposed to be covering, and now had become a source, he was in an ethical gray area. At least that’s what he was telling himself. Baxton would have said that, ethically, it was black and white. An open and closed case. You don’t sleep with sources, and you certainly don’t sleep with subjects.
Alex could hear his voice now. "You dumbass. She’s the lead prosecutor for the city of New York. You’re going to have to cover her for years. What the hell were you thinking?"
He leaned back in the chair and swung his feet up on the desk.
The truth was that he had been thinking, but he’d had only one thought: will I get fired for this?
That was often Alex’s barometer when making decisions. He’d come up as an intern at The Standard before getting his first gig on the Metro Desk, where he’d excelled because he was often willing and able to do things no one else would do to get a story. Sometimes it just meant working harder. Other times it meant pushing the boundaries, like showing up at the zoo for a seven-year-old’s birthday party after hearing that a police precinct captain would be there. And he’d always done it in service of getting the story. He didn’t invent facts or stretch the truth. Those were lines he never crossed. But pushing boundaries? He was fine with that as long as he didn’t get fired.
The overhead lights came on and startled him.
"Where’d you go?" Joey’s voice came through the room as Alex’s eyes adjusted. She’d neatened her hair and dressed in red silk pajamas that were too big for her.
"Just enjoying your apartment. This place is spectacular. And so are you."
She walked around the desk and wrapped her arms around his chest. "You were spectacular.”
He turned his head and kissed her as she flopped onto his lap. The office chair creaked and swiveled awkwardly. Alex grabbed the cold marble and rotated it back around to face the desk. "Is this your ‘home office’?"
"This is where the magic happens. Many of New York City’s worst have been put away through my efforts on this slab of marble."
Alex scanned the desk, admiring it. His eyes stopped on a stack of photos on the top left corner. He hadn’t noticed it with the lights off. "Is that Dos Santos?" Alex asked.
Joey scooted herself up onto the desk and sat cross-legged, facing Alex. "That’s just the opposition research we do."
Alex reached across the desk and slid the stack of photos toward him. "Did you guys take these or—"
"Of course not. We don’t stalk people, Alex. We contract an oppo-research firm and they buy photos from freelance photographers. These are from the opening of the Latino Heritage Museum a couple months ago. He dropped over a million dollars for that place."
Alex was thumbing through the photos. "I never considered that you guys would be doing oppo-research on a defense attorney."
"Honestly, we usually don’t. But this guy is so dirty, so unethical, and this case is so big that…But you told me not to talk to you about Dos Santos anymore. Plus, this desk is pretty big and marble is sturdy so…"
Alex was tempted, but he turned back to the stack of photos. Dos Santos wore a shiny, light gray suit, a blue shirt, a white tie, and a huge smile. Most of the pictures were taken just outside the museum, which was up in Washington Heights. There was a large white tent and a red carpet that ran to the street, and Dos Santos seemed to have had his picture taken with everyone in New York. In one, he was slapping Mayor Giuliani on the back. In another, he was shaking hands with Derek Jeter. In another, he was rubbing shoulders with Governor George Pataki.
And then there were the women: Rosie Perez, Catherine Zeta-Jones, WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes, and a few other models, TV personalities, and well-known lawyers. Then there was a woman Alex didn’t recognize. He handed the photo to Joey. "Who’s that?"
"Maria Fernandez."
He recognized the name but couldn’t quite place it. In the photo, Dos Santos was looking at her and laughing, one hand around her waist. Fernandez was in her forties and wore a tight silver dress, a black fur coat, and a lot of makeup. "Isn’t that…wait. Isn’t that Alvarado’s mother?"
"You said not to talk to you about it."
Alex thumbed through the rest of the pictures. At least three others showed Dos Santos with Fernandez. In one, they were inside the large entryway to the museum with a few others, holding flutes of champagne. In another, Fernandez stood just behind Dos Santos, a hand resting on his arm. In the last one, they were out front again, Fernandez pecking him on the cheek.
Alex dropped the pictures on the desk and they splayed out like a deck of cards. "That museum opened two months ago, right? Is this what you were trying to tell me about?"
"I’m not gonna go there, Alex. C’mon."
Alex’s mind was racing. He couldn’t be 100% sure, but the photos made it look like Dos Santos and Fernandez were romantically involved. "I need to use your computer."
She slid a laptop out of the desk drawer and opened it up for Alex. She said, "You can look into these, but you didn’t get them from me, right?"
"Right."
She scooted in front of the screen to block it. "Alex, I need to hear you say it. A prosecutor sleeping with a reporter is bad enough. A prosecutor who then gives the reporter oppo research, that’s..."
Alex gave her a half-smile. "I don’t even tell my editor who my sources are. I have never given the name of a source to anyone, and I never will."
"Okay," Joey said. "But don’t be long. I’m gonna go back to bed and wait for you."
He logged onto his Lexus-Nexus account, a database of old news articles from nearly every paper in the country. A quick search of the names "Maria Fernandez" combined with "Diego Dos Santos" confirmed what he thought. Multiple stories from The Miami Herald and The Palm Beach Post had reported that Dos Santos and Fernandez had been dating while Dos Santos was representing Alvarado in his domestic violence case back in Miami. At the time, the information was presented less as scandal and more as gossip. Further evidence that Dos Santos—who already had a reputation as a playboy—was playing fast and loose by dating the mother of a client.
By the time he read the third piece on Lexus-Nexus, Alex was in Breaking-News mode. His chest was hot and his thoughts jumped from one connection to the next, turning the pieces he had into phrases, forming the phrases into paragraphs. It was what happened when he knew something no one else knew, or at least no one with the power or inclination to tell the world about it.
He checked the time on the laptop. 10:10. Still time to get something in the morning paper. If he hurried.
He grabbed his cellphone from the bedroom, told Joey he’d just be a minute, and stepped out onto her small balcony. The night had grown chilly and he was still in his boxers and t-shirt, but he shook it off quickly and dialed the home phone of Baxton, who picked up after five long, slow rings. "Why in the name of Edward R. Murrow are you calling me?" Baxton growled. "I know you don’t work this late. Hell, you barely work until five.”
Alex explained the museum opening and the photos, then returned to the computer and read him snippets from a few of the older articles. "If Dos Santos is dating Maria Fernandez," he concluded, "or at least was dating her two months ago, that’s a clear, blatant, and egregious conflict of interest. You can’t date the mom of a murder victim while defending the alleged murderer."
Baxton was quiet for a minute, then asked Alex to read over the Miami Herald article again. When he was finished, B
axton said, "Does the article have art?"
"It sure does. Fernandez and Dos Santos at a club opening, then at a Miami Heat game in another article. They’re both younger, but—"
"You’re sure the photos you have are them?"
"I’m sure."
The line was quiet for a minute. Then Baxton said, "This is good, Alex. Very good. Bring the photos in tomorrow and we will check them out, call around, and see if we can’t break this thing."
"Tomorrow? Why the wait?"
"This is a big accusation. It’s a trial-buster, Alex. Do you know what that is? If true, it breaks this trial."
"It’s true," Alex said. "I’m staring at her lips on his cheek right now. From two months ago. After he started representing Mendoza. We already knew this guy was a sleazeball. Honestly, I’m just ashamed I didn’t catch this story earlier."
"And we’ll talk about how you missed this tomorrow as well. But at least you have it now. And we will run it. TOMORROW. Goodnight, Alex."
The line was dead and Alex paced the balcony for a minute, thinking. The feeling was getting to him, the warmth creeping up from his chest and filling his head. A blend of excitement and vanity that was too alluring to ignore. Of course, he knew that there was a slight chance Joey had left those pictures there intending him to find them. She certainly had the ability to use him. But he had the ability to use her as well. And even if she had only shown an interest in him to try to feed him the story, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Sources used reporters all the time, and vice versa. The popular trope of the lone journalist striving for truth was nice, but had very little to do with reality, in Alex’s experience. Reality was much more messy.
He knew he shouldn’t do what he was about to do, but when he asked himself whether it would get him fired, his internal answer was, "Probably not."
He hurried back into the bedroom and found Joey naked again, half under the blankets, scrolling through her Blackberry, which she was holding between her breasts. "As much as I’d love to stay," Alex said, "I’m gonna need to borrow those pictures and get out of here."
* * *
The office of The New York Standard was just six blocks away, on the thirtieth floor of the Standard Media building. Alex ran the whole way, photos tucked under his shirt, and was still out of breath when the elevator opened into the sprawling newsroom. Most of the staff had gone home, but copy editors, layout staff and a few others were racing against the clock to get the paper finished by eleven.
Susan was in her usual spot, hunched over a mouse, staring at columns of copy. Alex came up behind her and she nearly jumped out of her chair when he put his hand on her shoulder.
She spun around in her chair to face him. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Susan was Alex’s age and wore wide glasses and a severe expression. During the daytime, she was quick with a smile and quicker to start inappropriate sexual banter with Alex, but after six o’clock she wore an expression that said, "If you waste even a second of my time, I will kill you."
They’d landed jobs as interns at the same time and had slept together for a few months early on when they were both desperate to cling to someone in the chaos of their first real jobs in New York City. But neither had wanted anything serious and they’d grown to become friends and mutual supporters. They were two of the youngest people in the city to hold their respective jobs, and they’d each helped the other to get there.
Alex said, "I have something big."
"Don’t fuck with me, Alex. I have like ten minutes to edit forty inches of copy."
He dropped the photos on her desk.
She thumbed through them and swiveled her chair back around to face the monitors. "So?"
"So we’re running a photo of Dos Santos, right? Next to my piece on the deal?"
"Of course. We always run art with your stories because they’re so damn short."
"Do me a favor. Run this one instead." Alex pulled out the photo of Fernandez pecking Dos Santos on the cheek.
She studied the photo, then swiveled back around to study Alex. "Why?"
"It’s a long story, and you’re in a rush, but the short version is that this is the mother of the victim in the Mendoza trial. It’s a huge conflict of interest and—"
"And Baxton won’t let you drop the story tonight?"
"There’s no harm in running the photo. Look. I beat the rest of the city on this story and I want people to know it, damnit. I sit next to those bastards from The Times and Post all day. I want to be able to point to this photo and say, 'Hey guys, look what I did.'"
Susan smiled at him. "That’s really pathetic. But okay. What about the cutline?"
"What’s a cutline?"
"Didn’t you go to journalism school?"
"I did, but I was too busy rocking stories to learn obscure terms from journalism history."
"The caption. The writing under the damn photo, jackass."
Alex thought for a moment, then said, "Something like Defense Attorney Diego Dos Santos with Maria Fernandez at the opening of the Washington Heights Latino Heritage Museum in February. How many words do I get?"
Susan was writing it down in a notebook on her lap. "You’ve got another line."
"Add, Fernandez is the mother of Victor Alvarado, who was killed last year at Vinny’s Restaurant. According to reports, Dos Santos and Fernandez dated in Miami in the mid-nineties."
Susan stopped writing. "That’s too long. Plus, do you know the FIRST THING they teach you about writing these things?"
"Don’t editorialize in a caption?"
"It’s called a cutline, but that’s right. Don’t editorialize in a cutline."
"This isn’t editorializing. This is fact."
"But it has the effect of…it will…you know what I mean, Alex. Plus, I have to get this past the layout editor. She usually doesn’t give me any crap, but if the cutline reads as anything other than universally-acknowledged truth, she might." She paused and scribbled for a few seconds. "How about this for the second line: Fernandez is the mother of Victor Alvarado, the victim in the trial of Manny Mendoza."
"Fine," Alex said. "I wish we could really go for it. But that’s good enough for me to be able to take a victory lap on the off chance that someone breaks the full story before Baxton lets me break it tomorrow."
Susan stopped writing and leapt up. "Gotta get this to layout."
When she was on the other side of the newsroom, she turned and began walking back toward Alex.
He noticed and met her halfway. "What?" he asked.
"You’re sure on this, right?" She reached her hand to his chest and met his eyes. "I mean, you’re sure?"
"There’s nothing to worry about."
Chapter 6
Alex’s Apartment
Wednesday
Alex turned off his phone, closed the blinds, and slept soundly.
Since Judge Butcher had issued a continuance, there would be no court on Wednesday and Alex would be able to sleep in for the first time in a month. He’d thought of going back to Joey’s after meeting with Susan at The Standard, but decided he wanted to spend the night in his own bed. She’d been half asleep when he called and they’d agreed to check in the next day.
Alex lived at the corner of 105th and Broadway, a no-man’s-land north of the Upper West Side and south of Columbia University. A king-sized Tempurpedic filled about seventy percent of the floor space and he could almost reach into his kitchen—which was once a closet—from the edge of the bed. The apartment was cheap, small, and close to the subways. Alex hoped he’d be able to upgrade soon.
When he woke up, it took him a few seconds to remember where he was.
He microwaved leftover coffee and sipped it while scrolling through emails on his laptop. So far, he hadn’t had any response to his stunt with the photo. All he had from work was a reminder that he needed to be at The Standard at noon for a meeting. He turned on the TV—a 19-inch he’d had in his dorm room in college—and muted it, then flipped c
hannels to see if any of the morning news or talk shows had picked up the story. Nothing.
Maybe no one had noticed.
Part of him was hurt, the part that craved attention and validation. But part of him was relieved. As much as he looked forward to the accolades he’d get for breaking the story, he knew he was going to catch hell from Baxton. Alex was still a little miffed that he hadn’t let him write the story last night.
In his experience, some news stories broke soft and some broke hard. When a story broke soft, the news trickled out over the course of the day. People began to talk about it at work, maybe on their lunch breaks. Stories that broke soft would build momentum throughout the day, then drive-time radio and evening news could pick it up and, by the end of the night, Leno and Letterman were commenting on it. When a story broke hard, people were already talking about it before the morning papers hit the newsstand. Usually this happened because someone at the paper tipped the late news shows or the morning talk shows. And the story itself had to have enough news-value pop to get producers interested before the actual story came out. He was worried that the news about Dos Santos and Maria Fernandez was going to break with a whimper.
When his phone rang, he hoped it was some sharp TV producer who had read the piece, picked up on the significance of the cutline, and desperately wanted Alex to appear on the news. But he recognized the number and answered full of fear because it was The Colonel.
"Alex, you son of a bitch. What the hell were you thinking?"
Baxton sounded about fifty percent more pissed than Alex had expected. "Colonel, sir, I can explain."
"Get down here. Now."
It wasn’t a request.
Alex hung up, pulled on his standard gray jeans and black button-down, and rode the subway downtown to the Standard Media Building.
The Cutline (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 0) Page 4
