We are not news, she would rant. If you must have an opinion about the facts, she would say, and if you must express it, use the fourth person: find a source and make them say it. And if I cannot tell you intellectually dishonest cretins’ve done it, she would add, peering over the top of the half glasses she otherwise wore on a string around her doughy neck, maybe I’ll leave it in.
Poteet seemed willing.
“Any idea about why?” I asked.
“Why? Why as in motive? No, nobody knows yet. I mean it’s an old lady and three kids, for Christ’s sake.”
“You ever see anything like this before?”
“Like what?”
This was fishing. I threw out the chum.
“Drug deal. Mob hit. Thrill killing. You tell me.”
Poteet did not bite.
“Around Failey? Come on.”
“Four people lined up on the floor. Shot in the back and the head from at least two angles. Phone out. Lights out. Somebody calm enough to pick up the shells. Tell me what that sounds like.”
At first, Poteet’s expression was bright and curious, engaged in the argument, but as I ran on, the light in his eyes dimmed and his face sagged.
“They didn’t tell me about the phone,” he said. “Or the lights.”
He dropped his head while he considered the question.
When he looked back up, he said, “The facts presented so far would lead one to conclude that at the very least these homicides were intentional and evidently well-planned.”
He gazed, but did not really look, over my shoulder as he selected his words.
“In my eighteen years as the coroner of Austin County, I have never seen anything like it.”
He thought about it some more.
“And I hope never to again.”
When I finished writing it all down, I said, “You’re too good to me.”
Poteet shook his head and pursed his lips, as though he didn’t believe it himself.
“I am,” he said.
He pressed a button on the machine, and it emitted a hum. Slowly, a clear reddish fluid running through a tube on one side of the body began to chase a dark red, nearly black, fluid out a tube on the other side. Poteet examined the machine one last time and nodded his satisfaction. He began to massage the body’s lower extremities.
“Do you know why?” he said, raising his voice about the hum.
“Do I know why what?”
“Why I tell you things?”
The smell was now thick enough to flashback to Vietnam. I had a sudden, sick feeling that I was not going to make deadline and that I needed to leave.
“Charm? Engaging listener?” I said, shaking my head and glancing at the door.
Poteet would not hurry.
“I’ve done this nearly twenty years,” he said. “Every one of your predecessors I’ve invited to the way station.” He shrugged with a wry smile. “Some came once. Some would not even come to the door, just used the phone. Not you. You don’t just come to my door. You stand across my table and talk to me.”
Poteet cocked his bald head, opened his mouth a fraction, and reset his lips in his jowls, a gesture that usually signaled the onset of his public face.
“But I notice you don’t look much,” he said. “Not if you can help it. Just a glance now and then.”
I slid my eyes away from his, but he went on.
“I do this”—Poteet swept his arm over the corpse like a magician over his lovely assistant—“because people want, maybe need, to look, to convince themselves that it’s not nearly as ugly and undignified as you and I both know it to be.”
He checked the instruments on the machine, walked into the office, and reappeared in the doorway with a cigarette in his hand.
“Sometimes you get to them before I do, though, Clay. Before I can dress them up,” Poteet said. “And you make people look. Whether they’re ready or not.”
He lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and considered me through the smoke that he exhaled.
“So, Clay, I’m wondering how much’re you going to make’em look at this one?”
“Lyle, if you’re arguing that I should hold back, let me tell you the last time an edition sold out.”
“Don’t bother,” Poteet said, waving it off with his hand. “The last time was a double traffic fatality. I know what sells your damned papers.”
I was heading toward the doors.
“Then you know what I’m going to do,” I said and threw him a salute.
“Yes, God damn you, Clay,” Poteet said behind me. “I do.”
A curtain of sound cloaks a newsroom. It is a little threadbare now, not like the old days when phones rang, typewriters clacked, and threads of electronic pulses tickled the news-service wire machines and made them incessantly chatter and whine. Now, the pulses burst into light like mute fireworks behind computer screens. But the curtain remains. Its fabric is clicking keys and murmuring voices; its texture phones ringing and shouts. When I blew in the back door, the curtain fell.
It is not just a newsroom at the Mirror-Press. In one large room, maybe two or three times the size of a school classroom, are crammed the desks, tables, and equipment of the news types, the advertising people, and composing. Around the perimeter are the general manager’s office, the owner’s office, the library and a darkroom. Only the press room and circulation are separated by walls from the rest of the operation. It is a small paper.
People on phones stopped talking, covered the mouthpieces, or hung up. The composing guys, like dinosaurs in movies, placidly lifted their heads and turned blinking from the brightness of their light tables. The circulation manager, the skeletal blond, Anorexia, gave me her greediest smile. The general manager did Ben Bradlee, sleeves rolled up, fists on his hips, sternly eyeing me through the large window in his office that looks out into the newsroom.
All eyes seemed to follow as I, perhaps ponderously, slid sideways in the narrow gaps between desks toward my own. A few eyes—most notably, those in the pale, gaunt face of Marley, who stood in the middle of the room talking to the sports guy—glanced at the clock over the window of the GM’s office. I did, too, and stopped.
“Hey,” I said. “Something the matter with you people? Deadline’s an hour away. Go to work.”
The curtain rose.
Marley’s desk and mine are next to each other in the editorial corner of the room. I like to think that Marley does not merely want but needs his best and most experienced writer next to him at challenging times such as these, but I’m open to the possibility that it’s Marley practicing the short-leash theory of personnel management.
We sat down at our respective desks at the same time. Marley leaned across his and said, “I believe that was my line.”
Marley at that time was in his mid- to late thirties and forever younger than me. He is maybe six-one, six-two and, on a damp day, weighs one forty tops. His face is composed of wide planes and the intersections of edges, cheekbones to sharp nose, jawlines to chin point. He is going bald, save for a tuft of blond hair on the top of his head that he tries unsuccessfully to comb back. Horn-rim glasses, sweater vests, and knit ties do little to moderate his intensity. I sometimes think of Marley as the electric Q-tip, but then I try to remember he was once the meanest political reporter in Cincinnati and has been in the Program three years longer than I.
“I’m holding half the front page and about that much more space inside,” he said in a low voice before I could shrug out of my jacket. “How’re you going to fill it, and how late’re you going to make me?”
I got the jacket off, laid out my notebook, and booted up my computer. Marley was still stretched across his desk, his eyes dancing over me. I wondered whether he’d come over the desk if I waited much longer to answer him.
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve got the thumbnai
ls of the kids?”
Marley nodded, but I knew that he did. The paper bought the yearbooks of every school in the county in case some kid made news, and we needed a picture. The quality was not great, but it saved a lot of the time, not to mention the messiness, that goes with talking to a family right after a kid dies.
“And the shooter’s going to have what, two, three photos?”
Again, Marley nodded. I told him I could do a main and three sidebars: one on the children’s background, one on Aunt Lotty’s background, and the third on her escape.
“Maybe 50, 60 inches total,” I said. “You got the obit sheets?”
Marley handed across the forms the funeral home submits. The sheets contain biographical details and information about when the funeral and calling hours will be. These sheets said funeral arrangements were “pending.”
“And Bob,” I said to Marley as I turned to the computer. “When have I ever made you late?”
This was hard news, but the details that I had and the fact that half the damned county would already know the basics by the time I finished writing required a lede that said more than: Three children were murdered at such and such time and such and such a place.
The main story began: On Friday, the night before Halloween, three Austin County children and their babysitter sat at the babysitter’s dining room table, making holiday decorations and eating a snack. Before the night was over, at least two persons lined up the children and the babysitter on the living room floor, shot the children to death, and left the babysitter for dead. Even Marley said he liked it before I shooed him away for reading over my shoulder.
For the next hour, I cranked. The second paragraph identified the victims by name, age, parents, and address. The third paragraph said that Lotty Nusbaumer, the babysitter, had been taken to an area hospital but that police declined to say which one and her condition was not known. The fourth paragraph said police had made no arrests and a motive was not immediately apparent. The rest went chronologically.
I told how the children had come to the home of an elderly woman known to generations of unrelated area children as “Aunt” Lotty to stay while their parents attended a Halloween costume party.
I said that Aunt Lotty and the children apparently shared apples and milk and coffee while they made holiday decorations—a witch’s hat and a pumpkin—out of construction paper.
I told how sometime before midnight at least two persons entered Aunt Lotty’s unlocked door.
I told myself to keep my eyes off the clock because that would only make it run faster.
I said the assailants lined up the three children and the woman on the floor before a plaid couch, stood on either side of them, and shot each of children at least twice with shotguns in the back and the head.
I said that the children died with their arms around each other.
Clarise, who did advertising, shouted across the room to me that there was a call from a wire service wanting to know what was going on. I shouted back that unless it was a cop or Poteet to shut the hell up.
I told how at least one of the shots blew off Aunt Lotty’s wig and made her assailants think she was dead.
I told how the elderly woman laid still in the blood-spattered room, listening to the sounds of the children in her charge dying until her assailants were gone.
I heard Marley lean across his desk in my direction and say in a low voice, “Tick, tock, asshole. Tick, tock.”
I said that when Aunt Lotty arose she would have found that her assailants had cut her electricity and telephone.
I told how she made her way stumbling down a wooded ridge, through bean-stubble fields, more than a half mile to the home of a longtime neighbor and friend.
She pounded on the door and left bloodstains like rose petals, I said.
The shooter came in, draped his arms across the top of my screen, and drooped a contact sheet in front of it. I am getting old; I had to move my face closer to see what he had.
He had not gotten inside. The miniature photos showed just cops walking in a line through the woods and exteriors with gnomes. I confirmed it was the right place, told him to see Marley, and brushed his arms out of my way.
I said Orlo wrapped Aunt Lotty in a blanket, carried her inside, and called police. I quoted what Orlo said she said, about babies and hoodlums. I said Lotty struggled to remain conscious to give to her account but could not.
I told how one young deputy, whom I identified, was the first police officer at the scene. I said that not knowing whether the assailants were still present and without backup, he had entered the trailer with his weapon drawn, but all that he found was a sight that sickened him.
I checked my notes, went back to the main story, and ended it quoting Poteet. It would be a little reward for the devoted reader who made it to the end, and, I was pretty sure, it was the last thing Marley would cut.
I played it straight and low key. There was no need to embellish; the facts were enough. It was Marley, not me, who tagged it the “Halloween Massacre” in the headline that day.
And when I had transferred the last of the last story to the queue in Marley’s computer, I rested my head against the edge of my screen. I was very tired, I realized, and a little hungry, too.
Marley had drawn chunks of my material through the network into his machine and edited as I wrote.
“Clay,” he said. “Clay. Update.”
He had to say it again before I looked up. The clock over the GM’s office said I’d made it with a minute to spare.
The state police dispatcher was friendly but firm. Sgt. McConegal was not available at the present time, the dispatcher had no information to release on the homicides in Austin County, and all information was to be released through Sgt. McConegal. Yes, of course, he knew where Sgt. McConegal was, but he was not at liberty to say. No, since he had no information to release, he could not say whether any arrests had been made. No, he could not tell me the present condition or whereabouts of the woman identified as Lotty Nusbaumer.
Crandall’s secretary was more succinct. In her kewpie-doll voice, Lorie said: “I don’t know where Potter is, Clay. He called, though. He said I was not to tell the media”—she giggled—“shit. And, he said, especially you. Not shit, he said.” Lorie giggled again as she hung up.
Wood Modine’s wife, Alice, answered the phone at the county jail. She is the jail matron and day dispatcher. I’ve known toast that was smarter; but she is good-hearted, honest, and patient. As a result, she is universally loved by the simians she keeps in her cage. Alice said she expected her husband was still at the autopsies of those poor youngsters who got killed last night.
“Anybody new booked recently, Alice?”
“No, Clay.”
“Nobody since, say, midnight last night?”
“No, Clay, why?”
“’Cause it’s a matter of public record. ’Cause I’m curious.”
“You’re always curious, Clay.”
“Anybody been arrested in connection with those murders?”
“No.”
“Anybody going to be in the next hour or so?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Alice?”
“Honey, you know I would.”
“Now you quote Janis?
“What?”
“Never mind. Are you lying to me now, Alice?”
“No, Clay.”
What’re you going to do? I turned to Marley.
“Run it,” I said.
We are all paid to do the math. Marley is paid more. He was going to do it for me sooner or later, so I let him take me to lunch and serve it as the appetizer.
We went out the back, since a crowd had already gathered at the front desk and the box outside to buy that day’s edition. The GM was ecstatic. I was merely gratified,
given what I’d said to Poteet.
We retired across the street. The Pug Café is a little feminine in terms of ambience. It’s fussy, with red-checkered table clothes and country knick-knack decor, and it’s named for the breed of the owner’s late dog, for Christ’s sake. The creature’s tongue-lolled, bug-eyed, punched-face countenance adorns the place’s sign through the P in the name. But it suits Marley’s need—and maybe my own—for order, neatness, and control, and since it has no liquor license, it was a safe place for two drunks who were maybe a little full of themselves after doing good work.
The first person to hit the Pug after the paper is published is expected to pay his respects to Dot, the owner, by giving her a complimentary copy of that day’s edition. We did, and Dot rewarded us with a booth at the back.
Dot stood for a moment holding the paper at arms’ length, scanning the headlines and the ledes on the front page before she took our orders. I thought it important to replace the vital carbohydrates I had expended in the last twelve hours, so it was a tossup between the chicken and noodles and the roast beef manhattan. I finally settled on the manhattan, the cole slaw, the cherry pie, and a little iced tea. Marley had a BLT, bacon crisp, on dry, white toast and water. I suspect booze was the only thing the guy never worried about putting in his mouth. He certainly is not on speaking terms with food.
When she had our orders, Dot wanted to cluck about “those babies, those poor, poor babies,” but Marley told her we’d published all we knew on the subject and shooed her away. It seemed a rude thing to do to a woman who’d boost your portions if she liked you.
“First,” said Marley, getting down to business. “First, let’s be clear. We’ve published. We’re back to square one.”
“True,” I said.
“We’re starting from scratch again,” Marley said. “Just like we do each and every day.”
“Certainly, we have to recognize the bucket’s empty,” I said.
“Exactly,” Marley said.
“But then can’t we also say the well’s not yet dry?”
“Yes,” Marley said enthusiastically. “Yes,” he repeated before he realized he’d snagged his finicky old lady’s skirt on my mocking tone. “Are you focusing or you just fucking with me?”
Fourth Person No More Page 6
