Bertie sat at the kitchen counter with her coffee, logged onto her laptop, and typed in Rowley Poke’s name. Poke had been a big deal in the local environmental movement since the late nineties and was campaigning for a nomination to the U.S. Senate. His dead eyes still haunted her and she shook her head to get them out of her memory.
Just then the phone rang, startling her so badly she spilled her coffee down her pajama front.
She looked apprehensively at the phone. She’d been getting calls from a heavy breather, who listened to her ask “Who is this?” and then hung up. Always when she was home, as if someone was watching her and knew when she was there alone.
“Hello?”
Heavy breathing, like Darth Vader before the invention of anti-congestants.
“Hello, who is this?”
Nothing, just more nasally breathing and the sound of traffic in the background.
“OK, asshole, quit calling me unless you’ve got the guts to say something, you ball-less wonder. Stop calling here, you got it? Stop calling me.”
She hit the button on her cell phone hard. Bertie missed the days when you could slam a phone down on a receiver – cell phones were no substitute for that kind of psychological rejection.
Her concentration broken, she dressed in jeans and a comfortable top for a Saturday work day and then hesitated inside her front door trying to remember if she’d forgotten anything.
Nope, she was ready. She opened the door and let out a scream. Standing there was a tall, lanky man in his mid-40s with long, sandy brown hair, dressed in crumpled khaki shorts, a faded red Hawaiian shirt, and sneakers so holey they looked barely able to cling to his feet.
“Hello, Bertie,” he said.
“Oh, shit,” Bertie replied.
CHAPTER THREE
The Beacon-Banner building was almost empty on a Saturday. Bertie let herself in the front door where a lone security guard was reading. She flashed her ID and entered the elevator to the fourth-floor newsroom.
Rows of empty desks and dark computers gave the room a hollow, echo-y feel, like a big cave from which all the bats had fled. A curmudgeonly city editor, the room’s only occupant, barely looked up from his computer when Bertie came in and offered a low “Hi, how are you?” She mentally shrugged, threw her purse in a desk drawer and left to get a cup of coffee from the vending machine.
After three weeks, this newsroom was still unfamiliar to her. During the week a gallery of eyes stared at her every coming and going, a tough deal when she had to go to the bathroom. It had all the usual newsroom fixtures – the old biddy who knows everything about everything, the young college grad anxious to make his mark in journalism, the old salts who, in the old days, would’ve had a fifth of whiskey in their desk drawers. But they were all strangers and Bertie felt it in every pore of her body.
She enjoyed working on the weekends better when it was usually just her and some grumpy editor or two.
And here she sat, staring at her blank computer screen. After what had greeted her as she’d left her apartment she was having trouble concentrating. “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t want to write this crap for a vanity newspaper with pretensions of journalism.”
The Big Johnson guided what news he wanted in, and more importantly what news he didn’t want in, based on whims, peeves and personal dislikes. The metro editor wasn’t allowed to refer to the one of the town’s national sports team on Page 1 because Dillard didn’t like the owner who published a bigger newspaper.
“Whip out a tape measure and see whose is bigger, dude, but it’s still no way to run a newspaper,” Bertie said. She didn’t think she’d said it out loud, but the old editor looked up sharply, scowling. It was a bad sign, all this talking out loud to herself. Bertie got up, left her computer on, and fled to the bathroom where a young woman was just washing her hands.
“Oh, hi,” she said, a red stain flooding her sallow cheeks. The woman, really a young girl in her early 20s, had short, spiky black hair streaked at least three different colors, a ring through her eyebrow and thick black mascara and eyeliner around her squinky blue eyes. She wore a short skirt, a big sweatshirt with Make Gloves, Not War on it and shredded fishnet stockings.
“Hi,” Bertie said. “Not many people here on Saturdays, are there?”
“Um, no.”
“You look kind of familiar, do I know you?” Bertie had been introduced to a number of people in her first days there and she thought she had them all sorted out, but this girl/woman looked oddly familiar in an unfamiliar way.
“Bertie! It’s me, Tiffany.”
Bertie stared at her in shock. Mousy Tiffany, the city hall reporter, dressed in twin sets, tweed skirts and flats, not this thank-Goth-for-little-girls horror.
“I can’t very well dress this way to go to city hall, can I? This is how I really look,” Tiffany said in her Minnie Mouse voice, defiance giving her young, made-up face an even harder edge. “Can you imagine the mayor’s face if I asked him about the new sewer project dressed like this?”
Bertie smiled, then laughed and after a moment Tiffany joined in.
“So what’s new?” Tiffany asked, checking her face in the mirror as she applied a fine layer of white makeup.
Bertie started laughing again, this time with a tinge of hysteria. She blurted out the story of last night’s falling, bleeding man while Tiffany awkwardly patted her back. Eventually Bertie wound down.
“Thanks, I needed that,” Bertie said. “It’s the second body I’ve found in less than a year, it just got to me for a second.”
“Two bodies? Wow!”
“My mother has found three.”
Bertie’s breakdown had resulted in a comfortable, a girls-against-the-world feeling of camaraderie. Bertie entered a stall and said loudly over the door, “So, why are you here? City hall’s strictly a weekday gig, isn’t it?”
Silence. Bertie finished up and exited the stall. Tiffany was looking suspiciously at her. “Why?”
“Cheeze, cool it, I was just curious, if you don’t want to say, I don’t really care.”
Tiffany gave her a calculating stare. “Well, OK, but if you repeat it, I’ll deny it. I come in on the weekends because …” Tiffany looked around as if expecting a horde of people to be listening – “because my mom won’t let me out of the house dressed like this. I keep my makeup and clothes in a locker in the printers’ shower room.”
Bertie fought the urge to laugh. This was all too serious to Tiffany.
“You’d better learn to be paranoid in this place,” Tiffany continued. “Howard doesn’t like talk, he doesn’t like laughing, he doesn’t like fun and he doesn’t like anything that might get him into trouble with Dull Dill. Remember that and you’ll be OK here.”
Howard Schompe was the managing editor. He was so grim when Bertie met him that his face seemed crumpled in on itself, like a wadded-up ball of paper, and he’d never softened up.
“Yeah, he doesn’t seem very friendly.”
“Just keep your mouth shut around him. Seriously, there are the people he likes, then there are the rest of us. And for God’s sakes, don’t ever criticize Kathy Lee Gifford in front of him.”
“Kathy Lee Gifford? Why? Are they related?”
Tiffany made a noise that sounded like “pffffcchha.” “He loooovves Kathy Lee Gifford. No relation, but he thinks she’s the greatest thing since … I don’t know what. An intern was making fun of her one day – just casually, you know, joking around – and he made her life so miserable she quit. She not only quit, she changed her major from journalism to ceramics.”
“Ceramics? Like coffee mugs with ducks painted on them?”
“OK, fine arts, whatever.”
“Seems kinda silly.”
“You won’t think that if he ever gets you in his sights. Huh-uh. Do not talk in front of him. And if you’re smart, you’ll never talk about how much female editors fart or how much time they spend in a bathroom stall.”
Bertie was
ready to say she’d never do any such thing, but she knew she would so she stayed silent.
“Remember, there are cameras everywhere. They say it’s for security, but it’s really to spy on the employees. Find out where they are and be careful what you do and say around them.”
Bertie leaned against a sink. “You know, I could actually live with all that if I just felt like I was doing real journalism, not this … whatever you call this job. Nobody writes about society anymore.”
Tiffany turned sharply toward Bertie. “I wanted that job, didn’t you know that? And you got it and you don’t even want it. I can’t believe it.”
“You wanted this job?” Bertie looked at her black liner-ringed eyes, multi-colored hair and combat boots. “C’mon, this job is pretty lame. You have to hang around with snobby rich people who won’t talk to you, then list their names, that’s it.”
“Hey, you get to go to nice parties and get goody bags and meet famous people. And after what happened last night, you could be a commentator on TV, like on TruTV or something.”
Bertie was horrified. “I don’t want to be on TV,” she said.
“Then why did you go into journalism?” Tiffany looked puzzled.
Bertie wanted to say, “TV doesn’t have much to do with journalism,” but knew that at Tiffany’s age, she wouldn’t understand.
“I’m going to try to talk Howard into letting me write a story about the murder. I think it’s the only way I can get out of this job.”
Tiffany was silent for a moment. “If I help, unofficially of course, and you get another job, will you talk to Howard about giving me yours?”
“Umm, sure,” Bertie said, but wondered about the wisdom of such a deal.
“Well, then, here’s the first thing you need to know. Howard was banging Rowley Poke’s wife.”
“Howard who?”
“Howard Schompe! Who do you think I mean? They met at one of Dilly-willy’s parties and, you know, like hit it off. It was a big deal around here for a while last year, then someone told Dill-Boy and I guess he stopped it. The gossip sort of died away and I haven’t heard any more about it for a while.”
“Howard Schompe? The editor Howard Schompe? He’s such a stick.”
“Yeah, well, apparently he walks softly and carries a big stick.” Tiffany snickered.
“Do you think he killed Rowley Poke to get his wife? Cheeze!”
“It wouldn’t be the first time it’s ever happened, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” It was going to take Bertie a while to digest this information. Howard Schompe was not only physically uninspiring, he was the worst kind of boss – he viewed all his employees as The Enemy and treated them that way. Maybe he was different in the bedroom. “Ewwww,” Bertie thought, “don’t go there, Mallowan.”
After Tiffany left, Bertie stood for a few minutes, looking at herself in the mirror.
“I think I’d better start investing heavily in lottery tickets,” she said to her mirror-self, then left to write her story.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bertie struggled to finish her story about the Beverly Hills Association Gala. It wasn’t difficult, she was making it difficult, she decided. She’d read some of the stories written by her predecessor, Bromby Pompton, and they were mostly a straight recitation of who was there, what they were wearing, what food was served and – less important – the charity for which the gala was being held.
Several execution photos – people lined up against a wall and shot – featuring her boss, Dillard Johnson, with the biggest celebrity in attendance, accompanied the stories. Johnson had a big smile in all of them. There was one with a frowning Julia Roberts, another with George Clooney, who looked distracted, and others.
But Bertie wanted her story to be interesting. Like …
Mariela Jones-Smythe and her husband, Dr. Dean Jones-Smythe, arrived in Southern California from their home in France just in time to attend last night’s gala. Mariela was wearing a Haltoon-designed dress, which was so tight her eyes were popping out of her head. Blah, blah, blah.
Bertie liked it, but Mrs. Dr. Jones-Smythe wouldn’t. And more importantly, neither would her employer.
Of course last night’s party had been livened up considerably by the murder, but Bertie was given strict instructions not to mention the murder in her story. “That’s like not mentioning the giraffe you forgot to sweep out of the living room while you were cleaning,” she thought.
She stared out the window for a while and typed several nonsense words, just to get limber, then she typed Rowley Poke’s name in the search line to see what popped up.
Poke was credited with starting the green movement in the city, at a time when only a few nuts and maybe Euell Gibbons, cared about how the planet was being treated. In old photos, he looked and dressed like a hippie – T-shirts with slogans (“The Unbearable Lightness of Greening”), raggedy jeans and sandals, long hair. He had the doughy face she remembered from last night, but he was considerably leaner and had a head full of black, wavy hair that reached to his shoulders. In one of the photos, an earring sparkled in the sunlight.
At the start of his career, he seemed to waver between environmental awareness and eco-terrorism.
One story skirted gingerly around accusing him of setting fire to a float in the Rancho Cucamonga Fourth of July parade. The float was a frothy confection of toilet paper carnations tortured into the shape of George Washington’s head. Thanks to the toilet paper, the first president was not only soft and absorbent, but also highly flammable. He shot up in flames and burned in less than five minutes.
There was a picture of a snarling Poke being hauled off in cuffs by two cops.
No charges had been filed against Poke because the kid driving the float had a bong, matches and a dime bag of grass on him. He’d been driving erratically, and after the fire on his own float started, he rammed a flaming George into the back of a TP-festooned float carrying a gaily waving Miss Cucamonga. The fire spread onto that float and for awhile, it looked like the entire parade was destined to go up in smoke.
Bertie was trying to muffle her giggles when Howard Schompe, who’d come up behind her, tapped her on the shoulder. “What are you doing, Bertie? We’re waiting for your story.”
She let out a small scream of surprise. “Cheeze, Howard, don’t scare me like that. Can’t you make a little noise instead of sneaking up on a person like that?”
“A, I didn’t sneak up on you and B, I told you not to include Poke in your story.”
“A, if I didn’t hear you, it’s the same thing as sneaking up on me and B, I’m not writing about Poke, but the guy did die on me, more or less. I’m curious, that’s all.”
Although their tones were light – just an editor and his reporter exchanging banter, hahaha, all friends – the words were pointed on both sides.
“You can be naturally curious later, finish your story so I can go home.”
Howard wasn’t very tall, but he towered over her as she sat at her desk, something that irked Bertie. He was outstandingly average: short brown hair, brown eyes, somewhere in the middle of middle-aged, and with a grayish tint to his skin. He dressed like he was expected to dress, a shirt and tie and nondescript suit and shoes. His middle-management” uniform never varied, even on casual Fridays when plaid shirts, sandals and sometimes even shorts were the norm. Altogether he was a big zero.
Howard was on his fourth marriage (it always amazed her that men with no apparent attractive qualities often mated multiple times) and she wondered if he spent so much time away from home because this marriage was heading for divorce, too, or if the marriage was headed for divorce because he spent so much time at the paper. “Obviously he doesn’t spend all his time here, if he had time to poke Mrs. Poke,” Bertie thought..
She gave up trying to make her story interesting and concentrated on getting the names spelled correctly before sending it to Howard for a quick read so that she could leave.
After getting a grudgin
g “Good job,” from him she had no more excuses – she’d have to go home and face what was waiting for her. She closed down her computer and looked around for the first time in an hour. This side of the newsroom was deserted, almost dark, except for the bank of fluorescents glaring down over her desk.
On the other side of the room, across an expanse of empty cubicles, was an oasis of light where the skeleton Saturday night crew was working. It gave her a comforted feeling to see them bent over their computers, typing in the next day’s news. As Bertie made her way out of the building, it was the same on every floor – a few people here and there working into the night to get the paper out. It was a wonderful tradition that had continued at newspapers around the world for decades, maybe even centuries, and Bertie took pride in the steady rhythm of newsgathering and sharing.
But the almost empty rooms and dark building was also a foreshadowing of the bleak future of journalism.
Fewer and fewer people were doing a job that once took thousands, while Internet “cell-phone reporters” were shooting video, sending it to a Web site and calling it news. It was the end of an industry that had started even before Gutenberg invented the printing press and Bertie mourned its loss.
She stood at the front door and looked back into the empty and dark building before she turned and left, the heavy door sighing shut behind her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bertie stopped at her neighborhood grocery store to pick up milk and eggs. While she shopped, she dredged her mind for more errands she might run. Usually Saturdays and Sundays were ruled by how many chores she could cram into her few hours off before returning to work on Monday, but now, when she wanted to delay going home, she couldn’t think of another thing.
She stared unseeingly at the racks of produce. “Isn’t that always the way?” she said out loud to the celery, which chose not to respond. She walked aimlessly around the little store until she had no more excuse to linger.
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