by Allen Steele
No proof, no story. Unproven allegations didn’t mean shit to him. I should have known better. “Aw, man, I’m sorry, Pearl. I didn’t—”
“Don’t call me Pearl,” he said. He hated his nickname, even though everyone used it. He glanced at his watch. “You were supposed to be at the staff meeting.”
“Oh … yeah. Staff meeting.” I sat down at my desk and rubbed my eyes. “When it’s supposed to start?”
“A half-hour ago. You missed it. That’s why I’m up here.” He started to walk toward the bathroom, then caught a whiff through the door and thought better of it. He cocked his thumb toward the john. “Is there anything alive in there?”
“Nothing you haven’t seen before.” I stood up from the desk. “Okay, I’m sorry for missing the meeting. I’ll come down right now—”
“Naw, man. If you came downstairs now, you’d only make everyone sick.” He shook his head in disgust, then favored me with a little smile. “You worked hard last night. Get a shower and put on some clean clothes.”
“Thanks. I’ll be down in a half-hour—”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes, and tell the president I think he’s a dickhead and I don’t believe in world peace.” His smile faded. “If I don’t see you in fifteen, you can begin updating your resume. Got it?”
“Got it.” I didn’t like the sound of that.
“See you downstairs.” He turned around and tromped back through the door. “And clean this shit up. It’s embarrassing … to me, at any rate.”
He slammed the door on the way out.
The offices of the Big Muddy Inquirer were spread across a large room occupying the second floor of the building, its various departments separated from each other only by cheap plastic partitions. The place resembled a lab maze for down-on-their-luck mice: computer terminals on battered gray metal desks, fluorescent lights hung from pipes and ductwork along the cobwebbed ceiling, checkerwork brick walls plastered with old posters for rock concerts. Near the stairwell leading to the front door was the personals desk, where a steady parade of lonely people visited to place their ads for other lonely people; at the opposite end of the room was the layout department, where a handful of bohemian graphic artists pasted up the pages within a perpetual haze of marijuana fumes, vented only by a half-open window. Radical chic long after it was chic to be radical and Tom Wolfe had gone to the great word processor in the sky.
Somewhere in the middle of the room was the editorial department: four desks shoved together in a small cubicle, with Horace—the paper’s unofficial mascot, a trophy-mounted moose head decked out in oversized sunglasses and a Cardinals baseball cap—standing watch over the proceedings. The two other staff writers were out on assignment, allowing John Tiernan and me a chance to have our own little staff meeting regarding the events of the previous night.
John was the oddest person working for the Big Muddy in that he was the only staffer who closely resembled a normal human being. At a paper where everyone drank or smoked dope or experimented with various bathtub hallucinogens, John’s only apparent vice was chewing gum. While most people reported to work in jeans, T-shirts, and football jerseys, and our arts editor frequently sported an opera cape and a pince-nez, John came in wearing a business suit, a button-down Oxford shirt, and a plain tie. Sometimes he wore sneakers, but that was as informal as he got. He wore his hair neither too short nor too long, shaved every day, and probably couldn’t say “shit” even if his mouth was full of it. He had a wife and a kid and two cats, lived in a small house in the western ’burbs, attended Catholic mass every Sunday morning, and probably gave the most boring confessions a priest had ever heard.
No one at the Big Muddy ever gave him flak about his straitlaced ways. John was not only tolerant of all the bent personalities around him, he was also the best investigative reporter in the city. Earl would have sold his own son into slavery before giving up John Tiernan to another paper.
“Did you get her name?” he asked once I had given him the rundown of the Muny raid.
“Uh-uh,” I replied. “I didn’t even get that good of a look at her, beyond what I just told you. But she didn’t belong there, man. She was no squatter.”
“Yeah. Okay.” John’s face was pensive. He had his feet up on his desktop next to his computer terminal; he opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “But you say she knew me—”
“She knew your name, but not your face. How else could she have mistaken me for you?” John offered me a stick of Dentyne; I shook my head and he unwrapped the stick for himself. “Does she sound familiar?”
“I dunno. Could be anyone, I guess.” He shrugged as he wadded up the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he used the computer’s trackball to save the story he had been working on. “And she said she wants me to meet her at Clancy’s tonight at eight?”
“Right, and not to believe any other messages you happen to receive from Dingbat …”
John grinned from one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right. I suppose I’m not to believe anything I hear on the phone, either. Weird.” He shook his head, then dropped his feet from the desk and swiveled around in his chair to face the screen. “Well, I gotta finish this thing, then I’ve got a press conference to cover at noon …”
I snapped my fingers as another thought suddenly occurred to me. Chalk it up to my hangover that I buried the lead. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “one more thing. When I asked her what this was all about, she told me two words … um, ‘ruby fulcrum.’”
John’s hands froze above the keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I could see from the change in his expression that he was no longer concentrating on the minor news item he had been writing.
“Come again?” he said quietly.
“Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated. “I checked it out with Joker, but it couldn’t tell me anything. Why, does that ring a bell?”
He dropped his hands from the keyboard and turned back around in his chair. “Tell me everything one more time,” he said. “Slowly.”
Let me tell you a little more about John Tiernan.
John and I were old friends since our college days in the nineties, when we had met at j-school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. We were both St. Louis natives, which meant something in a class full of out-of-staters, and we worked together on the city desk at the campus daily, chasing fire engines and writing bits. After we had received our sheepskins, I went north to work as a staff writer for an alternative paper in Massachusetts, while John remained in Missouri to accept a job as a general assignments reporter for the Post-Dispatch, but we had stayed in touch. We married our respective college girlfriends at nearly the same time; I tied the knot with Marianne two months after John got hitched to Sandy. Even our kids, Jamie and Charles, were born in the same year. Things go like that sometimes.
About the same time that I bailed out of journalism, John moved into investigative reporting for the Post-Dispatch. When I began to seriously consider getting Marianne and Jamie out of the northeast, John had urged me to return to St. Louis, saying that he could put in a good word for me at the Post-Dispatch. I went halfway with him; my family moved back to Missouri, but I decided that I had had enough with journalism. A New York publisher was interested in my novel-in-progress, and Marianne had agreed to support us during the period it took for me to get the book finished. John made the same offer again after he left the Post to go to work for Pearl, but I still wasn’t interested. The novel was going well, and I didn’t have any desire to go back to being a reporter.
And then there was the quake, and Jamie’s death, and my separation from Marianne, and suddenly I found myself living in a cheap motel near the airport with only a few dollars in my wallet. I did as well as I could for a while, doing odd jobs for under-the-table slave wages, until one morning I found myself on a pay phone, calling John at his office to ask if his offer was still valid and, by the way, did he know of any apartments I could rent? John came through
on both accounts, and he probably saved my sanity by doing so.
This all goes to show that John Tiernan was my best friend and that there was little which was secret between us.
Yet there were secrets; John was a consummate professional, and good investigative reporters don’t discuss their work even with close buddies. I knew that John played his cards close to his chest and accepted that fact as a given, and so I wasn’t terrifically upset when he wouldn’t disclose everything he knew.
“This ruby fulcrum biz … it’s important, isn’t it?”
He slowly nodded his head as he rubbed his chin between his fingertips. “Yeah, it means something.” He gazed out the window at the gothic steeple of St. Vincent de Paul, rising above the flat rooftops a few blocks away. “It’s part of the story I’m working on right now … and I think I know the person you met last night.”
“A source?” I reached across him to the pack of gum and pulled out a stick. “I take it you haven’t met her.”
John shook his head. “Just a couple of anonymous tips that were e-mailed to me a few weeks ago. I can see how she might have confused you with me last night, since you were obviously waiting for someone at the gate, but …”
He shrugged. “Darned if I know how you got sent an IM meant for me on your PT. The prefixes aren’t identical. That’s never happened before.”
“Some kind of screw-up in the net. I dunno. I received a message meant for you by accident, and …”
We looked at each other and slowly shook our heads. Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy was my mother-in-law. The odds of a random occurrence like this were as likely as trying to call your mother-in-law and reaching an emergency hot line between the White House and the Kremlin instead. Yeah, it could happen … oh, and by the way, you’ve just won the Illinois State Lottery and you’re now a millionaire, all because you happened to pick up a lottery ticket somebody had dropped on the sidewalk.
Coincidence, my ass … and neither of us believed in the Tooth Fairy.
“Let me ask you,” John said after a moment. “If you saw this woman again, would you recognize her? I mean, you said it was dark and rainy and all that, but—”
“If we had gotten any closer, I would have had to ask her for a date. Yeah, I’d recognize her.” I unwrapped a piece of gum and curled it into my mouth. “Where do you think we’re going to find her? Go over to the stadium and ask if they busted any middle-aged black women last night?”
John smiled, then he swiveled around to pick up his leatherbound notebook from his desk. Opening the cover, he pulled a white engraved card out of the inside pocket and extended it to me. “Funny you should ask …”
I took the card from his hand and looked at it. It was a press invitation to a private reception at some company called the Tiptree Corporation, to be held at noon today. I turned the card over between my fingertips. “Here?”
“Here,” he said. “She works for them.”
Coincidence City.
“But you don’t know her name …” He shook his head. I turned the card over and noticed that it was addressed personally to him. “Wonder why she didn’t just tell me she’d meet you at this reception.”
“There’s good reasons,” he replied. “Besides, she probably didn’t even know I was going to be there. The company probably sent a few dozen out to reporters in the city—”
“And I didn’t get one?” I felt mildly snubbed, even though I was fully aware that it was only senior reporters who got invited to things like this.
“It’s just one of those brie and white wine sort of things …”
“But I love cheese and wine.”
“Yeah, nothing gets between you and cheese.” I gave him a stern look, and he met it with a wide grin. Friendship means that you don’t deck someone for making asshole remarks like that. “Anyway, another one was sent to Jah. Apparently they want a photographer on hand. If you can finagle the other invitation from him …”
“I’m on it.” I stood up, heading for the back staircase leading to the basement. “When are you leaving?”
John glanced at his watch. “Soon as you get back up here. It’s out in west county somewhere, so we’ll have to drive. Don’t stop for coffee.”
“Not even for tea. I’ll see you out front in fifteen minutes.” John gave me the thumbs-up and I went straight for the stairs.
Pearl didn’t glance up from his desk as I slipped past his cubicle; for a moment I had the guilty notion that I should drop by, knock on the door, and tell him where I was headed. But if I did, he would probably insist that I stay put in the office until I had met the deadline for my column, even if it was more than twenty-four hours away. The notion, along with the guilt, quickly evaporated. My column could wait; for the first time in months, I had a real story to pursue, even if it was John’s byline that would appear on the final product.
I wanted a hot story.
For my sins both past and future, I was given one. When it was all over and done, I would never want to tag along on another assignment again.
6
(Thursday; 10:17 A.M.)
CRAIG BAILEY’S DARKROOM WAS in the basement, down where a microbrewery would eventually have been located had his father been successful in opening a saloon on the ground floor. I found Jah slouched in front of his VR editor, wearing an oversized HMD helmet as his hands wandered over a keyboard, manipulating various pieces of videotape and computer-generated imagery into his latest work of interactive cinema.
Working for his dad as the Big Muddy’s photo chief was just a day job for Jah, and a temporary one at that. His real ambition was to move to California and go to work for Disney or LucasWorks, and every cent he earned from his grumpy old man went to buying more hardware and software to feed his obsession. For this, the University of Missouri basketball coach was crying bitter tears; Jah stood about six-ten in his stocking feet, plus or minus a few extra inches of dreadlocks. He was hell on the half-court—I once made the mistake of playing one-on-one with him after work for a dollar a point and lost half a day’s take-home pay—but Jah would rather dick around in virtual reality while blasting old reggae and techno CDs at stone-deaf volume.
I had no problem getting the extra press invitation from Jah; he was involved with his latest project and really didn’t want to go out to west city just to take pictures of business types swilling martinis. He loaned me one of the paper’s Nikons, loading a disc into the camera for me and reprogramming the thing to full-auto so that I wouldn’t have to futz around with the viewfinder menu, and gave me a spare necktie from the pile next to the disk processor, thus making the disguise complete. A tie with a washed-out denim shirt would look a little strange where I was going, but formal wear for news photographers usually means that they changed their jeans today.
“Got a minute to look at this?” he asked when we were done. He held up the VR helmet. “Sort of a documentary … you might like it.”
I shook my head as I pulled the camera strap over my shoulder. “Catch me in the next episode, okay? I gotta book outta here before your pop finds I’m missing.”
He looked disappointed but nodded his head. “I hope you’re not fucking with him. He’s kinda pissed at you these days.” He glanced at the door as if expecting to see the elder Bailey’s shadow lurking in the stairwell. “Fact, man. He’s been talking about making some changes ’round here, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but neither did I have time to further inquire what Bailey and son discussed over the dinner table. “Believe me, I’m not trying to fuck with your dad. I’m just trying to—”
“Hey, that’s cool.” Jah held up his hands, keeping his distance from the bad vibes between his father and me. “So long as you come back with some shots for next week, we’re solid.”
“Sold for a dollar.” We elbow-bumped, then he headed back to his workbench as I made for the basement door, avoiding taking the stairs back to the office.
John was waiting for me a
cross the street from the office, leaning against the hood of his Deimos. “I don’t think Pearl missed you,” he said in reply to my unasked question as he dug a remote out of his pocket; the Pontiac’s front doors unlocked and pivoted upward. “He’s busy editing the arts page for next week.”
“Fine with me.” I walked around to the passenger side and slid into the seat as John took the driver’s seat. “I just talked to Jah, though. He says Pearl’s thinking about making some staff changes.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.” John pressed his thumb against the ignition plate as the doors closed; the car started up as the seat harnesses wrapped themselves around our bodies. “Pearl’s always talked that way,” he said, opening the steering column keypad and tapping in the street address for the Tiptree Corporation. “When he had his band, he used to say the same thing whenever he had an off night. Y’know … ‘That drummer sucks, I gotta get a new drummer before the next gig.’ That sort of thing.”
“Uh-huh.” A map of metro St. Louis appeared on the dashboard screen, a bright red line designating the shortest course between us and our destination. “How many drummers did the Howlers have?”
“Umm … I think I lost count,” he murmured as he eased away from the curb. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing—”
“Yeah. Okay.” John was trying to be candid and comforting at the same time, yet I couldn’t refrain from glancing up at the second-floor windows as we headed down Geyer toward Broadway. I couldn’t see Pearl, but nonetheless I could feel his angry presence.
Something had better come out of this field trip, or I was screwed.
The main office of the Tiptree Corporation was located on the western outskirts of St. Louis in Ballwin, not far from the Missouri River. We took Route 40/I-64 until downtown faded far behind us, then got off on the I-270 outer belt and followed it until we found the Clayton Road exit. By now we were in the gentrified suburbs, where subdivisions and shopping plazas had replaced farms in the latter part of the last century. The quake had destroyed most of the flimsier tract homes and cookie-cutter malls that had been thrown up during the building boom of the eighties; bulldozers and backhoes could be seen from the highway, completing the demolition of homes and stores that had been initiated by New Madrid. Architectural Darwinism: quakes kill buildings, but only the sick and feeble ones.
