“Nah, I don’t think they probably would know. They’re not as smart as you.”
It was shameless, but luckily Lenny didn’t seem to notice. For a second I thought it was my bodacious bod that was doing the trick, but as it turned out, he was staring down at my other cookie. It was damned attractive, laden with walnuts and M&M’s. It broke my heart, but I gave it to him.
I stood there while he chewed, and when he had finally swallowed enough to make his loaded mouth merely indecent, he answered. “Definitely,” he said.
“Definitely what?”
“The environmental reports were definitely straight up.”
“How do you know?”
“Jeepers, Alex. You’re a reporter. Look at the sources. Glenn made sure they got guys who’re pro-environment to begin with, so nobody’d say they’re biased. Even Charlie Brewster signed off on it.”
“Who?”
“He’s that emeritus prof they call ‘Mr. Mohawk Lake.’ I mean, come on. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
The singers had moved on to “Cool Change,” which has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I listened to it for a minute before I answered. “So that’s it? You think the results are solid because you trust the people who did the research?”
“You’re making it sound like that’s, I don’t know, sordid or something. All I’m saying is, these guys live by their scientific reputations. If they signed off on the project and then the lake got screwed up somehow, it’d be the kiss of death. So yeah, I trust them.”
“Fair enough.”
“Where’d you get this crap, anyway?”
“I told you, from the protesters.”
“Which one? Or are you gonna give me some junk about protecting your sources?”
“I’m quoting the guy in tomorrow’s paper, so no. His name’s Axel Robinette. Also his buddy”—I looked down at my notebook—“Robert Sturdivant.”
Lenny gave a horsey laugh. “Sturdivant? Huh. Reliable source you got there.”
“You know him?”
He looked down at his unlaced Docksides. “Kinda.”
“From the anti–Deep Lake thing?”
“Look, I gotta get back to work. I’m supposed to be handling the media.”
“Hey, I’m the media. Handle me.”
He looked me up and down, then made a snorting sound. “Cute.”
“Come on, Lenny, what’s the big deal? Just tell me how you know them and I’ll free you up for Katie Couric.”
His eyes lit up for a millisecond. “Is she…Oh. You’re kidding.”
“Come on, don’t keep me in suspense. How do you know them?”
“You know, there’s something I always wanted to say to you.”
“What’s that?”
He started to walk away. Then he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and smiled his bucktoothed smile.
“No comment,” he said.
CHAPTER10
I was in the newsroom the next day, supposedly writing a profile of a Benson freshman but really contemplating what I was going to wear to dinner with Cody that night, when my worst nightmare walked up the newsroom stairs.
Okay, to be more specific… it wasn’t my own personal worst nightmare; rather, it was the worst nightmare of journalists in general.
And that would be: grieving relatives.
Because, you see, when somebody dies—particularly when they die suddenly and young—it’s all but inevitable that the media is going to piss off the family and friends, or at least dissatisfy them. These people have lost something precious, and there’s no way on earth that anything can make them happy, at least in the short term.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing them at all. Their reaction is only natural—and when someone I loved died a few years ago, I felt exactly the same way.
No obituary is long or worshipful enough. Media attention is intrusive; a lack of media attention is insulting. Reporters ask the wrong questions, or they ask the right questions too many times. When the death is covered on the front page, the family is tortured every time they pass a newsstand; when it’s shunted to the inside, it’s as though the paper is saying their loved one doesn’t matter. Asking people to describe what the victim was like is downright cruel—almost as cruel as not asking.
You get the idea.
So you can understand why, when Tom Giamotti’s parents walked into the newsroom, I tried to slouch behind my terminal and hide. And when I realized that the three people with them were Billy Halpern’s parents and Shaun Kirtz’s mother, it was all I could do not to crawl under the desk.
They were greeted by the newsroom secretary, who—merciful God—had just come back from a cigarette break. Mr. Giamotti said they were there to see Marilyn, and when Kathie asked him if they had an appointment, he said they didn’t. She told him she’d check, but that Marilyn was a very busy person and the odds that she could see them weren’t good. I slunk down even farther.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I’m Vince Giamotti. This is my wife, Nancy. These people are Bill and Janice Halpern and Marsha Kirtz.”
“Okay, I’ll just—” Then the names clicked. “Oh. Oh. Let me see if she can see you.” I caught the top of her head bobbing as she sprinted into the office, emerging seconds later. “Please come right in,” she said, smiling way too broadly.
She showed them into the office, and when she emerged, she went hunting for two more chairs, which she pinched from behind Lillian and Ochoa’s desks. After she delivered them, she shut the door behind her and sat down at her desk with a dodged-that-bullet sort of whistle. I retained my defensive perch for a couple of minutes, and was just sitting up and breathing my own little sigh of relief when Marilyn’s door opened a foot.
“Alex?”
Damn. “Um…yeah?”
“Would you come in here and join us, please?”
She sounded extremely polite, which put me on guard for something truly awful. As I walked toward the office, Mad whistled the Darth Vader death march under his breath. I was just about to mutter some choice obscenities when Marilyn called out again in the same scary-nice voice.
“Jake? Would you come in here too, please?”
“Jake?” I stage-whispered to him. “We are so screwed.…”
Mad let me go first, which I in no way mistook for chivalry. When we got in there, we had to stand in the corner next to the door, since Marilyn’s already-compact office was packed solid.
“Alex Bernier, Jake Madison,” she said. “These are the Giamottis, the Halperns, and Marsha Kirtz.” They acknowledged us with nods and hellos, none of them warm. “Jake is the science writer I was telling you about. And Alex”—their attention shifted to me en masse—“is the reporter who covered Melting Rock.”
The sentence hung there in the air for a while, laden with all sorts of unspoken ickyness.
Alex is the reporter who covered Melting Rock. Alex was there when your sons died. Alex snuck a peek at their corpses, then skipped over to the media tent to write about it. Then she went dancing and had some curly fries.
Okay, so I was feeling a little defensive. But it was hard not to, pinioned as I was by five pairs of grieving eyes.
“You wrote about our son’s funeral,” Janice Halpern said in a voice so blank I wasn’t sure if she was pissed about it. “I recognize your name.”
“Um…Actually, I covered all three funerals.”
More silence. For the second time in as many weeks, I longed to pitch myself through Marilyn’s office window. Finally, the boss took pity on me and said something.
“The Giamottis and the Halperns and”—I caught her glancing down at the notebook on her desk, though I doubt anyone else noticed—“Ms. Kirtz came in to talk about the coverage of their sons’ deaths. They feel that—”
“We feel that you people are being incredibly irresponsible.”
This from Vince Giamotti, who sounded equal parts angry and exhausted. I girded myself for t
he standard lecture about how we were exploiting their pain to sell papers—how if another reporter bothered them or their friends, they were going to call their lawyer, yadda-yadda-yadda. Why Marilyn had dragged us in here for this was beyond me.
“As we’ve been telling Ms. Zapinsky,” Giamotti went on, “there’s a vitally important story that you’re not telling. Now, I don’t know why you’re not telling it. None of us really want to get into who pulls the strings around here. But the purpose of a community newspaper is to serve the community, and I’ll tell you right now that the Gabriel Monitor is doing the community a disservice.”
I still had no idea what he was talking about; in fact, he seemed in imminent danger of losing it. His words were running together, and the tightness in his jaw said he was trying not to cry.
“The point is,” he continued, “there’s got to be more of those drugs out there—more of that garbage that killed our boys. Now, I don’t know why you don’t consider this to be newsworthy, but I can tell you the rest of the community doesn’t agree with you.”
He was starting to get choked up, and his wife put a hand on his arm. The other hand stayed in a white-knuckle clench around her handbag.
“We’re not trying to blame anyone,” she said, though nobody in the room believed her. “All we’re saying is that we don’t want this to…to happen to another family. We don’t want anyone else to go through what we’ve been going through.”
“We need you to help us get the word out,” Marsha Kirtz said in a matter-of-fact way that seemed to come out of nowhere. On second thought, though, it fit; with her graying braids and aging hippie manner, she was a breed apart from the Giamottis and the Halperns. “We can’t afford to let people’s interest in this wane. We need to have parents talking to their kids about it. Do you understand?” The three of us nodded. “Good. So what do you plan to do about it?”
Marilyn gave her own longing look, at the set of nunchakus hanging on the wall. “As I told you, our coverage has been driven in part by local law enforcement. If they aren’t actively—”
“Please don’t pass the buck,” Kirtz said. “We’ve all heard of freedom of the press. You don’t need the police to give you permission to write about something.”
Marilyn was managing to keep her temper in check, which for her constituted front-page news. “I didn’t say that we did. All I’m trying to tell you is that if the story isn’t there, we can’t cover it.”
Janice Halpern drew in a sharp breath. “Isn’t there? How can you say that …? Our children are dead. Don’t you dare even presume to tell us that—”
Her husband put an arm around her and made shushing sounds, though I got the feeling he was more embarrassed than anything else.
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn said. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded. Of course this is an important story. It’s an extremely important story. And as I’m sure you’ve seen, it’s had a presence in the paper almost every day since it happened.”
“But the stories are getting shorter and shorter,” Tom Giamotti’s mother said.
Her voice cracked at the end of the sentence; since I couldn’t bear to look at her, I stared down at my sandals. If Marilyn gave the poor woman a lecture on the structure of the news cycle, I was going to slit my wrists with her Japanese throwing star.
“In your opinion,” Marilyn said, “are the police doing an adequate job with the investigation?”
They looked to each other, and I saw Marsha Kirtz give Vince Giamotti some sort of unspoken go-ahead.
“Chief Stilwell is a good man,” he said, “and we all appreciate his desire to solve this case himself. All of us…I’m sure any one of us would love to get our hands on the person who sold our sons those drugs. And we’re all very fond of his daughter, Trish. But we feel as though …We’re concerned that he’s in over his head.”
“You think he should ask for help from other law-enforcement agencies?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you spoken to Chief Stilwell about your concerns?”
“We have, but…it doesn’t seem to have done a lot of good. He was very nice, but he obviously thinks he can handle this. We disagree.”
“And would you be willing to say that on the record?”
“I suppose so….Why?”
“Because,” Marilyn said, “that’s a story.”
• • •
THERE WERE, in fact, quite a few stories that came out of that excruciating Thursday morning. Ochoa, who’d missed the meeting by the dumb luck of being out on an interview, came back in time to do the piece that would run the next day under the headline FAMILIES PRESS FOR WIDER INVESTIGATION. Marilyn pushed the drug deaths back up to the top of the story budget, either because she was suddenly intrigued by the subject or (more likely) worried that the grieving relatives were going to take their sob story downstairs to the publisher’s office.
As for me and Mad: We got pulled off the pieces we were working on and assigned to put together a huge package on LSD—as the rack cards advertised, “Its science, its culture, its possible dangers.”
We spent most of Thursday doing research and setting up interviews. It was around five in the afternoon that the police scanner went off, and the day officially tilted toward the absurd.
Emergency control to Gabriel monitors. Report of a suspicious substance at the Deep Lake Cooling facility on East Shore Drive. Two G.F.D. units with paramedics are requested to respond to the scene with haz-mat gear. Repeat, haz-mat gear is required.…
“Haz-mat gear?” Ochoa said. “What do you think is going down over there?”
I looked to the scanner, which provided zip in the way of further information. “Maybe something went ker-bloowie.”
Mad shook his head. “That’s not supposed to happen. Whole system’s set up to be …What do they always say? ‘Passive and benign.’ ”
“Yo,” Ochoa said with a grin. “I likes my cooling like I likes my women.”
I cast about for something to throw at him. “You people are appalling.”
Bill came out of his office then, having caught wind of something interesting. “And which one of you appalling people wants to tell me what the hell’s going on?”
We filled him in, and he pondered which one of us was going to have the joy of going over to the cooling facility. Since I’d covered the Deep Lake open house—and since I didn’t have a story to file for the next day’s paper—I was the lucky winner. But at least I didn’t have to go alone; Bill’s parting shot was for me to get Melissa out of the darkroom and drag her along.
We got into my wee Beetle and wiggled our way out of the Monitor’s minuscule parking lot. By the time we got where we were going, the place was clogged with fire trucks, so we had to park a few hundred yards down the road where there was enough of a shoulder to keep the car from toppling into the lake.
We hiked back, and when we got to the top of the curvy driveway, we saw a trio of firemen in protective suits, their heads encased in oversize helmets with thick glass faceplates. It may sound futuristic, but frankly they looked like they ought to be shilling tires for Michelin. There were also two ambulances and a pair of cop cars, Gabriel’s finest never liking to be left out of the party. There were no other reporters in sight, which was no surprise. The local TV news goes on the air live at six, and they’re not a big enough operation to deal with a story that breaks at five-fifteen.
At fire scenes, at least in this town, you can usually tell from the gear who’s in charge. Regular firefighters wear yellow, while lieutenants and other muckety-mucks wear white. I saw plenty of guys in normal yellow coats, but I couldn’t find whoever was supposed to be the commander on the scene.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from covering this kind of spot news, it’s that you don’t want to piss off cops and firemen by sticking a notebook in their faces while they’re trying to do their jobs. So we wandered around the periphery for a while, keeping our distance from the mob at the cooling facil
ity’s front door. This wasn’t just a matter of respect, mind you; if there was really some awful chemical blowing around in there, we had no interest in inhaling it.
When fifteen minutes went by without anything exploding, I nosed closer in the hope of finding someone I knew. I didn’t recognize any of the firemen, but when I got to the other side of one of the ambulances, I encountered a very freaked-out Glenn Shardik.
The Deep Lake Cooling engineer was pacing around a tiny patch of asphalt, looking like he could use a hefty dose of elephant tranquilizer. If I were a nicer person I might have left him alone, but, hey, I’m a reporter.
“Hi, Glenn,” I said. He stopped pacing for a second and squinted at me. “Alex Bernier, from the Monitor. Remember me?”
“What? Oh. Yes. Of course.”
“So…can you tell me what’s going on?”
He ran a hand through his hair, which is so bushy his fingers got stuck. It must happen a lot, though, because he didn’t seem to notice. “What’s going on?” He started pacing back and forth again, so fast it was almost comic. “I’d love to know what’s going on. But nobody’s telling me anything, are they?”
“Well… what happened?”
I didn’t really expect him to answer, but apparently he was upset enough to overlook the fact that he was talking to a reporter.
“There’s something in the system,” he said. “And don’t ask me what, because I don’t know.” He looked over at the front door, still blocked by a cadre of firemen. “And I’m not going to find out anything soon, because they won’t let me back in….”
He was talking and walking a mile a minute. I grabbed him by the wrist and noticed that he had the hairiest forearms I’d ever seen on a two-legged animal. “Look, Glenn, why don’t we go sit down for a minute?”
“Where?”
It was a good question, but I had no answer; there’s no place to sit in the Deep Lake Cooling parking lot. “Then how about if we just stand still for a second, okay?”
He’d gone back to staring at the entrance. I doubted he was even listening to me.
“Listen, Glenn, can you just tell me what you saw in there?” He didn’t answer. “Glenn?”
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