by Bryan Gruley
He was taunting me. “OK, Ernest,” I said. Then I pronounced his full name.
V chuckled. “What are you going to do, get me fired? Remember, my friend, we were off the record. Blowing my cover would get you in more trouble than me.”
He was right, of course. Many of the rules of journalism are dressed in shades of gray, but this one is black and white: If you promise a source anonymity, you never reveal his or her identity. You keep your mouth shut. You go to jail before you unmask an anonymous source. A reporter who ratted out a source might as well leave the profession for good.
I hung up the phone without saying another word.
Pellets of sleet pricked my cheeks as I walked home. I’m screwed, I thought. It wasn’t V’s fault, either. Sure, he hadn’t told me the whole truth, but I had never sought it; hell, I’d avoided it. I’d worried less about his angle than I did about cops at the bus station suspecting me of drug dealing. And now, yes, technically I could plead ignorance about everything V had given me except that last little gift, the pass codes. On that count, I was dead. I’d used the codes to write my final masterpiece. The only way to absolve myself of that sin would be to go in that morning and confess to my editors.
Instead, I called in sick. I phoned in the final changes to my story. It ran that Sunday at the top of the front page and jumped inside to an entire page of copy dressed up with photographs and charts. The next week, I helped my bosses draft a letter nominating me for a Pulitzer Prize. All along, I kept telling myself that that last story-and every single story I had written about Superior’s pickup trucks-was true, that none of what I had reported would ever have come out if I had not used the voice mails, that no one ever would have known how Superior had tried to cover up its deadly mistakes. The stories were right, I told myself, and that’s all that matters.
Six months later, I was summoned to the office of Wendy Grimm, executive editor of the Times.
She sat behind a massive oak desk in a charcoal suit embellished by a bloodred silk scarf, her gray eyes fixed on a stapler she was fiddling with. A Times attorney named Ferris, whom I’d met once when he had reviewed and praised one of my Superior truck stories, sat glumly beside the desk. Grimm took her eyes off the stapler long enough to motion me into a chair. Her secretary closed the door behind me, shutting out the clatter of the newsroom.
“Gus,” Grimm said. She set the stapler down. “We have an issue.”
Wendy Grimm was a rising star in All-Media Corporation, the agglomeration of newspapers, TV and radio stations, and quick-copy companies that owned the Times. She’d come to the Times, her fifth newspaper in eleven years, only two years before and was expected to advance to the corporate offices in Dallas once she’d made her mark in Detroit. She’d had me in her office just a few months earlier to congratulate me on having my Superior truck stories selected as one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. That day she’d stood beaming at the framed certificates on the wall bearing witness to Pulitzers won by the Times in 1931 and 1954. “You’re next, Gus,” she’d said, knowing full well that my Pulitzer would be regarded by the corporate bosses as her Pulitzer.
After the Washington Post won the prize for a six-part series on the Congressional Budget Office, I’d actually felt relieved, because I had grown secretly terrified that winning the biggest prize might draw closer scrutiny of my reporting methods. Although I had continued to write an occasional story about Superior’s trucks, I’d cut off contact with V, rid myself of the bus station locker, and successfully resisted calling the voice mails again. I thought I’d put the previous year’s stories far enough behind me.
All of that changed when Wendy Grimm opened a desk drawer, took something out, and laid it on the desk in front of me. I immediately recognized the key to my old bus station locker, with “927” engraved on its bright orange fob. I felt Grimm and Ferris gauging my eyes and tried to stay calm through the sudden feeling that the bottom of my stomach was about to drop out.
“Tell us, Gus,” Wendy Grimm said. “Just how did you go about accessing Superior’s voice-mail system?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Only a couple of times.”
“Enough to get caught. Superior set up a trace.”
Yes, I thought. But the stories were true.
We sat there for a moment in silence. Wendy Grimm broke it.
“So who was your source?”
“The stories were true,” I said.
She picked up the stapler and slammed it down on her blotter. “Is that your rationalization for stealing property that wasn’t yours?” she said. “Who was your source?”
I looked at Ferris, then back at Wendy Grimm. “My source was anonymous,” I said.
“That isn’t what I asked,” she said. “Did you tell any of your editors about this person?”
“No one asked and, anyway, I didn’t need to tell anyone because I didn’t quote the voice mails.”
Wendy Grimm pressed her lips together and leaned forward over her hands, which were now folded together so tightly that her knuckles were white. “Gus, Superior is threatening lawsuits and some rather unflattering publicity. If we knew who your source was, we might be more comfortable in trying to deter them. If it was someone at Superior, I want his or her name. You will give it to me. Now.”
Normally a reporter would reveal an anonymous source’s name to an editor, who would then be bound by the same oath of confidentiality. At most papers, including the Times, refusing to do so was an offense that could get you fired. But it was clear by then that I was a goner anyway, and that this wasn’t about me or Superior or the trucks or even the Times. A fire was raging in Wendy Grimm’s building and she had to extinguish it before it spread to All-Media Corporation.
“I’m no longer in touch with the source,” I said. “He stays anonymous. That was my deal.”
“ Your deal, Gus? Your deal? Who do you think you work for? Do you realize how much shit you’ve brought down on me-on us, the Times, all of your colleagues?”
“Those trucks are burning people to death and Superior knows it. Every word I wrote was true.”
She smiled the brittle smile of a climber who could feel the rungs of the ladder snapping off beneath her feet. “We’re in a place now where that has become irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.” She turned to Ferris. “Phil?”
Ferris unfolded his praying mantis arms and outlined the lawsuits Superior was threatening: libel, slander, invasion of privacy, theft. One way or the other, he said, my methods would become known. The paper, my colleagues, Wendy Grimm, All-Media, all would be disgraced. Further, a libel jury might well have to disregard any evidence I’d collected with the help of the voice mails, because they were stolen property.
“Libel my butt,” I said. “Truth is a defense, as you told us over and over in your little newsroom seminars.”
Ferris looked annoyed. “Truth is not a defense,” he said, “until you’ve established what the truth is, until you’ve proven the truth.”
Wendy Grimm’s phone burbled electronically; she started to pick it up, then decided against it.
“Unfortunately,” Ferris continued, “without the aid of your purloined voice mails, we can’t prove very much, which means we’d be liable to lose a libel action.”
“These people are killers.”
“And we’d lose big,” Wendy Grimm said. Her phone rang again; again she ignored it. “We’re in discussions with Superior. The long and short of it is, we need you to resign, effective immediately.” She placed in front of me a single sheet of paper. At the bottom I saw my full name, “Augustus J. Carpenter,” typed where I was supposed to sign away my job. Until that morning, I had told myself that even if I did get caught with the voice mails, I’d only have to endure a beat change or maybe a suspension. They’d never fire me for writing stories that were true. Certainly not at Superior’s behest, and not without a fight. But sitting there, with my name in capital letters staring up at me, I knew I was dead.
Ferris withdrew an expensive-looking pen from inside his jacket. “Sign, please,” he said, “or we will be forced to terminate you.”
“They’re killing people.”
Wendy Grimm’s secretary ducked her head into the office. “It’s Al on four,” she said. “Better pick up.” I could hear computer keys clacking in the newsroom outside. Grimm held up one finger to hold the call.
“I don’t have time for this, Gus,” she said. “Just sign the damn letter. Or don’t sign, and you can get yourself into even more trouble.” She pressed a button on her phone. “Security, please.”
My brain stopped working then. I felt like I felt when we’d lost a hockey game in sudden-death overtime. When you lose like that, it happens so fast that at first you can’t believe it. But then you see the refs leaving and the other team celebrating and you look up at the zeroed-out clock and the certainty of your failure tears through you like a tumbling bullet. Losing in regulation time doesn’t hurt as much. The clock runs down. You prepare. In overtime, you just die.
I took the pen.
Soon, I was back in Starvation Lake. With my first Pilot paycheck I made part of a down payment on a used Ford pickup truck.
Two days before Christmas, my lawyer called. I had never met Scott Trenton, having hired him over the phone on the recommendation of another Times reporter who had used him for her divorce.
“The news isn’t too frigging favorable,” he said. I was in my kitchen, wrapping gifts for Mom. A robe, a fancy cribbage board, a gift certificate for dinner at a restaurant in Ellsworth. Freezing rain had coated my window with ice. For months I had heard nothing about my situation as the Times and Superior tried to negotiate a settlement that would avert a libel suit. Superior’s lawyers would have loved to stick the paper for a front-page apology, but the company’s executives weren’t eager for anything that would draw more attention to their death-trap trucks.
Trenton explained that Superior was seeking the Times ’s cooperation in the Hanover litigation. The Hanovers were the Indiana family who had lost their son Justin in a flaming truck and later won the $354 million verdict against Superior, based in part on my stories. Superior had appealed. Now it wanted the Times to file an affidavit with the court stating that my stories were less than accurate, which might in turn nudge the court to throw the case out. The Hanovers would then have to decide whether to endure a second trial and another six to twelve months of reliving their son’s death.
“It’s not pretty,” Trenton said. “So far, Superior and the paper haven’t been able to agree on the language of the affidavit. But they’ll get there. They’ll probably file one minute before five o’clock on New Year’s Eve.”
There was more. In separate settlement negotiations between Superior and the Hanovers, the family had agreed to drop their lawsuit in return for Superior contributing $200 million to a fund that would subsidize alterations of the trucks for owners who wanted them. The Hanovers would also receive a $5 million cash payment, most of which would go to their lawyers.
“They won’t get the windfall,” Trenton said, “but some of the trucks might actually get safer.”
“That’s what they said they wanted all along.”
“Between you and me and the barn door, Gus, plaintiffs always say that. Really most of them want a mountain of cash and maybe a CEO with his testicles in a bear trap.”
“The Hanovers are good people.”
He paused. “Yes, they are. Which is what makes this last little detail a bit of a problem. Superior has stipulated that a condition of their going through with the Hanover deal is you have to give them the name of your voice-mail source.”
“They can’t do that.”
“They’re doing it, friend.”
“They must know who it is. They had the key to my damn locker.”
“Whether they know or not, Gus, they want you to tell them, OK? If you don’t, the Hanovers don’t get their settlement.”
“The hell with them.”
“Then it’s the hell with the Hanovers, too, because Superior says this is not negotiable. No name, the deal with the family’s off, and they take their chances on the appeal, which won’t be too good after the Times tells the court your stories are bullshit.”
“But they weren’t bullshit.”
“Frigging tough to argue in the shoes you’re wearing now.”
My anger felt like it would suffocate me there in my kitchen, surrounded by wrapping paper and Scotch tape. I wanted to shove the phone through the icy windowpane into the pelting needles of rain.
“I can’t fucking believe this.”
“Believe,” Trenton said. “And one more thing: If you don’t give up the name, Superior will also go after you for felony theft.”
“Why the hell do they care so much about the source?”
“I wish I knew. All their lawyers will say is they have their reasons.”
“Right. They want to fuck with me. So, basically, I can screw the Hanovers or I can screw myself. Either way, Superior comes out OK, and tough shit for all the poor bastards who fry in their trucks.”
“My advice?” Trenton said. “Give the guy up.”
“How do you know it’s-”
“Shut the hell up a second and listen to your attorney. You’re pissed off and I don’t blame you. But you don’t owe this voice-mail guy or gal or whatever a thing. You two made a deal: He tells the truth, you protect his identity. But he didn’t tell you he’d been canned. He lied. You couldn’t know his motives were questionable. That’s a breach of contract. You’re no longer under any legal obligation to cover for him.”
Technically, he may have been right, but I didn’t think that V had lied to me. As a journalist, it was nice to imagine that, in extending the cloak of anonymity, you were protecting brave and noble people who were risking their livelihoods or maybe even their lives to tell you things you weren’t supposed to know and were unlikely to learn otherwise. But a lot of the time-hell, most of the time-you weren’t protecting the brave or the noble. Most of the time you were shielding lawyers and flacks and lobbyists and other dissemblers who knew exactly how to exploit your convenient little rule of anonymity so they could shape your story without leaving fingerprints. Yes, V hadn’t told me the whole truth. But I never sought the whole truth. V told me what I wanted to hear, and I eagerly, willingly, hungrily swallowed it. He got what he wanted, I got what I wanted. And the truth was now, as Wendy Grimm had said, irrelevant.
“When do they need to know?” I asked Trenton.
“ASAP.”
“Merry Christmas, Scott,” I said, as I dropped the receiver in the cradle. Then I picked it up again and dialed V. I heard one ring followed by three high-pitched beeps, then a recording saying the number had been disconnected.
sixteen
So have you told them yet?” Joanie said. We had finished the beers and most of the nacho chips while I was telling my story.
“Told them what?” I said.
“Told them to go to hell, what else?”
She wasn’t letting me off the hook. “I haven’t told them anything yet.”
“Look, Gus. Maybe you shouldn’t have stolen the voice mails. But what’s done is done. You’re still here, doing what you do. Don’t mess that up. There’s no wiggle room here. You can’t give up a source. Period. Did the Times file that thing Superior wanted, saying your stories were bull?”
“Yep.”
“Nobody noticed?”
“The court sealed it. But it’ll be public when the ruling comes.”
“Which is when?”
“Superior’s lawyers are expecting it Friday. I have until Tuesday to decide. If I give up my source, they settle with the Hanovers and the appeal is moot. If I don’t, and Superior wins the appeal, the Hanovers are screwed.”
“The Hanovers are not your responsibility, Gus.”
“Yes, they are.”
“No. You cannot-wait, hold on.” She yanked a pager out from
under her sweater and peered into it. “Oh, gosh, I gotta go,” she said. I watched as she stuffed notebooks and papers into her backpack and threw on her coat.
“Where are you going?” I said.
She ignored that. “Will you be in early tomorrow?”
“Probably. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ll do the Dingus press conference?”
“Yeah.”
“The zoning board’s at two.”
She was almost out the door. “Oh, right. I wish I could do that, too, but looks like I’ll be wrapped up with the cops.”
I heard the bells jangle on the front door. I’d started collecting the empties when I heard the bells again. Joanie reappeared, breathless. “I got it,” she said. “‘Sound Off: Do you believe there are underwater tunnels in the lake?’”
“Done,” I said.
I left Tillie a note about the Sound Off question and went up the inside stairs to my apartment. As I reached the top I heard a voice outside. Through the curtains I saw Soupy sitting on the landing, his head in his hands, a bottle between his snow-slickened boots. His jacket was unbuttoned. He was shaking his head and muttering something. I stepped outside.
“Soup?”
He didn’t look up. He just kept shaking his head. “What the fuck, Trap?” he was saying. “What the fuck you doing to me?”
“Soupy, what are you talking about?”
“You fucking know, Trap.” He was drunker than he’d sounded when he called from his truck. Barely two fingers of whiskey remained in his bottle of Old Crow. I reached for it, but he pulled it away.
“The Crow, man,” Soupy said. He took a swallow. “All I got. You want that, too?”
“Come on in, Soup.”
“I’m fine, see?” he slurred. Then he tilted his head back and squawked like a crow: “Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“You’re going to wake the whole town. Come in, please.”
He tore off his hat and swiveled his head up toward me, his face a rubbery grin. “Quite a night,” he said. “Two beers-make that three, three beers-and a shot with my dear old pal.”
