Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  “Hey, you’re the columnist,” the plainclothesman says. “I like your stuff,” he adds. “I never used to look at the business pages before.”

  He introduces himself as Sergeant Mazolli. “One Z,” he says. Journalists should never stereotype, but he looks like the guy who’s owned your favorite Italian restaurant for years: portly, fleshy-faced, stubby cigars for eyebrows and an expression that’s friendly as long as you don’t push it. I put my notebook away. Mazolli wants to discuss high finance. I stare toward the Toyota. I remember the view off Troy Hardesty’s boastful balcony, dizzy, free-fall, devil nightmare, all the way down to the people-ants along Fourth Avenue. What would you think about on the way down? Would you have enough time to wonder if you’d made a big mistake? Or would it just be one long terror ride to the surface?

  “Take the Chinese,” Mazolli says. “They’re loving these wars. We spend the blood and treasure, and they just keep racking up our debt. What is it? Six-hundred billion a year we borrow from them? And all so we could buy their junk.” I nod knowingly. He finally gets down to business.

  My hands are shaking. I may or may not have been the last person to see Troy Hardesty alive. Mazolli doesn’t say. Something keeps me from wanting to know. So we go through his questions. No, Troy didn’t seem despondent when we had talked. No, he didn’t say anything about wanting to take a dive off an office building onto the product of the world’s largest automaker. I don’t know much about Troy’s private life. His wife’s name is Melissa and he lives on Mercer Island; I’ve never been to the house. He was a wealthy, influential guy who liked to talk and occasionally he had good information. It wouldn’t be the first time money couldn’t buy happiness. Hell, maybe he got too close to the railing and slipped. Mazolli wants to know what we talked about but when I tell him he grows bored. “I lost a ton in Olympic stock,” he grouses. I wish my hands would stop shaking. Mazolli confers in whispers with another cop and tells me I can go.

  I don’t get back to the newspaper until nearly three. Now I’m starting to get anxious about the Sunday column, due in twenty-two hours. I can write fast and I never freeze. An editor once nicknamed me “the deadline man” for my poise under pressure. But I still need to gather material and critical time has been lost. Some of the calls I need to make are to New York, where it’s nearly six p.m.

  ***

  The Free Press Building is an art-deco jewel close by the downtown shopping district. If I look outside the window by my desk I can see the blue, vertical Nordstrom sign. It consists of a fourteen-story tower and a five-story addition that mostly holds the presses. The newspaper building was finished in 1931 and has been lovingly preserved, right down to a side door that still says “newsboys only.” The main entrance has an eagle, wings spread, and elaborate scrollwork carved into the limestone. Large letters proclaim THE SEATTLE FREE PRESS, and below them is carved DEDICATED TO THE PUBLIC TRUST. A single flagpole hangs out to the street from above the eagle, with the American flag slapping languidly in the October breeze. There’s scrollwork, filigree, and other designs above and below the windows, and carved figures inset at the building’s corners. One is winged Mercury, another a 1930s working man, yet another vaguely resembles one of the panhandlers down by my place in Pioneer Square. More stern-visaged eagles roost close to the top, poised to fly, then, above them, towering statues emerge from the limestone as the building reaches the roof. These are robed figures: wisdom, truth, philosophy? Obviously they are not most editors. The building attests to a time when the press had great power. Now the company leases much of the building to software firms, game developers, and lawyers.

  I walk in the grand entrance, through one of the six brass doors, across the polished marble floor. The lobby was once busy with people placing classified ads. Now it’s nearly empty, few people there to see the front pages from 100 years of the Free Press, displays holding eight Pulitzer Prizes, and portraits of its publishers. Prominent is the painting of Maggie Forrest Sterling. She looks out on the lobby, frozen at age fifty, at the height of her powers. No matter that she was the grand-daughter of the man who started the paper—she had begun in the newsroom covering cops. I had always imagined her as one of the wise-cracking, tough-as-nails girl reporters from old movies. She had still seemed that way when I knew her, a young eighty, opinionated sweet vinegar. She had liked my column and protected me from businesses that didn’t care for my take on their troubles. Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Microsoft, Amazon.com—I don’t always make friends. She had died in her top-floor office three years ago. It had been a Friday the thirteenth. I see a very alive publisher near the elevator bank. James Sterling looks like a handsome intellectual, with tortoise-shell glasses, reddish brown hair and beard, and a narrow mouth. He’s friendly and has carried on the family traditions with the paper and I don’t quite trust him. With him are two men in expensive suits. They look anonymously like bankers or lawyers. Throw them into a convention of either and you’d never pick them back out. I hang back at the security console and let them take the first elevator. A man I knew just dived off a skyscraper. He fell right in front of me. My shoes don’t quite connect to the floor and I have a cosmic sinus headache. In a moment, I walk on and push the button for the fifth floor. It takes a moment before I realize someone else is in the car: Karl Zimmer, the head of maintenance. He’s a tall, humorless man with an old-fashioned crew cut gone white and a raw-boned face so pale it looks like concrete. He’s worked here as long as anyone can remember. I say hello. He grunts. Melinda Stewart jokes that he’s a serial killer.

  The main newsroom of the Seattle Free Press takes up the entire fifth floor of the tower part of the building. When I first started here, it was a low-ceilinged clutter of metal desks and cigarette smoke. I had missed the era of typewriters by just a few years, and IBM Selectrics languished in stacks inside closets. By the time I came back to the paper a few years ago, the ceiling had been opened up, low carpet-wall cubicles had replaced the metal desks, and color-coordinated banners hung over the departments: METRO, NATIONAL, COPY DESK, DESIGN, and more.

  Still, you would never mistake it for an insurance office. The cubicles are inevitably cluttered with files, piles of old newspapers and precariously stacked cardboard boxes to hold the overflow from the cubicle file drawers from the Herman Miller designers. Here and there, old timers have thin metal pica poles sticking out of pencil cups—I still have mine, with my name etched in it. From the remains of the old newsroom: waist-high wood cabinets to hold bound editions of various sections or the whole newspaper, and, especially around the cluster of copy editors, shelves contain every kind of reference book. Four large blue recycling containers further destroy the pristine intentions, looking as if they had just been wheeled in from the alley. A Free Press newsstand sits beside the metro desk, the day’s edition looking out. On the far wall is a large map of the world with six clocks spaced above it: Seattle, New York, London, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo.

  Newsrooms are quiet now. It gives me the creeps. If typewriters and teletypes are long gone, so are most of the loud, profane, eccentric characters that used them, yelled “copy!” to summon the gofer copy boys and girls, and didn’t necessarily play well with others, particularly their bosses. The best of them had high-octane talent and taught me much. As a young reporter, I missed deadline by eleven minutes, prompting a screaming tirade from the city editor, who somehow was able to accomplish this bit of mentoring without ever removing the cigar from his mouth. I never missed deadline again. Now shouting is frowned upon, much less smoking. Shout and they’ll send you to HR for a talking-to, or maybe they’ll Myers-Briggs you, so you know what an inappropriate, extroverted, cynical bastard you really are, and how it’s offensive, especially to women.

  The room is also quiet because of worry. It hasn’t been that long since the Post-Intelligencer closed and the Seattle Times always seems to have one foot close to bankruptcy court. Not that long ago, Seattle had been the last city outside of New York to have three
newspapers. Now it’s one of a handful of two-paper towns and the alternative press and blogosphere speculate about it being a no-newspaper town. I don’t think that will happen—this is a readers’ town—but the Free Press news staff is less than half its size in 2000. There’s an entire ghost newsroom on the third floor—up until 1957, it was the newsroom for the family’s afternoon paper, the Mirror. Once that closed, the room was given over to the features department. But with the cuts, features grew so small it could be fit into the extra space up here on five. More cuts could come any day. Everybody’s afraid.

  The main newsroom is crowded. All the desks and cubicles are taken and reporters, photographers, and editors stand around. Maybe it’s a metro meeting. Bad time for a meeting. The daily deadlines are cascading now. Reporters will start filing stories and editors will be under pressure to make the early editions. The 4:00 news meeting will have to be pushed back. Halfway across the room, Melinda Stewart, the national editor, smiles at me, rolls her eyes, and runs a hand against her dark brown wedge of hair. When she smiles wide, it’s a goofy sexy grin that can lead you to underestimate her. She complains that I have gotten handsome as she has only gotten older. It’s not true—she’s as attractive as the first time I saw her twenty years ago. I smile back, then make a hard left and walk down a corridor toward business news, which is off in one of the building’s many out-of-the-way spaces. In fact, it sits on top of the presses in the five-story addition.

  I pull the mail out of my cubbyhole and glance across the toweringly messy cubicles of ten business writers. Five desks are empty from the hiring freeze. One reporter who left and wasn’t replaced had covered Olympic International, and now that company has gone uncovered for three years. The business editor has an enclosed office with a door. I have one, too, but rarely use it. I unlock the door and leaf through my mail. There’s a pink envelope and, inside it, a card from Melinda Hines. I smile at my techno-luddite who won’t use email and stick the card in my pocket.

  “The columnist graces us with his presence,” the business editor says. I ask her if she knows about Troy Hardesty.

  “The young cops reporter told me,” she says, rising from her chair. “Why do all these kids have names like strippers? Amber, Tiffany, Crystal. God, I feel old.”

  “Amber’s a nice name.”

  “Mmmm. Anyway, newsroom-wide meeting. You’re just in time.”

  “Oh, joy. What do you want to do about Hardesty?”

  “Suicide, right?” She seems uninterested as we walk. “Another one bites the dust.”

  “Maybe his fund is about to crater.”

  “Just like 1929, huh? Well, good luck finding that. There’s probably no disclosure.”

  “Somebody knows.”

  “And I wish I had a financial services reporter,” she says. “Five reporters down, remember. Chase it if you want.”

  I think about that. I really want to get ahead on the Olympic International story. But if a fair-sized hedge fund has lost a bunch of money and caused the suicide of its rising-star leader, well, I’d read that one in the newspaper, too. But I don’t have time to call in a bunch of favors from the Microsoft millionaires and other assorted gentry, to find out who’s lost money in Troy’s fund and—harder still—is willing to talk about it. I decide to wait to see if someone calls or files suit. I will stay on Olympic International. If it’s bought, thousands of jobs could be cut at the headquarters half a mile away, and a few people will make hundreds of millions of dollars. All those employees, living their lives, paying their mortgages, drawing their paychecks. The company won’t tell them the roof is silently crumbling. I will.

  The main newsroom is even more crowded now but it’s quiet. I see James Sterling standing in the middle of the room, next to the executive editor and the managing editor. They look at the high ceilings, the television monitors of cable news attached to the pillars, the big recycling bin by the metro desk. They don’t look at anyone. The executive editor opens the meeting and I am half listening. The rest of me stays back at Troy’s obsessively neat office. All that money. All that stuff. Now he’s dead, squashed after a twenty-story fall. He knew somebody was stalking Olympic International. It’s a big private equity outfit from New York, and the talk is of a leveraged deal. Take on debt, don’t use your own money. You’d think after the crash, that kind of thing would have gone out of style.

  Sterling starts talking. He has a high voice, naturally soft, and it scratches anytime he tries to project in a room. He’s recounting the fiscal year that just ended: the performance of the seven newspapers owned by the company, declining advertising revenue, rising costs of newsprint. Hardesty told me that the leveraged deal would be followed by the breakup of Olympic. Take it private. Strip it down. Sell off the dogs. Go public again with the best parts. Get rich. It’s a classic move. Hardesty knew it all and I was amazed he gave it to me.

  I had to promise not to name the private equity firm in the first column, otherwise they might know he had told me. Was he in on the action? I asked. He just gave a tight little chicken-lips smile. I can’t quote him. I can use the information he gave me to ask others. I can check filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, short-selling of the stock, insider trading. I can see what relationship the top Olympic executives have with the private equity guys. The golden parachutes will be sweet.

  “This is a day we hoped wouldn’t come.” That’s what James Sterling just said.

  He repeats it. “This is a day we hoped wouldn’t come.”

  “But we have to live in the real world,” he goes on. His professorial face now looks ratlike. A rat in tortoise-shell glasses. So now it will be bad news. No one even coughs or moves a chair. A wave of apprehension rolls silently through the room. Melinda Stewart stares ahead, pale, grim. With her right hand, she silently grasps and releases a stress ball, a handful of sand packaged in a tight rubber wrapping. It’s meant to help combat repetitive stress injuries. It silently comes apart in her hand and the sand spills onto her desk. I think: layoffs. He keeps talking. Jargon. Filler. He talks about the need to “reinvent the newspaper for the 21st century” and a “difficult journey ahead.” He says, “We need to listen to our readers.” I watch faces: people I’ve known for years; younger ones I don’t know. I was Maggie Sterling’s favorite columnist. I wonder if that means anything now.

  “We’ve hired an investment banking firm to advise us…”

  The metro, sports, and lifestyle reporters look blank. Not the business writers. We know what’s coming.

  “The company will be sold. And if that doesn’t eventuate in this media environment, then the Free Press and our other papers will be closed in sixty days.”

  Chapter Three

  That night I break up with Rachel. Somehow I don’t have enough stress in my life. The newspaper is for sale. It may close. Hell, it will close. Nobody is going to buy the Free Press chain. Layoffs are imminent and consultants who know nothing about journalism are studying us. The staff heard that news and then was expected to go put the paper out as always. That’s just what they did. They are pros. They did this after a venomous question-and-answer period that James Sterling left as quickly as possible. The top editors were left but it was quickly clear they are nearly as surprised as the rest of us.

  Reporters and editors at their desks were typing even as their colleagues were asking what the hell the future held. Phones rang and were answered. They had to move copy. They had to get the paper out. Some of them were crying. We were all sick. I was sick. I backed out of the room and returned to my office, closed the door, and closed the blinds. The computer told me there was no news about Olympic International. All quiet on the Online Journal, Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch. The shares closed down two cents. My scoop was safe. I made eighteen phone calls, left eighteen messages, asking about Olympic. I left my cell phone number. Maybe I would start getting return calls early in the morning. I made two additional calls about Troy Hardesty’s fund, just to
cover my ass, just in case. I left more messages, then walked down the back stairs five floors without talking to anyone. A drunk was walking up the stairs. He asked if I was the sports columnist. I said no, and called security.

  At six minutes after seven, I walked into a bar in Belltown and saw Rachel already at a booth in the back. She had ordered me a martini and was waiting to take her first sip. The place was mercifully empty. There’s small talk. The newspaper may close. Easy stuff like that. Then, the hard stuff. I have gotten good at breakups, a master of goodbye. Still, a ball of anxiety and sadness fills my middle. She doesn’t cry until I open the door to her taxi. She puts her hand on my arm, promises to keep reading my stuff, “even though it would be hard.”

  “You’re a nice guy,” she says, a lie. She is a nice girl, the truth, a brunette with flawless fair skin, abundant and naturally curly hair, and the character to teach middle school in the inner city. Her father is one of the richest men in Seattle. She is a nice girl and that’s the problem. She will want marriage and stability, whatever she says, and I can offer neither. It’s better for her this way. That’s what I tell myself. It’s better for me, too, a selfish bastard. I let this one go too far. I broke my rules. Now I have made it right, she can go find a nice boy, and make a nice future, and I feel like shit. The cab glows lurid yellow under the streetlight. The color of the coward. Then she’s gone. She’s rid of me. I can’t hurt her now. A ball of anxiety stays in my middle. It starts raining. Fine, gentle drops. Seattle rain. The sidewalk is wet with Rachel’s tears and my face is wet and my footsteps are muffled by the leaves on the sidewalk. It’s as if I’m not there at all.