by Jon Talton
I talk as we crawl along a street clogged with cars and roaring buses and crosswalks crowded with pedestrians in coats. I feel hemmed in and vulnerable, scan the sidewalks for Stu and Bill. My neck hurts from looking behind us. “I knew they were going to try to frame me. I knew they had put my fingerprints on the gun.” I am more awake now, finally feeling the chill of the morning. “After that, I didn’t know whether to stay or go. Call 911 or go. I don’t know. Then I was just out on the street, walking.”
“You sound drugged.”
I ask her what she means. Why would Pam slip me a mickey?
“Whoever killed her could have use a cloth with chloroform. Or injected you with valium, something like that. There’s lots of ways. They drugged you before they shot her.”
And with Ron thrown in as a bonus. Pam’s boyfriend must have let himself into the house as they were finishing up and they killed him. A colder thought comes through: They waited for him, hoping to frame me for both killings with the everyday motive of a love triangle gone bad. “You’re right. They intended for the cops to find me with the bodies…”
“Who is ‘they’?” she demands.
I don’t know how to answer. I hear my voice: “Her face was just gone…”
“That’s an exit wound.” Amber sounds clinical, detached.
“But it was such a small gun, like a .22.”
“Soft-point bullets,” she says. “They expand on impact. Nasty. Assassination issue. You have blood spatter on your face. They would have shot her in the back of her head. Probably used a pillow as a silencer.”
“How do you know these things?”
By that time we are at my apartment. She finds a parallel parking space a block away and expertly slides in.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“Nine-fifteen.”
I curse. I have a column due at one. “Maybe I’ll call in sick.”
“No.” She turns off the car and jams up the parking brake. “You have to act normal. Like nothing happened. Let’s go.”
Inside my loft, she helps me out of my clothes. I am sitting naked on the bed as she momentarily cups my crotch in her warm hand. But it’s only for a moment, a half-smile on her face. “You are trouble. Get in the shower, now. And clean under your nails really well.”
I do, even though I feel every individual spray of water as if it’s an electrical charge hitting my skin. I scrub hard everywhere, washing off Pam. Pam who is dead and I’m to blame. When I watch the water swirling down the drain, I start to feel nauseous again. I imagine gallons of blood spilling down, circling counter-clockwise in a dark red vortex. But it’s only water. The familiar shower is brightly lit and white tiled but it feels like a cell. When I step out and towel off, Amber is putting my clothes and shoes into a plastic garbage bag. She walks over and kisses me, then holds my face tightly, aiming eyes to eyes.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
She might as well have asked me to give the GDP price deflator for Bolivia in 1998. I search my scrambled brain. The wine bottle empty. In bed with Pam, starting to fall asleep. Nothing out of place. The house locked.
“What time?”
After a second, I remember. “Before I put my head down, I actually looked over at the digital clock on her night table. It was 11:11.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I thought how weird that was, but it said 11:11. Then I went to sleep next to her.”
“That’s the last you remember? Are you sure?”
I nod. But the memory of the clock brings back more. How looking up and seeing those numbers chilled me with dread. How I cradled my arms around Pamela, already sleeping, held her in the tight embrace of mortality, her skin soft and arousing even after an hour of lovemaking. Her soft hair close to my face as sleep overtook me. I keep all this to myself.
Amber lets go and takes a step back. Her voice is businesslike. “Act like nothing happened. If the police ask, tell the truth like you just did. But you left her house after midnight to come be with me. Got it? You woke up with me this morning, here. And you damned well better be a good actor when the cops tell you she’s dead. They’ll watch how you react.” She raises a strawberry blond eyebrow. “Just pretend you’re lying to one of the women in your life. We’ll sort the rest of this out later. I’ve got to be in Bellevue in an hour.”
She slips on her coat and starts to go, carrying the trash bag.
“What are you going to do with that?” I ask.
“Dump it far away,” she calls over her shoulder.
“Wait.”
She stands in the doorway.
“Why are you doing this?
She tilts her head, tossing her red mane, and examining me as if from a far distance. Her expression is neutral. “Maybe you have potential.”
Chapter Nineteen
After trying four times, I knot my tie correctly, a dimple in the middle. I had started to reach for a favorite Ben Silver, but realized that it was one Pam had given me. My hand withdrew as if it were a snake. So I settle for a burgundy tie with no history. The cops will take my tie and belt so I can’t kill myself. I slip on my suit coat and walk out the door on rubbery legs.
Just act normal. Easy enough, when I am expecting to be intercepted by a SWAT team when the elevator doors open, or when I step out onto the street. Yet everything outside is normal, from the homeless guy sitting on his scuffed plastic crate selling Real Change—probably a failed business columnist himself—to the hoodie-clad techies streaming into the software company three doors down. I become aware of the coolness of the day, the brilliant reds and forlorn faded greens of the leaves on the trees. Soon Pioneer Square will be without its shade canopy. I should have worn a coat, but the chill steadies me and in ten minutes I step off the elevator into the newsroom.
It is 10:16 a.m. and I have no idea what I am going to write.
“I’ve been looking for you.” It’s the business editor, and she should be in the ten o’clock news meeting, and yet she’s looking for me. I get a sour wave in my stomach. The detectives are here. Act normal. Act surprised that Pam is dead. I can barely breathe.
“I know this is late notice, but you’ve seen the market today…”
I nod. I haven’t a clue, but it’s probably down again, maybe big time. That’s been the story for months, years.
“Can you set aside what you’ve got going for tomorrow and write a market explainer?” She is tense, out of breath. All my muscles relax by fifty degrees. “I know we’re all kind of burned out and there’s not much new to say. But the head-shed wants it.” She nods toward the fishbowl, the glassed-in conference room where the news meetings are held.
“Sure,” I say. She pats my arm, thanks me, and strides back to the meeting. I lean against the wall for a moment, feeling my chest expand with air, studying my hands, fingers, and fingernails for any traces of Pam’s blood.
Then I am on deadline.
I am saved by the news. Once I left the Army, every day of my working life I have wondered if I could sit before a blank computer screen and produce a story or a column. I know that I am a fraud, whatever readers might think or however many awards I have won. When will I be found out? What day will I have nothing fresh to write? What moment on deadline will I finally freeze? That’s really one of the determining characteristics of the ones who succeed in newspapering: they never freeze. I don’t freeze today. I create a new file. It is named like all the others over the years, with my name and “col” and the publication date, all rammed together, a cabalistic computer tag for editors and designers. We still call this a “slug,” one of the many holdovers in our tribal patois from the days of hot type and Linotype machines. Then I start to write.
For months I have been wanting to write this: We have entered a period of discontinuity. Anyone looking for the market to return to what we used to call normal is on a fool’s errand. The next thirty years won’t be a replay of the past th
irty. Too much is different: peak oil, a hollowed-out economy, too many bets made on financial products that turned out to be swindles, global warming. The easy days are gone. It’s too blunt for the careful Seattle Free Press. But I write it today and to hell with it. Discontinuity. Nothing will be the same again. The clean white bedclothes are fatally stained red.
I write like a maniac, banging the keyboard. I am in the crazy zone of time telescoping in on me. At four minutes before one o’clock, I hit the key that sends the column into the editing queue. I check to see that it is there, the button on the CCI menu glowing a festive green. Outside my window, even this high in the building, the fall leaves blow up and linger before flying away forever. The column is filed. Only then do I push the chair back, walk to the door, close it, turn away to my desk again, sit, and bury my face in my hands, weeping.
***
The rap on the door is sharp. I wipe my face off, swivel my chair and turn the knob. The managing editor stands in the threshold, rubbing his beard. It is newly trimmed, looking like a mowed lawn of dead winter grass. He’s nearly as tall as me, but reedy like a runner, and he has terrible posture. His body can’t avoid a slump for long, and he tips himself against the wall.
“Let’s talk.”
“Sure.”
He slides past me and drops into the single chair that my little office will accommodate. He closes the door. Obviously the police are here. I’m surprised he didn’t bring them along—surprised they didn’t insist. Obviously they are waiting downstairs. He will lead me down the elevator, one last favor, helping me avoid the humiliation of being taken out of the newsroom in handcuffs.
“Are you okay?”
He coughs nervously, and then studies me with those tragic eyes through the lenses of his fashionable glasses. Usually he wears contacts. Everybody who works in the newsroom ends up with glasses or contacts. Somehow I have managed to keep twenty-twenty vision. A sniffle I can’t avoid, however. My eyes are red. He only saw me cry once before, when my ex-wife left me. I pull myself up in the chair and say I’m fine.
“We need your files.”
I stare at him, my emotions quickly shifting to anger. The wave of emotions rumbling inside me has only partly to do with freedom of the press. I say nothing.
“I know what you’re going to say.” He wags a finger at me. “But this is the way it has to be. I talked to Kathryn and Mr. Sterling…”
“So we’re going to turn them over?”
He removes his glasses and wearily rubs the bridge of his nose. “Apparently the National Security Letter is real. Our compliance is mandatory.”
“What do our lawyers say?”
“This is what they say. We have to produce your notes and emails.”
“Are we going to write about this?”
He looks away, out my window toward the Nordstrom sign, then checks his wristwatch. I keep talking. “Aren’t you curious about what they’re after?”
“I need your notes.”
“The First Amendment…”
“Just stop.” He says it quietly, yet it carries more force than if he had slapped the desktop. I study his face, which looks drawn, gaunt. He looks as if he’s been crying. “Bring them to my office. I’ve got a two-thirty meeting. Please have them on my desk before I get back.”
He stands quickly and opens the door, then pauses. “For what it’s worth, I think this is shit. I tried. I really did.” Then he’s gone.
I sit for a long moment considering options. I have so many. There’s that nice flat in Paris where I could fly this afternoon, hide out, reinvent myself, drink wine, and write novels—all that, except I chose the wrong parents and the wrong career and there’s no flat in Paris.
I return to the Governor’s Library and fish out the files, half wishing that some of the building’s infamous rats had eaten them. Then I take the fire stairs down to advertising.
A couple of years ago I dated one of the classified sales reps. Carrie. I used to thank her for ensuring my paycheck; now, thanks to Craigslist and the shortsightedness of newspaper publishers, classified advertising has crashed. Carrie and I ended badly. Don’t fish off the company pier. But I need a copy machine that’s not in full view of the newsroom, and Carrie’s cubicle is on the other side of the room. At least I didn’t get her killed. She should come thank me. For the next twenty minutes I copy everything: handwritten notes, printed out email messages, story drafts, SEC documents. It looks boring as hell to me. Troy Hardesty was not that great a source.
We have so many ways to hurt you.
As the machine whirs and paper spits out the side, I try to make connections. The agents obviously killed Pam and her boyfriend. I was going to take the fall. If I had dozed a few moments longer, I’d already be in jail. Pam floats across my consciousness, without a face, without a pulse. I grip the sides of the machine. Cause and effect, damn it: They warned me. But I wasn’t writing about Troy. I sure wasn’t writing about Megan Nyberg. But I never called the number they gave me. I kept the notes and they killed Pam. And now the paper is giving up the notes, too. What is in there worth killing for? Apparently something connected to eleven eleven. Rachel warned me I was in danger. I study the scar congealing over the top of my hand.
We have so many ways to hurt you…
I return to the third floor using the fire stairs and take the back hallway into the business news department. There I wrap a rubber band around the copied records and slide them into a manila folder. Nobody said I couldn’t keep copies. They didn’t give me enough of a chance to read the National Security Letter to know if it’s a violation of executive order whatever-the-hell. I could ask the M.E. But I don’t. I slip the file into my briefcase. It’s a handsome Coach, black-leather job, and it was a Christmas gift last year from Pam. I latch it and walk out, carrying the original files under my arm, feeling nauseous.
I can count the strides it takes me to round the hallway and cross the main newsroom to reach the managing editor’s office. Thirty-five. Every one of them feels heavy and painful in my feet. I ease myself down into a chair at an empty cubicle and stare into the empty office. I am waiting for a reprieve that won’t come. The digital clock on his credenza reads 2:28 p.m. in red. The chiseled face of the reporter on the poster still calls for rewrite.
The chair creaks as I lean back and look over the newsroom. The air is heavy and overly warm like so many interior spaces in Seattle this time of year. I watch the clocks on the far wall, above the mural-sized world map. Reporters and editors walk past; others huddle over their keyboards, heads low in concentration, or lean back in chairs with telephone receivers cocked between their ears and shoulders. Most of them are my age or older. Every cubicle is decorated. Flags, awards, maps, bumper stickers, ancient Shoe comic strips, a Che Guevara T-shirt, coffee mugs of all provenances, badly dressed people with large, delicate egos and, sometimes, awesome talent. One copy editor has a large sign: “The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that the Titanic had a band.” Three dozen conversations going at once. And most of them are about the news. The excited energy flies around, ricocheting off the walls.
The newsroom at its best is a place of magic and conflict and profanity. It’s a room where Pulitzer-prize winning stories have been brainstormed, reported, written, and edited. Where a few of the best-known writers in America passed through on their way up. Where, every day, new news originates and goes out to the Northwest and the world, on paper and on the Internet. Read by nearly a million people every day.
And yet, at the moment, it suddenly all looks dead to me, as if I am looking back through time at a long-ago era, and hearing the sounds of ghosts. Suddenly everything is bathed in a sepia-toned sadness. The reporters and editors wear masks of sadness, their movements lethargic, the usual noise of the room replaced by a subdued haze. As I look around the room, I run my hands across the day’s edition, sitting there for me atop the otherwise empty desk, feeling the fine fiber of the p
aper. I suddenly know, a tactile premonition. It’s all gone. As gone as the reporter on the managing editor’s poster, with his press card stuck in the band of his fedora.
I stand, nod to the M.E.’s secretary, and leave the package of original files with her. Then I return to the Governor’s Library. A meeting of features editors is going on. I silently curse all the damage endless meetings have done to newspapers as I go to my office to wait, the briefcase with the files on my lap like a heavy tumor, the stress of the day about to twist my head off. I try again in half an hour and the room is empty. I slide the briefcase behind the Churchill books and walk quickly to the door, turning out the lights.
My cell phone rings as I step out into the lobby. It’s a producer at one of the radio stations. Can I be on the five o’clock show to talk about the market? Sure. If I’m not in jail. I scan the big room, looking for detectives walking my way from the elevators. I only see a young woman in a black-and-red checked miniskirt, her hair swaying lushly as she walks by. I smile at her. I hear Pam: You are a monster.
Chapter Twenty
After the radio show, I walk outside into the gathering gloom. I don’t know where the day has gone. The sidewalks are thick with people leaving their offices, rushing to catch the bus, and the weather has changed. A cold wind gusts off the bay. Soon daylight savings time will be gone and Seattle will slip into the winter months when night comes early. It’s suicide season and the time of year when distracted drivers run down black-clad pedestrians and people complain about the dark and the rain. I like it.
The police have not come for me, not even to talk. I couldn’t bring myself to check the online site of the Free Press to see if there’s news about Pam. My cell phone says it is 5:30 and it shows five missed calls and one voice message. I had muted it while writing on deadline. All the missed calls and the message are from Melinda Stewart. I didn’t see her in the newsroom today and I don’t want to talk. But I step into an alley and call her.
