Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  In the newsroom, the paper is put together with the latest computer programs. Page designers do everything and more that the old printers used to handle in the back shop, the last of whom were bought out eight years ago. But the printing presses remain, the muscular manufacturing process that puts news on paper. When I started, the pressroom was grimy, the presses old, noisy as hell. It looked exactly like something out of the black-and-white movie Deadline USA, where Humphrey Bogart as fearless editor defies a threatening mob boss. Now it’s surgical-suite clean and high tech, with stainless steel catwalks surrounding Goss Uniliners that can print 80,000 copies per hour in full color. They’re still loud. I can hear them—feel them—through the glass.

  The Free Press is one of the last major metros that still prints downtown, rather than using a satellite plant out in the suburbs. I sit on the metal bench on the sidewalk and watch in a wonder that has never diminished. The company installed the bench several years ago, facing toward the big windows, with metal arms every few feet so the bums don’t sleep there. A statue of a 1930s newsboy stands next to it, his mouth frozen in a call of “Extra! Extra!”

  How many times have I been here, in all weather, all hours, and stages of life, often sporting a glow of liquor from the nearby Puget Embassy. We all called it the Putrid Embassy, or just the Putrid. It was the last newspaper bar in Seattle. The place was long and narrow, smoky and dear. The booths were ancient and the walls were decorated with notable Free Press front pages. It was run by an old Greek, who would run us out at two a.m. exclaiming in his wonderful accent, “got to go, got to go!” When I qualified to run a bar tab, I knew I had become a real newspaperman. The bar had closed four years ago, replaced by a Starbucks. But the presses still thunder.

  In less than sixty days, all this may be gone. That was the press, baby. Still, the presses center me. I won’t freeze. I turn away, aware that this time last night I was with Pam. She was still joyously alive.

  But another realization pushes all this away. I stand on the empty sidewalk. Free Press trucks crowd along the street waiting to pick up papers, their tailpipes blowing fog into the night air. One has a billboard on its side advertising my column. I ignore all this. After one of the worst days of my life, my brain finally reconnects.

  I know that blonde.

  I’ve seen her before.

  The blonde who was watching my place. I’ve seen her before. She gave me the shoulder block that day by the elevator, the day I was leaving Troy Hardesty’s office. She must have been headed in.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Years ago, I was part of a team of investigative reporters sent to Texas, to look into a rash of unsolved drug killings. In some cases, they were classified as suicides, such as the man who lay naked in his bathtub and shot himself three times with a pump-action shotgun. Law enforcement was compromised. Big drug money will do that. Only the Texas Rangers and a few local cops were trustworthy. They suggested that we be armed at all times. Our ethical qualms went away once we found that the dealers had contracts out on us. This in the days before lawyers and HR people had castrated newsrooms. We didn’t bother to tell the bosses.

  I did my job with a gun in a shoulder holster and a rock in my gut. There was the ever-present knowledge that a bomb could be under the car; that guys with submachine guns could appear out of the night. I learned about the Columbian Necktie and how many bodies are sitting in oil drums in the Gulf of Mexico. We moved around a lot, stayed in small-town motels. I was glad to leave. The fear stayed with me a long time after I left Texas and our stories were winning awards and putting people in jail.

  I have that rock in my stomach again. I also still have the gun, a Smith & Wesson .357 short-barrel Combat Magnum in blue carbon steel with custom grips. I am a good shot. It feels heavy and comforting in my hand, and I think hard about carrying it. I decide against it.

  It’s twilight as I step aboard one of the Third Avenue buses and ride up to Brasa, a restaurant that was very chic a few years ago. But the money and madness of a few years ago are gone, replaced by worry and waiting. The bar is half deserted. I sit at a table by the window, facing in. Twenty minutes later, Wendy Chan walks in, sees me, waves, and walks over.

  I haven’t seen Wendy in three years and she’s cut her hair. From lush and straight touching her shoulders, it’s now very short and no doubt chic. It still strikes me as a cancer-survivor ‘do, but she is radiant as always, a smile briefly playing across her delicate features.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” she says as we sit. “You know that I got married. I’m really happy.”

  I tell her I’m glad about it.

  “Don’t get me wrong, we had fun. But it’s over.” The server arrives, takes our orders, and goes away.

  “I just wanted to talk,” I say. She looks at me suspiciously. Her lawyer look, I used to call it, back when Wendy worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office. From her LinkedIn page, I found that she had moved to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That would have been an impediment to our relationship back then. Now I hoped it might help me.

  “What about you? Are you holding up? I read about the newspaper. How it might even close. Awful. You’ll be okay, of course. Are you still rescuing birds with broken wings and then letting them fly away?” She smiles. “Am I still on your account at Megan Mary’s flowers?”

  “I have a real girlfriend now.” I don’t know why I say this, but I do.

  She looks relieved and I begin a slow seduction of another sort, interrupted briefly as our drinks arrive. Wendy makes the common protestations about talking to the press.

  “I keep secrets all over town,” I say. “Cheers. I don’t want to quote you. I just want some guidance before I go off half-cocked.”

  She studies her white wine for a couple of minutes after taking the first sip. For several seconds I worry that she will just get up and walk out. Then she sighs and cocks her head slightly, a mannerism I still find sexy when she does it.

  “Shoot.”

  “Troy Hardesty.”

  She looks relieved. “He’s as clean as they come in a dirty industry. Was. What a horrible thing.”

  “I was there. We had just had a meeting. I was down on the street.”

  She says my name in a way that makes me miss her. I ask her if she knew anything about him.

  “Only what I read, mostly. He was a man who seemed to have everything to live for: pretty wife, private airplane, the big house over on Mercer Island. I went to a party there once with Chad.” Her husband. “This was about a year ago.”

  “Those cozy regulators.”

  “Stop it. He wasn’t under investigation, and Chad was doing some IT work for one of Troy’s friends. Anyway, no expense was spared. I could get a real taste for beluga caviar…”

  “So nothing wrong with his hedge fund…”

  “That I knew of,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound cold, but the suicide of a big investor isn’t exactly a surprise nowadays. But was he a Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford? If he was, it sure hasn’t come to our attention.”

  “Was he faithful to his wife?”

  “The columnist digs for dirt. How would I know that?”

  “No taste for young girls?”

  She laughs loudly. Wendy has a great laugh. “We don’t have a morals division at the SEC.”

  “So why would the FBI be investigating him?”

  She eyes me warily, as if she’s afraid I am going to drag her into some bureaucratic swamp. She holds up her hands. “I just can’t tell you. I mean, I don’t know.”

  I let it go. Something ties Hardesty to Megan Nyberg. I let the conversation drift and she’s telling me about their ski trips to Whistler last year, about fixing up their house in Magnolia. It all sounds very domestic and predictable and I am happy for her. When the drinks are drained, I pay the bill and ask her about eleven-eleven. She shrugs and smiles, says, “I’m pretty out of it when it comes to pop culture,” and we st
ep out into the night.

  It’s starting to rain a very fine mist and the street is turned dark black.

  “I can’t believe October is almost over,” she says.

  “Do you know what a national security letter looks like?”

  She hesitates, bites her lip. Finally, “You know I can’t even go there.”

  “But you know what one looks like. Just hypothetically.”

  “Just hypothetically.”

  I stand there letting the mist gather on my forehead. She raises the hood of her coat.

  “Just hypothetically,” she says, “it would have a Justice Department letterhead. It would have some officialese up there, like, ‘In reply, refer to file number’ blah, blah.”

  “How would it be worded?”

  “Very legalese. ‘Under the authority of Executive Order…’ ‘In accordance with…,’ that kind of thing.”

  So far, it sounds very much like the piece of paper I saw on my table the other morning. “And it would be signed?”

  “Of course.”

  My letter didn’t have a signature.

  “Would a person who received a National Security Letter be allowed to keep it?”

  “Of course,” she says. She pulls back the hood and looks at me. “Are you in trouble?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We hug. It’s a hug that lasts exactly three seconds too long and I remember exactly the way we used to fit together. Wendy had a fondness for Billy Collins poems and foot massages. Her girlfriends didn’t like me.

  Now she walks to a silver Lexus and drives away. I stand in the rain. So many pieces of me are left in so many places. Some times it’s a good feeling and every once in a while it hurts like hell.

  ***

  I am losing time. The Sunday column is due in less than seventeen hours, but I can dig into the evergreen file. A column idea squirreled away for a slow news day. The bosses are so distracted they won’t notice. In fact, they seem to prefer it now when I don’t write about controversial topics—another change from the old days when the Free Press had real balls. But I’m not getting results where it counts. Wendy was my hope for a home run. Troy was under investigation for a massive investment fraud? Maybe that would have made him a target for suicide—or maybe assisted suicide if he made powerful enemies. The only trouble is, it’s apparently not true. Not only did Wendy say he was clean, but I haven’t received one tip about trouble in Troy’s hedge fund. I am further than ever from connecting him to Megan Nyberg, Ryan Meyers, and Heather Brady—kids who should be far out of the orbit of Troy’s lavish life.

  I ride back toward Pioneer Square on a quiet, electric Third Avenue bus. As night has arrived, the clientele has changed. I look like the only person aboard who makes more than $25,000 a year. A woman with a long, scraggly beard sits across from me. Parts of downtown are dark and seedy looking, new empty storefronts added just since the last time I was along this way. A long recession will do that.

  I pull out my Blackberry, wanting to call Amber. I am missing her. I am missing Pam and Rachel and the two Melindas. I put it away. It’s untrustworthy for much more than calling to order a pizza. Why am I really surprised? It was well-reported, including by our soon-to-be-dead Washington bureau, that the National Security Agency had spied on reporters during the Bush years. I thought most of that was all in the past. And why would anyone be listening in on a business columnist at a paper in Seattle?

  That had been Faith’s question to me that afternoon, a quizzical half-smile on her face—after thirty minutes spent fiddling with my computer.

  “Has it been slow lately?” she asked, running an anti-virus program while I sat on my desk watching. I told her it had been, and had crashed a couple of times. She nodded and opened different menus. “No obvious viruses,” she said. “I see from the AV program that you’ve been rebooting every day. That’s when we install new anti-virus patches. You wouldn’t get it if you didn’t…”

  I nodded cooperatively.

  “Sit down here.” I followed her instructions and sat at the keyboard. She got on her knees and swept her black hair out of her face as she watched the CPU on the floor. Her hair fell in a perfect crescent just below her shoulders. “Just open a file and start typing. Any old thing.”

  So I did, discreetly appreciating the shape of her denim-clad behind.

  “Now stop.”

  I stared out the window at the rain. She said, “Now start typing again.”

  After a few minutes of this, she went out into the business newsroom and worked on a spare computer. Then she came back and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking up at me. She pursed her lips, moving her mouth to the side and up. “This is really interesting. See the processor lights?” She pointed to the box on the floor. “They blink when you’re not doing anything. So I looked in back, at the network interface card’s activity light. Packets of data are being sent out when they shouldn’t be…”

  “So I’m being spied on?”

  “I’d say. It’s pretty sophisticated snooping, though. I called up the task manager a few minutes ago…”

  “Don’t know nothing about no science, Faith.”

  I got a smile out of her. She adjusted her black oval glasses. “The task manager, Mister Economics Columnist, should show any spyware that’s running.” She smiled with one side of her mouth. “If you know where to look. Now they can name it something innocuous, but I couldn’t find anything. But I’m pretty sure we’ve got a cracker. Somebody who’s broken through our security.” She rubbed her small hands together. “Takes me back to my cracking and hacking days. Want me to take it down? Re-route them to a porn site? Send them a virus?”

  I shrugged. It might be useful to let them think I was as clueless about this as I was about the rest of the situation. I asked her to let me think about it.

  “I’d guess it’s just you,” she said. “I have to check and make sure it’s not a general breach, but it looks like they are targeting you. Why would anybody be snooping on the business columnist?” she said, rising to go. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Thanks, Faith. You’ll have a job long after I am living under a bridge.”

  “I actually gave notice today. I’m going to a startup. May as well get off the Titanic.”

  I told her I was sorry to see her go, knowing she was too young to miss the good times of newspapering, wondering if she even reads the paper, if someone of her generation has had her brain so rewired by constant electronic distractions as to be like me at all. She broke my reverie.

  “You write at home, too,” she said.

  “I own a Mac. Two, actually.”

  “Don’t sound superior. Assume that’s been cracked, as well.”

  I held out my Blackberry and asked her if it was safe.

  “My God, that ought to be in a museum. It’s so not safe. If they can get past our firewalls, they can easily snoop wirelessly. They can also track it.” She bites her lower lip. “I can get you one of the new Blackjacks they have downstairs.”

  “I thought those were just for the bigwigs.”

  “They’ll never miss it. And I can put an encryption program into a Blackjack.”

  The newspaper is failing and they don’t know how many expensive cellphones are sitting around.

  “Want your old number?”

  I think about this and tell her to keep my old number on the Blackberry and give me a new one on the encrypted cellphone.

  I ask, “Can they crack that, as you put it?”

  She gave that little half-of-the-mouth smile. “Not the way I do it.”

  ***

  I sit on the bus, trying not to stare at the bearded lady. The driver announces Pike Place Market and the monorail and I think about the blonde. Suicide blonde—who sang that song? She ran into me as I walked toward the elevator that day in Troy’s office tower—that much I’m sure of. She is tall but willowy, hardly the type who could toss Troy the gym rat off
a balcony. Maybe she had help. Maybe he looked away at the wrong moment. Amber is checking the license tag on the blonde’s gray Ford. I still haven’t seen her face up close.

  So far, I don’t know anything else except she was standing outside my building. Maybe I am the next to die—she bungled the assassination, so Stu and Bill were understandably upset last night out on Mercer Island. But I’m still alive—foolishly comforted by the bright lights inside the bus—and they were looking for something, going into Troy’s old house. They were looking for something in my notes. I can’t figure it out and I am running out of time. Two weeks to November 11th.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The rain eases into a steady mist as I walk down the hill to First Avenue. It gives haloes to the street lamps. I stop in a little convenience store and buy a throwaway cell phone. I read somewhere the world has four billion cell phones; now I have one more. Out on the street, I find it actually works and I call Amber’s pager. Free Press police reporters still carry pagers, as well as cell phones, don’t ask me why. They are barely used now. Amber hasn’t returned her pager, even though she is off the cops beat. In five minutes she calls me back.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “A big smile for you,” I say. “Is the line safe?”

  “I’m at a pay phone. What about you? Did you buy the drug-dealer cell like I suggested?”

  I told her I had, and quickly brought her up to date on my day’s dead ends.

  “I have good and bad news. If I sound distant, it’s because I don’t want to catch Ebola from this phone mouthpiece. The good news is, I snuck back to Seattle early and pulled a missing person’s report on one Heather Brady. She’s a runaway from Denison, Texas. Seventeen years old. Long story short, she was in Seattle for about a year, but got back in touch with her parents three months ago. She would call them twice a week. They’d send her money, hoping they could lure her back home. She said she had enrolled in community college and was finishing her GED. But a month ago, the calls stopped. Her dad flew up here and filed the report, which the cops promptly shelved. What’s another runaway in Seattle?”