by G. M. Ford
“The screwup was mine,” Corso said. “The piece was self-indulgent. Part of the job is knowing which way the wind blows and then tailoring your approach to the weather. I didn’t do my job.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, Mr. Corso,” she said.
Down in the park, an elderly Asian woman walked a little brown-and-white dog whose swinging belly nearly dragged on the pavement. With one hand she jerked the leash, as if teaching the dog to heel; with the other she fought to keep her red umbrella from turning inside out in the gale.
“I’m pained to have been forced to prevail upon you in this manner, Mr. Corso. I know what you’ve been through.”
“Pained enough to tell me to forget about it and go fishing?”
“No.”
A sudden swirling gust tore the red umbrella from the old woman’s hand. She lunged for it, missed, slipped on the wet grass, and went down heavily on her side, dropping the leash as she fell. The dog took off, running after the tumbling umbrella on four-inch legs. The woman struggled to her feet and started after the dog in an arthritic, splay-footed shuffle, waving an arm, shouting.
“I don’t want any part of this,” Corso said.
“I don’t blame you.”
The umbrella lodged halfway up the fence on the east side of the park. The little dog hopped on its hind legs in a single-minded frenzy to pull it back to earth. By the time the old woman arrived, her hair was plastered to her head and the umbrella was history. The wind had torn the red fabric free, dropping the metal frame at the base of the fence. She grabbed the leash and nearly fell again as she dragged the dog back onto the pavement. In the deepening gloom, the red nylon waved like a signal flag.
Corso folded his arms across his chest and turned back toward the room. His face was grim and the look in his eyes suggested he might be capable of casual cruelty.
“If I do this…this will clear our slate,” he said. “Once and for all.”
She tapped her manicured fingertips together. “The column too?” she asked.
He thought it over. “Way I see it, the column works out for both of us. The syndication keeps you afloat and the press credentials get me into places I couldn’t otherwise get into. I can’t see any reason to change that. Unless you want to quit.”
“Of course not.”
“Well?”
“I suppose I deserve this,” she said.
“You suppose correctly.”
She fixed him with a steely gaze as she thought over his proposition. “All you have to say is no,” she said.
“But we both know I won’t, don’t we?”
Annoyed now, she arched an eyebrow. “What we both know, Mr. Corso, is that above and beyond either our friendship or our mutual indebtedness”—she waggled a finger at him—“you harbor a certain quixotic spark….”
Corso opened his mouth to protest, but she waved him off. “You say what you want,” she said quickly. “It comes out in your columns, in your books. There’s a messianic tendency at the very center of you, Mr. Corso. You know it and I know it. You write as if there’s a single path to the truth, and you’re the only one with a map.” She shrugged. “Trust me. It doesn’t go unnoticed. I read your hate mail.”
“I’ve always inspired damn little ambivalence,” Corso said.
“No doubt.”
Corso smiled. “My mama used to say I had enough moral indignation for half a dozen preachers.”
Beneath the words, she thought she heard the lazy trace of a drawl. She’d noticed it before. Sometimes when they talked late at night. When he was tired and his guard was down, you could almost hear another voice.
“Your mama had a point,” she said.
She watched as his eyes turned inward. “I remember the first time anybody ever told me life wasn’t fair,” Corso said. “I was three or four…something like that. I was pissing and moaning about something not being fair and my aunt Jean leaned over the dinner table and told me how I might as well shut up and get used to the idea.”
“And?”
He made eye contact. “I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now,” he said. “If I thought for a minute the world was that arbitrary. I’d go down to my boat and blow my brains out.”
A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. Corso heaved a sigh, cursing silently.
“And you want me to do what?” he asked.
She held up two fingers. “Two things. If Walter Himes didn’t kill those young women, then I want to know who did.”
“Good thing you don’t want much.”
“Second, while you’re looking into this, I want you to write the stories.”
“Hawes is right, you know. Getting between the people and their pound of flesh is going to generate a lot of heat, and having my name on the byline is gonna be like throwing gasoline on the fire.”
“I’m aware of that,” she said. “The situation, however, is desperate. We’ve reached the point where we at the Sun can no longer concern ourselves with what people may be saying about us as long as they’re saying something.”
“It’s going to get ugly.”
“I can handle the heat. Can you?”
“We’re gonna find out, aren’t we?”
She pulled a small leather-bound pad toward her.
“How much space are you going to need?”
“For the ‘Leanne Samples Changes Her Story’ story?”
“Yes.”
“With a recap…probably sixteen hundred words.”
“If we’re upping the street run, I’m going to need it by nine.”
“I’ll have it ready,” Corso assured her.
“Anything else?”
“Have somebody call Himes’s attorney of record and ask if Himes will agree to see me. Tomorrow. As soon as possible.”
“He hasn’t spoken to the press in nearly two years. What makes you think he’ll talk to you?”
“Have whoever calls tell the attorney about the story we’re running tomorrow morning. Tell him who wrote it. Remind him of the ‘rush to judgment’ piece. Run my famous-author status by him. See if maybe that doesn’t loosen things up.”
“Excellent idea,” Mrs. V. said. “As I recall, he wanted to see you rather badly way back when…” She let it hang.
“Ask if we can bring a photographer. Somebody other than Harry Dent,” he said, naming the Sun’s ancient photo editor whose outdated noir style of photography regularly made baby showers look lurid.
“Mr. Dent is the only photographer we have left on staff,” she said. She read Corso’s pained expression. “He had seniority.”
“Who took the shots of the bus accident on Aurora a couple of weeks ago?”
“A freelancer,” Mrs. V. said. “A woman named Dougherty, I believe.”
Corso recalled the battered metro bus lying on its side. The anguished looks on the faces of the citizens who risked their lives to rescue passengers from the smoldering ruins. Pictures that seemed to jump off the page at the reader.
“Can you get her?”
“Miss Dougherty is…as I understand it…how shall I put this? I’ve been led to believe she’s some-what exotic and perhaps a bit…forward.” She seemed pleased by her choice of words.
Corso chuckled. “We ought to make an interesting pair,” he said.
“I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”
Corso gave it some thought. “That’s it for right now,” he said.
“And you?” Mrs. V. asked of Corso.
“I guess I’m headed downtown. See if I can’t scratch up a denial.” She looked at him as if he’d broken wind.
“At the Sun, we don’t generally preview stories,” she intoned.
“Neither do I,” said Corso, “but, as much as I hate to agree with Hawes twice in the same day, I want to make sure our asses are covered on this one.”
She thought it over. “As much as the precedent pains me, you’re no doubt right. After all, exclusives like this don’t drop on one’s door
step every day.”
“Nice touch, by the way, the room at the Carlisle. The watchdog and all,” Corso offered with a grin.
She looked offended. “It was my Christian duty. Could we, after all, have the young woman’s group home inundated with the press?”
“As long as we have her to ourselves, we have the story to ourselves.”
She gave Corso a wicked smile. “At best, we’ll get a day out of the Carlisle,” she said. “By this time tomorrow, the hounds will have found her.”
“There’s lots of hotels.”
“My thinking exactly.”
She got to her feet, stretched, and then checked her watch.
“You haven’t done anything like this in a while.”
“I remember how.”
“Are you sure you have the stomach for it? It’s going to be New York all over again. Whatever personal space you’ve cut out for yourself in the past couple of years is going to be gone.”
“Did I miss the part where you left me a choice?”
She raised an eyebrow. “As you just so poignantly pointed out to me, Mr. Corso, choices come in all sizes and shapes.”
“Yeah, but some of them are easier to live with than others.”
She smiled that wicked smile again.
“Every form of refuge has its price, Mr. Corso.”
Chapter 6
Monday, September 17
5:05 P.M. Day 1 of 6
Corner of Fifth and James. The Public Safety Building is notched hard into the side of the hill, sentencing an entire city block to perpetual shade. Connected by a seventh-floor covered walkway to the King County jail, the complex is a remnant of an age when signs on the freeway implored the last person leaving town to please turn out the lights. A pair of ten-story poured-concrete monuments to fiscal restraint, they looked remarkably like waffles standing on end and were quite easily the ugliest buildings in the city’s gleaming downtown core.
Two officers at the front desk. Blue shirts, sitting way up high in the power position. Typical city cops. If your aorta wasn’t severed, they were going to finish what they were doing before they bothered with you. Corso reached up and dropped a business card faceup in front of the older of the two. When neither of them so much as glanced at the card, Corso asked, “Either of you remember the officers of record in the Trashman killings?”
Without looking up, the young cop said, “Densmore’s the three. I don’t—” He suddenly frowned and looked desperately toward his lap, as if the older cop had grabbed him by the balls. The older cop locked his eyes on Corso and said, “You mean back in ninety-eight?” Corso couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw some color drain from the younger man’s face. “Yeah,” said Corso.
“Chucky Donald was one of them. He’s a lieutenant in the East Precinct. Him and whoever was his partner at the time. I think the guy pulled the pin a couple years back.” Corso thanked him and wrote Donald’s name in his notebook.
“Help you with something?” the older one asked. He now held Corso’s card with his fingertips, as if it were radioactive.
“I need to see whoever’s in charge of public affairs.”
“Dorothy Sheridan,” the older cop said. “She’s in a meeting.”
“Does she have an assistant?”
“Bunches,” he said with a sneer. “They’re all in the meeting.”
Corso searched the cop’s face for some indication as to whether the guy was busting his balls for fun. Officer John McCarty, according to the name tag, wasn’t, however, offering any hints. When in doubt, keep talking, asking questions—anything to keep a dialogue going. “Do you have a direct number where I could reach Lieutenant Donald at the East Precinct?”
The cop shifted to his left and touched the keyboard. His pockmarked face was bathed in blue light. He pushed a couple of more buttons. “Three, two, nine, three, nine, four, five, extension eleven twenty-nine.” The screen went black. For the first time, the younger officer was looking at Corso, who thought he detected a hint of amusement in the guy’s eyes. “Was it something I said, fellas?” Corso asked. He pulled open his coat and sniffed at his right armpit. “Deodorant failure?”
Officer McCarty looked only slightly amused when he said, “Happens Lieutenant Donald’s in the same meeting.”
Corso smiled. He now knew the meeting must be here in the Public Safety Building, otherwise a couple of desk cops wouldn’t be privy to it. He took a chance. “Wouldn’t be that an ADA name of Timothy Beal is in there with them, would it?” He hunched his shoulders, spread his hands. “Just a guess.”
The younger cop checked the screen in front of his face, tapped the keyboard twice, and then looked to McCarty, who leaned over in front of the younger man’s video display.
“You read palms on the side?” the older cop asked.
“The bumps on your head,” Corso said. “Phrenology.”
The cop looked like he was considering adding a few bumps to Corso’s head.
“I think you better let me see this Ms. Sheridan.”
McCarty weighed his options. “I drag her out of a meeting and this turns out to be crap, there’s going to be a problem.”
“I understand.”
McCarty finally read his way through Corso’s card. “Hopkins covers crime for the Sun. Says here you write features.”
“That’s right.”
“How long you been with the paper?”
“Three years or so.”
“So how come I’ve never seen you before?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” Corso joked. McCarty was not amused.
“Hopkins under the weather?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” Corso said.
McCarty waited for an explanation.
“I need to run a story by someone in authority. To give ’em a chance to confirm or deny.” The cop wasn’t impressed. “I’m guessing it’s the same story they’re sitting in there talking about,” Corso added.
McCarty got to his feet. Took Corso in from head to toe. Pointed across the room to the built-in bench running along the north wall. “Take a seat over there.”
McCarty disappeared through a door behind the desk. Corso planted himself on the blue Naugahyde. The sticky plastic groaned as he slid back. No magazines. No cigarette butts. Just an overgrown jade plant, its thick leaves covered with dust, meandering its way around the dirty window. Corso took his notebook from his coat pocket and had begun to leaf through it when the front doors were pulled open wide.
Deep voices filled the room. SWAT. The storm troopers of the status quo. A full tactical unit, fresh from an operation. Still coming down from the adrenaline rush. Eight jackbooted, armored urban warriors. All in black. Darth Vader helmets. Huge men. Three white, four black, one other. Olympic weight lifters with twenty-inch biceps carrying bulging equipment bags full of body armor. A four-foot steel battering ram swung from the arm of an immense black man who carried what appeared to be an M16 in his other hand. The noise of their walking toward the elevator drowned the rush of the wind and the wet hissing of tires. When the elevator came, only four could fit in the car. Four went. Four waited.
McCarty came out from behind the desk. Clipped a visitor’s badge on Corso’s collar. “Follow me,” he said. Together they crossed to the elevator. The door slid open.
“Hold it, fellas,” McCarty said. “Got a priority here.”
The SWAT team stopped talking. Didn’t move an inch. Made McCarty and Corso squeeze around them and into the elevator. They reminded Corso of those space droids you see on TV. The ones with the tubes coming out of the sides of their heads. Steroid suicide squads, protecting truth, justice, and the American way. Mercifully, the door slid shut. McCarty pushed the button for the eighth floor. “I don’t know how the criminals feel about guys like that,” Corso said, “but they scare the hell out of me.”
“They’re supposed to,” McCarty said.
She was waiting just outside the elevator. She was pushing forty. Still winnin
g the battle of the bulge. Short blond hair and a bad color sense. She wore a yellow-and-green-plaid sweater and a bright yellow skirt. The yellows didn’t quite match and the gold glow lent her complexion a sallow, almost jaundiced tinge.
McCarty held the door open with his arm, handed her Corso’s business card.
“And this is about what?” she asked.
“Leanne Samples,” Corso said.
She raked her free hand through her hair, thought about running a “Leanne who?” number on Corso and then decided against it. She gestured with her fingers for Corso to get off the elevator. Corso stepped off. The door slid shut.
Corso held out his hand. “Frank Corso.”
She made no move to shake. “So it says.”
Corso put on a smile. “And your name is?”
Her facial expression said “worst-case scenario.” She sighed.
“Dorothy Sheridan. What is it you need, Mr. Corso?”
He pulled out his notepad. “We’re running a story in tomorrow morning’s edition to the effect that Leanne Samples, who, if you’ll recall, was the state’s star witness in the Walter Leroy Himes case, that Miss Samples has told both the DA and the SPD that she lied three years ago when she testified that Mr. Himes had sexually assaulted her.”
“And?”
“And we wanted to give the department the opportunity to comment on the story beforehand. Just as a professional courtesy.”
“Anything that may or may not have been said between Miss Samples and any member of the law-enforcement community would certainly be—”
“I’ve got her on tape,” Corso said, “I’ve also got a deadline, so I don’t have time to dance, Ms. Sheridan. Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Confirm, deny, or tell me ‘no comment.’”
Her cheeks reddened. “Are you threatening me?”
“No, ma’am,” Corso assured her. “If I were threatening you, my position would be that you either talk to me or I’ll go to print. That would be unethical. This isn’t like that. We’re going to print with the story. That’s a given. I’m merely providing the subjects of the story with an opportunity to comment prior to publication. In the interest of both accuracy and balanced reporting.”
