The stairway was steep and narrow, the walls covered with names and slogans and epigrams that had seemingly been scrawled while the draftsmen were on the move, following one or the other arrow. One slogan read “Truth is a complete defense.” Below that someone had added, “The Forty-Niners have no defense at all. If they stop telling lies they’ll lead the league.”
I was trying to decipher some more of the writing when I was interrupted by a tall, urgent-faced boy who was galloping down the stairs as fast as he could go. I pressed against the wall to let him by, but I don’t think he even noticed me. He was holding some sheets of copy in his hands, but I couldn’t read what they said. From the look on his face they announced the imminent disintegration of the planet.
The second floor was an open loft that had been subdivided into a maze of cubicles, each cell walled off from the other by half-plywood, half-Plexiglas partitions that rose six feet off the floor. The Plexiglas was frosted, making the figures behind the panes ghostly blurs of light and dark. Overhead, bands of fluorescent lights irradiated everything. I felt as though I had stumbled into a place under investigation by the antivivisectionists.
I poked my head inside the first cubicle I came to. The woman inside was short-haired and negligently attractive, with eyes that immediately seemed to challenge me to keep a secret, any secret, from her for over five minutes. She raised her brows in a question but before I could say anything she began thumbing madly through the telephone book, slapping pages aside as though she were brushing dust off the family album before showing her baby pictures to the new boyfriend.
When she paused a moment I asked where I could find Chet Herk. She raised her hand to make a gesture, then stopped in mid-motion. Her head cocked and her eyes narrowed and her lips puckered. “I’ll take you there,” she said, slowly and speculatively. She slid off her chair and smoothed down her jeans and stuck out her hand. “I’m Pamela Brown.”
“Pamela,” I repeated, bowing.
“Miss Brown to you,” she replied, grinning.
“Billie Holiday. Circa 1935.”
“Hey. Not many people know that.”
“Not many people listen to good music. I’m Marsh Tanner.”
“Charmed, I’m sure. It’s down this way.”
She led me out of the office and down the corridor, loping along in strides I had to work to keep pace with even though her legs were half as long as mine. From the rear her body was round and firm, packed tightly in a denim wrapper, good for a long shelf-life. Her waist was half the circumference of her hips.
Halfway down the hall she allowed me to catch her. “Have you come up with anything on Mark yet?” she asked casually. Too casually.
“Mark who?”
“Come on, pal. Mark and I were real close. We worked side by side in this madhouse for three years. I’m as worried about him as anyone around here, Chet included.”
“Lucky for Mark. Whoever that is.”
“Well, if you’re not here about Mark you must be here about whatever it is that has Chet so uptight this morning.”
“Is Chet uptight?”
“Very. The question is, why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, buddy.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.”
We considered each other for a moment, dogs eyeing the same bone, then we both started to laugh. “One of those days,” Pamela Brown said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Come on.”
She turned and hurried on down the hall and I fell in at the rear and rode in her wake, listening to her sandals slap her heels.
At the end of the corridor we turned right and then left and stopped beside a wooden door with the word “Herk” printed on it in red helvetica letters. “Here we are,” she said. She knocked three times, sharply, then turned the knob. A voice inside said “Come” and we did.
Pamela Brown blocked most of my view, but over the top of her head I could see Chet half-buried behind the pile of papers on his desk. “Some guy named Tanner here, Chet,” Miss Brown declared. “You want me to sit in?”
Chet smiled benignly and told Pamela that no, she didn’t need to stick around. She frowned and started to say something but changed her mind and shrugged and stepped back. “There you go, Tanner. But if you are here about Mark Covington, stop and see me on the way out.”
I nodded politely and thanked her politely and went past her into the office and shut the door behind me. Miss Brown’s sandals began slapping her heels again, but not right away.
Chet nodded grimly and gestured to a chair in front of his desk and asked me to sit down. “Greer should be here any minute,” he said wearily. “I haven’t been able to talk to him since Friday, but I think he’ll want you to go ahead on the Covington thing. He won’t have long to think it over, though. Someone dropped a bombshell here this morning.”
“What kind of bombshell?”
Chet was about to answer me when his telephone rang and he slid into a discussion with someone on the other end about the size of that week’s press run. I let my eyes wander and my attention wander along with them.
Chet’s office was a monument to the newspaper business and, although he didn’t intend it that way, a monument to Chet Herk as well. The walls were streaked with front-page headlines clipped from the original papers in which they’d appeared: Dewey Wins/MacArthur Fired/Kennedy Dead/Man on Moon/Nixon Resigns/Mayor Killed. Beneath the headlines were stacks of newspapers, side by side, ringing the room like a limestone fence. The papers on the bottom of the piles were curling and yellowing with age. On the opposite wall books occupied their shelves haphazardly, as though thrown into them from across the room. Here and there were bronze medallions and brass plaques and shiny white certificates that testified to Chet Herk’s place in the journalistic pantheon. None of them were prominently displayed. Chet was immodest about every history but his own.
He hung up the phone and looked at me. “We got this letter,” he said gravely. “From something called the Sons and Daughters of Isaiah.”
I perked up at the name, but as I was about to ask a question the door opened and a man came in. He was small, tiny in fact, with white wispy hair and a thin face with a chin that pointed down and a nose that pointed up. His left eye had a black patch over it.
“I hear something’s up,” the man said as he marched to the center of the room. His voice rattled the panes. His walk came close to a goose step.
Chet nodded. “This is Marsh Tanner,” he said to the man. “Marsh, this is Arnold Greer. Our publisher.”
I stayed where I was and so did Greer. He made no move to sit in the chair beside me and no move to change his expression, which was haughty and watchful. “Marsh is a detective,” Chet continued. “Used to be a lawyer. We met years ago, when I was with the Trib. He’s the best in town.”
“Are you?” Greer asked bluntly. I checked, but he didn’t seem to be joking.
“It all depends on what you want done,” I said. “For some things Jessie Tadlock’s the best and for other things Ruthie Spring is.”
Greer was tactless and proud of it. “Our thing is trying to get a reporter back from wherever he’s gone without letting our competitors know he’s been missing. Who’s best at that?”
I decided to be macho, too. “Me,” I said.
“What’s your fee?”
“Fifty an hour.”
“That’s too much.”
“No it isn’t.”
There was some silence then, and I just let it build. I didn’t like Arnold Greer much, and if it weren’t for Chet I would have walked.
“Okay, Tanner,” Greer said heavily. “I’m good for a week. No more. If you haven’t found him then, forget it. Okay by you?”
I shrugged. “Normally it wouldn’t be. I don’t like taking on jobs in increments. It’s like the Late Show. I don’t
start watching unless I’m sure I’m going to be around for the finish.” I looked at Chet. He looked at me. “In this case I’ll make an exception.”
Greer nodded. Chet looked relieved. “Welcome aboard,” Chet said. “I know you can wrap this up in a hurry. Like I said, Mark’s been gone for almost a month. I’ve written out his wife’s name and address for you, since she was probably the last person to see him. She’s the only one outside the paper I can direct you to. In the office Mark’s only real friend was Hal Arndt, our sports man, and his only real enemy was Pammy Brown. Her you’ve met.”
I nodded. “What was that about, anyway?”
“Oh, Pam’s Mark’s heir apparent. She thinks she should get the stories Mark gets, that her byline should get equal space with his, that kind of thing. Her problem is, she’s not that good. Not yet. His problem is, he’s told her so. More than once.”
“You’re not saying she’d do away with Covington just to take over his space in the paper, are you?”
I expected Chet to laugh but he didn’t. “I’m not saying that,” he muttered grimly. “But Pam’s damned determined. Sometimes I think she’d do anything to get ahead, starting with a slash at my balls.”
Chet seemed a little more involved in that subject than was healthy so I switched streams. “What was Covington working on recently? The last thing I remember was the piece on that charity, what was it?”
“The Order of Nineveh.”
“Right. Five million collected and only two hundred thousand made it down to the poor, wasn’t that about it?”
“Exactly. But hell, every story Mark wrote flushed out a new covey of enemies. It’ll take you years if that’s all you have to go on.”
“What was he working on when he disappeared?”
“I don’t know,” Chet said. “As far as I know, no one does. Mark had lots of leeway. Unless he needed money he’d only show up when he had a story. We’d print it and people would scream and shout and Mark would disappear until the next time. Do you know anything, Arnold?”
Greer shook his head, silently, his eyes on mine.
“Did he have an office here?” I asked.
“He had one but he never used it. I checked it out last week, Marsh. Empty.”
“Where does he work?”
“Beats me.”
“So what you’re saying is there’s not much to go on.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Greer turned toward me, smiling tightly. “Since you’re the best in town I’m sure we’ll hear from you soon.”
“You will if you’re listening.”
Greer started to respond, but turned back to Chet instead. “Now what’s all the uproar?”
“We got this letter,” Chet began. I should have left but I didn’t. I was interested, for no particular reason except that I began to hope the letter meant trouble for Arnold Greer.
“Who wrote it?” Greer asked.
“Some group that calls itself the Sons and Daughters of Isaiah.”
“Who are they?”
“Never heard of them.”
“What do they want?”
“They want us to publish their manifesto. They say if we don’t they’ll blow up the building.”
Greer scoffed dryly. “Talk’s cheap. Always has been.”
“In this case it may be more than talk,” Chet said soberly. “They claim that ten days ago they planted a bomb at the headquarters of Laguna Oil, over on Market. They say it went off, but that the company and the cops got together and covered it up, made it seem like an accident. They say this time they won’t worry about killing people, that if a bunch of us die the cops won’t be able to stonewall it.”
Greer began to pace. “This manifesto,” he said. “What does it say?”
“Well, they use a lot of rhetoric—call themselves the heirs of Bakunin and the Naradnaya Volya and all that—but at bottom what they seem to want is for the oil companies, all of them, to stop importing foreign oil. Totally. They say their cadres in L.A. and Houston and New York are prepared to strike immediately if their demands aren’t met.”
I looked at Greer. A line of shiny sweat had begun to form along his forehead. He swiped at it with his palm and in the process brushed the patch away from his eye. There was no eye, though, only a hole, black and fathomless. The flesh around it was white and lined with red scars, a piece of horrific scrimshaw.
Greer adjusted the patch and the hole disappeared, though not from my mind. “We get these things all the time, Chet,” he said nonchalantly. “Why do you think this one’s legit?”
“Because they gave us something we can check. One way or another we ought to be able to get the straight dope about Laguna Oil.”
“That’s true,” Greer said, “and I know just how to do it.”
“How?”
“Call Max Kottle.”
I blurted a question. “Why him?”
“He owns Laguna Oil. Every last barrel of it.”
“But Max is dead.”
Greer looked at me oddly. “Oh. Yeah. The Big C. Too bad.” He looked at Chet. “Try Walter Hedgestone.”
EIGHTEEN
Chet and Greer launched a discussion of journalistic integrity and the news worth of extortionate demands and honor and truth and like that, and like most debates over principle it was predictable and self-serving. I excused myself and went out into the hall, wading through the weeds of the Kottle case that had sprung up around me like thistle. I thought about those weeds for a while, thought about whether I should do something about them, and finally decided not. They didn’t amount to much—a few questions, mostly—and I never did like to pull weeds, even as a kid, especially if no one was paying me to pull them.
I went back to the place where I’d first met Pamela Brown and tapped on the side of the cubicle and waited for her to look up. She did. Her eyes began to gleam, polished with a buffer of triumph. “I thought I’d be seeing you again, Mr. Tanner. Come in and have a seat.”
Pamela Brown leaned back and put her feet on the corner of her desk and clasped her hands behind her head. Her breasts flattened beneath her T-shirt, which rose above her navel. The word on the T-shirt was “BITCH.” I’d never seen anyone take so much pleasure in being right. “The Covington thing, correct?”
I nodded. “What do you know about it?”
“What I know for sure is that I couldn’t care less if the guy never comes back. Now tell me how shocked you are.”
“Not much. He’s in your way, isn’t he?”
“That he is.”
“Anything else going on there, besides professional jealousy?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Like what?”
“Oh, like sex, for example.”
Her eyes widened. “You do come out with it, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
She laughed and nodded, then picked up a pencil and began to gnaw on the eraser end. Her eyes closed. Wisps of hair danced down the slopes of her face. Somewhere down below us, way down below, something began to rumble. Walls and things began to rattle and creak. I thought it was an earthquake, maybe even the big one all of us are waiting for, but then I figured it out: the press had begun its run.
“I’m probably a fool to talk about it,” Miss Brown said slowly, “but what the hell. Sex. Mark did take me under his wing, so to speak, when I first started here. And like an idiot I snuggled right in there, all warm and cozy and dry, or so I thought, even though after a few bouts with professors in college I swore sex wasn’t going to have any role whatsoever in my career. It can help for a while, but in the long run all you get is fucked. Well, I should have stuck to my guns. I found out that every girl in the office had been under Mark’s wing at one time or another over the years, so I backed out.”
“Any withdrawal pains?”
“Sure. There always are, at least for me. But it had to be done. Mark, of course, hardly noticed I was gone.”
“And since?”
“Since then
it’s been like Frazier and Ali between us. Tooth and nail, all the way. If I thought it would help me beat him to a story I’d scratch his eyes out.”
“Who’s under his wing now?”
“Who knows? I stopped keeping track a long time ago, when I started having to take off my shoes to count them up. My guess is Mark’s libido has dropped below the boiling point at long last, but maybe he’s just dipping his wick somewhere else. He’s not around much, I know that. But I don’t worry about it.”
“Anymore.”
“Right. Anymore.”
“Any chance an irate husband could be responsible for whatever happened to him?” I asked. “Assuming something has?”
She shook her head. “It’s possible, but I doubt it. Mark wasn’t a home wrecker, particularly. God knows there are enough single girls around this town, a pirate like him wouldn’t have any trouble keeping the steerage full.”
“You don’t happen to have a picture of the pirate, do you?”
She grinned. “No, but it’s funny you should ask. He was buggy on that, you know? Refused to have his picture taken. Ever. I saw him give fifty bucks to one of those street photographers on Union Square one day, just to get the negative back. Mark took his work seriously. Too seriously, probably.”
“More seriously than you take yours?” I asked.
She frowned, a mixture of two parts anger and three parts sadness, from the way it looked. “They don’t like me, Tanner. The men. They think I’m some kind of freak, but I’m not. I’m just someone trying to make something of myself the best way I can. I’m just like them—in ability, ambition, arrogance, greed, all of it—but because I’m a woman they can’t accept it. You can’t either, can you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not in a position to be threatened by anyone, male or female, so I don’t worry much about it. But I’m no better than the next guy. When I act like a prick it’s usually because I’m afraid.”
Death Bed Page 13
