Crime Beat

by Scott Nicholson

  Crime doesn’t pay…but neither does journalism.

  CRIME BEAT

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2011 by Scott Nicholson

  Published by Haunted Computer Books

  Visit Scott’s Author Central page at Amazon

  Table of Contents

  CRIME BEAT

  1.

  Moretz started work on a Tuesday, but maybe his real work didn’t begin until a few weeks later.

  Moretz was the last guy to apply for the crime beat position. I wouldn’t have hired him if I wasn’t down to the bottom of the applicant pool and drowning in my own fatigue. As editor of the Sycamore Shade Picayune, if one of my writers didn’t come through, it would be my cheeks in the sling when the corporate bosses swooped down in their BMW’s.

  The overlords had kept me on a tight budget for the past year, and the two slackers already on payroll when I started this job were killing time until they figured out what they wanted to do when they grew up. I had already nailed my career track: I was going to win the Pulitzer and move on to the New York Times. Except the step from a Blue Ridge Mountain tri-weekly with a circulation of 5,000 to the big time was going to be murder.

  Which is where Moretz comes in.

  I didn’t figure him for much. He had decent clips as a feature writer for some weekly shopper on the West Coast, one of those rags that whined about the decline of the redwoods and how Big Sur had been taken over by old acid heads that cut their hair and became developers.

  But Moretz had taken a few detours along the career path, according to his resume. A stint as a short order cook in Des Moines, a gap where he claimed to be taking community-college classes, and a year running the political campaign of a state senatorial loser in Orange County—Republican, for the record, though like most true journalists, Moretz could switch-hit in a heartbeat if the money was better.

  At the time Moretz came in for the interview, I already had my mind set on another candidate, a girl with long legs whose ink on her journalism degree was still sopping wet. I had delusions of offering her the benefit of my experience.

  Moretz interviewed on a Friday, the press day for our weekend edition, the busiest time for the Picayune. I’d just put the paper to bed, which is a lousy industry term for it since our paper went out mid-day. My eyes were dry and burning, the victims of a 4 a.m. date with the computer screen. I blinked twice when Moretz walked in, and then checked my PDA to make sure I’d scheduled the appointment.

  I had. Damn it.

  “Hi, Johannes,” I said, reading from the resume. I pronounced it “Yo-hann,” not sure if that was some sort of Austrian pronunciation. I figured somebody with a name like that got beat up a lot as a kid.

  “John,” he said. He was tall, dark, and, if you like that sort of thing, I guess he was handsome. Solid jaw, a little twinkle in his black eyes, built like he’d played football in high school but had turned in his jock for a Sunday afternoon armchair. He looked about 30, not so threatening, since I had a few years of longevity on him.

  After all, he was the one looking for a job. I had one. Not a great one, but a job nonetheless.

  I browsed his clips. He’d won third in a press association feature writing contest with a piece about an old lady with 30 cats. The Picayune’s audience, like that of most local newspapers, is old, slightly educated, and fairly conservative. I browsed the article and noticed John Moretz (bylined as John J. Moretz) had not once given in to sarcasm or ridicule. An unbiased treatment, journalistically solid, fair and balanced.

  Big deal. Could it swing advertisers?

  “So, John, this position is for the crime beat. We haven’t had a real crime reporter since I’ve been here. I like the writers we have now, but they don’t know how to go for the throat.”

  That was an understatement. Westmoreland was an aspiring actor whose last big role was playing the narrator in the local community theater performance of “Our Town.” Baker had served with the Picayune as an intern before my tenure, dropped out to tour with a bluegrass band, then got his girlfriend pregnant and needed health insurance so he’d crawled back on his hands and knees, bloody mandolin strings trailing out behind.

  Of course I rehired him. I do have a heart, despite all other evidence to the contrary.

  “I can do the job, sir,” John said.

  Major points. I studied him to make sure the “sir” bit wasn’t resentment. The black eyes stayed black, not squinting, not blinking, not smirking. He was a possible keeper.

  “This job means you’ll have to maintain good relations with the local police. You don’t have to like them, but you need to respect them. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t say, “Yes, sir,” which would have come off as toadying. I started to respect the guy, especially since he respected me first. And that probably meant he could pretend to respect cops.

  “We’ve had other serious candidates for the position, so I’m sure you understand this is a tough decision.”

  “I know you have to do what’s best for your paper.”

  Your paper.

  Your goddamned paper.

  The guy hit me in my soft spot. I checked my watch. I had a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in half an hour. I’d gained twenty pounds since I took the helm of the Picayune, most of it to blame on the Chamber.

  I sometimes wondered who ultimately picked up the tab, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Unless you’re in the journalism business.

  “Your work looks good, John, but of course I’ll have to talk it over with the higher-ups.”

  Which was complete fabrication. In the era of corporate mergers, broadsheets like the Picayune were nothing more than tax write-offs, and the publisher sat in his corner office and calculated salary cuts. The Internet was killing us all but we were too stubborn to admit it.

  “I understand,” John said.” I appreciate it if you’d let me know as soon as you can. I’m looking for an apartment right now and I’m trying to figure out my price range.”

  I couldn’t tell if that was a dig for sympathy. Probably not. John’s clothes were clean but inexpensive, his shirt tucked in, shoes not terribly scuffed. He was taller than the county sheriff, which might be a liability, but he had a manner that suggested he could be trusted.

  Cops in Pickett County were notoriously tight-lipped and didn’t like media coverage unless they were photographed grinning next to a pot plant or standing outside the contaminated remnants of a trailer park methamphetamine lab. If John could play Good Ole Boy and still make the cops accountable as public servants, he might score some good stories.

  Damn. And I had been dreaming about that female journalism major’s calves.

  There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to do the right thing, no matter how much he hates it. Johnny would benefit the Picayune a lot more than the journalism major would benefit me, even though at my age all I would manage was the occasional wistful fantasy.

  The truth hurts, and they say journalism is nothing more than an unbiased search for the truth. Sometimes I hate being a born editor, and we should pity all those burdened by an unfortunate sense of morality.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, though my decision had already been made. I wanted to call the other applicants first. Give them the bad news and invite them to apply later if circumstances so merited. I planned to call the journalism major last. Maybe ask her for coffee to talk about her future.

  John and I shook hands and that was the last I saw of him until Tuesday. I’d left a message on his cell phone that the job was his if he wanted. He returned a message saying he was pleased to be part of the Picayune team and was looking forward to helping me take the paper to the next level, blah blah blah, but he needed Mon
day to move.

  One more round of phone tag later and another vapid, crime-free edition of the Picayune had hit the street. The front page featured a color photo of the mayor shaking hands with the president of a new bank, an article on the local community college’s board of trustees’ meeting, and the planning board’s vote on a twelve-unit condominium complex.

  A yawner even for the people whose names were in the articles. Sex and death, those great marketing tools for the ages, were entirely absent. We didn’t even have a dog photo, for heaven’s sake.

  I always arrive late on Tuesdays. That’s my “me” morning, when I do things like sleep in or go to the waffle shop and pump the locals. I’m a football fan, Tennessee Titans, and they had played on “Monday Night Football” and lost by just enough points to keep me up until one. I’m not a big drinker but football and Budweiser go hand in hand. Must be that media brainwashing we all hear about.

  When I strolled into the Picayune’s sheet-metal, prefab walls, Moretz was already at his desk. The surface was clean except for a single notepad opened beside his telephone. The police scanner sat on the cubicle divider, broadcasting its hiss across the building, occasional cop-speak cutting in.

  Baker and Westmoreland were late as usual, even later than I was. Let’s face it, they were alkies. The tradition of journalism is that reporters keep a fifth in their bottom desk drawers. My guys kept theirs in their hip pockets. But we’re family, at least until the bottom line requires the elimination of a position.

  This Moretz guy, though, he was on the ball. It’s easy when you’re fresh meat, not worn down by salary, but he had a sharpened pencil and a cup of coffee and his computer wasn’t logged into his online-dating Web site. Good signs, all.

  “Morning, Johnny Boy,” I said, though I usually try to refrain from fraternization. First day, I figured we’d be equals.

  “Hi, Chief,” he said. “I got a bead on a potential drug arrest.”

  I nodded. Drug arrest. Big whoop-dee-doo. Crime brief, page two, maybe three column inches. I needed front-page stuff. “Anything else?”

  Moretz turned to me, and his black eyes flashed just the faintest flicker of red. Must have been those three extra Buds I’d consumed after my two-drink limit. Or else the latent effects of contamination from the morning’s sausage biscuit.

  “Deadline’s tonight?” he asked.

  “We can hold the presses if it’s something good, except the press operators will piss and moan. Otherwise, you can e-mail it so I’ll get it in the morning.”

  The scanner crackled and the communications op, who sounded like a 40-year-old smoker who’d failed in the phone-sex industry, broadcast a 10-50 P.I. In human language, that meant a car crash with personal injury. Moretz jotted down the address, checked the map on the wall, and was out the door before I could ask if Serena Fitz, the photographer, should tag along.

  Not that it would have done any good. Fitz was one of those artsy types, probably out trying to catch a squirrel burying a nut or some old woman digging in her flower garden. She thought “art” while I thought in squares.

  No wonder Fitz rebelled against me. But she won the Picayune a press award almost every year and showed up for high school sporting events. What else could you ask of a photographer in the digital age?

  I settled in at my desk and started to update the paper’s Web site. The scanner spat static and erupted in chatter. The 10-50 P.I. turned into a four-alarm call, with the police requesting the fire department, rescue squad, and ambulance service. Above the sirens wailing in the background, a panicked voice broke in: “Request WINGS, airlift transport.”

  Airlift transport. Serious business.

  Nobody wanted to go to the local hospital if the injury was life-threatening. Better to ride a chopper to the regional medical center a half-hour away. Much as I hated to admit it, the possibility of head trauma enthralled the editor inside me.

  2.

  Moretz came in two hours later, one of his shirttails out and his collar rumpled. My other two reporters had yet to clock in.

  “The victim was a young female,” Moretz said.

  “Victim?” I would have said “Vic,” while the perpetrator would of course have been “Perp,” but this wasn’t a lousy TV crime show, this was reality, and my eyes were killing me and my pulse was a bag of nails in my temples.

  “She died en route.”

  “En route?” Don’t tell me Yo-hann was French. They didn’t like French here in the North Carolina mountains. My readership was Freedom Fries and church socials and obituaries and animal-shelter fundraisers and the occasional gruesome, sex-related carnage.

  Moretz checked his note pad. “Carleena Whitley, 22, address given as 1332 Swamp Box Road, Sycamore Shade.”

  Whitley. A name I could forget. But not Carleena. The blonde journalism major with the flashy calves. The one who should have been sitting at Moretz’s desk, and with a lot more attractive bulges under the armrests, if I do say so myself. Now she was the headline instead of the byline.

  “A fatal?” I used the industry slang for “fatality” to let Moretz know we knew the language. My lips were numb but I was already picturing the layout.

  “I got a few snapshots with my digital,” Moretz said. “I didn’t focus on the body.”

  I’ll bet he didn’t. Either he was gay or he had a lot more journalistic distance than I did. “Download them and put them in the photo files.”

  “Alcohol may have been a factor.”

  “Hmm. Might be a follow-up on substance abuse later in the week.”

  “I’m all over it, Chief.”

  Chief. I liked the sound of that. I’d helmed three papers, none of them dailies, but I had this image of myself as Ed Asner in the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” the tough but fair crusader for truth and justice.

  A career spiced by a healthy rise in pay along the way, even as my hairline receded. Until one day I achieved the top of my profession. Whatever that was.

  I’d always pictured a heart attack and ten column inches of cold copy, because your paper was always obliged to make the editor a “community hero” despite the fact that few people outside the Chamber of Commerce would recognize me on the street. But so much for the future. In the newspaper business, the future is already past deadline and yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news.

  “The trooper working the scene gave me a copy of his report,” John said. “They won’t have the toxicology until next week, but he said, off the record, her blood would have burned with a blue flame, the alcohol content was so high.”

  “The Picayune has a policy of never letting public officials go off the record.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have known alcohol was involved.”

  “How can we run with it? Was it in the accident report?”

  Moretz smiled, a crooked, ghastly, jagged thing, kind of like the one I saw in the mirror when I brushed my teeth. “I saw them taking beer cans from the car. Let the reader make the next logical leap.”

  I patted Moretz on the back. I usually don’t go in for male bonding crap, especially with people who work for me, but I was beginning to like this guy. Besides, throw a dog a bone once and it will come sniffing around your hand for the rest of its life.

  That day went well. My other two reporters turned in solid copy, late as usual but clean. I started work on the Wednesday edition, comforted by the knowledge of a front-page death. As the newsroom cliché goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

  The good got better, though I’d never have guessed it at the time. In my six years at the Picayune, we had struck red gold for the front page about once every two months or so. Usually it was a traffic fatality, but unless we were lucky enough to hear about it on the scanner, our coverage was spotty.

  The State Highway Patrol had a habit of letting the troopers carry accident reports around with them for days before turning them in to the communications office. Often we’d end up with nothing more than a photo of the mangled wreck hooked to a
tow truck while emergency responders packed their gear.

  Learning the victim’s name was an exercise in blood-pressure management, and the chore had only gotten harder with the passage of federal privacy laws that allowed everybody to avoid giving out health-related information.

  Privacy laws were just an excuse for cops, crooks, and politicians to hide even more stuff from the public, but the laws were packaged as “civil liberties,” so the poison pill went down sweet.

  But this time truth and justice carried the day.

  In his first trip to the plate, Moretz had scored not only the name and police report, he’d been on the scene of the crash while everything was still fresh. His copy was full of those tiny details that really bring a story alive for the reader: the University of North Carolina coffee mug that had flown from her Subaru sedan upon impact, an anonymous eyewitness who suggested Carleena had been exceeding a safe speed, a photo of the sedan’s interior showing the empty beer cans.

  He even had a shot of a single white hand fallen softly open in the twisted wreckage, as if Carleena had been asking a higher power why she’d had to die so violently.

  I probably wouldn’t run the beer or corpse pictures, but it was nice to have them just in case. I usually stayed within the bounds of good taste whenever possible, even though bad taste sells more papers.

  We wrapped it up and the Picayune hit the street by early afternoon the next day. The reporters sometimes go out for lunch after the paper is done, especially since they’re nearly cross-eyed from proofing and aren’t ready to stare at their computer screens yet. Fred Lance, the sports editor, was up for Tres Hombres Mexican Restaurant, but then Lance was always up for burritos and imported beer.

  The trouble was that his notorious and chronic flatulence tended to clear the office within two hours of our return, so I subtly suggested a trip to the Waffle House instead. Moretz blew us off, saying he had to check on something at the courthouse.

  I had a crime dog in the making. A reporter who would pass up a meal for a story was a definite keeper.