Mystery Dance: Three Novels

by Scott Nicholson

  “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 Monday 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 email 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 shirt tails 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 arm rests, 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.

  The waffle house did us right, except I discovered Spanish omelets had the same unfortunate effect on Lance as Mexican food did. Must be a Hispanic thing. He’d probably go off on a jar of olives or a Ricky Martin song. Perhaps any excuse would do for Lance to bathe the world in his odor.

  But the afternoon wasn’t a total dark cloud: Moretz had scored again while we were out. I was about to close my office door and enjoy the relatively wholesome air when Moretz rushed in.

  “Drug fatality, Chief,” he said.

  “Overdose?” Like most community papers, we downplayed suicides. It was too easy to trigger copycats and, despite the press’s reputation for wallowing in the worst of human behavior, we occasionally had respect for the grieving family.

  But most importantly, suicides didn’t sell papers. They just depressed people instead of enticing them into dropping quarters.

 
; “Better than that. A drug deal gone bad. Gunplay.”

  On his first story, I’d had to resist an urge to hug Moretz. Now I had to turn away before I gave the guy a full-fledged peck on the cheek. Drug deal gone bad. Murder investigation. Only one thing would make the story better…

  “Sweet,” I said, maintaining my editorial composure. “Is there a female involved? Or a puppy?”

  “Some college kid. A real Mister Nice Guy, according to witnesses interviewed by the police.”

  “County or town?” Sheriff was an elected position, so Hardison was more likely to pose beside the murder scene for a photograph. The Sycamore Shade police chief was appointed by the town council, and therefore pretty much had the job for life unless he managed to get caught in illicit business.

  Smart cops rarely got caught but they made golden copy when they did, guaranteeing increased circulation and press awards. I wouldn’t wish such a thing on any community but mine.

  “The body was county, but the kid lived in town.” Moretz didn’t show any flicker of excitement. Even veteran reporters got a rush from a potentially ace story. But Moretz was as cold as three-o’clock ink.

  “Details,” I said. In a newsroom, you don’t waste words. You want them on paper instead of evaporating in the air before someone could pay for them.

  Moretz consulted his note pad. “Simon Hanratty, 22, 2753 Terrace Trace Apartments. Found dead at the scene from a single gunshot wound to the head. Looks like the body was dumped at a remote campground near the national forest. No murder weapon recovered. The vic was set to graduate from community college in May.”

  “Any leads?”

  “It’s pretty fresh. Sheriff said the case is officially under investigation and he can’t comment.”

  “Damn. He always says that, right up until the case goes before the Grand Jury.”

  Moretz grinned that lopsided grin of his, the one that suggested he’d been eating crow and had found it palatable. “I worked on him a little. Told him I respected his need for confidentiality but the public would want some answers. Plus I told him I’d be in trouble with my boss if I couldn’t feed you any details.”