“These ladies,” the attendant said through the perforations in the Plexiglas, “are here to see you.”
Infante and Nancy turned and realized that the two women sitting in the lobby were Helen Manning, who looked different in her street clothes, and a hulking, almost obese woman in a pink T-shirt and brightly printed stretch pants that were being forced to live up to their name.
“I’m Alice,” the fat woman said, “and I want to help you any way I can.”
20.
Mira Jenkins sat in the downtown office of the Beacon-Light on another ho-hum Saturday night, trying to figure out exactly when newspapers had decided they preferred nothing to happen. She had come in for her weekly night shift determined as always, happy to spin straw into gold if that’s what she needed to get a byline in the next day’s paper. But the day cop reporter had been lamentably efficient, scooping up the overnight array of misdemeanor murders and fatal auto accidents and transforming them into briefs. Mira was left with nothing but condition checks on those who hadn’t been considerate enough to die by 5 P.M.
Now, with 10 P.M. fast approaching, she wouldn’t be allowed to leave the office for anything short of World War Whatever—defined as a multiple murder in a bad neighborhood or a single homicide in a good one—because the night editor couldn’t authorize overtime or hold the pages without the managing editor’s go-ahead. Plus, she had to be in the office to watch the ten o’clock and the eleven o’clock news, because the one thing the television stations did better than the paper was jump on stories from the scanner.
Even then she wasn’t guaranteed a byline. Some weekends the editor might dismiss even multiples as briefs, depending on the demographics. But there had also been Saturday nights when Mira was sent out to horrible neighborhoods for rinky-dink two-alarms with no bodies, just because some flashy image in the video had caught the executive editor’s eye.
Her one crucial responsibility, or so she was informed when she started the Saturday shift, was the 8 P.M. dinner run. The night editor, who otherwise kept her on a short leash, would juggle anything to make sure she was free to do that chore.
“You can pick,” he had said, fanning the take-out menus in front of her. “Chinese, pizza, Japanese. You go, you pick.”
“Why do I have to get your dinner at all? Because I’m the girl?”
“Oh, settle down, Gloria Steinem,” he said. He was that out of it, he actually said Gloria Steinem. “Night cops gets dinner. Ask anyone. Ask rewrite. Ask the guy who did this job before you. This is a godforsaken neighborhood after 6 P.M. on Saturday. We have to brown-bag it or send someone out. Wear your beeper.”
The last admonition was unnecessary. Mira always wore her beeper. She had arrived at the paper with one, an accessory not commonly needed by a neighborhood reporter in the county bureau. It had been her expectation that the suburban assignment would last six, maybe nine months at the most. But she was still stuck in the county seventeen months later, watching newer and less worthy reporters get the call downtown. All because of one mistake, a mistake that could happen to anyone, a mistake that wasn’t entirely her fault.
Yet Mira was perhaps the one person at the paper who didn’t blame her situation entirely on That Story, as it was known in news-room shorthand. Mira blamed her name.
“It’s Mira with an i,” she sang into the phone almost every day. “M-i-r-a, Mira.” The confusion was entirely her own fault, for she had been born Myra with a y and decided upon entering college to revise herself by just one letter. Myra was an old lady’s name, whereas Mira had a certain glamour to it.
The unexpected consequence was that she went through life correcting people upon first meeting. “No, it’s Mira, long i. Not Meer-a. Not like the actress.” She should have gone whole hog, changed the pronunciation along with the spelling, but that had seemed like a bigger mistruth. That was Mira’s word for the white lies of which she availed herself no more often than anyone else. Mistruths.
But if she’d had it to do over, she would never have contradicted the top editor when he referred to her as Meera. “It’s Mira,” she had said automatically, and then realized her mistake. Nostrildamus, as the editor of the paper was known behind his back, had been disturbed to be in error even on something as innocuous as the pronunciation of an unusual name. Mira got the job, but she was left with the distinct feeling that if Nostrildamus—then known to her only as Willard B. Norton—wanted her to be Meera, she should have agreed to be Meera.
She had tried to make up for that early blunder by cracking the code of this particular workplace culture, as she had done in high school, college, her internships, and her previous job. By every measure, she had much of what was required for success here—she was young, hardworking, and pretty in the right way. The right way being interpreted, as everything about Nostrildamus was interpreted, by inference and example. Judging by the women he hired, he preferred a skinny kind of prettiness, not too flamboyant and not overtly sexual. He also liked the females to solicit his opinion on all matters, large and small, to treat him like a father figure. The young women agreed it was creepy, but innocuous, the kind of gray area flirtation that had long been part of their pretty young lives.
After that disastrous first meeting, Mira had styled herself after the paper’s most successful reporters. She had made appointments to “drop by,” seeking his story ideas, asking for his career advice. If he had called her Meera again, she would have let it stand, but instead it seemed his gaffe was what he remembered. “Why, it’s Mira with an i,” he said when she entered his office. He said it in the hallway, if she happened to pass him by, and on his infrequent visits to the bureau. She began to wonder if he knew anything else about her.
When she asked him where she might go next, when she spoke of being ready for new challenges and bigger beats, he became vague and distant, as if she were a telemarketer he wanted to brush off politely: “It’s my observation that people here don’t spend enough time on their beats, don’t hunker down and really learn the ins and outs of beat reporting. I predict”—he was big on predicting, which explained half his nickname; he would even hold his index finger aloft, a regular Mr. Wizard—“I predict you will have plenty of time to do other things.”
“And until then?”
“Let’s keep giving those neighborhoods the careful attention they deserve. Go to community meetings. Take local activists to lunch. Build up your Rolodex, develop sources. Neighborhoods are the building blocks of society, the DNA of Baltimore.”
“Yes, but neighborhoods aren’t as defined in the county as they are in the city,” she ventured, making sure it sounded more like a question than a challenge. Speaking with Nostrildamus was a variation on Jeopardy! Every answer had to be in the form of a question. He simply nodded, assuming agreement in her voice. Sometimes she wasn’t sure that Nostrildamus heard the actual words that came out of her mouth, or anyone’s mouth. His responses didn’t quite match up. Something seemed to go dark inside him when another person spoke, as if he left his body through astral projection and returned only when it was his turn to take the helm of the conversation.
“Yes, indeedie,” he said, being the kind of man who said “indeedie” and “awesome be dawesome,” and, most mysteriously, “Thanks for the college knowledge.” “Neighborhoods are the DNA of our city, and you have to see yourself as one of the scientists trying to crack the genome.”
She nodded earnestly, staring up into the black, bottomless holes of his nose, which accounted for the other half of his nickname. He had remarkably large nostrils, and because of the way he held his head while speaking, his reporters were forced to gaze into them.
“Watch out for him,” an older reporter had told Mira in her early weeks. “He’ll send you to the cornfields.”
“What?”
“That’s right, you’re too young to remember The Twilight Zone. There’s a little kid with psychic powers who holds a whole town in thrall because he punishes anyone who doesn’t do exactly w
hat he likes. What he likes is the same food day in, day out, with a birthday party at the end of every day. And no contradictions. If he even catches you thinking contrary thoughts, he’ll send you to the cornfields, which means you’re as good as dead.”
Mira had shrugged, bored as usual by the baby boomer habit of referring to things from their youth. The Twilight Zone. Jesus. Why not The Honeymooners, why not Fibber McGee? The way she saw it, anyone who remembered black-and-white television should have the good sense to read a few magazines, keep up with what was going on now.
Nostrildamus couldn’t send her to the cornfields because she was already there. But he could keep her there for her mistakes. The irony was, That Story was his fault. But only he and Mira knew this. Nostrildamus was the one who had passed the handwritten letter along to her, with his distinctive red printing: Just a suggestion, but this looks very interesting.
Just a suggestion was widely understood as Do it now, so she had knocked herself out. She had driven to the Woodlawn neighborhood and interviewed an elderly black man about his role in desegregating a nearby amusement park, Gwynn Oak. Almost forty years after the fact, the man wanted to buy the abandoned property, which remained behind fences, a wild and implausible place in a once-suburban neighborhood that was going rapidly to seed. He described a vision of a public park, with statues to civil rights leaders. All he needed, he said, was start-up money. He was even willing to mortgage his own modest home to get the ball rolling. That had been his phrase—to get the ball rolling.
The story had run off the front on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the only ball that rolled had been the one that flattened Mira’s career. The calls had started at 7 A.M., overwhelming the morning cop reporter, the only person in the office early on a holiday morning. Mira’s subject was a penny-ante con artist, hopelessly delusional. On the day the civil rights protesters had marched on Gwynn Oak, he had been serving time for larceny. His dream may have been true, but little else in the story was. He didn’t even own the house he was willing to mortgage.
Who would lie about such a thing? What was the point? “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” one of the older reporters told her, in seeming sympathy, but Mira suspected he was rejoicing at her blunder. Although neither she nor her story was cited in the subsequent memos and workshops, everyone knew why they were being reminded to run criminal record checks and pull the clips. If Mira had compared her source’s stories to the original coverage, she would have seen he was wrong on several key details.
The Saturday night cop shift had been her self-selected penance. She had cut a deal with Nostrildamus and the secretary who kept the pay sheets, agreeing to work six days a week for straight-up comp time instead of overtime. Comp time the bosses knew she would never take, because she didn’t even use up her two weeks of vacation time. That was another part of the culture here: no one got ahead by taking time off. If the union knew about her arrangement, they would shit, but the union took twenty-two dollars a week out of her paycheck and what did it do for her? Oh, they had been ready to defend her when she screwed up, but that was more for them than for her. The union wasn’t going to get her downtown full time. If Maryland law had allowed it, she would have quit or refused to pay the dues. Then Nostrildamus would know where her true allegiance lay.
So she was downtown one night a week. Just her luck, Saturday nights went cold when she arrived. The good stories, the page-one stories, now seemed to happen every other night of the week. There was nothing to do but read the wires and other newspapers, which didn’t actually interest Mira much. Mira liked the idea of newspapers, enjoyed telling people she was a reporter, but the daily product meant little to her. Her passion was hitting milestones, accumulating tangible proof of her advancement.
Now she was stuck. In this city, in the suburbs, on permanent Saturdays, in limbo. She was even between boyfriends, unusual for her. She no longer remembered why she had chosen journalism, but she remembered her determination to succeed in it. She was not going to slink off to PR. Thank God she hadn’t jumped ship in the dot-com boom, which had lured so many of her friends away, then stranded them. She was not a failure. She got lots of “good jobs” from Nostrildamus and the occasional fifty-dollar American Express gift cheque, largely in recognition of all that unpaid overtime. She was being reborn. It was just taking so damn long.
For some reason, this made her think of the story from one of the western states, where a mother had hired a rebirthing coach to help a troubled child, and they had ended up smothering the girl in her own vomit while simulating passage through the birth canal. Now that would be a good story. She could do something with that. What could she do in a city where it was just boom-boom-boom, one lowlife taking out another lowlife, and not even at the hours that fit her schedule?
The night editor’s voice interrupted her reverie: “Call for you, Jenkins.”
“Put it on 6129.”
“I know the extension,” the night editor said. He was quick to remind Mira of everything he knew—and everything she didn’t know. A few months ago, on a freezing winter night, he had ordered her to go stare at a street sign on a forlorn corner five blocks north because she had misspelled it in a brief. She had gone downstairs, hidden in the ladies’ room off the lobby, and come back a suitable interval later. “Centre Street,” she had said, “C-E-N-T-R-E,” pretending humility, shivering a little for effect. She had checked it on the map she kept in her purse. “I won’t get it wrong again.”
“Newsroom,” she said on a sigh. “Mira Jenkins.”
“You’re a reporter?”
The very challenge in the voice, the unearned hostility, signaled trouble. The night editor must have forwarded one of the regular nuts just to play with her.
“Yes, I’m a reporter. I cover police on Saturdays, but during the week I’m out in Baltimore County.”
That should scare her caller off. Nuts always wanted to talk to the most important people, Nostrildamus or one of the metro columnists.
“How old are you?”
“I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Is there something I can help you with tonight?”
“Oh, it’s rel-e-vant.”
The husky female voice was perplexing. The syntax was ghetto, but the pronunciation was sharp, exaggerated. It reminded Mira of the way people speak after drinking, when they’re trying to convince others they aren’t drunk.
“How may I help you?” Mira repeated. She must not lose her temper with any caller, no matter how rude. One unhelpful word to the wrong person, a person who knew Nostrildamus, and she was beyond rehabilitation.
“You can help by knowing a little history. You know history?”
“I like to think I do.”
“You know local history?”
The rhythms were definitely ghetto to Mira’s ear, but she had to be careful. There were some politically connected types who spoke that way.
“Is there something I can do for you tonight?”
“A baby disappeared.”
“Yes, we’ve been following that story.” Another chore done by the day cop reporter, who had thoroughly covered the absence of leads and the Baltimore County cops’ refusal to say whether they thought this was a stranger kidnap, a domestic homicide, or something in between. Nostrildamus didn’t like the story, Mira had heard from the night editor when she came in today. “I predict,” the executive editor had said at the Friday four o’clock news meeting, “that this will prove to be a sad but small story. The media has gone overboard in its coverage of such stories, which have no true global importance. I predict”—finger held aloft—“that it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way.” No one in the meeting had the heart to suggest that Nostrildamus might see the future differently if the child had been white and middle-class, instead of a biracial girl from a marginal city neighborhood. “If you want page-one treatment from the Beacon-Light,” the night editor had told Mira, “you need to disappear from a better part of town. Prefer
ably his.”
The night editor was just trying to make her feel better for being elbowed out of a story that had actually happened in one of her duller-than-dirt neighborhoods. Mira’s only contribution so far had been to ferry a photo downtown, which had earned her a ’trib line, even though the desk forgot to use the photo.
“You have been following,” the voice agreed. “Now you need to lead.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“You must remind people that this has happened before, that such coincidences are to be explored, not ignored.”
“I’m sorry,” Mira said, checking out the Caller ID log on the phone. But because the call had been forwarded by the night editor, it showed his extension, not the originating number. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Now, see.” The voice was triumphant. “That’s why I asked your age, where you were from. Nobody who lived here seven years ago could forget what happened that summer.”
Seven years ago. Mira was starting her senior year at Penn, dating a boy named Bart, short for Bartholomew. He had money and ambition—the first sometimes precluded the second, she had later learned. She knew she didn’t love him, not really, and he didn’t love her, but they would use the word from time to time, to be polite. The memories came back to her, like a movie montage. The golden autumns, the tender springs, the scullers on the Schuylkill.
“Well, I didn’t live here then, and I don’t know.”
“A girl named Olivia went missing,” the voice hissed. “Judge Poole’s granddaughter. Two white girls killed her but they got juvenile time because they were white. You want to think what would happen to two black girls who killed a white judge’s granddaughter? You think the legislature would have said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t be lowering the limit, you can’t send eleven-year-olds to adult prison.’ ”
Every Secret Thing Page 18
