McCarthy entered without knocking. Lawlor stood immediately.
“Where the hell have you been?” the editor demanded. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since Croon came back yesterday.”
“I figured,” McCarthy said.
“I hold the first edition for an hour and you tell me ‘I figured,’ ” Lawlor cried. “This is a daily newspaper, McCarthy!”
“C’mon, Connor, you knew we weren’t going with that story this morning or any morning,” McCarthy said. His tone was serrated.
Lawlor hesitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It was right there in front of me the whole time,” McCarthy said. “But it wasn’t until I stopped thinking like Gideon McCarthy and adopted Prentice LaFontaine’s perspective that I figured it out.”
The editor threw up his hands. “Now you’ve totally lost me.”
“Okay, I’ll be pithy: Famous editor knows about political corruption tied to sex scandal but covers it up. I feared a leak in here, but I always figured it was Ed. Never you. Never The Post’s icon of virtue.”
McCarthy expected an explosion. Instead, Lawlor laughed softly and shook his head. “I should have listened to that voice that said ‘Get him out of here’ when you puled that plagiarism stunt last spring. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t the first sign of the reporter in burnout, the first thin line in the crack-up. Now here it is, the completed web of paranoia spread out on the glass. Maybe I should move you to rewrite or obituaries.”
“I’ve got the facts,” McCarthy said.
“This I’ve got to hear.”
“You weren’t there at Burkhardt’s the night Carlton died,” McCarthy began.
“I should say not. I was at a fund-raiser for the Museum of Fine Arts.”
“I know. I checked the library. We printed a photo of you having cocktails with some local luminaries on the society page.”
“At least you still do some reporting,” Lawlor said.
“But after you got home, you got a phone call, a panicked call from the mayor.”
“Red pencil time,” the editor interrupted. “That’s what’s called an unsubstantiated leap of logic in this business, McCarthy. You have some kind of telephone company document to back that up?”
“I wouldn’t use it in the printed story. But for the sake of narrative continuity in my oral history, I’m including it for you.”
“The addled mind develops elaborate explanations. Keep going, you’re on a roll.”
“I figure Mayor Portillo didn’t know about the shenanigans planned at Burkhardt’s fund-raiser until Carlton died. But he realized the dire implications of an event like that coming to light. So he immediately touched base with his very private spin doctor.”
“Me?” Lawlor said, incredulously.
“You,” McCarthy said. “Pete Taylor was on night cops when Carlton died. He’d written a much bigger piece about the death, noting discrepancies in the official story. He talked with the night manager at the tennis club who’d been by that practice court ten minutes before Carlton was found. It was empty. And the security guard who discovered the body received an anonymous tip about Carlton’s location. Pete says you ordered the piece hacked and buried.”
“The second page of the Metro section is not buried.”
“That story deserved page one play—financial mover and shaker dies mysteriously, except we didn’t even mention mysteriously, did we?”
Lawlor’s expression turned hard. “Nice piece of fiction,” he said. “But I haven’t heard anything that connects me to any of this.”
McCarthy reached inside his sport coat and drew out a sheaf of papers. “A wonderful thing about lawyers. They tend to file documents pertaining to the same project the same day. So I asked a paralegal to pull out every document Max Crisp filed in Nevada on the day he filed for Portillo and Leslie. There you were.”
He tossed the papers on the desk. “You bought land on Lake Mead the same day as Portillo, Carlton, and Leslie. Your divorce records from five years ago show you’re a limited partner in a Texas real estate venture, which I believe that with enough digging I could bring full circle into one of the partnerships in Burkhardt’s Blue Coast organization.”
Lawlor looked through McCarthy as if he wasn’t there.
“It gets better,” McCarthy said. “This morning I had a researcher at the SEC in Washington take a close look at the debentures The Post floated two years ago when we were in trouble. A substantial portion was underwritten by Carlton Bank through a New York firm. And my sources say that Burkhardt purchased a significant volume of the bonds, which means he has influence in here. Connection enough?”
“It proves nothing,” Lawlor snapped.
“But it raises questions the Columbia Journalism Review would have a field day with. And raising enough questions is all it takes these days for the press to destroy a reputation. But you’ve known that for decades, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lawlor said again. But McCarthy caught the slightest quiver in his hands.
“Let’s go back, shall we? deep background to a time when a largely untested reporter gets onto the biggest story of his life,” McCarthy went on. “It begins with a tip that a construction company owned by the mayor’s family has been making kickbacks in return for lucrative public projects. The reporter works hard and ethically and documents several instances where money changed hands in return for contracts.
“The first story appears and the district attorney, who has been looking for a weak link in the mayor’s organization, opens up an investigation. Because you broke the story, you have the upper hand when it comes to getting scoops and information. And to your credit, you work day and night.”
Crevice lines of concentration appeared on Lawlor’s forehead. “I didn’t take a day off for more than two years.”
McCarthy nodded. “Those stories were hard-fought-for, beautiful examples of what investigative reporting should be. I went through just about every one this morning and you were ahead of the government professionals at least two dozen times.”
“We’re not in the business of just reporting the news,” Lawlor said as if from a distance. “A good newspaper makes news.”
“You made big news. And if my own understanding of how wrapped up you can get in a story is any guideline, you got to the point where you felt an almost-religious need to expose Jennings, to bring him down.”
“He was a walking cesspool,” Lawlor stated flatly.
“As thoroughly corrupt as they come,” McCarthy agreed. “But the voters didn’t care, even in the face of all you’d uncovered. They reelected him. You felt betrayed.”
Lawlor did not respond. But McCarthy knew he’d struck the raw nerve under the scarred-over tissue.
“When I stole those quotes last spring you lectured me about the minor crimes in journalism,” McCarthy pressed on. “You said you can tape someone without telling them you’re making a recording. You can let the opposition beat you on a story you knew about first, but failed to write. You could name a source you promised would remain anonymous, something you went to jail rather than do.
“But you said the worst crime you can commit in this business is to take someone else’s work and call it your own. You called plagiarism ‘the intellectual equivalent of armed robbery.’ ”
Lawlor nodded warily.
“I never thought about that metaphor closely until last night,” McCarthy said. “Armed robbery isn’t the worst crime there is. Murder is. And libel—making up a story and publishing it as the truth—is about as close as you can get to verbally murdering someone, isn’t it?”
“I made nothing up,” Lawlor said. “Jennings was corrupt.”
“It’s funny how year upon year of repeating a story to yourself makes it almost true,” McCarthy said. “But I’ve read the Justice Department report. There was no evidence to support your story that the mayor was tied to Quintana through Jaime
Ramirez.”
“There were investigative documents,” Lawlor said. “I quoted from them.”
“The wonderful official document.” McCarthy laughed derisively. “We reporters love them, don’t we? An authentic government document says Mr. X has engaged in questionable business practices so we dutifully print it and scald the man’s reputation without pausing to question, really question, if there were ulterior motives behind that piece of paper. Why? Usually we don’t have time. But it’s also that questioning is hard and it makes a story harder to tell. Better to jump on the hard fact of the allegation and, of course, put the poor man’s attorney’s protests in paragraph seven and tell ourselves we’ve been jolly well balanced.”
McCarthy pointed at the editor. “Here’s what I think happened. You were crushed when Jennings got reelected, even after all your stories. So were Portillo and Leslie, your two prime sources, the men with access to whatever information you needed. Add to the mix the man any investigative reporter worth a damn is going to start milking in a situation like this, the man who hates Jennings most, Coughlin Burkhardt.”
The editor’s thick eyebrows flickered.
“I figured you all decided that if Jennings was going to be driven from office you needed to bring in the big guns, Bobby Kennedy’s boys,” McCarthy said. “What better angle than the Quintanas, who had ties to the New Orleans mob?
“So Portillo and Leslie cooked a document based on the innocuous fact that Jaime Ramirez had inherited a piece of property frequented by a nobody at the outer edge of the Quintana organization. Official document in hand to show your editors, you did some sleuthing and discovered a series of anonymous sources who would back up the document’s findings. Only there were no anonymous sources. It was all bullshit.”
“Fuck you, McCarthy,” Lawlor seethed. “Jennings was corrupt and he had to be brought down.”
“What about Jaime Ramirez?” McCarthy asked. “You destroyed an innocent man for your own personal gain.”
A wave of pain crossed the editor’s face. “I did it for the good of the city!”
“The ends justify the means?”
“You’re damn right it does. I was sick when Jaime jumped. But look around you. When Jennings was in control this was a cow town with a bunch of military bases and the promise of greatness. Now it’s one of the finest cities in this country, a place people from all over the world come to study as an example of progressive urban development.”
“But they don’t get the real story, do they?” McCarthy demanded. “The real story is that to get these buildings up, pockets have to be padded. Face it, Connor, this is just another big city with an even bigger crook at the helm.”
Lawlor shrugged. “You get to my age, you realize that sometimes you have to overlook minor transgressions for the larger benefits.”
“Like your illustrious career?”
“I’ve stayed true to the ideals of this profession.”
“You hypocrite. The entire story on which you built your career was fabricated!”
“No, it wasn’t. Just Ramirez.”
McCarthy gestured at the mementos on the editor’s credenza. “But that was the integral piece, wasn’t it? Because of it you got hauled before a judge, who compelled you to reveal your sources. You refused, not because of some goddamned reporter’s right under the First Amendment to the Constitution, but because the sources didn’t exist. You went to jail. You were lionized by the national press as some kind of journalism saint. They gave you the Pulitzer Prize!”
“I deserved it.”
“You faked it!” McCarthy yelled, not caring that heads were probably turning in the outer room trying to figure out what the two were arguing about. “You faked a story to win the Pulitzer.”
Lawlor’s skin turned beet red. “I was no Janet Cooke crafting the entire world of a five-year-old heroin addict for The Washington Post!”
“You were worse! You were this close to getting it the right way and you decided to cut corners and tell yourself you were doing it for the benefit of mankind. Bullshit! You were doing it for the benefit of Connor Lawlor. And you sucked Ed Tower into it. Ed Tower idolized you and because of it he wouldn’t dig deep enough to see you for what you were: a fraud.”
“Who are you to talk to me about cutting corners for the greater good?” Lawlor snarled. “You figured out you weren’t going to get Tina’s kids by working the system, so you decided to bribe a judge. The ends justified the means. Face it, McCarthy, you’re just like me.”
“Maybe I am,” McCarthy said softly. “Maybe that’s the problem with this entire business. We set ourselves up as watchdogs over government, business, society. But who’s the watching the watchdog?”
McCarthy waved his hand at the newsroom. “I could take you out there and document every shortcoming we take delight in exposing on the front page. We’ve got sports reporters who gamble on the teams they cover. You don’t see them being banned like Peter Rose. We’ve got writers with drug and alcohol problems. You don’t see them chronicled in the gossip columns like Liz Taylor. We’ve got pundits with agendas as glaring and as biased as the Reverend Al Sharpton. We’ve got editors as conniving and as mad for power as Oliver North, but we ignore it, shrug it off. Almost every tough reporter turns tongue-tied or apologist when asked to explain the culture inside hard news.”
“We’re journalists. We aren’t public figures!” Lawlor seethed.
“The hell we aren’t,” McCarthy responded. “We put our names, our bylines, under our stories. Stories where we filter and mold an understandable reality for our readers. That’s as big a public responsibility as any. Because by shaping reality, we’re playing God. And who the hell are we to play God?”
“I don’t know about you, McCarthy. But I’ve never played God.”
“No? You decide what goes in the newspaper every day. You decided thirty years ago that Harold Jennings should be thrown out of office, so you played fast and loose with the facts and ended up causing an innocent man’s suicide. I always wondered why The Post never achieved greatness, why it was such a twisted, screwed-up place to work. Now I know. Because the moral center, you, was rotten.”
Lawlor grinned and then laughed. “Nice speech, McCarthy. Too bad no one will get to hear it. You open your mouth and the kids are gone, so why don’t you get out of my newsroom before I have you thrown out.”
Now it was McCarthy’s turn to laugh. “You know, if all you had done was fake the Pulitzer, I’d probably turn around and walk right now. The newspaper business is doomed anyhow. What’s the difference if this is exposed?
“But you did more than fake the Pulitzer, Connor. You were frightened when Prentice and I started looking at this story, not because of what it could do to your buddies, but because of what it could do to you. So you started tracking us by breaking into our computer files. And when Prentice, the gossip master, figured out that there were no anonymous sources and no truth behind The Post’s one Pulitzer, you killed him.”
At that the editor’s entire body turned tense, like a snake about to strike. “You’ll never prove that.”
“Yes, I will,” McCarthy said. “You deleted his files the day he died. But what you forgot was that we have a back-up disk in the computer room.”
“I didn’t forget,” Lawlor said. “I deleted that, too.”
“I know,” McCarthy said. “Two days after you killed him, you called and asked to have that day’s disk loaded on the mainframe so you could review the files. The computer guys keep a record of those requests.”
McCarthy took two steps and picked up the editor’s famous cane and weighed it in his hands. “I imagine if the police were to scrape away the new varnish on this old shillelagh, they’d find a smattering of Prentice’s blood in the wood, enough to put you away for life.”
Lawlor’s voice was viperous now. “That’s a story that will never be told. As I said, your kids depend on you.”
“You didn’t think I was going to let you get aw
ay with killing News, my best friend, did you?” McCarthy asked. “This morning I called Charley Owens’s mother in Denver and told her what a scumbag her son is. I told her the kids deserved a grandmother in their lives. We cut a deal and then I arranged to sell my land and give the money to Owens in return for his dropping the custody suit. The necessary documents were filed a half hour ago.”
Lawlor shifted in his chair. He opened the top drawer of his desk. “There’s still the tape of you talking about the bribe with Crawford’s husband.”
“True, but no money ever changed hands. I’ll take my chances with a conspiracy charge.”
Suddenly there was a very small revolver in Lawlor’s hand. “I don’t think I can allow this to become public. It would mean the end of The Post.”
McCarthy stared at the gun, incredulous. “What are you going to do, shoot me in the middle of the newsroom?”
Lawlor shook his head. “No, outside somewhere. Here’s the story: I was tipped that you tried to bribe Judge Crawford. I confronted you with it and told you your career here was finished. Because I loved you like a son, I wanted to get you out of the newsroom before you could embarrass yourself, to get you outside where I could suggest counseling. But you attacked me out there on the street. I have a license to carry a concealed weapon. It was self-defense. A tragedy.”
“No one will believe that.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Lawlor kept the gun low and motioned to the cane. “Lean that against the desk please.”
McCarthy did as he was told. Lawlor got his blue blazer on. He took a silver letter opener and handed it to McCarthy.
“Good, now put that in your pocket,” Lawlor said.
“My weapon?”
“Yes. You’ll manage to stab me once before I shoot you down.”
Lawlor put his hand with the gun in his right pocket and picked up the briarthorn cane. “We’re going to take a walk out of here, real calm, real collected. If you open your mouth or make a move, I’ll shoot you dead and claim you were insane in here. I was trying to get you out of the newsroom before you hurt someone. Now move.”
Hard News Page 41
